Kian woke that morning with something like dread hunkered down in his chest.<br/>Not the crippling terror of sleep paralysis, he’d had enough encounters with that particular hell to know the signs upon waking. Besides, Kian was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to forget an episode if he tried.<br/><br/>He had a paper due later this week on ‘Post-Modernism in the Modern-Day Media’ that he had barely started typing up (notes, he had plenty of notes. Pages of notes, in fact, but they were no closer to being arranged into anything that even vaguely resembled a grade-worthy submission than they had been three days ago), but it didn’t feel like his usual procrastination-induced jitters. The residual feeling left him scattered and sullen for the rest of the morning, to the point that Stiles ordered him out of the apartment for ‘reaching a whole new level of grouchy cunt’. Stiles had been putting up with Kian’s emotional baggage for years already, it took a lot to drive him over the edge these days.<br/><br/>Kian grabbed his laptop and stalked off to the library. He couldn’t really blame his housemate, but it didn’t mean he had to be happy about it either.<br/><br/>The library was quiet enough for him to have a corner to himself for a few hours. Kian fucked around on Reddit and attempted to focus himself on his coursework. He managed a page and a half before it was time to head to Saar - time to meet with Dr. Hale for an hour’s worth of providing monosyllabic answers for increasingly irritating questions. The sessions helped no-one whatsoever, Kian didn’t even know why he kept going. Not true, actually. He went because the receptionist had already scheduled in his return visit before he’d even walked out of Hale’s office and it seemed like too much of an effort to have to cancel it. He could just not go, but eventually Stiles would figure it out and then the badgering would begin about ‘being an adult’ and ‘dealing with his trauma’, and then that would be a whole new headache Kian just didn’t want to deal with. For a happy-go-lucky idiot, Stiles was far too astute for Kian’s liking.<br/><br/>So he went to the monthly sessions like always and went to work at the hipster coffee joint conveniently located halfway between his apartment and the Saar building, like always, and went home to listen to Stiles wax poetic about the wonders of the criminal justice system. Living with a Criminology major was a special kind of hell.<br/><br/>Except today somehow Kian never made it home.<br/><br/>He wasn’t sure how exactly. One moment he’d been closing up at work, dumping three garbage bags worth of coffee grounds into the dumpster out back, the next his head was killing him and his shoulders felt as though they were being ripped from their sockets. His eyelids felt weighed down by ten pound sandbags and his stomach roiled, threatening mutiny on its contents. In an effort not to be messily and horrifically sick, Kian sucked a deep breath through his nose before regretting it almost immediately - wherever he was, it did not smell pleasant.<br/><br/>Unwashed bodies and something stronger - metallic. The taste of copper filled Kian’s mouth as he avoided breathing through his nose. His stomach churned uneasily once again.<br/><br/>Slowly, his senses fought through the fog that permeated his mind to discern that he was a) hanging by his wrists and b) not alone. A soft, continuous sobbing seemed to be coming from somewhere to his left. Not yet ready to open his eyes just yet, Kian instead slowly experimented with shifting his weight to stand rather than hang in an attempt to take the strain from his shoulders. The relief was instant, followed almost immediately by painful pins and needles as blood rushed into his fingers, the shackles on his wrists having cut off circulation for however long he’d been dangling there. Kian wasn’t particularly tall - had he been any shorter standing may not have been an option. Finally, he opened his eyes in the gloom.<br/><br/>A basement. A fucking basement.<br/><br/>Oh Jesus, he was in a B-grade horror movie. And he was a virgin. This couldn’t be real. This was a poorly written plot worth a dime a dozen on Netflix.<br/><br/>‘What the fuck?’ Came out as ‘Whaaz th fffff-’ Dry throat. He swallowed thickly and blinked in the gloom.<br/><br/>There were three other figures he could see, no windows. A set of stairs and not much else from this vantage point. He wasn’t quite ready to risk moving to look behind him at this stage.<br/>One of the figures was whimpering, tugging weakly at the chain that bound their wrists over their head. Her head. Despite being filthy she was definitely female. The two others were men; one looked like he was probably somewhere in his thirties with a weak chin, the other was closer to his fifties and drooped like a wilted flower. It wasn’t possible to be one hundred percent certain that the older guy was alive.<br/>Neither the woman nor weedy-chin seemed to have  noticed Kian’s struggle to consciousness, otherwise engaged in the woman’s now furious  battle to free herself. Weedy-chin was pleading desperately with her to stop. ‘He’ll hear you’ He begged, panicked and breathless. ‘Please, Lydia, stop. He’ll hurt you. He’ll hurt us! Pl-’<br/><br/>A lock clicked.<br/>Another.<br/>Two more.<br/><br/>Then footsteps, unhurried and certain. In the gloom Kian could make out the outline of a figure descending slowly - long haired and slim. Every horror movie Kian had ever seen streamed through his mind and seemed to directly contradict the creeping suspicion that this was their antagonist.Some Wolf Creek looking motherfucker should be bearing down on them now, not what looked surprisingly like a male model. All the same, self preservation dictated that not attracting attention to himself until he had a more concrete idea of exactly what was going on here would be pr-<br/>Oh.<br/><br/>The woman’s head snapped forward to smash into the brickwork with a sickening crack, splitting the skin of her scalp. Kian winced in sympathy and immediately regretted it asthe movement brought about the discordant clanking of his chains.