'I've been watching you. I've been waiting for just the right moment...'
*
Heroes aren't the good guys anymore. The laws have changed. If a hero saves your life, they own you. And sometimes, they might just orchestrate saving your life to subject yo...
Y/N had absolutely no idea how long she had been down here. Time seemed to have become meaningless and it wasn't like she had a calendar or a clock down here. There was no way to keep track of it. All she knew was passing in and out of consciousness, the pain in her arms and her shoulders and her back, the pain in her knees, the pounding headache and how Shouta would come down to her every once in a while to check on her, feed her and give her something to drink.
Y/N was starting to understand what he had meant when he had said that he was going to force her to trust him. She felt like the intervals in which he would come down to give her food and drink would always vary. Sometimes it felt like she was going days without food and other times he was feeding her so much she could barely keep it down. She wasn't sure if he was doing that to make her lose track of time or if she had already lost track of time and was going insane.
Every day she was listening out for the sound of his footsteps on the stairs, waiting for him to come down to her, let her use the bathroom, wash her face and give her something to eat and to drink. Y/N was mostly looking forward to the smallest interactions between them now - the slightest touch, a few words exchanged between them... It made it so much easier in this isolation.
Some days she couldn't believe how she had become so touch-starved and weak in such a short time. She would resolve not to speak to Shouta, to give him the cold shoulder... it never lasted very long. The moment he was there with her, speaking to her, touching her... she was melting in his hands.
Y/N had also taken to talking to herself when she was alone. She wasn't even sure what she was telling herself most days. Her memory wasn't even close to what it used to be. She started telling herself stories... stories from work, stories from back in high school, anything like that. A lot of the times she forgot what she had told herself the day before. Sometimes she forgot halfway through a story. Sometimes she would just string nonsensical words together.
It was mostly so she could just hear something, get some sort of stimulus, even if it was just the sound of her own voice. Y/N believed that it was the one thing that kept her sane down here. That and Shouta exchanging a few words with her, touching her lightly and gently. Any kind of skin-to-skin contact felt like magic to Y/N. It was like it was immediately erasing every pain she felt. Only when he left again, things were getting rapidly worse, because she never knew when he'd be back.
Y/N was just counting quietly to herself, when she heard the footsteps this time. She lifted her head, hoping they would come closer and not just pass her by. It had felt like such a long time since she had last seen Shouta. There was always a voice at the back of her head telling her that Shouta was not a good person, that he didn't care about her and that she needed to get away from him... but that voice was getting quieter and quieter by the day. She needed Shouta.
