Fleeing the Baba Yaga

Family Troubles

Trigger Warning: This story will deal with heavy themes such as kidnapping, conditioning, Stockholm Syndrome and mental abuse. This is a work of fiction and will not always depict realistic scenarios.

Readers, please prioritize your own mental well-being and make an informed decision about whether or not to proceed.

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Chapter One

Family Troubles

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One of his earliest memories of that place had been the little blue pencil case and notebook. They

were all given the same notebook and pencil case, always a light blue one, with pencils and pens inside. They were meant to write down their feelings, starting their day with same affirmation.

"I belong to the Baba Yaga"

Zayn still had the pencil case. No notebook though. At first, he was adamant that it had to be somewhere but as the years stretched on and he went to more therapy, he finally learnt to let go of the fabled notebook. There were many things he'd had to learn to let go of. When he first began therapy, he thought he would go mad. He thought he wouldn't be able to function each day with a handful of pills and the kind of playlist that would make the walls shake.

More than once his therapist had asked him to describe what he was so desperate to hold onto. The problem was, he had no idea how. He was never able to articulate it. He had tried. He had closed his eyes and reached back for anything at all but so many of his memories, huge chunks of his childhood were just... blank. Gone. Scraped away. His therapist, a lovely woman named Olivia Rossell, liked to say it was a coping mechanism of his body and mind. Whatever trauma had afflicted him, he had forgotten it to protect himself.

He had been warned that the memory loss might be permanent. Especially since he couldn't remember the cause of the trauma, there wasn't any way for him to work through the block. He'd even tried hypnotism. Just once. That night he had the worst night terrors he had ever experienced. He had screamed loud enough for his neighbors to call the police. That was the first and last time he'd tried hypnotism, at least with a professional.

Sometimes, when he couldn't stop thinking about it, he had a few drinks and lay in the darkness. He could close his eyes and when he eventually fell asleep, he could almost see...

She found them one by one, collecting them up like a crow collects coins and other shiny objects. In the blackness, he heard wings. He couldn't remember anything else, no faces and no places. He couldn't even remember what any of them sounded like and yet he was sure there was a "them" just as he was sure there was a "her." He could never prove it, he could never describe them and after so many years, he was finally willing to let those strange dreams be just that.

Dreams.

Aside from this entirely bizarre quality of his past, Zayn liked to think his life was relatively mundane. He worked for himself, taking graphic design jobs from Fiverr and other sites. Sometimes he made book covers, other days he made graphics packages complete with logos and banners for websites. He liked the variety. It did mean that he had to be strict with his time. If he didn't work, he didn't get paid. No sick leave when he worked for himself, but he did have a tidy little savings laid up for a rainy day. It wasn't too difficult to save money when he didn't exactly go anywhere.

He didn't leave the house much at all. He also didn't have many friends. Those two facts were probably linked but he wasn't quite up to crossing that line yet. He'd met a few people online, even had a few that he kept in regular contact with. That was progress, right?