MAZES | cake ✓ | warning:shitty!

o n e

It was dark.

It wasn't the type of darkness you would see at night, faintly illuminated by slivers of milky white moonlight and your eyes very slowly adjusting to the dim light. This was nothing like that.
This was the kind of darkness you feared. The kind of darkness you feel inside when you're sleeping through a nightmare, your eyes are closed and you see not a thing but then again, you see everything. It was the kind of darkness that little girls feared in stories that they were told of monsters under their bed.
It was that kind of darkness. But worse. Worse in every way.

Calum awoke in an absolute panic. His eyes were open, yet he was met with no surroundings, only darkness. He was on his hands and knees, his chest heaving as if he had just sprinted for miles on end, but the pain was excruciatingly different than a simple cramp. This was the pain you felt when you fell on your back or you were hit in the stomach and your breath was knocked out, only this time you couldn't regain it.

Calum felt bittersweet beads of sweat slide down the side of his forehead. He was in something that was moving sickeningly fast, rumbling as if it were an elevator.
But it practically was, he noticed as he felt around, hiccuping fir breath. His sweaty palms felt the cold, rusty metal flooring around him until he fell back as the 'cage' he was in jerked a bit, but instead he fell on a pile of old, dusty wooden crates that broke under impact.

And then he was on his knees again, screaming hoarsely out for help as he threw his head back, staring upwards through narrowed eyes. There was a slight crack of light where this cage was heaving, and it was about to hit it with full-on impact. His cries grew dry and he screamed until he had lost the audacity and strength to do so. Falling back onto his hands, Calum hiccuped again before he vomited, the taste vile in his mouth as he practically fell on his chest.

He was dying, he thought miserably. This was what it was like to die, wasn't it?

He had no recollection of where he was, where he came from... Nothing. All he knew that he was Calum. Calum Thomas Hood. Who was dying.

Or so he thought.

Moments later, the fast upwards movement of the cage halted at last. Calum lay there, scrambling up from his knees and staring up with bloodshot eyes at the 'ceiling.' Slowly, he was met with blinding white light as the 'doors' opening, and the box came to a halt.

Calum was still in the pile of broken wooden crates, undoubtedly having splinters. He just couldn't feel them because he was so numb from, well, everything that just occurred. Wiping his mouth with his wrist, he looked up.

He was met with dozens of curious gazes of teenage boys, from thirteen to as old as him, nineteen, maybe even a bit older. Judgement. That's all Calum saw in their eyes as he stared around, chest heaving. The only sound he heard was his own irregular breathing.

"Get out of the way," A voice, thickly accented (Australian, to be precise, just like Calum,) harshly mumbled from the crowd as a few boys scooted aside.

A broad-shouldered, very well built young man stood at the front of the crowd of boys now, before leaping down to the top of the cage (a/n the box, for those tmr fans,) and lifting open the top hatch. Calum raised his arm and shielded his eyes from the blinding sun, examining the boy. He had very messy blond hair that clearly used to be in a quiff, and piercing blue eyes. He had only a bit of stubble and wire a ripped up black tank top with black skinny jeans (a/n remember they wear whatever they wore when they came up wearing in the box, don't kill me) and wore a long, silver dogtag necklace and a lip ring.

"Get up, kid," The blond boy grunted, and shakily Calum managed to stand, grabbing the boy's outstretched hand when offered as he was helped from the metal box. The blond boy tugged him through the crowd so he was in the middle of a circle of all the boys, all curious eyes on him. They all were so fit. Calum didn't belong here. But then again, he didn't know where 'here' was.