Taken • cth

seventeen | sketch

Calum lay trembling on the hard wooden floor, pain pulsing throughout his entire body. A thin dribble of crimson consistently flows out of the corner of his mouth, but he does nothing to stop it.

His bruised hands clutching his middle, Calum struggles to push down the rising hysteria that threatens to take over his mind and shatter all aspects of calm. He keeps seeing his father, beating the shit out of him, bringing the snapped neck of his beloved guitar down onto his body over and over again with brutal force. He keeps seeing his mother, sitting next to the window in their dining room, staring out into the pouring rain with a bottle of whiskey in her hand. Every time he would ask her what was wrong, she would hurl back an insult. Sometimes she even slapped him. He can feel the burning on his cheek now, like the ghost of her hand. Nausea rises in his throat. Calum manages to push himself up on his elbows just in time to wretch, all the contents of his stomach pouring out onto the blood soaked floor next to him, bits of red going with it.

His entire body hurts. Calum drags himself to his corner, the one he often takes refuge in, and collapses into a ball. The tears roll down his cheeks relentlessly and all at once. He can't stop the violent sobs from racking his body, or the horrible flashbacks running through his mind. Visions of his sisters hanging body, his fathers hard slaps, his mother's countless insults..

Calum struggles to hold it all in, but fails. The beatings are getting to be too much for him. Every time Arrow screws up or he causes any sort of disturbance, he's hit and kicked and punched until he coughs up blood.

It's like he's back in his childhood home. In his bedroom. Waiting in fear for his dad to get home and find the shattered lamp in the living room. Waiting for the pain.

The mark on his arm pulses with agony, and Calum closes his eyes. His breathing starts to pick up until he's almost hyperventilating, a high pitched ringing sound in his ears, and he slumps to the floor, his hands clutching his head, trying to stop the horrible sobs as the darkness closes in around him.

***

Jack has felt the burning pain in his arm enough times to know when he's being called to.

He's sinking his teeth into his fifth kidney of the evening, taken from a dying wolf a few miles off, when the mark near his elbow begins to glow with a faint dark light. A burning, buzzing sensation begins to squirm through his veins, and he immediately drops the organ and stands up.

Jane and the others join him as he walks outside, his destroyed body taking the steps almost before he can register them. They all stomp through the foliage together, assembled almost like an army, until they get to the single ring of trees marked with the Collective Circle. Together they stand, in line formation, side by side with their backs rigid and their hands behind their backs. Smiley sits and grins.

Before them a dull fog begins to swirl into the air, and when it clears out their master stands in its place. The Slenderman looks as elegant and terrifying as usual, with the smooth leather face Jack has just only become accustomed to, his tentacles out and floating in the air almost dreamily.

"My loyal proxies." There is somewhat joy in the monsters voice, speaking deeply in the boys mind, and Jack instantly relaxes. So this isn't going to be another agonizing punish session. "You have done well. Where is the girl?"

"She is in the house, master." Jane speaks up, her chin held high and her black eyes gleaming. "Chained and trapped in the room directly above the portal. Ready at your disposal."