Captive || 5sos AU

A Nightmare Begins

Laurie's eyes flickered as she slowly drifted back into reality, shutting themselves involuntarily at the sting of bright light. Her head was pounding, and she rubbed it as if to soothe it.

"What a dream." She groaned to herself quietly and sat up, positioning herself to sit at the edge of her bed. She swung her body forward to get up, but shrank back immediately, pain shooting through her leg at an intense rate.

Her eyes shot open and she let out a shriek of both terror and immense pain which, after hitting the charcoal colored cement walls, bounced back to her and echoed, causing her heart rate to increase to an unhealthy speed. Laurie identified her ankle as the source of pain and her head shot down in an attempt to examine it further.

Her eyes widened and her heart continued to race wildly, though her thoughts were having a difficult time keeping up. She swallowed the hard lump in her throat which usually came with tears, but this time came on its own for reasons Laurie was unable to explain, and exhaled deeply. Her leg was shackled to the end of her bed and she had a newly formed gash, which was bleeding uncontrollably.

She shouted out for help but her voice hit the walls and shouted back time after time. Laurie sighed and placed her face in her hands. "What am I going to do?" She said, losing her composition and sobbing uncontrollably. For a time, Laurie felt as if this all might be a joke, a horrible joke that Calum pulled on her and had taken too far. She would chastise him for it when she got out. If she got out.

But as she examined her still bleeding ankle, the idea of it being a joke faded away quickly. Her head was still pounding, but in a different way. Laurie knew that this was because of how much blood she was losing, but didn't know what to do. After exhausting all thoughts in her mind and calling out uselessly for help several more times, she lost her strength.

She looked down at the gash again, but something else caught her eye. About a foot away from her bed was a sheet of paper, unfolded and written on in large letters. She couldn't read it from where she was, but she hoped that this strange note, wherever it came from, could help her get home.

Laurie looked around the room slowly, trying to formulate a way out of her imprisonment. "I just need to get that note!" She whispered angrily and slapped the bedpost, knocking the metal off of its stand, and exhaled sharply.

As she calmed down from her rage, she looked at the metal bedpost, then again at her shackles. An idea came to her and flickered in her eyes before her mind put it into action. She reached out and grabbed for the long strip of metal, her fingers barely able to grasp it from where she was sitting, and examined it. Without thinking, Laurie wrapped the chain of her shackle around the bedpost opposite to the one she had in her hand and started beating it wildly.

The sound of metal hitting metal made Laurie's headache worse, but as she saw the shackles weakening she continued. Finally the shackles broke and Laurie threw herself onto the floor, losing her adrenaline rush and only now remembering the pain situated in her ankle. She tried to stand up, but the throbbing pain she felt forced her back down, and she settled for crawling.

When she finally reached the note, she snatched it from it's place and read its words breathlessly. 'Your shirt.' It wrote. "My shirt?" Laurie said inaudibly and looked down at her oversized UCLA T-shirt. "My shirt?" She repeated, this time audibly and obviously angrily. She balled the note up and chucked it across the room weakly. "What the hell does my shirt have to do with any-" her voice trailed off as her eyes reached the discarded note.

On the back was more writing, and she found the strength to retrieve it. She uncrumpled the paper wildly, her heart rate beginning to quicken again, and her fingers fumbled to trace the new words on the paper. 'Use it for the blood.' It said, in the familiar handwriting of her friend.

She scoffed at the thought of calling him a friend now and threw it again, this time angry at Calum for his betrayal. Laurie ripped her shirt off, not caring anymore that Calum and whoever else was there could definitely see her, judging by the note. She rolled her shirt up into a towel-like thing and pressed it against her wound.

She threw her head back in pain and struggled to muffle her screams. She continued putting pressure on the shirt until she felt she could let go, and tied the shirt around her leg like a bandage. Having everything settled, Laurie could finally think- but she found this to be more a curse than a blessing.

Where was she? She asked herself. Why was she there? Why would her best friend, former best friend, do this to her? Did he do this to her? She scoffed again. Of course he did this to her, she thought, he wrote her a creepy note telling her how to stop the bleeding in her leg and was obviously watching from somewhere.

She remembered how much she had trusted Calum and tears began to well up in her eyes. She shrank back into the corner of her tiny room and began sobbing again. She just sat there and cried for a long time, counting the cracks in the walls and looking up at the ceiling, which had a way of making a person feel as if they were a tiny ant trapped in a chalk line.

Though the room had no windows and was illuminated using only harsh fluorescent lights, she could tell that it was well into the night, because her body was tender and her eyes could barely keep themselves open. Refusing to lay in the bed in which her nightmare had begun, Laurie curled up into a ball in her corner and drifted into a dreamless sleep.

~~~~~~~~~~

The jingle of a door being unlocked from the outside shook Laurie awake. Her body began to shake at the thought of finally getting to look Calum in the eye. She would finally be able to ask what was going on. She would be able to tell him how upset and angry she was, but at this point Laurie began to wonder if he would care.

These thoughts raced through and fried Laurie's mind all at once within one second. She shut her eyes, afraid that Calum may no longer be friendly, and pressed her body into the corner. The door cracked open and she heard the footsteps of her former friend step in, only it wasn't anyone she had seen before.