A wavering in the chilled air around him, and a steady cadence of shoes across the tiled floor, echoed around him. The subtle tingle against his skin—a passive brush across the back of his neck—made him flinch away. The bookbag in his hand brushed against his leg as it swayed from the sudden movement.
“You can sense me.” The man’s voice was booming and soft at the same time, bouncing off of unseen walls in the darkness. “I find that intriguing.”
“What did you do to me? What is this?”
“My aptitude. And a final warning.” His voice seemed closer, the air wavering with every word. “I require that bag.”
“Yeah, you’ve said.” This was becoming unbelievably annoying. “Just asking for a friend, but what exactly do you need it for?”
A long pause. A deep, audible inhale, but when Fuchsia turned to face the source, it was gone. The brunet’s skin prickled, and he felt his body tense in anticipation of the worst.
“I require the bag because of who it belongs to.”
“That kid?” The brunet looked around skeptically, slowly circling in place. “What do you want with a dead kid’s bag?”
The air shifted, almost as if it were laughing at him. “She is not dead. She is very much alive. And currently in possession of something that belongs to me.”
The brunet clenched his jaw, his pale eyes glowering into the darkness surrounding him. He wouldn’t exactly categorize himself as a good person, but there was a big difference between a desperate immigrant up charging a grown man for oral in a public restroom and some creep actively seeking out a teenage kid.
He wasn’t naïve. He knew better than anyone just how disgusting guys like this could be.
“You said she didn’t jump,” he swallowed hard, feeling his nails dig into his palms as his fists tightened around the bag still in his hand, “But the police wouldn’t be here if nothing happened. So, what happened? What did you do to her?”
“What did I do?” Another pause. A moment in time where the man said nothing, and the darkness of the space seemed to fall in on the brunet like a cascade. The next few words grazed across his skin like acid. “I pushed her.”
The undeniable feeling of fingers gently curling around his throat struck the brunet forcefully. He reflexively tried to kick out in the direction the hand had come from—to fight off the touch of the cold hand squeezing into his flesh—but when he managed to get his throat released, his ankle was captured by another unseen hand.
It pulled his foot harshly, ice cold fingertips forcing their way into his skin as the brunet fell harshly against the ground. When the grip didn’t let up, and instead held his leg up in the air to allow for a warm, unseen liquid to trickle across the broken flesh there, the brunet could only grit his teeth in pain.
“You resist me.” Vague outlines of the body the hand belonged to, its head tilting to the side, a shadow watching Fuchsia in the dark as the brunet in his grip writhed in pain. “But it would appear as though you have the potential to be quite useful.”
The station suddenly spun into view, lights flickering back on and sound rushing back to his ears. A dizziness destroyed his vision.
He was so desperate for stability that his hand reached out for the first thing it could find—the shoes of the man standing beside him. His breath came out in pants, and he squinted at the thin, claw like marks etched across his skin and quickly fading.
A sudden rush of nausea made him shut his eyes again. His leg, which had become numb, was mercifully released. He folded in on himself, curling around the feet he awkwardly clung to in order to ground himself as he spiraled out of his sanity.
“Resisting me,” the man said, his voice floating down from above, “Will not bode well for you.”
The harder Fuchsia tried to fight against his rapidly depleting consciousness, the quicker it faded. It didn’t help that a set of gloved hands covered his face, cutting off his already shaky breaths and making his world fall away yet again.
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