Murmuring; there was nothing but murmuring for an indefinite amount of time as a voice laced with concern penetrates a mind that is clouded with confusion. He can feel warmth, and the gentle pushes of an outside force trying to intervene, which in turn let's his eyes that are weighed down with the power of sleep, slowly peel open.

"Wake... up."

In his blurry vision he can a somewhat far away image of golden hair framing features that he cannot yet make out.

"Come on... wake up... time... you've wasted a lot of time..."

The eyes are prominent now, and the boy found himself reaching a frail hand upwards as if to touch something of foreign curiosity, before he retracted his hand as if it had been burned. Warmth radiated from this figure like the sun, but the opposition was that Nikolai was never this warm. Nikolai was warm in the way that mothers were suppose to be, soft and caring to the point where their own body temperature didn't matter because their way of doing things created comfort--but this. This was too warm. It was hot and stuffy, and upon closer examination one could see that although the hair was golden, it did not have the same volume of health that Nikolai's did, and although his eyes were green, there was too much brown in them for them to be considered the green that Nikolai possessed. The hands were not youthful, but etched with the labor of life and the boy felt a scream bubble up his throat only to die upon his lips as a clammy hand silenced it.

It was him.

Now, even in his normal state, his strength would not be anything special, but his resistance at this particular moment was especially futile due to the fact that this was a grown man silencing a child. His brown eyes dilated, and his heart quickened to a quick tempo as his legs did a dance with the white sheet below him.

"Boy."

A single fly came tumbling from the older man's mouth, it's black body colliding onto fair skin and crawling around the expanse of it as if it were some delicacy. It's tiny legs crawled quickly around his face, crawling closer and closer towards his ear before it peaked into the dark cavern, only to fly into it as if it had just found something of intense interest.

"N-no!"

Everything came out muffled as the man came closer, breathing a breath so rancid it made the boy see stars. He felt like he was breaking into tiny little pieces, first it was his neck, then his stomach, his hips, his thighs, everything was breaking as if it were nothing but fragile pieces of glass. The buzzing in his ear was so loud that he couldn't think, he couldn't function, he was helpless, and with that his legs stopped dancing, and his screaming was replaced with sobbing that became more and more meek the longer time passed.

His submission was key. 

It always had been. 

It led to his eventual freedom. 

It always did.

He closed his eyes and when he opened them again he was in a small room, similar to the hospital in some ways, but different in other ways. His body, was no longer riddled with bandages, although sweat clung to his gown like a second skin. Sweat he never knew that he had been sweating. His heart danced about his chest painfully and he rose up unsteadily, head snapping to the left as he felt a pair of eyes upon him from within the room. This by no means made his flighty heart any better in condition, so of course upon seeing a such thing, his body reacted in a terrible way. The skin on the back of his neck rose, the goosebumps on his skin creating miniature mountains as a surprised yelp escaped his raw throat. Slender fingers reached for the closest thing available, that by which happened to be a pillow, and in an instant, it was thrown in self defense.

This however made the stranger yelp as well as recoil, and in such a way that made the boy think that this was no one but a child no older than he, himself. But what was a child doing in his room?

He found that his breathing was still heavy with terror, but to a lesser extent that made it possible for him to actually observe his surroundings. He was no longer in the white room that he had come to know briefly, nor was Nikolai anywhere to be found. The room that he was in had two beds, his and apparently the other child's, but although there were two beds, they lie on opposite sides of the wall, never to touch, never to mingle. There in-between the beds shown a window that was small and offered a glimpse of the outside world, but besides that and a religious cross hanging ominously next to the door that seemed locked shut, there was nothing to stimulate the senses. No books, no crayons, not even a stuffed animal.

The boy may have been frightened, but he was observant enough to know that the other seemed ready to chuck a pillow right back at him, so with that he decided to make things better, because this was a child no older than he was, and the boy particularly trusted children by default.

He found himself slowly slipping from his bed with a small gasp as the coolness of it upon his feet was unpleasant in the middle of winter with nothing but a gown on, and not a slipper in sight. There was hesitance in his step as he took it, and although his irregular way of walking seemed to bring fear of the unknown onto children, for this particular child, there seemed to be no fear of such a thing. Only curiosity and a hint of sympathy. The boy stopped walking when he got halfway between the two beds, only to sit upon the floor as if it were the most coziest thing imaginable.

He didn't know how long he sat in that position; legs sprawled outward but parallel as the other crawled to the edge of his own bed to peer at him with eyes so blue that it was as if an ocean had been thought of upon constructing his eyes, but there came a time when the other male slid out of his own bed to sit on the floor as well, cross-legged unlike him, although there were noticeable differences upon examination.

This boy had unkept hair that was wavy, wavy like Nikolai's, but yet unlike Nikolai's at all as it was the color of a cocoa bean. His facial features gave away to two eyes that were so intense that a stare felt like daggers in the most literal sense possible. When he spoke, it was something that made the boy recoil slightly as if he had been hit, but that was the only action that came from it.

"Do you scream often?"

Again, there was another jump, involuntary and yet true as he was brought into a reality that he didn't think he was in. He had been screaming?

"Hm? I mean I don't know what you mean..."

"You were screaming before you woke up."

It occurred to the boy that maybe that had been the reason as to why his throat felt weird, raw now instead of just a normal throat, but of course when the dots were connected, it only led to a blank conclusion that couldn't even be called a conclusion.

"I suppose if you heard it, then it must be true... to be honest, I don't remember screaming though."

"Of course you don't, I mean you were sleeping."

The other boy had something about him that made the boy frown, whether it was his monotone way of speaking, or his intense stare, there was just something about it that was somewhat off putting .

"Anyways, whether you're a crybaby or not, it means nothing to me. My name is Joshua, Joshua Lee, and you've been asleep for a while now."

"Awhile?" The boy turned around to gather his surroundings. Awhile.

"Where am I?"

The question was simple , curiosity etched within it, but to a degree that was dull and almost too tired and skeptical to want to know the answer.

"Hell."