Let me hold you like a hostage pt. 2
4.4k words | read on ao3 | Part 1 | MDNI
summary: When your therapist starts acting out of the ordinary, you end up following her to a mysteriously abandoned furniture store and encounter a peculiar doorway. What hides behind it is beyond your imagination.
tags: therapist/entity!Mary, kidnapping, bondage, degradation, praise kink, slight knife play, extremely toxic yuri
notes: homoerotic knife (letter opener) fight scene because I am not immune to evil women and stabbing, you’re welcome
Chapter 2: I wanna feel you in my arms (hold you hostage in my heart)
You hadn’t been able to get your last session with Mary out of your mind for the next week, each touch marking your skin like a tattoo and every sweet nothing she had whispered in that demeaning voice echoing over and over ahead in your mind like a broken record. What once had been an innocent crush had transformed into something made up of intense passion and devotion, and you felt slightly fearful of the ease at which your thoughts were consumed by her at all hours of the day. Even at night you couldn’t escape the fantasies that flashed through your head, the phantom touch of her lips against your ear as she whispered “You know it’s true.”
Your heart ached with guilt and longing, because internally you knew she wasn’t lying. You’d let her ruin you with just a single word if she asked you to, therapist and patient relationship be damned. It was that twisted desire that led you forward, dragging you back towards her door for your next therapy session.
Hand poised above the varnished wood, you froze when you heard a pair of murmuring voices behind the door. It caught your attention since you had memorized Mary’s schedule and knew that she didn’t usually have any patients with appointment times before you. The deeper voice of the two began to grow louder, and you heard the abrupt crinkle of paper as if someone had slapped something down against the desk.
All of a sudden, the door flung open, and a man with copper skin and brows knitted with frustration barged out of the room. You jumped out of the way of the doorframe, but he still barely acknowledged your presence as he hurried towards the exit.
Peeking into the room, you spotted Mary sitting back against her usual office chair, lips pursed and fingers criss-crossed on her lap as she stared into space contemplatively.
“Uh– hi?” you cleared your throat, standing awkwardly at the door since you were unsure if you were intruding on something personal.
Mary’s gaze snapped up to meet yours at once, a faraway, detached look in her eyes as if she wasn’t truly there. When the silence dragged on for an uncomfortable amount of time, you shuffled your feet and prompted her again.
“I’m here for our session today?” you trailed off questioningly, attempting to jog her memory.
“Right,” Mary replied, shaking herself out of her dazed trance as she began to fidget with the buttons of her blazer and arrange the paperwork that was scattered across her desk.
She beckoned you in with her pointer finger and offered you a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes once you sat down in your respective seats. Shifting in your armchair, you glanced down curiously at a paper with jagged, boxy shapes scrawled across it almost as if it were mapping out a convoluted office building. Mary instantly followed your stare and snatched the paper away, folding it up and tucking it into a pocket inside of her blazer.
“So,” you started when she maintained her unusual silence, pressing your heels into the carpeted rug. “I thought I’d talk a little bit about the no contact rule I have with my ex…”
Even though your therapist was physically right in front of you, nodding at appropriate intervals and giving short words of advice, she seemed less present and focused than she usually was during sessions. Her mind would seem to trail off as she flickered her gaze around the room in a paranoid manner, and she dug her nails into the leather of her armrest so hard that her knuckles turned ivory white.
“Mary?” you asked when she had gone quiet for an abnormally long period of time, gaze fixed on the top left corner of the ceiling.
“Mary,” you called out a little more firmly this time, causing her to jolt in her seat and face you immediately.
“Yes, darling?” she feigned impassivity, coiling a strand of hair around her finger in that nervous manner that you recognized.
“Is everything okay?” you pressed, boldly deciding to reach out and stroke your thumb against her knuckles.
Mary jerked away from you as if your touch was a jolt of electricity straight up her veins, inching her chair backwards subconsciously. You noticed the microadjustments in her posture immediately, clutching your hand to your chest shamefully as if you had done something wrong.
“Everything’s fine,” she told you, her words anything but reassuring as doubt crept into her tone. “I’m afraid we need to end this session early, though,” Mary flashed you an apologetic smile, her eyes flickering in a distracted manner from the door to her desk. “I have some… business to attend to.”
You watched your therapist shrug on her coat and grab her briefcase, deliberating if you should insist for a better answer by pressing further. However, you were merely her patient, and you didn’t think you had the authority to demand an answer out of her, especially if the matter was something occurring in her personal life. You didn’t want to potentially cross the precarious line of your relationship and destroy one of the only true connections that you relied on. So you watched her exit the office just as abruptly as she had left last week, tongue tied and left with a twinge of unease curling in your stomach.
The next week, you arrived at Mary’s office with a small bouquet of tulips and daisies, eager to brighten her mood and make up for trying to pry into her thoughts the previous week. However, when you knocked a couple of times to no reply and found the door strangely ajar, you entered the room to find it unordinarily empty. When you asked about your therapist at the front desk, the receptionist told you that she had never arrived at the office that morning and was probably spending the day sick at home.
You immediately took a trip to the library and scoured over telephone books, dialing her home phone on the landline. Concerningly enough, her phone rang unanswered 5 times in a row, causing doubt to spiral deeper in the pit of your stomach.
Realistically, you should take the receptionist’s advice, you reassured yourself. She was surely not feeling well, and was probably spending the day at home resting. After flipping through a few residence books, you located her address and set off to make her a get well soon gift.
A long afternoon of baking led you to walking down a couple avenues with a box of homemade lemon meringue cookies and flowers in hand, and soon you stopped in front of a quaint one story house. Stepping up to the welcome mat, you rang the doorbell twice, knocking against the doorframe for good measure. When you were met with only silence once again, you pressed your cheek up against the frosted window and tried to peer inside, only seeing dark, empty hallways.
Walking around to the side of the house, you quickened your pace once you noticed that her garage was open. Oddly enough, her car was nowhere to be found, leaving behind the husk of a room with miscellaneous tools and gardening equipment.
Collapsing against the curb, you pressed your palms against your closed eyelids, groaning internally at the dilemma you were facing. Your therapist had strangely disappeared without a trace. Women didn’t just go missing out of nowhere unless there was an underlying reason. Pausing your lamenting, you remembered how distracted Mary seemed at your last session, as if she had something else troubling at the forefront of her mind. Your memory flashed back to the architectural map that she had snatched up and hidden, the man who left the room before you in a disgruntled stupor. They all had to be connected somehow, but you just couldn’t put your finger on it.
Rising from your hunched position, you decided to take your car out for a drive to get some fresh air. Maybe driving would get your mind off of the disappearing woman, or the convoluted map, or the strange man who you had never seen at any sessions before yours. As you drove across the highway towards nowhere in particular, eyes surveying the horizon absentmindedly, your gaze caught on a large building that seemed to stand out in front of the towering mountains.
“Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire” popped out in bright red letters against a yellow background, with an image of a pirate painted across the front of the building.
‘Where have I heard that name before?’ you hummed to yourself, pulling off of the highway and down a side road to get a closer look. You recalled seeing one of his advertisements on television, a middle aged man with a considerably low budget cracking jokes about furniture.
All of a sudden it hit you: the man who walked out of Mary’s office had the same brown eyes and dark complexion as the owner of the furniture store. Pulling a hard right, you skidded into the nearly empty parking lot, passing the vacant rows until you reached the front.
As you drew closer to the furniture store, you spotted a familiar vehicle that you always recognized in the parking lot behind her office building– Mary’s car. You had to be getting close. After parking in the closest available spot and shutting the driver door with a click, you tucked Mary’s gifts under your shoulder and headed towards the double doors. When you tried the handle, the door was thankfully open, and you entered a building filled with sparsely filled furniture and fluorescent lights that flickered above you at random intervals.
“Mary?” you called out cautiously, scanning the room for any sign of life. “Captain Clark? Anyone?”
After circling the entire building and finding nothing but dusty pillows and abandoned sofas, your curiosity led you down a flight of stairs into a smaller room. Approaching a table with miscellaneous papers scattered across it in a frenzied manner, your breath caught at a page that eerily resembled the map that you had seen in Mary’s office on the day that she had begun acting abnormally. This must’ve been the place that she had gone to since all the pieces were colliding together.
Giving the room a once over, you tilted your head at a strange arrangement of strips of blue tape marking a rectangle on the far wall, almost as tall as a door frame. Strangely fixated, you reached out to touch the wall and nearly leapt backwards when your hand began to sink into it. Warily reaching out a second time, you reacted with fearful horror when your fingertips sunk even further as if they were falling into quicksand.
Rationally, you knew you shouldn’t enter the strange door. There was no knowing what was behind it, and you weren’t one to take chances. However, you felt a pang between your ribs when you thought about Mary, who had mysteriously vanished for a number of days and could be in grave danger somewhere beyond the quicksand wall. If you ever wanted to see her again, your only choice was to brave the unknown.
So, you took a deep breath and slowly walked forwards through the wall. When you opened your eyes on the other side, you were met with the peculiar sight of yellow patterned wallpaper, a stack of furniture halfway sinking into the floor, and fragmented wall segments that trailed off and curved in every direction like a maze.
You marvelled at the sight of the anomaly, taking a few cautious steps forward that crunched underfoot as if the carpet were slightly moist. Gripping onto the cushioned seat of a dining room chair at the edge of the stack of furniture finally grounded you, allowing you to realize that what you were seeing before you was real. If the strange yellow office building truly was part of reality, then Mary logically had to be wandering between its walls somewhere– you reasoned. So you walked through a few rooms, trying as best as you could to memorize each turn and doorway so you had some semblance of the direction you were heading towards and where you came from.
All of a sudden, you heard a faint voice cry out, the sound ricocheting across the thin walls as if you were in an echo chamber. You stopped walking, listening closer.
“Help me!” a soft voice with a light accent called, sounding pained and fearful.
You recognized it as Mary’s immediately, sprinting towards the source of the cry as fast as you could.
“Mary! Where are you?” you shouted, projecting your voice as loudly as possible.
“Somebody please!” Mary cried out again, sounding on the verge of tears.
“I’m coming!” you called back, hair whipping across your face as you turned each corner at an increasingly dizzying speed.
Eventually, you came across an open space about the size of a living room with a cardboard cutout of a man positioned in the center.
“Help me!” Mary’s voice echoed from the direction of the man.
You slowly moved towards the cardboard cutout until you circled around its side to see a recording device taped to its back. Staring wide eyed with horror, you darted your gaze around the room, paranoid of who could have lured you here with the sound of your therapist’s voice. The last thing you saw before everything went black was a flash of a creature with a distorted face and dark brown hair placing its palms over your eyes.
In your first stirrings of consciousness, all you could feel was the dull throbbing of your head pounding against your skull. It beat like a persistent drum, rudely awakening you from the deceptively comforting hands of eternal slumber. The next thing was feeling returning back to your fingertips and toes like the fizzy sensation of fireworks. Still, something wasn’t quite right.
Shifting your hands, you winced in pain as you found them tightly bound to the chair you were sitting on, cutting off your blood flow and biting into the edges of your wrists. You felt another pair of ropes across your torso and ankles, keeping you firmly rooted in place. Blinking your eyes open, you awoke to a dimly lit living room with a couch and television set parallel to you. Straight ahead was a pair of windows boarded up with pieces of wood, cardboard, and newspapers, only allowing small beams of light between the cracks to shine through.
“You’re awake,” a familiar voice spoke behind you, causing you to jolt your head around and abruptly regret the sudden movement when a sharp pain rose in your neck.
Mary came into the edges of your peripheral vision, dressed in a watercolor button up blouse and a pair of wide leg slacks cinching in her figure at the waist so impeccably that your mouth went dry. She knelt down before you and cupped your cheeks in her palms, stroking her thumb against the side of your face gently. However, your eyes widened when you noticed the dried blood at the side of her temple and on her inner arm, a wave of concern washing over you.
“You’re hurt,” you told her anxiously, arms straining against their ties in an effort to motion to her wounds.
“Oh,” Mary moved a hand to her temple, lips parted slightly as if she had momentarily forgotten about her injuries. “It’s nothing serious. It’s you I should be worrying about.”
It was then that your brain fog momentarily cleared and you finally questioned why you were tied to a chair, in a strange home you had never seen before, and staring at a woman covered in blood in front of you.
“Why am I tied up?” you asked with a hint of unease, feeling suddenly claustrophobic. “Can you take these off?”
“I’m sorry, but not yet, sweetheart,” she replied apologetically, an eerie smile overshadowing her usually stoic expression. “Until I can be sure that you’re not a threat to me, you’ll have to keep the binds.”
“A threat? What do you mean?” You asked, confused by her strange words. She wasn’t making any sense at all, and the queasy feeling in your gut was only growing the longer you stayed confined in the room.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” Mary murmured ominously, beginning to walk a slow circle around you.
“Where am I?” you asked a little more forcefully, raising your chin.
“My childhood home,” she replied simply, meeting your eyes with an off-putting, unreadable stare. “Or a version of it, at least.”
“What was that place with the yellow wallpaper back there?” you questioned, memories of the past few hours slowly trickling back to you.
“Its called the Backrooms,” Mary explained, resting against the couch across from your chair. “An infinite plane of an empty yellow wallpapered office building filled with pieces of people’s memories. When I sensed your presence, I knew I had to save you before they found you.”
“Who is they?” you asked, none of her cryptic explanations making much sense to you.
“ASYNC, an organization that hunts down people like me who have been here for far too long,” she breathed, her eyes fluttering shut for a brief moment as if she were reliving a traumatic experience. “If they got a hold of you, god knows what type of tests they would start running on you or missions they would send you out on. But all of that doesn’t matter anymore, because you’re safe with me now. Here in this house, close enough to the Backrooms but deep enough inside of my memories that they won’t find us, is where you’ll be the most protected.”
“I don’t understand,” you shook your head, a million thoughts spinning through your mind. “Are you trying to say this house that we’re in right now is in the Backrooms?”
“Yes,” Mary replied, motioning to a chair that had half sunken into the carpet at the corner of the room. “The Backrooms makes some minor changes to the place, but everything is still orderly and fully functional.”
“Why can’t you just take me home?” you questioned her, searching deep into her almond eyes as if you could find a hint of rationality left inside of her.
The brunette tutted at you as if your suggestion was ludicrous, coming over to stand behind you and place her hands upon your shoulders.
“There is no home anymore, darling,” Mary whispered above your left ear, just unsettling enough to let a chill run down your spine. “They’d scour the Earth to find you and drag you back down to their labs. The only place you’re truly safe is here with me.”
At this point, you knew better than to trust the little white lies she kept murmuring to you in sweet tones. Something about the way everything had been strategically planned out, her careful explanations, gentle touches, even the ropes she had used to tie you to the chair knowing you would wake up with a seed of doubt rooted in your mind. If you wanted to make it out of this alive, you would have to play the fool for a while– at least until you were untied and gained control of your senses again.
“Okay,” you exhaled, turning to glance over at her face just inches from yours. Even with your creeping suspicion overshadowing your affinity for the woman, the proximity of being able to count each eyelash and mole across her face still stole your breath like none other. “I trust you to take care of me.”
“I knew you’d come to your senses,” Mary squeezed your shoulders tightly.
To your immediate relief, she began loosening the bonds on your limbs one at a time. You waited until you had regained proper blood flow and the pain in your aching joints eased up before making a move. If you were going to escape efficiently, you would have to act swiftly after she released you.
Thinking fast, you lunged towards the first threatening object within reach– a silver letter opener sitting on the nearby coffee table. Before Mary could even react, you threw all of your weight against her and pushed her into the wall, satisfaction rising in your chest when you saw the breath knock out of her with a thud.
Sprinting towards the door fueled solely by adrenaline and the threatening stationary tool you clutched in your fist, you were surprised to feel your body suddenly pulled backwards as blinding pain prickled across your scalp. Mary tugged you back by the hair, wrapping her arms around you as she attempted to wrench the letter opener out of your grasp. You kicked your foot backwards against her knees until she partially collapsed with a grunt, turning to ram the letter opener into the side of her head.
However, she was more agile than you expected, dodging the stab so the blade only sliced a shallow cut against her cheek instead. The brunette used the momentum of your swing to send a punch to your exposed torso, sending you both careening towards the living room rug. You fell hard against your lower back, letting out a string of curses as you tried to recover and swipe at her with your weapon.
Allowing you to absorb the brunt force of the fall, Mary kneed you hard in the chest and brought her legs outwards to straddle your hips, fighting to release your hold on the letter opener. Momentarily stunned from the lack of oxygen going to your lungs, you let her wrench the blade out of your grip with one hand and pin your own hands above your head with the other.
You had already been sore from being tied to a chair for countless hours on end, your wrists and ankles rubbed raw from the tight ropes. However, something deeper seemed to flow inside of your veins, making your movements sluggish and your mind more dizzy and disoriented than usual. You suspected that your therapist had drugged you before knocking you out, and the extra weight of her body on top of yours weakened your remaining strength.
Now, leaving you completely incapacitated under her hold, she traced the blade across the edge of your jaw. It was light enough not to break skin but dangerous enough to send the message that she had the power to if she so desired.
“You trust me, now do you?” Mary leered over you, panting lightly from the exertion.
“You’re fucking deranged,” you hissed between your teeth, flailing your limbs to no avail.
“You look so pretty when we’re at each other’s throats,” she smiled viciously, tracing your jugular with the tip of her blade delicately. “Although, I prefer you much better horizontally.”
Retort caught at the tip of your tongue, you were suddenly hyperaware of her chest nearly flush against yours, her thighs bracketing your hips, her dark brown hair tousled messily from the fight, the light pink flush against her cheeks. Even if you loathed admitting it, seeing her in such a raw, feral, messy state was doing unspeakable things to your body.
Your pulse quickened traitorously, and you swore Mary could feel it beneath your skin as she chuckled lowly under her breath, running her thumb against the edge of your throat more tenderly this time.
“I’d wrap my hands around your neck and choke the pretty little life out of you if I could,” her fingertips danced across the exposed skin of your throat teasingly. “But you’d be too turned on to care, wouldn’t you, you little slut?”
Her tone was so demeaning that a needy whine unconsciously escaped your lips, her words running straight to your core. Fuck. You’d never heard her say such filthy words, but you instantly needed to hear her call you every degrading name as if you were injecting poison directly into your veins. Her pupils dilated instantly, ravenously drinking in every last sound that you tried to stifle. As abruptly as the wilder, animalistic side of her nature was revealed, her eyes were eclipsed with a calmer, more controlled glimmer. Almost as if she were biding her time with you, waiting on just the right time to pounce.
“Infatuation is a strange thing,” Mary hummed, coiling a lock of your hair around her finger. “I’m not sure if I want to taste you with my tongue or my blade.”
Your heartbeat thrummed thunderously out of your chest and your arms went limp against her tight hold, your body nearly shaking with the temptation of what she was implying.
“First, though, I’ll need to take care of this,” she swiped the back of her hand against her cheek bone, a ruby rivulet of blood running down her wrist from the cut you had marked on her.
Mary regripped the handle of the letter opener, her eyes running up and down your body as if searching for something. You let out a strangled cry once you realized that she was looking for a place to mark you herself, limbs kicking uselessly as if you were being weighed down by iron.
“Well, it’s only fair,” she licked her lips, her gaze pausing just below your eyes. Raising the blade with precision, the brunette drew a jagged cut against your lower cheek in the same place that her own scar was. “A scar for a scar.”
Mary never broke eye contact with you the entire time, following every micromovement of your expression and the bob of your throat. You bit your lip to hide the wince of pain that threatened to escape your mouth, an equal wave of pleasure coursing through your body at the action.
This desire was a dangerous thing controlling your mind, solely fixated on the intoxicatingly gorgeous woman on top of you taking pleasure in drawing your blood. You knew if you didn’t put a stop to this now, your remaining sliver of restraint would crumble and you’d never be able to return home. So you hardened your gaze, facing her petrifying stare head on.
“I’ll never give in and let you control my life,” you vowed, fighting to keep the cracks out of your voice.
“We’ll see about that,” Mary rasped in your ear, so low and insatiable that you felt a shiver run straight to your core despite your rational judgement.
Without warning, you felt something cold and needle-like stab into the side of your neck, and your thoughts of hatred and lust dissolved entirely as you went completely under once again.
