Februwhump Day 25 - Muffled screams
Title: They took you and they made me see
Fandom: 9-1-1 Lone Star
Characters: Carlos Reyes, TK Strand, Owen Strand, Gabriel Reyes
Pairing: Carlos Reyes/TK Strand
Chapter 5
He wasn't sure if he had been knocked unconscious, fallen asleep, or if exhaustion had caused him to lie there, eyes open staring into nothingness and brain shut down. He didn't know if it had been a minute or several hours since his hood had been untied and removed from his head. He was sure he had been shocked.
He had been pushed to the limit of his capabilities, to the edge of his strength. They had made him remember so many things. That day trapped, thinking he would not make it out of that black hole in which he had been trapped. How old was he? Six? Seven? Less? He had forgotten, only the feeling that he was about to die and that no one was going to get him out of there.
Since then the idea of being trapped had evolved into an elevator that stopped for a second too long or the stupid dreams of someone tying him up and throwing him down a well.
Few people knew about it, because it made him feel too weak and fragile, and he imagined one of the criminals he was chasing using that against him. He had never imagined that it could end up happening, let alone that it was a macabre game for people bidding at auctions to watch other human beings suffer.
He only hoped that TK and his parents would never see that.
They were denigrating him in a way that would never allow him to look them in the face again. He had screamed, he had begged, he had cried, and he had felt like the same helpless child he was then again.
TK couldn't be on the other side of that screen, couldn't see him like that.
He wasn't ashamed or bothered to cry in front of TK, but this was different. This was something very close to feeling violated; these people were playing with his emotions and his greatest fears for fun and money at his expense.
TK couldn't see that. His parents couldn't see that.
Plus he was hurt.
With the times he had seen something happen to TK, had seen him end up in the hospital and after what you went through when the person you hurt the most or your life is in danger, TK couldn't see him like that, with that wound in his side that no one had come to heal.
He hadn't stopped bleeding and he knew that wasn't good and when he had struggled to keep them from putting the ropes on his wrists and ankles, he knew he had hurt his side, he knew he had made the wound worse.
That was what they wanted.
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