title: Lost Happiness

author: melpomene_blue

chapter: one

Felicity.

Fel-icity.

Fel-ic-ity.

Fel-ic-i-ty.

Felicity-ty-ty-ty-ty...

The name – word maybe – echoed in her head in an endless loop of senseless noise. It had long since lost any meaning, just a jumbled up cluster of sounds. It was memory that kept repeating it. The memory of another voice saying her name over and over again. At least...she was fairly certain it was her name. It had been a while, she could be wrong. Maybe it was someone else's name she heard in her head. Maybe it was a prayer.

She had been alone for...well, for a long time. Alone in a cavern deep underground. Alone in a cold, dank, dark hole in the ground unable to see or escape. The cavern floor measured no more than ten feet across – early on in her captivity she had worked to learn as much as possible about her prison thinking it might aid in her escape. There was a crevice in the rock high over her head – she estimated the cavern went up at least twenty feet – that allowed a thin, weak stream of light to play across the floor throughout the day. There was also a trapdoor somewhere near the crack of light. Escape had become a distant dream.

Without her glasses, her observation capabilities were severely limited. The crevice that seemed to lead outside was little more than a blurry scar in what passed for a ceiling. The trapdoor near it, so far as she could tell, was the only truly passable means of entrance or exit and had been how she had entered the cavern, very much against her will but also very much overpowered by the large, burly, mostly unwashed thugs who had shoved her through it with no ceremony whatsoever. It was high overhead, maybe twelve feet or so, more than twice her height.

She had fallen through the air into a black unknown, her scream reverberating and echoing back at her, surrounding her in a cacophony of noise. The landing had been sudden, jarring, and overwhelmed her with so much pain that her fear was all but forgotten at least temporarily.

Some time later, she didn't know if it had been minutes or hours, she had been able to differentiate and catalog one pain from another. Head – slammed against the stony floor upon her impact with enough force to send her into a world of vertigo and leave a huge goose egg at her temple. Shoulder – dislocated and throbbing dully. Wrist – bent oddly beneath her as it struck the ground just before the rest of her body landed on top of it, sprained but not broken. Fingers – snapped too far back and broken, swelling freely. Leg – broken below the knee, bone still apparently in place but swelling rapidly. Fingernail – torn, marring the manicure she had just gotten.

Giggles shook her body, creating new waves of pain to crash over her. Of all the serious damage done to her body, it was her broken fingernail and chipped polish that managed to send her over the edge. As much as it hurt, she couldn't stop the hysterical laughter that bubbled up in her chest and aided in adding one more injury to her mental list.

Ribs – definitely cracked and possibly broken.

After the hysteria had subsided, she had fallen asleep with the thought that if she was lucky she would slip into a coma and never wake up again.

Luck had not been with her in the hole. That had been day one.

She had no idea how long she had lost between her arrival in the cavern and waking up again. She had been snatched off the street in front of her apartment in the evening, dropped into the cavern the next morning after spending the night disoriented and locked in a crate, but beyond that...

When she had first been dumped into the cavern, the thin line of light from the crevice overhead had illuminated the ground near where she had fallen, when she woke up again the light had traveled across the floor and climbed half way up the wall. Had it been a day? Two days? Even longer?

Her mouth was dry, her tongue completely parched. A quick, blurry look around the cavern revealed no water save the rivulets of moisture that trailed down the walls and formed small pools on the floor. She didn't want to think about how many little microbes were lurking in the pools as she painfully drug herself close enough to one to dip her fingers in the cold liquid. She brought her hand to her mouth, sucking the water from her fingers greedily. Again and again she dipped her fingers in the shallow puddle and brought them to her lips until her desperate thirst was quenched. Hunger began to gnaw at her stomach but there was nothing to be done to ease it and so she contented herself with the water.

Her first day of captivity stretched into a second and then a third and on and on. She couldn't remember the last time she had eaten a true meal. The day of her capture? The day before that? She tried to focus on other things since even the vague memory of food was a torment. Her captors would occasionally toss scraps to her through the trapdoor: stale, moldy crusts of bread and pieces of half-rotten fruit. At first she had tried to take care of what she willingly ate but eventually the desperate nature of her hunger wouldn't allow her any alternative. She ate what she was given: mold, maggots and all.

She was filthy but had ceased to care. The bright pink and yellow tones of the sheath dress she wore had turned a uniform dark gray-brown. The material that had hugged her figure before now hung loose across a frame grown too thin and bony. Her hair was a tangled mass of dirty, mousy brown that had little to do with her natural roots showing.

No one came. No one spoke to her. No one explained why she had been taken or what they hoped to accomplish with her abduction. No one came at all, not really, except for the rare times the trapdoor would squeak open enough for what passed for her food to be shoved through. Whatever the reasons for her captivity, gaining information was obviously not one of them.

She had tried talking to them, pleading with them, cursing them, begging them, yelling at them, reasoning with them...all for naught. She called out until her voice was a hoarse husk. She mused that they must be deaf, well-paid thugs or maybe they just really enjoyed torturing her.

Unfortunately for her, it wasn't always quiet. Occasionally her ears would be assaulted with an onslaught of screams coming from somewhere beyond the trapdoor. Children's voices, John's, Oliver's, others'... The cavern would capture the cries and magnify them until she was cowering on the floor curled into a tight ball with her hands ineffectually clapped over her ears. Sometimes her own anguished scream would join the throng. Even after she knew the voices were merely a recording, she could not remain unaffected. They tore at her soul until she sat and literally, repeatedly, banged her head against the rough stone wall in a bid to make her suffering end. Only rarely was she able to knock herself unconscious – the resulting headache when she roused was always well worth the accompanying silence.

In the quiet times, she sat and avoided looking at her calender. After the first day, she had cleared a small space on the cavern floor where the crack of light never quite reached. Each day, she would place a pebble in that dim hidden space, one pebble for each day: her calender of days spent in captivity. She never counted how many pebbles had amassed. She felt that keeping track of the number of days as accurately as possible was important but she had no desire to learn the exact number. Knowing for sure how many days she had been there would be nothing short of a living death.

At those times when she was not completely mired in misery, she wondered if they were looking for her. Were they busy at her computers in the Arrow Cave - Dig's words, not hers - while she wasted away in the confines of her own hellish cave? Were they checking video feeds and trying to track her disappearance in any way they could? Did they have any idea how to access all the information that was quite literally at their fingertips? Had they paid any attention at all when she had explained and demonstrated some of the more basic search techniques she often utilized in their quest? Or had they written her off as a lost cause, dead or worse?

It was in those moments that she would begin the tail spin that would start her spiraling into horror-filled depression. Dead, or as good as dead... Oliver had been there, Sara had been there – but neither of them had been trapped in a cavern with no way out. She knew that if she died, there would be no miraculous return from the dead, no family reunion to celebrate her return. Would her mother even have a body to bury or would she be left with an empty grave over which to morn the loss of a daughter who had run as far away from Vegas as she could?

Over the time her wounds had healed as best they could given her complete lack of first aid supplies. Her fingers had healed badly, as had her leg. They still hurt but they were healed. She had tried to align the bones in her fingers but with nothing to bind them with, and given how small the bones were anyway...her task had been made all that much more futile. The dislocated shoulder had been the only thing she could even try to repair with any confidence, relying heavily on too many action movies and throwing herself painfully against the wall until she felt it shear back into its joint with a loud pop and a horrifying wave of pain that had her dry heaving against the floor. It was the only time she had been grateful for an empty stomach.

It was in her dank cavern, broken and so far beyond afraid that she had no word to adequately describe it, that she sat and tried to fight the soul-sucking depression that threatened her with every passing second. But with every passing day, she found it harder to fight against the darkness.

She had discovered a sharp rock that fit nicely in the palm of her hand and there were times she was sorely tempted to use it against her wrist, end her suffering once and for all. She kept it close at hand at all times. She kept it to remind herself that she still had options. She still had that one aspect of control over her situation even if some mysterious force had managed to strip away everything else.

to be continued...