Victoria Julian's eyelids felt like they weighed a ton. In fact, all of her limbs felt like they weighed that impossible amount. She felt like she could barely breath. She felt like her heart wasn't even beating. The poor seventeen year old brunette was paralyzed.
How it had happened, or better yet, why it had happened, was a complete mystery to her. She had blacked out in the middle of reading a book, it had felt like a bomb had gone off inside her brain, and now she was in her current predicament.
Victoria wanted to open her eyes, to scream for help, to do something to confirm to herself that she was still among the living, but all of her attempts were thwarted by whatever plagued her.
She couldn't hear a thing except this echoey quality in her ears. Great...was she deaf too? Is this what it felt like to be Helen Keller? She couldn't feel anything. She wasn't numb, per say, but the air seemed to have no temperature. She could tell that she was nude, but there was obviously no one around to see it.
but then there was something different. Beyond her eyelids, there was a light. Flashing lights, actually. She could hear voices, feel the cool and humid air, like it had just rained, feel the wet pavement underneath her naked body. Had she been found? The young woman wanted to move her arms, curl her legs up to cover herself since she could tell that she was splayed out for the whole world to see.
A voice penetrated through her eardrums, a man it sounded like. Probably a cop.
"Oh geez, this is not what I was expecting." He sounded torn between angry and disgusted. Victoria could tell that he had averted his eyes as he had said it.
She still felt floaty. Far away from herself. She still couldn't move. God, they thought she was dead!
Victoria started to panic, and with that panic came a vibrating, rushing sensation. It felt like she was moving at the speed of light. She lights and the voices and the sensations got louder and closer and much more real and then-
Victoria awoke with a jolt, gasping and coughing and retching, trying to take in her surroundings while doing so. She covered herself as best as she could while the people that were around her leaped and scuttled back in fear, shock, whatever.
Her wide brown eyes looked around and she quite resembled a sciddish feline, the way she was curled in on herself, backed up against a police car.
Everyone was staring at her and she was staring back. No one knew what to do. Jack Crawford, who had been the owner of the voice Victoria had heard, looked to the empath Will Graham, who had his eyes firmly fixated on the pavement near his shoes. At least he had the decency to avert his eyes from the seemingly mute and naked teen in front of them.
Hannibal Lecter, however, was behind the two just over Will's right shoulder, watching the girl with keen curiosity. She was mute and had just come back from the dead. The latter was the main source for the psychiatrist's cat-like curiosity.
Victoria's eyes were still darting around. Ninety-nine percent of the cops and medics looked positively horrified, like she was going to run at them and start gnawing on their flesh.
The other one percent was a middle-aged African American man, a pale man in his early thirties that had his eyes firmly fixated on the ground, and a middle-aged white man with cheekbones to die for that had brown eyes that she could've sworn were looking through her soul.
She looked down, curling up further as if trying to disappear into the car behind her. That was when Dr. Lecter realized how rude he was being by just staring at her and not offering her some coverage. How insensitive.
Victoria gave a look of confusion laced with fear as the Dark Man, which was what she was mentally calling Lecter, cautiously made his way toward her, like she was an abused Pitbull that could either run to him and start licking him or run at him and try to maul him to death.
He pulled off his very expensive looking jacket that was part of an equally expensive looking three-piece suit and wrapped it around Victoria's quivering form as she watched him cautiously out of the corner of her eye.
Her eyes flickered back to Crawford, who was now starting to ease himself forward as well, then to Graham as he was suddenly right beside Lecter. She hadn't even heard him coming.
"Can you walk or do you wish for me to carry you?" The Dark Man asked in a luxurious foreign accent that sounded Lithuanian. Victoria wasn't sureif she could walk or speak, so she decided to try. She unfurled her legs, which were rather long, and pushed her weight onto the balls of her feet. That wasn't too bad, so maybe she could stand.
Wrong. She ended up losing her balance and falling right into the black haired man that hadn't even bothered to look at her before a mere few seconds before. She felt his hands gripping her upper arms, keeping her up straight, and she held onto his shoulders in an attempt to stabilize herself.
"I, uhm, I think the latter would be best, Doctor Lecter." The man stammered before practically pushing Victoria toward the Dark Man that was now known as Doctor Lecter.
Victoria froze and her eyes became ever wider as the name sunk into her mind. Lecter. Doctor Lecter. Hannibal Lecter. She turned to look at the Dark Man behind her, now completely terrified if she hadn't been before.
But before she knew it, she was hoisted up Bridal Style. She kept Doctor Lecter's jacket front closed to provide some sort of modesty, but that really wasn't her problem.
Her problem was that she was far away from her home. She was far away from her dimension, even. And she was in the arms of a serial killer.