Honestly I blame it on the Historical Romance book I just finished reading. I know. Don't ask. But this story is rather morose and as hard as it is to keep everyone in character, it's harder then it sounds.
Merry Christmas, I'm, sure.
By the way, it's fluffy.
The Bubble We Live In
It didn't take her long to realize that something was wrong.
After all the years of the same thing, same place, same time, she knew instinctively that something had changed. Call it psychic powers or a woman's intuition or even careful observation but she knew that something was different.
And it wasn't necessarily a good thing.
Still retaining that spark of innocence and not entirely disillusioned to the realities of life, she made her living from drawing and writing, prone to bouts of creativity that would leave her smiling for days. Somehow, after everything, she had managed to be able to see the lighter side of things as well as the dark and make sound decisions from there.
That's not to say that she is in any way innocent. Years of adolescence and parents with gun licenses had taken care of that small issue. No, the real concern for her in this big bad world we live in was that she would get to caught up in everyone else's problems and theories and concerns.
After all, the latest scandal is all it takes to distract a person from their duty, from doing whatever it is that they chose to do.
Flare was what some would call strange, others opportunistic. If there was something that was likely to capture her interest, she went all out to make sure she achieved what it was that she wanted achieved. Not exactly naïve and not really all that worldly, she harbored a great deal of curiosity about the very things that respectable people did not talk about.
Too bad she would never dare look in his direction; no doubt he could show her every one of her secret desires.
It had started about a year ago, with an innocent encounter in a bookshop of all things. She was searching for the latest thriller and he was just there.
It would have been difficult to miss his presence, merely for the fact that she was female and in the prime of her life. At nineteen, she hadn't shown all that much interest in a love affair of any sort, to concerned with other important matters to really care. That and she didn't want anyone to turn out as messed up as she thought she was.
But, either way, she noticed him. It was hard not to with him standing there for no apparent reason, glancing up every now and then at the other customers in the well-known bookstore. She was female and he was shirtless and that's pretty much all that needs to be said on the subject.
Oh, but what a fine subject it was.
She would never admit it, but she had thought over that shirtless man for days, not anything that would ever be revealed in the light of day of course but thoughts all the same. With parents who were oh-so-prim-and-proper, she knew it would be fooling to see the man as anything more then a fantasy.
Then, suddenly, he appeared to be stalking her. Everywhere she went, he was there before her, making it almost seem like she was the one stalking him. The coffee shop she went to every Thursday morning suddenly had a new customer who was always there when she was, the club that she sometimes worked at had another employee.
But the worst of it was that she knew on some level that he was stalking her when he couldn't have been. He was a religious man, as was evident by the rosary beads always hanging around his neck whenever she saw him. And surely a man of religion wouldn't stalk some poor girl barely out of college.
There were doubts of that. How could he be religious? Because, despite the rosary beads, everyone who had encountered him complained about his foul mouth and gruesome humor. According to her employer at the bar, he scared off patrons with details about how he planned to kill them.
Who knew? Maybe the gossips were just making up things for the sake of their own entertainment. They seemed to do that a lot.
The truth of it all didn't take very long to surface. Merely two months after she had first seen him in that bookstore looking dangerous and deadly, he turned up at the one place she honestly never thought he would be.
The swimming pool.
Imagine that. A man turns up in a bookstore wearing nothing but a black trench coat and leather pants with rosary beads and slicked back white hair. She glanced his way briefly. He starts turning up everywhere she went. Then, the last place she'd expect someone like him to be was a swimming pool, so, in desperation for lack of sense of control, she went there and there he was.
But really, that was when it started. Well, started might not be the best word. That was when it solidified into something real, something tangible.
She walked into the pool gates and paid her entrance fee before moving to the changing rooms and changing into her board shorts and swimming togs. She jumped in the pool, swam a few laps and got back out again. After a liberal application of high quality sunscreen on her easily burned skin she started to sun bake.
An hour or so passed and she removed herself from her comfortable chair she had been lounging in.
Walking along the edge of the pool towards the changing rooms now that the sun had dried her completely, she was not paying much attention to her surroundings when, bam, she was pushed roughly into the pool.
Gasping for air, she swam to the surface as quickly as she could only to be shocked when she saw what awaited her. The very man she had come to this place to avoid was standing above her grinning with what could only be chalked up to anticipation.
Sputtering like a half drowned idiot, she managed to choke out stupidly, "You made me wet!"
"I should hope so, seriously," he answered while smirking in a highly sexual manner as he leaned down towards her still-flailing form in the water.
Nothing else to do, and with no with to insult the extremely…attractive…gentleman that was standing over her so provocatively, she idly reached up a hand. He grabbed onto it and she marveled at the fact that he looked to be a hard working man and yet his hands were softer then hers were!
"Flare," he greeted her when she was on stable ground again.
"How- how did you know my name?" she choked out.
Apparently seeming like an idiot was all she was able to do.
"Nametag at the bar, your address written on a piece of paper you drooped. Seriously, people these days have no idea how easy they are to track down," he answered seriously.
Finding it a bit unnerving that he knew something as private as her personal address and nick name, she decided to run away. Actually, retreat at a nice, slow, unconcerned pace so he wouldn't think she was running.
She walked straight into the changing room and changed into her normal clothes in one of the toilet cubicles, paranoid that he was watching her after one little conversation. She walked out, satisfied when she couldn't see him. She left, the same way she had come when she was called over to talk by the owner of the pool.
"Flare! We got some shit to show you!" the owner screamed at her as she tried to pass.
Figuring that she had known him for years, she went in behind the counter, looking around in paranoid anticipation as she did so. The pools proprietor was taller then her by a long shot with scars covering whatever she could see of his body. He had interesting tattoos of stitches done in black ink over every single one of the scars, to her they looked almost real.
Kakuzu always claimed he had bought the pool as a financial strategy and apparently it had paid off. So had the laboratory/workshop in the basement of the pool house where people – for a price – could build their most illicit creations away from the public – and police – eye.
Walking down the stairs that so resembled a horror movie, she watched carefully as random people came and went, most looking like they had just stepped out of a pool.
Reaching the opposite end of the long room, she saw an old friend of hers working on a wooden carving while bickering with a blond who was molding things out of clay before exploding them in the carefully constructed bullet-proof safety box. Both the men were assumed lovers although they vehemently denied being intimate with someone who did not know the true meaning of art.
But really, they were lovers.
Kakuzu had caught it on tape.
And sold it on eBay no doubt.
She was unsurprised at the brief touch of a hand on her shoulder. It was small quarters and she had grown up with most of the people behind these walls. She was concerned, however, when the brief contact turned into an arm around her shoulders.
"No. No. No. No, no, no, no, no!" she screamed when she recognized who the arm belonged to, about the same time she had a sort of attack and starting biting his hand.
From the look in his eyes, he liked it, so she stopped.
"Hidan," her stalker was greeted cordially by the bickering artists.
"No!" she continued to mutter like a petulant child.
Curiosity stopped her fighting back – not that she thought she would have had a chance – when he led her, albeit forcefully, through a curtain secluding a corridor she had never been down before. They passed someone who vaguely resembled a fish and someone who looked like a plant cross human from a horror movie – both of who threatened to eat her – twice – before she realize that she probably should have been fighting back. For all she knew, the man could be a complete psycho.
Well, obviously he was, he was stalking an innocent girl after all.
So, she started struggling and trying to pull herself out of his grip. She managed to get halfway before she was crushed back against his hard muscled body, his voice whispering low and dangerously in her ear, "Don't try me. You won't like what I do then, seriously."
She believed him.
And yet she struggled, his word inciting more fear then they did excitement as the rational side of her brain won out against the curious side for once in her life.
Next thing she knew, she was waking up disoriented and …
SHE WAS CHAINED TO A FUCKING WALL!!
Mind you, it was in a nicely furnished bedroom, complete with silk sheets and whips on the walls.
And some random male sitting on seat staring at her with boredom apparent in his heartless red eyes. As soon as he saw that she was awake, he got up and left the room, probably to inform her captor of the fact that she was conscious.
A moment later her stalker walked into the room, Hidan as he was known.
"You know," he stated genuinely, "I usually prefer to be the one chained up, but, whatever floats your boat."
She was so damn innocent, that the statement did not have the desired effect on her, as was made evident by her snarling as her face lost its usual hyper-and-happy look, "I'll kill you!"
"Go ahead. We'd both enjoy it, seriously," he answered sardonically as he pulled of his clothes and hers.
She wasn't resisting now, wanted it all along. When she saw what was revealed she lost her breath.
That wasn't the only thing she lost that night.
Of course, I'm talking about her fucking car keys, moron!