A/N: Deleted Hide and Seek, the first fic I published on this site. Yeah, it had a smattering of reviews, but I really didn't want it up where people could actually, y'know, read it. Yeah, it sucked that bad.
But I still really liked the prologue. :D
Disclaimer: Dammit, I still own nothing. One of these days...
The room was small and damp and rank with the smell of rotting meat and waste, which would have bothered most people, but it suited him just fine. He hated heat more than he hated the smell, and the room stayed nice and cool even on the most sweltering days. If the smell became too much for him, he could always go back upstairs where it smelled like fresh, cooked meat and Master's cologne, but the skinny toy had to stay in the little room, because it was locked in a cage and Master had the key.
Sometimes he wanted to bring it upstairs to play, where it wasn't so dark and smelly, but it would run away if he let it go upstairs. If it ran away, he couldn't play with it anymore and Master would be angry at him, so he kept it locked up tight and played with it in the little dark room. And besides, there weren't any cages or pits of black water to make the skinny toy scream so beautifully upstairs.
He watched as the skinny toy clutched the bars of its cage, water running down its cheeks and dripping onto its filthy shirt. Its hair, once brightbright red like a fire truck or the hot blood that spilled from his toys when he was done playing with them, was now mangled with dirt and muck, a putrid greyblack. Its green eyes were still bright, with terror and maybe a fever, and it amazed him that its hair could get so dull while its eyes still shone like a lamp in the dark. Its skin shone, too, through the layers of grime and muck, moonwhite bonewhite corpsewhite slick and cold from fearsweat and grungy pit-water.
It keened, wailing and screaming and moaning like he did when Master was pleased with him and rewarding him with a raw fuck, but unlike him, the skinny toy was not making the noises because it was happy. The skinny toy was making the noises because it was cold and hungry and scared, even though it was the toy's fault about all of those things except for the last. If it had been good, it would have eaten its dinner like the rest of the skinny toys that needed to be fattened up before they would taste right. But once it realized what was on the plate, the toy vomited the precious meat and wouldn't eat--when he tried to hold it down, it had screamed and thrashed and clamped its jaw shut so he couldn't get the meat past its dry lips, so it wasted away in the cage, too stringy now to be tasty and too fragile to be fun for much longer. He would have snapped its neck by now and devoured it like the others—the only way it could be brought upstairs, dead and pliant— if its fear wasn't so pretty.
"Please," it groaned, snot now dribbling from its nose in addition to the water leaking down its face. He knew snot; it happened when he got sick and to almost all of his toys when they made the keeningwailingscreamingmoaning noises. It was yucky. He inched closer.
"Please? Is it begging?" He gazed curiously into those bright green eyes and leaned in, holding onto the bars just above its grimy hands. He snarled, letting out an excited bark when the skinny toy shrank back against the far wall of its cage, whimpering.
"Oh, God," it moaned again, hugging its bony knees to its chest. Its narrow shoulders trembled with the keening and the cold, and it rocked back and forth. Ohhh, the smell of its fear was delicious.
He yanked on the chain to his right, his gleeful howls drowning out the skinny toy's screams as it plunged downdowndown into the water at the bottom of the pit.