TRADITIONAL WARNINGS: The joy of fiction is that you can blur the line of consent without any moral ambiguity on your own part. In short, non-consensual sex/violence ahead. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK (your mileage may vary).
A final warning: there won't be any big reveals here, no shocking revelations after commercial breaks. If you have a question, it's because I want you to answer it for yourself. Who is the man, and who is the beast?
"O powerful love, that in some respects makes a beast a man, in some other, a man a beast." - Shakespeare
It's been an ugly enough year that Elena knows to feign sleep when she wakes up in this much pain. She does her best to hold her breathing steady and keeps her eyes shut- if her captor is inattentive (whoever he is), he probably won't notice the change in her heart rate.
Now, to learn what she can about her predicament... She's lying on her back. The breeze tells her she's outside, and the purply-black hue behind her eyelids means that night has fallen. The only really bad pain is coming from an ankle that's probably swollen (when has she ever gotten off easy?), but she won't know how she's doing for sure until she can get up and move. She's still clothed, thankfully. There's a weight across her chest and arms, and another over her shins- is she bound? The ground beneath her feels rocky, though something smooth and hard rests beneath her head.
She risks cracking one eye open, and it takes every bit of her resolve not to gasp. Train tracks, man, she's tied to fucking train tracks. Whose sick joke is this? Focus, Lena, focus...
"You're awake," he says. She'd know his voice anywhere, apparently.
"Please tell me you're here to rescue me." It could be true, right?
"Not exactly..." He's laughing at her, the bastard.
Elena makes a show of shifting so that she's facing him, testing the give in her ropes (not much). "Well, what are we doing here?"
"I haven't decided yet," he says with a bit of that supposedly forgotten Southern drawl. "It's hours before the next train comes, so there's no rush."
Well, fuck.
