The Hostage

…and he leaps.

Once his eyes have adjusted from the blue dazzle of the leap effect, it's dark. Utterly dark. Totally and utterly dark. He's lying down, so maybe he's just in bed and it's night time and he's in this room with all the curtains drawn. That must be it. He can't be blind. He leapt into a blind man's life once, and he wasn't blind then.

There are possibilities though. Leaping makes holes in his memories. Al says it turns his brain into Swiss cheese. What if it's doing physical damage? What if it's turned his optic nerve into Swiss cheese too?

He takes a deep breath to calm himself down. It's close in this room. The air's kind of stale. Must be just that all the windows and drapes and the door are closed. The best way to solve this will be just get out of bed and turn a light on. He tries to sit up and before he's even halfway to vertical, his forehead connects with something hard. Cracks against wood and he flops onto his back again. He's disoriented. There's a shelf or something right above the bed. Close. Is he on a boat? No. No sense of rocking, sound of the sea, smell of water. What about a submarine? No smell of oil, just the rank odor of a human body, the one belonging to the life he's just leapt into, he guesses.

It's not just an unwashed body smell, either. Now that his nose and brain are working properly again after the leap he realizes there's this ammonia stink and it's…

'Oh boy.' Somebody's wet the bed and it wasn't Sam. So…what? He's here to cure somebody's nocturnal enuresis problem? He hopes he's not a kid again. Not that being a kid isn't fun, but Time/Fate/God/Whatever asks an awful lot of him sometimes, and kids are seldom in a position of power.

Anyway, whatever. He needs to get up and do something about the state of this bed. It would probably help the kid if his parents would leave the light on, maybe then he could get himself to the bathroom and this wouldn't happen. This leap could be as simple as asking for a night light.

He rolls over to get up and his knees bump against a wooden wall. He puts his hand in front. Yeah, it's a wall. No wonder it's so close in here. Warm and sticky and smelly. He rolls onto his other side and there's another wall. No. What? He reaches behind him to the headboard, bashing his elbow, bruising his knuckles against - a wall, and when he wriggles down through the dampness towards the end of the bed, his feet encounter more wall. He kicks and his bare feet make a dull thud and the wall doesn't move.

He bangs with his elbow, deliberately this time, and the same dull thud comes from the side of the box. He's in a box. No wonder he can hardly breathe. This is stupid. He's leapt into a box. Just call me Jack. It's a dumb attempt at a joke and it doesn't work at all on him. He presses his palms against the lid of the box, suddenly afraid that it won't open, and he pushes. He pushes so that his arms strain and he brings his knees up and pushes with them too. His arms and thighs begin to tremble and it's close in there and it's hot, sweat runs down his face, armpits, groin and he pushes harder and harder but the lid of the box stays exactly where it was and he's trapped.

It suddenly occurs to him that he could be the victim of a premature burial. He thrusts, one last time, desperate to get out and the box does not move.

'Oh no.'