Opposition and Survival

Fight or flight.

The struggle between which of these would occur had never been a problem for Adelais; it was neither. She had nowhere to run, and fighting would just make her suffering worse in the end. It was always easier if she just remained as still as possible, took the abuse that was intended from the start, and cleaned up what followed. Fight or flight hadn't crossed her mind since she was a child, assuming she could still run or hide from her parents.

She could handle pain; it was a tolerance built over years. But never—not once since the beginning—had she been faced with the reality that someone knew. That someone had seen the greatest secret she was ordered to keep.

When Dennis reached for her scarf, those old instincts came roaring to the forefront.

Jerking back so abruptly her shoulder slammed into the wall, her hand snapped out before she could control her actions and snatching his wrist to stop his forward movement. It was the first time she'd outright refuted his advances or touched him without his explicit permission. Her shoulder throbbed from where it had connected with the stone—her knee-jerk response resulting in more force than was necessary when dodging him.

Not one to be so easily deterred, the jarring reflexes Dennis possessed had her arm encased in his grip as he reached out again.

The second time she lashed out resulted in her palm meeting his chest with remarkable force for someone of her size. The air rushed briefly from his lungs, more from shock than physical pain. Adelais felt the grip on her arm lessen with his surprise and her brain abruptly switched gears. Jerking her arm free, she dashed around him.

Unfortunately, he had not been that surprised.

His hand bunched in the material at her throat, stopping her from completely passing him, and the other helped to support her weight by grabbing a fistful of her shirt. It happened so quickly she was left momentarily disoriented when she suddenly found herself on the cot she and Casey frequented, staring at the ruined ceiling.

Her hands, with nothing else to hold, grasped his shirt and twisted. It was sure to leave wrinkles, if not ruin the material completely.

Cotton strands gave way with a tear that screamed through the room's previous silence. The skin at the back of her neck protested, reddened raw from the harsh pull of the fabric that had been wrapped securely around her neck.

Dennis leant over her like an enraged beast, one hand fisting her shirt on her stomach to keep her pinned and the other carrying away the tattered cotton remains of her scarf. His eyes remained acutely fixated on her throat. The macabre necklace of bruises her father had given to her were a mottled green and yellow from healing—days old, nearly a week at most. Even mostly healed they stood out against her pasty skin like blood on snow.

The hand in her shirt tightened, twisted, and bunched the material closer against his knuckles. This also strained it against her torso by pulling it down at the collar and up at the hem. When the movement drew his attention away from her throat, the heated desperation that had warmed Adelais's cheeks fled and froze. The material of her shirt was high enough to expose the skin above her pants, including one of the belt marks that sat higher on the side of her glutes, spanning around her hip to peek out the side of her waistline.

It was that mark, a stark red against the rest of her milky skin, that he zeroed in on.

Hands still fisted in his shirt, she used them now to push him away as she brought her leg up between them. This time, she put all of her strength behind the push through her foot. It sent him back into the wall she had leaned against just recently. Air blew through his nostrils like an angry bull, his shirt rumpled and slightly untucked from where her hands had knotted in it. She used the momentum of her kick to roll off of the cot, leaving behind the ruined remains of her scarf.

Her gaze completely overlooked the other girls still in the room and narrowed on the open door.

Vivid bruises were exposed around the swing of blonde curls, the two remaining captives in the room as still as statues as they watched Adelais flee like an animal for freedom.

Even after all of the times she had warned the girls it was useless to try and run, the other door was always locked, she still made a mad dash for it. One of her feet skid slightly when it hit a piece of the drywall that had been collected into a haphazard pile. It wasn't enough to break her momentum, however, as she bolted out of the room.

It wasn't even two steps through the door before an arm like a band of steel circled her waist and hauled her completely off of her feet.

The screams and sobs that had been repressed down into her chest over the past few days finally ripped free in a splitting shriek that she was sure tore open her throat. Dennis grunted at the sound, then again when her heel slammed back against his thigh—made worse by the small wedge heel she had kept wearing. Continuing to scream, she twisted and kicked in his grip, trying to find a tender place on his leg that would force him to let her go. The hit finally landed on the outside of his knee.

He very nearly tossed her away after that. Hitting the floor on her knees, she didn't let the shock of pain slow her and immediately dashed for the remaining door. The sound of him locking the other didn't even register as she slammed into the remaining one at a full run. The bruise he had left on her upper arm from their first encounter throbbed in protest. The blind need to flee overwhelmed her thoughts—she already knew the door would be locked.

But she tried the handle, rattling it in her desperation to get out.

The arms came around her again.

"No!"

Rather than taking her by the waist, he grabbed her wrists and forced them across her chest. Applying the full weight of his body along her spine, she was compressed in against the door until her chest was being used as a means of keeping her hands caught. Forcing his thigh between hers stopped her from lashing back at him with her foot again, but at this vantage she would have been lucky to even reach his shin.

Heaving for breath, she could feel the hot air at the back of her neck and the broad expansion of his chest against her back. "Stop," he ordered. Low and forceful. She would have followed that command in any other setting. Right now, her mind was too far gone to even consider being placid for an assessment.

Knowing this, his weight kept her pinned against the cold metal of the door.

To her horror, he used his freed hands to resume his previous inspection. Hooking his thumb in her waistband, he pushed the material downward. Shrieking again, he came to realize why it sounded like a dying animal. Continuing to force her pants lower until the snap of threads announced their breaking point, she was left with her pants and underwear shoved down on one side until scars—old and new—were put on display.

All of her hiding had been for naught.

A tremor rocked her body. Her heaving pants of air began to hitch in her throat.

Dennis's eyes were affixed to the marks across her skin. This wasn't all of them—the realization made him sick—and he felt the burn of tears against his eyes as he remembered each of her reactions. She hadn't run from his touch because his touch hadn't brought pain. He had kidnapped her from her life, and she had leaned into him for an embrace because it was better than her life. All those times she had stood waiting, malleable to his commands, was a trait she carried over from habits that had led her to those marks.

Adelais fought to silence the hitches in her throat, going so far as to hold her breath, as the tremors throughout her body increased. Hot tears traversed her cheeks in burning lines.

Feeling her shake beneath his weight, Dennis's forehead fell to rest gently on her shoulder.

"I'm so sorry," he breathed. A sob ripped from her throat.

Easing his weight off of her, he waited for her to lash out again. Instead, she remained pressed against the metal as she kept her face turned away from him. Arms that had once been forced against her chest were now cradled there in a desperate attempt to make herself smaller. He could see how violently she was beginning to shake, like a small child caught out in the cold.

Unable to stop the depth of his curiosity—the need to know, to see—prompted his fingers beneath the hem of her creased, stretched shirt.

"Don't look," she pleaded brokenly. Her voice was raspy and raw. The emotion it held seemed to come all the way from her bones. "Please. Please-"

Gradually lifting the material, more scars from burns, belts and sharp metal were littered across the skin that he revealed. Some were still fresh, maintaining a rosy quality to the scar of proud flesh; others had aged and lightened, taking on a silvery tone against the stark white of her skin.

Lowering the shirt back down, he swallowed around the sudden constriction in his throat. Stretching to the side, he grabbed Barry's discarded coat from the back of the computer chair and quickly wrapped it around her shoulders. The sudden contact drew a hitching gasp from her, shoulders locking in surprise.

"You're not for him," he whispered to himself, the words sounding like a thunderclap in the silent room.

Knowing that she would not move of her own volition, Dennis grasped her upper arms—still pulled so tightly in against herself—and gradually guided her away from the door. He could feel her resistance at first, pressing herself in as close as she could manage. The rattle of the keys made her flinch, but he could see her focus shift down to watch as he unlocked the door.

"Please, don't run. You're…you're safe here," he assured quietly, watching the bit of her face he could see around her mussed hair—her eyes were still keen on the doorknob he was holding, the ring of keys dangling from one finger.

Her attention shifted slowly, from his hand and the keys, up to meet his gaze over her shoulder. The forest green of her eyes looked lighter than before; bluer. Perhaps it was because of the tears that remained unshed, sitting at the cusp and waiting for the slightest prompt to fall free. It felt like she was staring into his soul with the look she gave him. Her eyes searched his for what felt like an eternity before she finally blinked.

The tear made a track down her cheek and disappeared into the curls of her hair.

"Will you let me go?" she asked quietly, her shaking limbs causing those simple works to tremble along with them.

Dennis's eyes flicked down to her throat—he couldn't see the bruising around the curtain of her hair—and his jaw flexed against the urge to grind his teeth.

"Do you want me to? Do you want to go back?"

Their words were whispered quietly between them, barely a breath of air into the space that separated the two.

The soft look had returned to his eyes. A gentle blue that made her heart tremble. No one else had looked at her with such an authentic sincerity before, it almost made her want to hide. She felt more bared beneath his gaze now—wrapped in a large, man's coat—than she did as he had stripped cloth from her body. Could she willingly give this up, and return to the torture brought about by her parents?

Reaching up slowly with his free hand, Dennis shifted her hair to the side just enough to wipe away the remnants of her tears.

"Adelais, do you want to go back?"

She closed her eyes and leaned into the steady pressure of his hand.

"No," she breathed out. "I don't want to go back to them." Unable to repress them, her tears fell in hot tracks down her cheeks—some caught on Dennis's lingering hand as he watched her break apart before him. This wasn't like her shriek of anguish or her bodily fight for freedom.

This was surrender in its purest form.

"I'm so tired of pain."

Dennis drew her in a moment later. The door was opened and he quietly ushered her out of the messy room that had sat beyond her cell for the past several days. Even though this would be her first time seeing beyond the second locked door, she found herself staring blankly at the wall as she remained tucked into Dennis's side as he relocked the door.

Her muscles slowly released from their constricted positions, the adrenaline of the past several minutes bleeding away into nothing. Her limbs felt like lead now that she had no energy to lift them. Dennis noticed the drag in her feet and the weight she placed on him for support. Without the adrenaline, the pain in her knees became vivid as she walked. If not for her extensive experience with broken bones and the associated pain, she'd assume her patella were cracked. Meeting the concrete floor had done her no favours.

Dennis halted their stride, noting her struggle.

He remembered the pain of her kick at the outside of his knee—a dangerous place to catch an injury if the right force was applied—and how he had thrown her from his arms on instinct. The slap of her hands to help catch herself was all he had heard, but he knew she'd met the floor on her knees. Just as the rest of her was beginning to lag with fatigue, the ebb of bruised flesh was becoming prevalent.

Based on the scars she bore, Adelais was no stranger to pain. She had extensive experience with soldiering on through that pain.

He did not want her to have to.

Stooping down before she had a chance to catch on, he kept one arm around her back while the other caught that backs of her damaged knees. Adelais tried to bury her sound of surprise, making a strangled gasp come out instead. He worried briefly that it was a sound of pain, but the look to her eyes said otherwise. Deceptively strong hands fisted in his shift again, further stretching the fabric. Barry's coat slipped off one shoulder, taking the curls of her hair with it, and exposed the necklace of bruises again.

A silent rage boiled deep inside of Dennis at the thought of someone—of a parent—strangling their own child in such a manner. The marks Adelais carried were a disgusting reminder that humanity was flawed.

Patricia's undying fealty to the Beast was not one that Dennis shared. However, seeing first hand what people could do—in personal experience from Kevin's early life and now with Adelais—he felt a dark desire stirring deep. He wanted to see them suffer for once. It was the abuse permanently etched into her skin that brushed aside his doubts about the Beast—for now.

A head of blonde hair came to rest on his shoulder as he resumed walking. Her breaths were soft and warm against his neck.

"We won't hurt you," he assured Adelais quietly. "I promise you'll be safe here with us."

It was easier to believe him than should be possible. The fact that her parents had never even bothered with such false promises made it so, so simple. He also carried no falsehoods. Even for a man who had kidnapped her and three teenagers in broad daylight, he had told no lies or offered empty assurances. Even after Patricia had scolded him, his reasons were disturbingly honest.

Food.

She wanted to ask, but no matter her effort she couldn't bring forth the words.

"You're not for him" he'd said. Not for who? What had changed that meant she was safe from whoever was coming for the other three? Her scars?

So, even a killer did not want her for the silver her parents had traced across her skin.