title: Lost Happiness
author: melpomene blue
chapter: two
Underground caves and caverns maintained a constant temperature year round. She remembered being impressed with that concept while visiting Great Basin National Park when she was a kid. It had been a long drive out of Las Vegas and she never quite understood why her mother had voluntarily gone to the trouble given that it was mid-summer and unbearably hot outside...and their car's AC had given out before they even got on the road good. But they had just rolled all the windows down and had gone anyway and once they had gone down into the caverns it was been blessedly cool despite the weather above ground. She had liked those caverns with their beautiful rock formations and had talked about them for weeks after that visit. She had even thought she might want to study geology for a little while after that.
She didn't like this cave. She didn't like it at all. This was just a prison, there were no beautiful stalactites, no mineral deposits, nothing but misery.
She was cold, not merely cool. She had been cold from her first moment in the cave and had written it off to shock and injury and her continued loss of body mass but there was something more to this chill than usual. It seemed almost as if her captors were dropping the temperature even more, intentionally making it colder. She couldn't detect any change to the air current, had no idea how they could be accomplishing anything of the sort. Maybe it was just all in her head.
She tried to take a deep, calming breath but failed. She was fairly certain that her ribs had not healed properly either - it still hurt to breathe too deeply and so she kept her breaths shallow as much as possible. The negative aspect of that, besides just the poor health and not being able to breathe easily thing, was that it made it difficult to get enough oxygen. She fought against the urge to cough but fighting it was just as painful as coughing would be and she gave in to the fit at last – living in damp and dirty conditions had wrecked havoc on her immune system.
She had been locked in the half-light of the cave for so long now and her health was beginning to rapidly decline that she wondered if it could be death finally calling on her. She wanted to think so but she had been fooled too many times since her capture. Death was the one final escape she really didn't think they would be kind enough to allow her unless that had no choice. Pretty soon, she was fairly sure they would have no other recourse but to allow her to slip away.
Occasionally, in her more lucid moments when she wasn't entirely preoccupied with hoping for death or eying her friendly pet rock, she thought she could detect the smell of salt in the air of the cavern. She liked to imagine that she was somewhere near the ocean. Somewhere clean and windswept with pristine beaches and cleansing air. Anywhere but stuck in a cave and barely alive.
She was laying down on the dirty, slick floor and watching the fuzzy outline of the trapdoor when she heard something new. She was too weak and disoriented to do more than close her eyes momentarily. When she opened them again the trapdoor was still closed but the odd sound repeated itself. She was nearly certain the noise was coming from the other side of the door. The sound was familiar in a decidedly nonspecific way, as if it was something that regularly faded into the background white noise without bringing attention to itself. She closed her eyes again and tried to place the sound.
With a jolt, she woke up some time later. She hadn't intended to drift off but sleep was becoming more and more frequent as time progressed. She still refused to count her rock calender but she knew it was growing impressively large and with each little stone she added to it, it felt as if her waking hours were growing shorter and shorter.
She paused, listening. Yes, the noise was still there. It was almost a distant thumping or a muffled clicking, persistent and measured. It reminded her of a metronome...or of Oliver when he was working out. Odd that she hadn't heard it before now. It brought to mind the old ghost stories from her days at overnight camp as a kid – the rhythmic banging against the roof of the car that the girlfriend discovers the next morning was the sound of her lover's foot just barely able to touch the car's roof enough to made a noise but not enough to prevent himself from being strangled to death – the lover who had gone out to investigate a weird noise and had been hung in the tree under which they had parked.
Sometimes as she lay on the floor of her prison or slumped against the rough walls, she let her mind wander far away. She wondered what Oliver and John were doing. Had they taken down any interesting criminals lately? Had they found any leads on locating her? Had they given her up for dead? Had they broadened their selection of take-out establishments? She also wondered whether Oliver had replaced her yet. In truth, he ought to have done so but the mere idea of being replaced was just a bit heartbreaking. It would have been reasonable though. How had the Queens survived for five years with no information as to what really happened to Oliver and his father? How did they manage to go on? She couldn't imagine that the loss of a friend would be anywhere near as difficult for Oliver or John to manage. After all, she wasn't family.
The noise just wouldn't stop. It kept dragging her back to the here and now and away from her musings. She squinted irritably at the trapdoor. Without her glasses it was hard to be certain but she thought a fine sifting of dirt and dust might be falling from the door's perimeter. She wondered if that meant who ever was up there was working to bury the door. She might be in luck after all...without food, she would certainly die.
Even the thought of sitting up required more energy than she could expend so she stayed exactly where she was, laying on the cold, hard rock directly under the trapdoor and her only hope of escape. At least this way, if someone ever came along and discovered the trapdoor they wouldn't miss seeing her remains. It gave her a small comfort to think that one day someone might know what had become of her.
She gripped her pet rock. It wasn't that she was afraid to use the rock, but if she could just fall asleep and achieve the same result then she couldn't see a reason to cause herself any unnecessary pain. Maybe if she languished too long, she'd change her mind. She closed her eyes again and felt her grip on wakefulness slipping with each shallow breath she took.
It was the noise that woke her. A new noise, something different from before. This noise was not the same as the metronome-like sound from before, this was a scraping, banging sound that seemed to come from just the other side of the trapdoor. She thought there also might be voices. It had been so long since she had heard another living person speak, she couldn't stop the tears that pricked her eyes and trailed into her hairline.
The familiar grating sound of the trapdoor being lifted was accompanied by a good amount of dirt raining down into the cave, dusting her in even more filth. She just remained still, watching to see what would happen next. Nothing was making any sense. This was not the modus operandi of her captors. This was definitely something new.
The trapdoor opened wider yet until she heard the thud of it falling completely open. The open door was accompanied by a blindingly bright light, so bright that she had to duck her head and close her eyes against it. She jumped at the sound of a man's voice shouting. The sound bounced against the walls of her cave and became deafening to her ears, so much so that she rolled onto her side and tried to block out the sound the same way she had with the recorded screams her captors had sometimes tormented her with.
As quickly as it began, the shouting stopped and she wondered if she had imagined it all. Cautiously peeking out at the cave wall, she saw beams of light playing across the rock. They were flashlight beams – her captors had never had flashlights before but she wouldn't put it past them to have created some new torment for her. It was then that she heard a very solid thud behind her, as if something had fallen into the cave from the trapdoor.
Maybe it was another prisoner? Company? If it was, they were certainly more docile than she had been when she had first been shoved into the cave. Maybe they were unconscious. But...there hadn't been the sick crack of bones breaking on impact. Certainly no one could fall from such a height without suffering at least one broken bone. After all, she had suffered so much damage
The feel of a tentative hand against her shoulder brought her to instant life. Unused for longer than she could remember, her voice sounded almost foreign and feral even to her own ears and she screamed in absolute terror. She scrambled out of the bright light with more speed than she had even thought possible given her poorly healed broken bones. Trembling in fear, her heart thudding dangerously fast and loud in her chest, she pressed herself as close to the wall as possible. There was no escape and she was in no shape to defend herself.
It wasn't until she was forced to stop screaming long enough to take a breath that she could hear the voice of her visitor whispering soothing words. They had followed her across the cave and she could feel hands gently gripping her face but the light was still to bright for her to be able to see anything. But the voice was familiar and the touch...it was familiar as well. She tried to squint at the face in front of her but it was just too bright for her to be able to see anything but vague shapes.
"Here, shhhh..." The person waved his arm wildly above his head and the painful light dimmed until it was almost as faint as the cave had been throughout her time there. Her hands were gently caught up in a calloused palm and the very familiar shape of her glasses miraculously appeared. They gently helped her to flip open the temples and slip them on.
For the first time since that night she had been snagged after parking her car, she could see clearly. The lenses had smudges and fingerprints but it didn't matter. She could see. She allowed her eyes to drift up toward the face of the person who had given her back her vision. Closing her eyes as soon as she was able to focus on his. She slumped backward without ceremony.
"Felicity!"