The nightmares always started the same.

"Hello?" Shiro's voice echoed around the cold, hollow room. Blindfolded, on his knees and with his wrists bound behind his back, he had no idea what was going on. The only thing he could hear were the tips of his own shoes scuffing against concrete as he tried to twist his hands free. "Hello? Is someone there?"

He was alone—he knew that. Has known that, at least for the last dozen or so times he's been here. Yet, for some reason, he could never remember when the last time was. It always felt so new.

"Keith! Allur—augh!"

Someone jabbed their finger into the open wound in his thigh, making him grit his teeth and double over in pain. Whatever was lodged in there—a bullet. Right. "Unless you'd prefer for the next one to be in your skull, I'd suggest you stop your blabbering."

He could see now—could see through his tattered pants that his wound was more or less healed over, that he was in a chair, that he wasn't alone. Sendak—that was his name, with the glass eye and that hellish, nightmare-inducing grin—stood over him with a glimmering, freshly-sharpened bowie knife. Shiro tucked his chin.

"Now, Champion. This isn't anything we haven't done before." Sendak chuckled, grabbing a fistful of Shiro's hair and yanking it back. He dragged the blade flat along Shiro's neck, from the bottom to the top, something damp and slimy giving way. "We need to make sure you look presentable for the show tonight. You seem to have gotten yourself quite the following after last week, and it'd be a shame if you didn't look your best for your new fans."

Holding the knife with his prosthetic hand, Sendak's grip was rigid and unsteady. He nicked Shiro's jaw on a particularly harsh upstroke, making Shiro hiss and reflexively attempt to reach up to tend to his wound. There was a bloody, raw stump where his right arm should've been.

"Oh, dear." Sendak clicked his tongue. "What a mess."

"Don't talk like that, sir. We're going to be fine." Shiro was back on his knees again, right arm intact, the bullet wound still fresh and searing in his thigh. In front of him sat Captain Holt, hand clutched tightly over his own bleeding arm. "Keith, he'll know how to find us, and if not—"

"Please, Shiro, this isn't the time for wishful thinking." Holt coughed as the dirt from the floor lifted and swirled around them. "God only knows where the hell they took us, and it's anyone's guess as to what they're planning on doing. Right now we need to be focusing on the next ten minutes."

"The next ten minutes?" Shiro asked, and then it was suddenly two weeks later, or three, or four, and he was alone again, tired and thirsty, wondering when the next time one of Sendak's men would come through with something to eat. There was a gunshot.

"Captain!" Shiro tried to meet him halfway as the door swung open and the captain was shoved back inside, tripping and falling to his knees with a pained grunt. Shiro looked him over frantically, searching for any new wounds or marks outside of the ones left behind from the Galra's usual interrogation tactics, but found nothing.

"Captain Holt? Captain Holt, are you alright? What did they do to you?"

"They—Iverson—" He retched. "I couldn't—"

Shiro grabbed him. "Captain Holt, please, you need to calm down."

"The room! The room, Shiro! I saw it! It's here!"

"The… room?" Shiro asked, but it was no use. Holt was nearly incomprehensible, crumbling more and more into hysterics with every passing second, eyes blown wide and hands shaking on Shiro's shoulders as he rambled on about some room, and the color red, and blood, god, there was so much blood—on his hands, on his glasses. On Shiro.

Captain Holt was gone. "I still think we should have killed him."

"No need. He's of more use to us alive than dead. A deterrent, if nothing else."

"But what if he comes back?"

"Assuming you kept his head covered as I had instructed, that will not happen."

Shiro couldn't see anymore, but he could feel the air move as Sendak's crony stepped around him. "Then what about this one? Drop him off, too?" There was some tugging at his wrist bindings. "I don't think we can use him for anything. He's too stubborn."

Sendak laughed that dark, malevolent laugh that never failed to send chills down Shiro's spine. "The perfect candidate for the showroom, in my opinion."

And for a brief, fleeting moment Shiro was in that room, the one he'd seen in so many evidence reels before. There was a camera pointed at him. He was clean and freshly shaved, wrists pulled high and secured in a thick rope of cable, where he hung from an industrial hook with his feet just barely touching the ground. Underneath the camera was a television that mimicked every move and sound he made. He could see Haxus in the feed, standing somewhere behind him, waiting.

But then he was back in the other room again, hands free, thigh only sore now and wrapped in an old blood-soaked tourniquet. Captain Holt was next to him, his back against the wall, looking as weary and hungry as Shiro felt. Between them sat a small tray with a few slices of bread and some water.

"Eat, Shiro. Don't worry about me."

"I'm not going to let you starve yourself, sir. It's been three days—"

"And it might be another three before they decide to give us anything else. Now stop arguing with me and eat." Holt's words were demanding, though hardly intimidating with how hoarse his voice was. "Don't look at me like that. That was an order. Not as your superior, but as your elder."

"But, sir—"

"Enough."

"Captain—" Shiro sucked in a breath. "Samuel."

"I'm not going to tell you again."

"You need to eat." He felt so out of line speaking to his boss like that but he had no other choice. He couldn't keep letting him do this. "Please, think about your family," he urged, "your wife, Matt, Katie. You're always talking about them. Don't tell me you don't want to see them again." He pushed the tray closer to Holt, who looked down at it with a grimace.

"I bet Matt's tearing apart the town looking for us as we speak," Shiro added, attempting to distract him.

Holt sighed. "You know he's been talking about leaving the lab? Wants to join the force."

"That's what he told me."

"I don't trust that boy with a gun." He shook his head. "To be honest, I'd rather him stay over in forensics. Less of a chance of him shooting himself in the foot over there."

"I'm sure it's just a phase."

"Humph." Holt shot him a look. "And Katie—I don't know what I'm going to do with her, either. Soon as she finishes up her Master's next month she'll be starting with the FBI."

"You must be proud."

"Oh, more than you could imagine." He grinned, ever the proud father, aguish and suffering be damned. "They recruited her before she even graduated. Can you believe that?"

"Well, you've always said she was smart."

Holt chuckled. "I've also said plenty of other things, too, but you don't seem to listen."

Shiro couldn't miss the teasing in Holt's voice if he tried. "Even in a hostage situation you're still trying to pawn her off on me," he observed humorously.

"You know I would have never suggested it if I didn't think you were a good man."

It was Shiro's turn to laugh. "Maybe once we get out of here I'll finally take you up on that offer," he told him, mirroring the captain's small smile. Then he closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall, ignoring the rumbling of his own gut as the captain finally caved.

But when he opened his eyes he was back in the room with the camera again, the sharp concrete floor scraping the skin off his bare shoulders, thumbs gouged into the eyes of some man straddling his chest. No, not some man—he had a name, a family, a reason he was there—but it didn't matter. None of that did. Not when their hands were clenched around Shiro's throat so tight that his lips were numb and he could hear his trachea cracking over the sound of blood rushing in his ears.

Shiro had tried to warn him, days before. Told the man that he didn't want to do this, that if they wouldn't fight then he wouldn't fight either. But the rules of that first game were simple: no weapons, only one survives; and after enough nights of food withheld in response to their protest, hunger soon turned to desperation, and Shiro had lost his first and only ally after the captain had been released.

Someone was pounding on the two-way mirror that took up nearly the entire wall adjacent to the camera.

"Gentlemen," Sendak warned from the other side, "let's hurry it up, shall we? Our viewers don't have all night, so let's move this along and give them what they paid for, lest you'd both prefer to die."

Shiro screwed his eyes shut as if it'd help block out the noise of the man screaming in agony above him. Blood ran down his wrists and dripped onto his face. The pounding continued.

"I said hurry it up, Shiro."

Shiro's focus wavered, giving the man on top of him a chance to really bear down on him with all his weight, choking what little air Shiro had left right out of him. Sendak hardly ever referred to him like that.

"Shiro?"

More pounding. More screaming.

"Shiro!"

He wasn't in the room anymore. He was outside, in the dead of night, running across the field and stumbling over overgrown patches of weeds. Again. The figure of a man stood on the roof of the warehouse behind him, loading his rifle, aiming it—

"SHIRO, WAKE UP!"