A/N: AU. Set after "Jones" (season 2, episode 18). No affiliation with Criminal Minds, own nothing except the original characters.
"We're all born mad. Some remain so." - Samuel Beckett
The first thing she noticed was how her sweat clung to her clothing. She hadn't sweated like this in years.
She did not know where she was but she did have an idea of how long she had been there. Despite the darkness' best efforts to disguise the time of day, she had been adamant about keeping time since her capture. Counting silently to herself, she tapped her finger against her thigh. Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Three hundred and sixty.
Three-hundred and sixty minutes. Six hours. She had been finishing her afternoon jog and was rounding Ravanel Street, a corner she had been meeting everyday between 3:15 and 3:20, when her captor tackled her to the ground. Within seconds she had a needle in her arm and could feel her body being contorted to fit into the trunk of a car. The last thing she saw after being pulled out of the trunk was sunrise, so six o'clock was her best guess for when she was put in the cage. That meant it was around midnight now.
Whoever had nabbed her had brought a blanket to her as soon as she was locked into the six-foot by six-foot metal cage, shoving it through a rectangular cut out on the door and letting it fall softly against the ground. Initially she convinced herself she was just in jail again; the cell was identical to the ones she had been put in before. It wasn't until her vision started coming back completely that she noticed something entirely un-jail-like: a wall of gray insulation built out about two feet from the perimeter, surrounding the cell. But something wasn't right about it.
She stood and approached the bars, cautiously wrapping her hands around them. Attempting to touch the wall, she reached her hand as far between the bars as she could. In the dim light she could see the dimpled foam that surrounded her cell, just out of her reach.
But the floor...the floor was concrete. And it didn't stop at the edge of the foamed walls. Were the walls fake?
Her eyes followed the edge of the wall to the ceiling, where she noticed that the foam-covered wall extended above her cell, too. In the right corner, a small red light stared at her. A camera. Whoever it was...they were watching.
Suddenly, the sound of creaking levers and chains flooded her ears. It was a shock to her previously muffled hearing, and her hands flew up to her ears to cover them. She forced herself to remain calm as the grey walls once surrounding the perimeter of her cell began to rise. More light began to pour in and she walked to the back of her cell, cautious and deliberate.
"Flamma!" She heard a high-pitched voice call out. The shrillness of the voice sounded like a bad version of the Joker from an 80's Batman cartoon. It was too high to be a man's voice, but so shrill, so repulsive that it gave her goose bumps. "I shall call you Flamma because you were the first to wake. Do you know what Flamma means?"
"My name is not Flamma," she spat at the hooded figure approaching her cell.
"Tsk, tsk, Flamma. Don't bite the hand that feeds you. Literally," the figure teased her, softly shaking a tray full of food in her face. "Are you hungry? You need to eat." The figure set the tray halfway through the cut in the door, waiting for her to take it. "Come on. You'll need your strength."
"What for?" Gravel ground in her throat as she tried to keep herself from vomiting.
"Well, if you would come to the front of your room and look around, Flamma, you would see!"
She stood adamantly in place.
"Come on, come on, I'm not going to hurt you. And you are hungry, aren't you?"
She relinquished her hands from her ears, only just realizing she still had them muffled. Cautiously she approached the door, the cold concrete chilling her bones from feet to head.
"There we go. That's good. See, you can see everyone from here."
She gently took the tray in her hands. Only then did her captor step back and allow her to see what lay in front of her: seven other cages containing seven other unconscious women, all arranged in a circle around a large, open area. An arena, she quickly realized. Soundproofed walls suspended above each of the cages on a pulley system.
"See? I'm really not going to hurt you," the voice assured her. And although she could not see who it was, she could hear the smirk in their voice. "You're going to hurt each other. Right here! In my gladiator pit."
The metal tray clattered against the ground, peas rolling across the floor.
"First fight is at dawn. Eat up."