WHO Luna WHEN Tues/Weds WHERE ??? WHAT Luna's taking a brief enforced holiday with a stalker. WARNINGS there's knives and blood. It's a bit gross, but it's not until the very end.
Luna woke with a heavy sense of grogginess over her.
Wait, was she awake? Everything was completely black in front of her and after blinking rapidly for a few moments, she tried to lift her hand to her face to see it. But the hand didn't move. The awareness of her own body was coming sharply back to her now, and she could feel that she was sitting in a chair and that both her wrists were held down, maybe taped down. She then tested her ankles and found that they were bound to the legs of the chair.
Luna gave all of those bounds some harder yanks, but her muscles felt so weak, as though she was awake but her body was not quite there yet.
She forced herself to take a slow steady breath- in through the nose, out through the mouth. She dropped her head back and found the solid chair there as well. Luna forced herself to do the breathing again a dozen more times.
Everything was still pitch black, and Luna couldn't even make out shapes. There could have been a wall five feet in front or her or fifty feet.
Okay.
It was okay.
Luna knew that she needed to remain calm. (Whatever he'd drugged her with was helping there, because Luna still felt a little like this was a dream. She knew she should hold onto that for as long as possible, unsure what would be coming after.)
With her fingers she reached around as much as she could to feel the chair handles. Wooden chair. Told her very little.
But she'd seen enough people tied to wooden chairs in the movies that an escape idea came to her without having to look for it. She started rocking from side to side, to try and get the chair to tip and maybe break. But the chair refused to budge and she realised that what she had thought was chair behind her head was actually a pole and that the chair must have been attached to it.
Okay.
This was still okay.
This was still going to be fine.
Should she be screaming for help? Would that do anything? Having no idea where she was made her want to keep silent, feeling like there were things moving in the darkness that she couldn't see but that were just waiting for her to open her mouth.
Paranoia, or another aspect of being drugged?
When a light did suddenly flick on, the change was so startling to Luna that she squeezed her eyes shut, opening them by degrees, blinking against the invasion.
She must have somehow fallen asleep, because she never heard the door opening but she could see it now, just as she could see everything. She was in a basement: a very normal looking basement filled with boxes and old furniture and a cold bare cement floor.
Dunkin was walking down the stairs towards her. He was dressed lightly tonight, his black sleeveless shirt showing off pale arms and one forearm that was in a cast.
So that had been what she felt on Staten Island when he'd shoved his arm against her throat, that unyielding aspect that had reminded her more of stone than flesh. From how active he'd been then (and probably carrying her to a car from the club) it didn't seem to be giving him any trouble.
"Surprise," he told her flatly, approaching and standing above her.
Luna met his eye and tried not to look as absolutely spitting mad as she felt. "Why are you doing this?" she asked, and felt she deserved a congratulations for how civil she made it sound.
"I didn't have any problem with you, you know," he told her, almost conversational except for the deep bitterness he couldn't veil. "You seemed cool enough. You're the one who made yourself a problem."
"You are completely delusional," Luna told him, wishing she could kick him very hard in the shins. "I want you to know that."
"I'm delusional? Oh Luna," he told her clearly, speaking slower now. "I'm not even real."
...
Confusion and horror swept through Luna's body.
She tried to stay calm and take that statement in, tried to think about the drugs in her system and how confused they were making her and the times she'd seen him before and-
Dunkin laughed. "I'm just fucking with you, but, my god, your expression for a second there." Then he slapped her across the face- not gently, but clearly not as hard as he could have. It still produced a sharp and sudden sting. "See," he assured her. "Real enough."
"What do you want from this, huh?" Luna asked, lifting her face to look at him properly. "Is this just revenge? Are you going to kill me? Scare me? Do you want money? Power?" The not knowing what was going to happen was so much worse than anything else. Luna would go crazy if she had to sit here in a dark room, tied to a chair, waiting for something to befall her.
She was still having trouble being scared of him, dumb unknowing mortal that he was. She knew that it was a foolish thought process though: humans killed humans every damn day. Humans did unspeakable things to other humans (like kidnap them and tie them to chairs in basements). Immortals didn't have the monopoly on being shitty and causing pain. In some way, with how belief worked, hadn't they just learned it from humans anyway?
Dunkin squatted down and leaned in close to Luna. "All I wanted was for her to look at me the same way she looks at you."
"No one can help you then," Luna told him, and her tone was cold. She didn't care about this shitty guy's inferiority complex.
He reached out and he grabbed hold of her arm, not moving it only because it was taped down at the wrists. "All these tattoos," he sneered, rubbing a hard thumb over them. "They make you so special and unique, don't they? Make you think you're better than everyone." He grabbed her face in his hand, squeezing her cheeks. "The most special girl in the room who wants everyone to look at her."
"You don't know anything about me," Luna said, although it was more difficult with the way he was squeezing her face.
He dropped her face and instead reached out for the neck of her thin black shirt and started tearing it open. Luna flinched away from the sound, more unexpected and threatening than actually alarming. "None on your stomach," he commented, and sounded smug. "None actually under your clothes. Oh, I know everything about you, and I know that all this is for display." From his knife he pulled out a flick knife and opened it, pointing it at her face. "You're just like everyone else, just boring and small and desperate."
He brought the knife closer and ran it very gently across the pink scar on her shoulder, the mostly healed knife slash from some drunk angry dude at Illunis. "I wish I'd opened you right up then and there," he told her.
Wait.
Wait.
Wait!
There was gears clicking and whirring to life in Luna's head and she didn't like them one bit. "Do you know Ava?" She'd almost said 'Peitho' and stopped herself just before.
"Who's Ava?" he asked, his expression reading the sort of confusion of talking with someone who was not reacting how he'd wanted and who was bringing up unrelated subjects.
"Motherfucker!" Luna exclaimed, her anger and frustration turning in on herself for a moment. Angry at herself for not seeing this, angry at herself for making assumptions. "This is about Solanine!?"
"Who else would it be about??" Dunkin demanded, grabbing her face again, squeezing it again. "She kicked me out because of you! Because of you acting like some romantic hero stepping in to save her from me, like I was some monster for just wanting to be close to her!"
Oh for fuck's- Luna had been so sure she'd had it all correct! Obviously it was about Peitho. Obviously some obsessed lover would come back! Never even once had she considered that it could be a completely unrelated person. Never had she considered that it was a man she'd met only when blackout drunk, while throwing herself across a table to try and fight him.
This had been about fucking Solanine all along!
She could almost have laughed, but instead she felt choked and trapped and angry. This was a normal man obsessed with a normal woman, and Luna was stuck in the middle of it. She tried to yank her face free, and he tightened his grip to the point of it being painful enough for her to hiss a breath.
When he let her go it was hard enough to throw her head to the side, although her body could go nowhere tied to this chair.
"You can play the hero however you like," he told her, waving the knife again, "but by the time I'm done she's not even going to look at you twice."
"Then you better learn to run, fucker," Luna told him, heart thundering to the twin beats of fury and fear. "Because the people I know are more powerful than you can dream."
"Of course they are," he mocked, and then he squatted again and pinched hard at the skin on her upper arm. "You think they'll know you without all this graffiti?" Then he took the knife, pressed it in where he was grabbing, and began to draw it slowly downwards with a slight carving motion.
Luna yelped and screamed and tried to pull away as he slowly removed a long strip of skin down to her elbow. Luna looked down with wide eyes and saw the layer of white-pink fat appearing beneath it, momentarily seeming like it wasn't going to bleed. He tore away the skin at the bottom and held up the tattooed strip triumphantly. Luna, crying and swearing, watched the blood start to escape the fat and then begin flowing in earnest.