he tried to work through how he had gotten here and where here was, exactly. He could clearly remember the carriage getting a flat and Avian moaning on about how her father was ‘jumping at shadows’. Then there was the attack. He knew that a few men had died at his hand, but he couldn’t remember anything after getting shot. It was just a blank in his mind. No sounds filtered through to him, no weird flashes of memory. From what he had managed to piece together, one would think that he had gone from laying below the cover of some trees in the middle of the mountains to this…room. He wouldn’t call it a prison, but he was getting that vibe. It was sort of like a holding cell.
And then there was the issue of where was Avian? She had been there, being protected by his love and energy one moment, and now she was gone.
A creak caused him to turn on the bed with a sharp intake of breath, averting his eyes from the wall and laying them on the door. A shadowed figure entered the room and set a chair just inside the door, laying a neat stack of clothes on top of it. The outline was feminine, but she didn’t say anything as she pulled the door closed again and the scrape of a locked could be heard loudly in the silent room. There had been a bright light just beyond the door and he hadn’t been able to distinguish details about her.
He wanted to get up and retrieve some clothes, but he wasn’t sure he could do it so soon. Laying back down had been a moderately good idea, except that he hadn’t planned on having to get back up so quickly. Mathieu’s muscled protested sharply as he attempted to push himself to a sitting position, immobilizing him. The clothing wasn’t going anywhere, so he collapsed back onto the bed and closed his eyes. His body just needed to rest.
After what could have been an hour, he bit his lip until it bled to give himself a sense of control over the pain in his body, he managed to sit up and swing his feet onto the floor. He only managed to push himself up to stand again with the thought of seeing Avian, but a light headed, nauseous feeling came over him the moment he was erect. This pain needed to go away, and quickly if he was going to accomplish anything.
Each step was taken in jarring agony, making slow progress across the room once more. Mathieu ground his teeth in frustration; however, he reached the clothes without having to stop. They were not his clothes. They were cut for a male, something he wasn’t quiet used to anymore.
Setting his pride aside at wearing barrowed clothes, he pulled the loose black pants on and slid the white tee-shirt over his torso. Mathieu was pretty sure the pain was going to kill him, because he actually started to cry. Looking at himself in the reflective wall, he punched the wall, against simulating control for himself, before wiping his eyes roughly. His reflection looked back at him, one eyebrow raised. There were no secrets in his face: concern, pain, fear, and anger. He also thought he looked rather ridiculous in the oversized clothing. Avian had been right to put him in girls’ clothes for so long, he realized.
The door creaked open behind him again. Mathieu turned but was too late: the visitor was faster and had caught him with a solid hit across the back of the neck. Giving a small whimper, he crumpled to the ground.
~*~
Slowly, things began to come into focus again, and the most nauseating sense of déjà-vu hit him.
A weird haze was clouding his mind yet he could distinguish that he was in another room, much like one he had just occupied, and just as cold. This one, however, had a chair instead of a bed and the walls were less reflective. Or maybe that was just a trick of the light. How he could tell anything through the pain and his fogged vision, Mathieu wasn’t sure.
His body kind of felt disjointed and he tried to lift a hand, wanting to make sure that everything was still where it was meant to go. When his hand didn’t simply rise to the level of his face, he tried to blink a few times before managing to roll his gaze down to his hand.