Author Note: I didn't have to go to university on Monday 'cause it snowed. Huzzah!

Summary: Memory lapses are not fun. Especially not when your hands are covered in blood. As in, literally covered in blood.

Warning(s): Gore, unbeta-ed.

Last Edited: Nov. 28, 2006

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Memory Lapse

Chapter Two: Rub, Rub, Rub

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After a while, he realized he wasn’t getting out anytime soon.

Of course, this realization didn’t come until after he wasted a good deal of time attempting to escape. He had kicked, punched, and thrown himself at the door. He had also wailed, screamed, pleaded, cried, and mumbled incoherently at the occupants of the room to no avail. Then again, he wasn’t really quite sure what he was doing, wailing at a tied up (hostage?) person for help. Oh, there was that girl, too – but he didn’t want to think about her right now. No, he didn’t want to think about her ever.

He slumped against the door, the cold metal absorbing the heat from his back. He breathed heavily, chest heaving, eyes shut against the dim light. He could still see what was tied to the pole. Correction: who was tied to the pole.

He didn’t want to think about it.

He almost put his hands to his face but he stopped himself in time. He stared at them again, for a while. He seemed to be doing that a lot. Staring at things, that is. Not stopping himself. He hadn’t stopped himself before, oh no, no he had not.

His mouth emitted something between a burp and a hiccup.

Gross.

The blood was drying and flaking off of his hands. He wasn’t really sure if it had been red when it first got on his hands. He hadn’t really been paying attention to his hands at that point. Maybe it had been neon pink. He’d been in enough fights to know that blood dried more of a dark maroon than red. The dim lights made it appear dark brown. Like dirt.

He felt like dirt. Less than dirt. Like the stuff under dirt. What was under dirt? Magma? No, that was too cool. Too hot. He sighed.

He flexed his fingers and watched the flakes fall. Was there any water around, here? He continued to flex, watching the chips and flecks break apart and fall down. Yes, they were indeed falling, not fluttering. No, not fluttering at all.

His hands clapped together as he rubbed them vigorously, forcing the flakes and flecks of blood to crumble faster, hit the ground more quickly, to get the hell off of him as fast as he could get them to.

Off came his shirt. He jammed his hands into it, continued to rub them together. He must have looked like a buffoon, but he didn’t really care. The only people who’d notice his wild antics would be the girl and the hostage.

Hostage?

Yes. The hostage.

Rub, rub, rub.

He was still rubbing (scrubbing, brushing, scouring) his hands together when he heard the footsteps. He chose to ignore them. The footsteps, not his hands. As in, he was choosing to ignore the footsteps as they came closer, not he was choosing to ignore his hands. No, his hands he could not ignore. He could ignore those footsteps as they marched steadily closer, grew steadily louder, and increasingly more frightening.

Her legs were in his field of vision before he could even think about calming down, before he could even think of a way to deal with her arrival. They were there before he cleaned his hands off, before he came up with a plan to knock her out, to attack her, to get her to tell him how he could get out.

She stopped right next to him before he was ready to deal with her.

Her shoes were high-heeled platform boots. High-heeled, platform boots. He continued to briskly scour his hands. What kind of a person wore platform boots, let alone high-heeled, platform boots to a, to a … to a whatever the hell this was?

His shirt was ripped out of his hands.

He was left staring at his bright red hands. Hands which were bright red not only from the stains of someone else’s blood, but also bright red due to his incessant rubbing. Perhaps he had been a bit too enthusiastic.

“Don’t want you to hurt yourself, now, do we?”

He hated it when she talked to him. He didn’t like her voice at all. No, not at all. It was too condescending, too nasal, too falsely emotional. Too fake. Too… he struggled to find a word to describe it. It was just too, too.

His shirt fell to the ground next to her boots. It looked strangely small, all crumpled up like that. He liked that shirt. Liked it a lot. He’d gotten it as a birthday present from his sister. She had good taste.

“Darling, won’t you look at me?”

Wow.

He really hated her voice.

And he really didn’t want to listen to her. Listening to her was the first step to understanding her, to finding out her excuses for what she had done to him, made him do to others. He didn’t want that to happen.

He continued to stare at the crumpled form of his shirt.

She heaved a sigh, bent at the waist, put her hands on his shoulders. He felt her hair, still in a ponytail, flop over her shoulder, and swipe at his head. A curtain of black threads obscured his vision.

“Oh, Eric, you never were a talker, were you?”

A pause, and then he realized what she had said.

He pushed her backwards, making her stumble as he scrambled to his feet, crawling around on all fours for a few seconds. He stared at her, took in what she looked like. Her hair was in a ponytail, bangs hiding eyes. Her vapid, brown eyes. She wore a grey hoodie with a zipper; her pants were a pair of tight, skinny jeans which were tucked into her boots.

He remembered what he’d put on that morning: a blue shirt over a sleeveless undershirt, along with a pair of jeans and a pair of sneakers. Did that outfit constitute as the official gear of a crazy person? He didn’t think so.

“Look,” he said, breaking the silence that now hung over them. Silence over which only she had had the authority, the audacity of breaking before. He breathed heavily, adrenaline still coursing through his veins. “My name isn’t Eric, it’s Damien.”

He paused, looked at his shoes. “And I want to get out of here. Why won’t you let me out?” His hands curved into fists as he stared up at her.

She smiled a freakish smile. God, he hated everything to do with her mouth. The way it curved, the way it moved, the way it let out such fiendish noises.

Like now… she was laughing. Laughing hysterically as if he had said the funniest thing in the world.

“You always were the joker, Eric,” she whispered, walking towards him. “Always the joker.”

He was about to tell her again that his name was Damien, that he didn’t know who Eric was, that this was all a terrible mistake, but then he noticed the knife she clutched in her left hand. The shining eight-inch machete he’d been holding not too long ago. Eyes fixed on the knife, he watched her raise it to her lips and lick the somewhat congealed liquid off the blade with her tongue.

Damn, he hated her mouth.