The pain was what woke Keith up, for the most part. Searing, radiating pain that seemed to tear through every nerve ending on his back in a way that made him wonder how he hadn’t woken up, before then. He lay on his stomach, freckled cheek pressed into a pillow. His heart hammered in his throat, and he made several aborted efforts to get up so that he could see what the hell had happened. When any movements became too much to bear, he squeezed his eyes shut against the tears brimming in them. Keith let out a hissed breath through his teeth, and tried to focus on any inklings of a car crash, a mugging, anything that would explain why he wasn’t at home, in his own bed, in one piece.

The last thing that he had remembered was leaving his house after fighting with Jan—or rather, after breaking up with Jan. They’d fought, some harsh words had been thrown around, and he’d left, because of course he had. He hazily recalled going on a walk to get some air, and that it had started to drizzle almost at the exact moment that his feet hit the pavement, and that the chilled rain had felt good against his shame-flushed skin. He definitely didn’t remember being hit by a car, but in his current state, he wouldn’t be surprised if he had been.

Everything hurt—from the tips of his toes, to his pounding head. Keith imagined that he was in a hospital, somewhere. If he could open his eyes without vomiting, he would see clean, white walls, blinking lights on machines, and the frowning faces of over-tired nurses who would assure him that he was lucky to be alive.

Cool fingers gently prodded at his back, and Keith whimpered, turning his face into the over-firm pillow. Bandages were peeled back, new ones taped down to his damaged skin—damaged from what, he wasn’t sure. His head spun as he fought to focus on anything but the jarring sensation of having some of his skin numbed, while the rest was on fire. It was almost as if he’d fallen asleep at the pool with only part of his back covered, leaving the rest to get what had to be the worst sunburn imaginable. Only, Keith knew that he hadn’t been in the sun, and from the amount of care being given to him, he suspected that things were worse than any aloe could heal.

The hands left his back, and he heard several small clinks as metal was dropped on metal, and then it was quiet, again. For a brief moment, Keith thought that maybe he was alone in the room—a thought that both relieved and scared him. On one hand, being left alone meant that he could regroup, and mentally catalogue his wounds, before facing whatever cruel reality laid before him. On the other hand, he had no idea where he was, why he was there, and how long it had been since he’d left his house. He really needed answers, and he wasn’t going to get them by impersonating a log.

In the end, his worry was in vain, because soon deft hands were guiding his head out of his pillow, so that they could pry his eyelids open, and shine a flashlight in them. The light burned his retinas, and drove spikes of pain into his head, drawing a whimper from him as he tried to press his face against the pillow, again.

“Hold still,” a low voice said, and while his mind had conjured images of pretty young nurses at his bedside, hearing someone actually speak broke his illusion, and startled him to the point of snapping his eyes open. Keith couldn’t help but to wince as his eyes were closed again on reflex, but the pain didn’t stop him from flailing out a hand to whatever person was there, trying to get a more solid grip on consciousness.

His outstretched fingertips brushed fabric—maybe the hem of a coat, or the cotton of nurse’s scrubs, but the man moved out of the way before he could really get a hold of him.

“Where ‘m I?” he slurred, long-diluted West Texan accent blurred around the edges by what felt like a double-whammy of concussion and heavy-duty medications. He screwed up his willpower, and got his hands beneath himself so that he could push himself into sitting on the bed. The mattress creaked, and Keith got about three inches off the bed before a combination of protesting wounds and strong hands had him pressed flat against the sheets once more.

“You must be a long way from home,” the voice said, and Keith had a hard time judging whether he sounded bemused or concerned. Maybe both. Maybe neither. “Lie still.”

“Who’re you?” he tried, attempting to crane his head to the side so that he could try to look at him. Even after he’d been told not to move, he couldn’t quite find it in himself to listen—he’d never really been great at following directions.

Glass bottles clinked together as a drawer was opened, and Keith only had a few moments to wonder why, before his arm was pulled off to the side. Fingers pressed to the crook of his arm, feeling for a vein, and Keith barely had time to say “Wait, no—” before a needle pushed more morphine into his system, and everything went dark.

——

When Keith woke up the second time, he was alone. He knew this because he’d gotten up without thinking, and nobody had tried to stop him from peeling back some of the bandages that wound around his shoulder and bicep to reveal long stripes of neat stitches. Nobody was there to tell him that he’d been in an accident, or that he might be a little woozy from the painkillers. Keith could figure that out all on his own. What he couldn’t quite comprehend, however, was the fact that while he was indeed in some kind of hospital room, something about it just wasn’t right.

Contrary to the mental image he’d created for himself, the walls weren’t white, but rather a light mint green. The bed he sat on wasn’t as high-tech as he’d imagined—there were no buttons to raise or lower his feet and head, and no machines were keeping an eye on his vitals. In fact, the only thing that he seemed to be hooked up to was an IV drip full of saline. Keith tended to avoid doctors and hospitals, as a general rule, and it had been a good while since he’d been in any sort of medical care facility. That being said, weren’t there protocols that they had to follow? Bandages covered almost the whole of his back, extending down one arm—he didn’t exactly have a skinned knee. Not that he was complaining about not being under close scrutiny, but still. Something like that should have gotten him a little more supervision.

The bed creaked under him as he rocked forward to get to his feet, and it struck him that he hadn’t heard a mattress squeak like that since Jan had convinced him that they should get one of those fancy memory foam ones, back in the 90’s. Suddenly, it clicked.

Everything in the room looked pristine—from the sheets he laid on, to the giant metal syringes. Very clean, but very, very outdated.

“Did I just go back in time?” Keith asked the empty room. He didn’t get a reply, save for the beating of rain on the roof. Something like time travel seemed ridiculous, but Skynet was always half a second from taking over, so he could never be too sure.

Laminate tiles were cold under his feet as he tried to stand. His knees wobbled dangerously, and Keith wondered how long he’d been out, for him to be that weak. It took a few tries, and a little stretching, but he was able to get his rogue legs to cooperate with him enough to walk around the room so that he could poke through the cabinets.

Most of them held glass vials, rolls of bandages, and plastic tubing, the paper backs of packaging browned and peeling back from their seals, as if they’d been sitting unused for long enough for the adhesive to break down. Keith frowned, thumbing at his bandages. They seemed to have been put on by deft, practiced hands, and his stitches—what he’d been able to see without craning his neck too hard—had been so neat that only someone with several years of experience could have done them.

There was no doubt that he was being treated by some kind of doctor, whether it was by the books or not. If the hospital was above-board by any stretch of the imagination, it certainly wasn’t being stocked with supplies that hadn’t yet reached their expiration date. Keith rolled his shoulders, trying to judge how much he’d healed, so far. Pain, dulled by heavy doses of opiates, wormed sluggishly through his nerve endings, as if his body were reminding itself how to feel, and only belatedly getting the message. There were no mirrors in the room, and even the shining metal counters were not reflective enough to give him a good idea of what sort of state he was in. Whatever had happened, though, seemed to have left him shredded from shoulder to hip, and his feeble attempts to bend and twist to get a better look had him gasping and swearing.

His hospital gown was all that he’d been dressed in, though some kind soul had allowed him to keep on his boxer-briefs. Being alone in a strange environment was one thing, but being stark-ass naked in one was another. It made him feel less self-conscious about wandering out into the hall to flag someone down. Or, at least, he would have left his room, if the door were unlocked. A crease formed between his brows, as he jiggled the handle with increasing amounts of force, until he was sure that had the door not been made of solid metal, it would have shattered.

Panic climbed up his throat, choking him for breath that came quicker and quicker, and by the time the doorknob jiggled from the other side, Keith’s vision had tunneled, and his main priority had shifted from “find out what happened” to “get the hell out of here.” The door crashed open, bouncing off the opposite wall loudly, and Keith instinctively dropped into a defensive crouch as a man filled the doorway.

Lanky was the first descriptor that came to mind. Feral was the next. Black hair rose from his head in a wild tangle, falling past narrow shoulders. A far-cry from the hot nurse Keith had expected to open the door. Keith had seen the type, before, and had the sudden, nonsensical feeling of someone who was about to be mugged in an alleyway by a meth addict.

“What the fuck,” he growled, eyes darting around the room to look for anything he could use as a weapon. His brain reminded him that there were some wicked-looking syringes in the cabinet at the same time that the man made a dash to grab him. The not-nurse was fast—unnaturally so—but before he could get a grip around his wrists, Keith was jerking away and scrambling backward toward the sink, and the archaic supplies stashed beneath it.

“Stop,” the man said, voice rough and low, but Keith’s fingers were already closed around the cold glass of a needle, which he held outward at his side, like a less threatening, less lethal switchblade. Up close like this, Keith could see the cold intensity in the man's icy blue eyes, and the eyebrow that arched over one in skepticism. He didn't seem daunted in the least by a pointy-object-wielding invalid in a hospital gown. Suddenly, Keith wasn't liking his opinions.

Quicker than Keith's lizard brain had time to process, he was grabbed by the shoulder, and spun toward the sink. Reflexes alone saved him from having the wind knocked out if him as he caught himself against cold laminate with his free hand. Not used to being overpowered so easily, it caught him off-guard when a strong hand held him face-first against the counter, planted in the center of his back, carefully avoiding the long lines of stitches that marred his skin. Even with due care, it smarted.

In a last-ditch effort to get away, he swung out wildly with the needle, managing to catch the man somewhere in the arm not holding him down. The man hissed a sharp breath between his teeth, and let Keith go for long enough that he could spin around to face him.

“Wait,” he said, as a pale hand pushed the sleeve of his hospital gown out of the way, and produced a smaller, more modern-looking hypodermic needle from somewhere outside of Keith’s field of vision. This one was not as large or dangerous-looking as the one on the floor, but the clear liquid that it was full of made it all the more frightening. “Wait! No, no, no, I don’t—don’t drug me again, that sucked,” he babbled, flinching away from the hands that moved with an impressive dexterity. “I’ll be good. I’m good! I’m cool. Seriously, no more fighting, I promise!”

Slowly, reluctantly, the grip on him loosened, and Keith held his hands up in surrender as he turned around to face what was very probably a kidnapper, serial killer, or both. At the very least, Keith thought, he didn’t look like a doctor. Pale blue eyes were bloodshot and had dark purple bruises underneath, veins stood out at his temples, and his hair was an absolute wreck. Despite it all, Keith thought that with about three hundred hours of sleep and maybe a few more calories, he’d be pretty good-looking. Subjectively.

Objectively, he would rather never see the guy again.

“Interesting,” the man said, gripping his chin and turning his head to one side and then the other. “I was not expecting her to send a lycanthrope.”

Keith jerked away quickly, distantly surprised that the man didn’t try to keep him from doing so. A dark chill of fear raced down his spine, and it was a near thing that he didn’t physically shiver.

“What?” he asked, rubbing his hands up and down his bare arms. “What’re you talking about?” Nobody had sent him—at least, not that he could recall—but the fact that he’d picked up on the whole werewolf thing was enough to make Keith a little nauseous. The man clicked his tongue impatiently, and walked him over to the bed with a hand on his arm, shoving him gently downward until he was sitting on it.

“What indeed,” he mused, opening a drawer under the counter and pulling out a small penlight, which he flashed into Keith’s eyes one after the other, seemingly satisfied with whatever results he got. “I suppose that Vasquez instructed you to feign ignorance, as well. I should have expected no less.” He made a move to make Keith lay down, probably so that he could check his bandages, but Keith grabbed his arm, halting any progress on manipulating him like a child’s doll, and making him look at him with a raised eyebrow and slightly more regard.

“Listen, I don’t know what kind of back-alley clinic you’re running here, buddy, but I ain’t tryna get mixed up in any, uh, gang politics, if ya don’t mind.”

“Hmm,” the man hummed, after a moment of looking at Keith’s face. “I need to check your stitches, if that is alright with you.” His hands were cold on Keith’s shoulder, even through his hospital gown, and his eyes were cold and hard on Keith’s own, like an iron vice that could keep him immobile without a touch. Keith hesitated, but ultimately nodded. So far, it seemed that the only way that he might get out of this situation alive was to play nice. Even if the the thought of some crazed black-market doctor prodding at his wounds made his skin crawl. At least, as near as he could tell, he still had his kidneys. He pulled his legs up onto the bed, and laid back down on his stomach, the way that he’d been laying for hours, before he’d woken up in Oz.

Sticky bandages peeled back from his skin with practiced efficiency, and if Keith didn’t know better, he could have imagined that pretty nurse, after all. Fingers only touched where necessary, and though his marred skin was still tender beyond belief, the brief stings of pain were much more manageable than he had anticipated.

“So, am I allowed to ask questions now, or what?” he asked, like an idiot who figured that he could, anyway. The man grunted vaguely, and he decided that it was as much of a yes as he could expect to get from him. “What happened to me? Where are we? Who are you? Should I just keep calling you Doctor Death, or—”

“Quiet,” the man said, busy with rewinding clean, white bandages around his shoulder and chest. “You were attacked,” he supplied, unhelpfully. Keith could have guessed as much. “We are in a clinic.”

“Are we? Seems more like a time capsule to me,” he tried to joke, but was met with silence that was just as thick as before. The sounds of paper peeling back from thin plastic accompanied his heavy breathing, loud in the silence. “I mean, it seems like you know what you’re doing,” he said, feeling a little hysterical bubble in his chest that grew with every inhale, and threatened to pop if he didn’t keep talking.

“Demitri,” the man said, suddenly. He stepped back, giving space the room to sit up once more, which Keith was thankful for. He scrambled into standing, the other man still too close, but a foot and a half of distance was better than none at all. At the very least, if he tried to shoot him up him with more morphine, he would be able to see it coming.

“What?” he asked, adjusting his hospital gown to at least make himself feel more covered. As if a hospital gown and a pair of boxer briefs might go a long way in stopping a bullet.

“My name is Demitri.”

“Oh,” Keith blinked. “Well, Dim—”

“Demitri.”

“Demitri, Can I, uh, settle up at the front desk and head out? I bet my girl is real worried about me, and gotta get home.” Keith tried a friendly sort of ‘slap a man on the arm and call him Buddy’ smile, which was met with precisely none of the socially-acceptable warmth that he’d been hoping for.

“I do not think that that will be happening,” Demitri said, and this close up, Keith could see the way that veins full of sluggish blood stood out under his paper-pale skin.

I was not expecting her to send a lycanthrope.

Realization hit Keith with a queasy punch to the stomach, and his hands balled into fists at his sides.

“Because I’m supposed to be dinner, right?” Keith’s heart thudded in his chest so loudly that there wasn’t even a slim chance that Demitri couldn’t hear it. Instead of following the question with a swift bite to the neck, Demitri snorted.

“Hardly. I am no so easily tempted by any warm body within reach.” Demitri took another step backward, and then turned for the door, pausing with his hand on the doorknob, and beckoning Keith to follow. Like he had much choice. “I cannot let you go, when you being here is suspect in itself.”

Keith’s indignant retort died on his tongue as they made their way down a hallway that must have crawled directly out of his nightmares and manifested itself in the real world. For a moment, Keith had to wonder if perhaps he had died in his accident, after all, and now he was in purgatory, and in order to get out, he’d have to fight a large man with a cone on his head, or something.

It was dark, and whatever else Keith had been picturing from the rest of the clinic, he hadn’t envisioned the pitch black. If Keith didn’t have extra-human eyesight, he might have stumbled into one of the chairs sitting off to the side of the hallway, presumably for visitors of patients, but were now coated in whole inches of dust. Cobwebs arched overhead in complicated patterns, and though they did not pass the front desk on their way, Keith imagined it would be manned by ghosts.

“So, uh,” he started, not sure what he’d even intended to ask. How long have I been here? How long has this place been closed? Is the dust and mold decorative, because, like, vampires and stuff? Am I going to die here?

Am I going to die here?

“If you’re not going to kill me, then what?” he asked, digging his fingernails into the meat of his palms as he toed the line of his fight-or-flight reflexes, body simultaneously coiled tight, ready to spring, and also ready to fall down from exhaustion and pain. He followed Demitri, instead of allowing himself to do either.

“I am keeping you here until I decide what to do with you,” Demitri answered, and Keith wondered if this guy even knew how to be less cryptic, or if this was just his default setting. Maybe it was a blood-sucker thing.

“Your bedside manner could use some work,” he said lowly, and Demitri didn’t seem to feel the need to rise to the insult, instead pushing open a heavy door that, instead of leading to the outside, lead into a dark, cluttered office space. They didn’t pause on their way through, and Demitri unlocked a door on the far side of the space, pausing to give Keith a once-over that made him feel stripped-down from the inside out. Keith fought the urge to cross his arms over his chest.

Whatever he’d been looking for, he must have found, because only a moment later, Keith was lead into what looked less like an abandoned hospital, and more like the foyer of an abandoned house. A shoe rack sat by the door, holding a few pairs of molding loafers, and though the dust was as thick here as it had been in the clinic, it had been recently disturbed, and footprints looked cookie-cuttered out, like they’d be in a cartoon. Each step as precise as the last.

“If you are planning to try the door, you will find it quite locked.”

Keith blinked, head jerking up at Demitri, who had continued down the hall, while Keith had been frozen for long enough that he’d had to stop and wait.

“I wasn’t—” he started, but cut himself off before he said anything that sounded as ridiculous as what he’d been thinking. He followed after him, because what else was he going to do, when that cool gaze was fixed on him? The memory of those strong hands on him was enough to remind himself why that would be a bad idea.

They passed by a couple more halls, and into a kitchen—the first room that Keith had seen so far, besides his clinic room, that was at least reasonably clean. Yellow-tiled counters stood out in the low light, and an equally sunny-looking refrigerator hummed cheerfully. It looked like something out of a classic sitcom, and reminded him, suddenly, of his childhood home.

“Huh,” he said, as Demitri pulled open the refrigerator, and extracted a couple of paper containers that looked like Chinese food. Smelled like Chinese food. Keith’s stomach rumbled loudly.

“I didn’t think leeches could eat, like, people food,” he said, eyes focussed on the containers, and not on the scowl that Demitri fixed him with.

“It is not for me,” Demitri said, popping the door on an absolutely ancient microwave, and sliding the containers—sans metal handles—into it. “I hope that beef chow mein is agreeable, to you. I was not sure what dogs prefer.” The dig at Keith startled a small smile out of him, and he had a split-second thought that he might actually get along with this guy, before he remembered that he wasn’t exactly a houseguest.

“That’s, uh. Thanks.”

Demitri just nodded, and without a word walked out of the room and down the hall, leaving Keith alone in the kitchen with a whirring microwave and the smell of reheating meat and noodles. It was a solid five minutes before he realized that Demitri might not be coming back for him—at least for a little while. For a moment, he debated on whether he wanted to stay and eat, and hope for a second chance like this, later. Or.

As quietly as he could muster in an otherwise silent house, he crept toward the door, all of his senses on high-alert. The carpet cushioned his footfalls, until it gave way to the tiled foyer floor, with its pristine footprints, and rotting shoes. A turn of the knob confirmed the the door was, indeed, locked. Where a latch might have been to unlock it was a keyhole, which Keith hadn’t noticed before. A keyhole, which meant that the door locked from the inside and the outside.

“Fuck,” he hissed, and had a split-second to feel disappointed before a hand closed around his upper arm, yanking him backward and in one fluid motion, slamming him face-first into the wall. Air vacated his lungs at a speed that Keith would have previously thought impossible.

“Did I not tell you,” Demitri said, voice as cool as ever. “That the door is locked.” He twisted Keith’s right arm up toward his shoulder blades, and his entire back lit on fire as his stitched wounds stretched in ways that were not strictly conducive to the healing process. He couldn’t hide the pained groan.

“If you think that it would be that easy to leave, then you underestimate how easily I could snap your neck and not even blink,” he hissed into Keith’s ear, bringing with him the scent of soap. He must have been washing his face.

“Uh,” Keith said.

“Try it again, and you will never make it out of here alive.” He gave another shove, pushing Keith’s nose into drywall, before he let go of him altogether, leaving him alone with his thoughts and his screaming pain. He slid down to the floor, until his knees hit tile, and he could rest his head on the wall.

“Oh,” he said, blinking in the dark. That could have gone better.