I've sort of been here before.

Tue, 29 Apr 2014 22:35:50 GMT

He doesn't try anything for hours, too exhausted and sick to come up with a plan. He thinks he might have dozed off again, never quite coming to until the smell of smoke rouses him. It doesn't quite register for a moment, but once it does, he jumps to his feet, heart pounding in panic.

They set the building on fire. They've set the building on fire and locked him in. Their plan is for him to just burn to death, destroying evidence of their activities and their botched kidnapping in one go.

He chokes on something like a sob in his throat as he makes his way to the window. Already, the floor's getting hot under his feet as smoke filters in through the cracks in the door. They took away his shoes - he's not looking forward to when the heat starts breaking through the floor - but left him the thin protection of his shirt, which he wraps over his nose and mouth, trying to keep out the smoke somewhat.

He'd thought, at first, that there wasn't a difference between this room and the one he'd woken up in before. Upon a less muzzy look around, he notices that they've left a chair in there. He briefly considers trying to break the window with it, but his gaze happens to go upward for a moment, and he realizes that the room has a dropped ceiling, the sort with easily-removed panels for maintenance workers and such to get at the light fixtures. If he stands on the chair, he can just hit one of the panels hard enough to punch a hole in it, and from there tear it until it's large enough to get through. Pulling himself up through the empty space is harder than it should be, while he's still dizzy from the way his head hurts, but he manages it and crawls over where the door is, dropping down on the other side.

Of course, all this is useless if he can't find a way out. He finds the stairs and works his way down as best he can, but they must have started the fire on one of the lower floors, because the air gets hotter and the smoke thicker while he moves down. Still, he can't think of any other way to go. By the time he hits what he thinks might be the third floor, he can barely breathe for the heat and the smoke. It's completely impossible to see anymore; he lets his fingers barely touch the rail to help guide him, ignoring the sharp pain from the amount of heat it's already absorbed.

Somehow, through the smoke and his streaming eyes, he sees a flash of daylight, which is quickly obscured by a shadow he thinks is one of the kidnappers. He knows it's one of them when he hears the unmistakable sound of a gun going off, and throws himself to the side to avoid being hit. The smoke, at least, is obscuring the gunman's vision as well, but there's absolutely no way he can fight like this. His only option is to run up again, stumbling his way over the steps as fast as he can, only just fast enough to avoid being caught when the ceiling over the second floor entrance collapsed, blocking the way down.

He just runs. Doesn't let himself think about what he's running to, that there's no way off the building once he reaches the top. It's all he can do to keep moving and not pass out. He loses track of time quickly, stops register much of anything but the heat in the air, the smoke in his lungs, and the pounding of his bare feet against the burning stairs. Finally, finally, he comes up on a metal door that must lead to the roof, and he pushes against it with the force of all his remaining strength and momentum. For a moment, he thinks it's locked and he's just going to die here, but then it gives and -

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Tue, 29 Apr 2014 22:14:22 GMT

He wakes up to an empty room, wooden floors and no furniture. For a moment, he just dry heaves, his head pounding and swirling with dizziness, but he staggers to his feet to have a look around the room.

Aside from the locked door, all he finds is a window that's of no use to him, since he's at least a good seven stories above street level. The only thing he can do is sit down and rest until someone comes for him.

He thinks it's been a few hours before the door opens to reveal the man he'd taken out with an oxygen tank, pure hatred burning in his eyes. He's followed quickly by the one he knocked out with the medicine ball, who points a gun at him with a little too much satisfaction. They lead him through a completely worn-down old building with pipes exposed in the walls and trash on the floor to meet their boss.

The sight that greets him is enough to make him wonder if maybe he's hallucinating. He barely notices anything else about his kidnapper, because he has the world tattooed on his face. The world. Tattooed. On his face. His head is an actual globe, all the oceans and continents replicated in astonishing detail. He thinks about what it would take to sit through the process of tattooing that on and feels sick.

The rest of the conversation is almost mundane in comparison to that astonishing fact. Paul Drevin's father is involved heavily in oil. Kasper intends to send a message to Mr. Drevin by sending pieces of his son in a box until he gives Kasper what he wants. And when Kasper produces a knife and rests it an inch above Alex's right little finger, he gives up all pretense of being Paul Drevin.

They toss him back in another room while they consider what to do.

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Tue, 29 Apr 2014 19:58:18 GMT

It was almost shocking, how easily it came back to him. It only takes him a moment to switch the plates on his and Paul Drevin's rooms. They're close enough in height and body shape that he can pass as the other boy in bad light, as long as he doesn't give them too much time to wonder why the room numbers are out of order or get a good look at him.

He doesn't.

The first man goes down with the help of the electric shock from a defibrillator. The second, from the force of a ten-kilogram oxygen tank slamming into his face. For the third, he rigs up a sort of rudimentary catapult using supplies from the physio department and a five kilogram medicine ball.

The last one is trickiest. He heads for radiology, slips into one of the MRI rooms. The minute the last man comes close enough, his gun is torn out of his hand by the magnet. Then his arm is all but torn out of its socket when his steel watch follows suit.

He just forgets one thing: four men entered the hospital. But one man waited outside in the car, and when no one came out from what was supposed to be a simple grab job, he came inside to check on them.

He barely feels it - just a flash of white pain on the back of his head - before falling unconscious.

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Sun, 06 Apr 2014 23:06:24 GMT

Leaving your world entirely isn't as easy at it sounds. He tries, he really does, to convince himself that he's okay with it, that he can keep going without ever seeing Jack or Tom or his home ever again. And for a while, he can. Every time he thinks longingly of going home, he presses his hand against where the bullet exited, just under his arm, and remembers that he left so he wouldn't get killed.

But. It's not so easy. He stops feeling the physical pain so acutely and starts thinking about how much he misses going home. MI6 would be waiting for him, but so would Jack. Maybe he could convince her to go with him. Maybe they'd back off after he was shot. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

So finally, he slips through the door back to his world. It doesn't take long to gather up the few things he left behind in his room into a bag and head downstairs. It's the middle of the night, but that just means the night receptionist he used to talk to when he was restless and unable to sleep will be on. At the very least, he might help Alex call home and talk to Jack.

He arrives on the bottom floor just in time to see four men holding a gun to the receptionist's head. He can't breathe. We want the room number of Paul Drevin. If you don't give it to me in the next three seconds, I will pull the trigger and the only part of this hospital you'lt ever need again will be the morgue, one of them says. He wants to rush in, do something, but he's frozen to the floor, caught in some nightmare. The receptionist gives them Paul's room number in a panic, but it doesn't do him any good. He's dead less than a few seconds later.

"I told you he was in room eight," one of the men says.

"Then why did you ask?"

"I just wanted to be sure."

And just like that, Alex is back.

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