Homeplot: Day 1

[missingthekeep]

The first time they come for Sean, they don't speak. They barge into the room, jolting him awake with a start, and haul him to his feet before he's got the chance to do it himself. There are no pretenses here as the first blow glances off his cheek and sends him right back down to the floor. This isn't an interrogation, and they aren't trying to get anything out of him. They're just softening him up for later. Fighting back proves to be fruitless, there are two of them with a visibly armed third standing in the doorway, and all he can really do is know how to take a hit and try to make certain they don't do him any real damage.

It goes on so long that Sean wonders if they're just going to try to beat him to death and be done with it, but they do eventually back off, leaving him battered and spitting out blood in the dingy, white-tiled room as they leave. The solid oak door closes with a bang, and then he's alone in the dark to figure out what's happening to him, the only light in the room coming from a small, barred window in the door.

He preferred it when his major concern was the beating.

The man in the doorway had been a cop, Polish from the look of the uniform. The two working him over, though, had been wearing suits. KGB then, most likely. While he can work out a few alternate scenarios for that, he can't afford to waste his time dancing around the most obvious one, no matter how much it hurts.

"Home sweet home, boyo."

The last thing he remembers before turning up on the island is beating on a Russian girl who'd just been in a car accident in broad daylight, it only makes sense that he'd land himself in prison for it, and with the way he'd been tailed ever since Berlin, the KGB would have ensured he didn't waste his time in regular lockup. The table, chairs, and cheaply soundproofed walls mark his surroundings as an interrogation room, and he knows his captors will be back in fairly short order.

If there's one perk to having apparently left the island behind (for now or for good, he can't say), it's that he should have his powers back. Assuming his injuries have healed enough to not affect them too severely, he's not going to be staying locked up for much longer. Having that ace tucked in his back pocket goes a long way toward solving some of his more immediate problems, namely being not far from getting executed and tossed in an unmarked grave hundreds of miles past the Iron Curtain.

Fortunately, he's saved from having to shift his focus to the less pressing but no less important issue of leaving the island and everything that entails by the shadow that falls across the room a moment later. Apparently his new friends hadn't gone far. For a moment, he considers just nailing them through the door, but as much as he'd like to get to freedom as quickly as possible, and as much as he doesn't like waiting when he's still not positive if his scream will be up to the task after nearly three years and a still-healing throat, knowledge is power, and he needs all he can get. If they weren't going to try questioning him eventually, he'd already have a bullet in his head. Adopting a defensive stance, he takes up position in a far corner of the room and readies himself for round two.

Comments

[drownondryland]

Indignation is, all things considered, probably not the best thing for Meredith to be feeling right now, but it beats fear. It is, in its way, useful. When she's imagined life after the island, she's always known it to be possible that going home and going somewhere new with Sean weren't really her only two options, that it could be much stranger or much worse. It's just been a lot easier to ignore that lately, not to consider that the island might just be a waystation before something else. Some kind of Eastern European prison wasn't really on the list of possibilities when she thought about it in the past, though.

They keep asking who she is and what she's doing here and she doesn't have the answers they want, doesn't have any answer other than her name, because she doesn't know where here is or how she got here. It's not what they want to hear, which she's pretty sure means a lot worse than getting pushed around and yelled at soon, and somehow that just pisses her off. Not that she can do a lot about, not that there's anything productive about getting angry, but again, it's better than being afraid, though she probably should be. Being American, being a doctor, being an innocent bystander don't mean much when she doesn't know what she was standing by, can't explain the hows and whys of her being here, has no identification. Looking around the cell, she can't see any way out whatsoever, and that anger, that fear creeping in against her will now, all it's good for is not thinking about the fact she isn't home.