Ten Days - Part One
Title: Ten Days
Fandom: NUMB3RS
Pairing/Characters: Colby, David, Don, Charlie
Rating: PG-13
Summary: After ten days he began doubt that they would ever find him.
Big thanks to my beta, pruehall and I don't own NUMB3RS. As it takes place in the post "When Worlds Collide" world, there are some spoilers for the aforementioned episode.
Ten Days: Part One
He was going to die here; he knew he was. The first three days, he had adamantly believed that his team was coming for him. Bythe fourth day he had still believed that they were coming, but his conviction was beginning to waver. The fifth day he had still believed that they would find him, but he began to wonder if they would get there in time. On the sixth day he began to think that the idea of rescue was simply wishful thinking at that point. On the seventh day he began to seriously doubt that they would find him while he was still alive. On the eighth day he just started to pray that they would eventually find his body. On the ninth day he just hoped against hope that they would catch his murderer eventually. But now, after ten days, he seriously doubted that they would ever find his body, let alone his killer.
Ten days of pure hell had wreaked havoc on his psyche. Sometimes he wondered if he had ever really gotten out of jail at all. He considered that maybe he had simply been transferred to Gitmo. Sometimes he thought that he had made up his escape and his reconciliation with the team, using it as a defense mechanism against his own personal hell.
He had spoken to David several times. Sometimes it was friendly David, telling him that they were coming for him and talking about the Lakers game or some such. Other times it was a bitter and hateful David, saying that he loathed him and that he would be glad when he was dead, that this was what he deserved.
He still preferred hateful David to his captors. Men in black ski masks, asking him questions, reacting violently when he didn’t give them the answer they desired. They almost made him long for Lancer’s drug cocktails again. But he considered that it was, perhaps, the length of the torture that made it seem more painful than the actual torture itself. Lance had only tortured him for a little over a day; they had been torturing him for almost a week and a half.
They liked to have some variety in his methods, using everything from electroshock and beatings to drugs- though none of them as sophisticated as Lancer’s had been, these were mostly relatively easy to get, not that it made the experience of them coursing through his veins any less excruciating.
He had made a stupid mistake and he knew it. He had gone to a scene alone. David was going to meet him there, but he had arrived before David and had and therefore had to make a stand against the half dozen or so heavily armed men alone. He had lost. Badly. He had taken one to his left arm and four or five in his vest, knocking him to the ground and his gun out of his hand, stunning him just long enough for them to chloroform him.
The next thing that he remembered was waking up in this room- more like a dungeon, really- cuffed to this chair. The men in the masks asking him question after question about his investigation, how he had found the place, who else knew about it- standard torture questions. Like hell he was going to answer them. He could only hope that they had all left when they took him, that they hadn’t hung around and taken David when he had arrived on the scene, and that David wasn’t somewhere else in this place, being tortured to death as well.