Chapter Text
Nadine had never had such a vivid dream.
All around her was bright and colourful and cheery, with soft blues and oranges and yellow. Carpet beneath her feet. Things on the ground — stuffed toys, based off animals that only a sleeping mind could make — all around.
She looked at her hands as she paced around the room. Any moment now the reality of the dream would be revealed; she’d yet to experience a dream that didn’t manage to fuck up her hands. Even if everything was normal, there was always something ‘off’.
Like an extra finger, Nadine thought, Or a hand that’s not a hand if you squint at it long enough.
She wiggled her digits, counting each one. She had all four fingers — plus a thumb on each hand.
Well.
That wasn’t completely out of the ordinary. Dreams, especially the vivid sort, were sometimes very good at mimicking reality. She could try another of her checks.
So Nadine scanned the room. But there was nothing on the walls. Everything was perfectly plain, perfectly devoid of any of the weirdness dreams gave to wallpaper, brick and to stone. It was then Nadine realised — where’s the door?
There were no windows, either.
She sucked in a breath. Stay calm, stay calm, stay calm. Panicking made dreams worse; it morphed them into nightmares. But panicking also tended to wake you up.
So, why wasn’t she waking up?
*
Caretaker Rhyomi was pleased. The little ones within her clade were all settled down, or in the process of doing so. There had been tantrums born from fear and confusion, but these were, thankfully, distressed tears and not angry ones.
Distressed tears were an easy fix. A quick rub on the back. The doling out of stuffed animals, and baths for the few who allowed her to touch them. Reading stories. Nice, quick and easy fixes.
But angry tears were different.
Rhyomi frowned at the very thought of them. Angry tears came with a lot of noise and a lot of hitting and striking. And the process of calming these bitter little things was a lengthy one, and one which took away valuable time. The hour spent soothing one angry child could have gone to another task, such as assisting another caretaker.
Rhyomi glanced down at her digi-pad. Rooms twenty to twenty-nine — nearly all the children who made up her assigned creche — were without issue. She only had one more room to check: Room Thirty.
She came in through the hidden door to find an empty room. There was nowhere for the little children to go to. So the child in Room Thirty must have been hiding. Golden eyes flit over to the closet on the other end of the room.
And Rhyomi quickly closed the door behind her.
*
Nadine swore softly from her hiding spot in the the little closet space she’d found. She laid flat on her stomach with her pushed back against the cold, metal wall. She watched the room through a small slit beneath the closet door-piece.
And she had seen, however barely, when someone entered. Nadine stared in a mix of amazement and horror when the wall itself shimmered and peeled itself upwards to act as a door. She kept her eyes close to the floor to see if the ‘door’ would open up again.
“×××?”
What was that? An incomprehensible language assailed her ears.
The closet door opened. Two hands ensared Nadine's waist, and she was hoisted up.
She thrashed and kicked, tried moving as much as possible to get away, even though she knew she had nowhere to go. Her kidnapper was not the least bit phased, though.
Nadine felt a hand rub her back, and it simultaneously pushed her against the kidnapper’s chest. She kept twisting her head. It was her way of resisting whatever this newcomer was trying to do to her.
Nadine managed to get a food look at the humanoid: it was huge. Practically a giant, and with a warm-brown skin and yellow eyes.
There was a nametag stuck to its front: ‘Rhyomi’, it read. (Goodness, what a pretty name.)
Rhyomi made some motion to a wall, and a cushioned table with a deep basin connected to its side shimmered into being. Nadine gaped. Her kidnapper made a noise; a soft chirp.
Nadine was set down in the basin, and held firmly in place with the weight of the other’s hand. By the time Nadine realised what was to happen, there was not much she could do other than slap the other’s hands away and try to bite.
Nadine’s clothes were removed. They were placed aside in a neat, oddly clinical sort of way, and then Nadine felt warm water gush from between her legs. It bubbled up from what she thought had been a drain within the basin, and it kept going until the water rest just above her hips.
She was being bathed.
Her face was held in place so it could be washed and scrubbed. The same was done to her legs and arms, and then to her back. The warm soapy water was without a scent. Nadine wouldn’t have been able to identify the fragrance even if there had been one.
Two lathers later, Nadine was dried off with a warm towel and moved to the padded part of the table.
Her stomach dropped when ‘Rhyomi’ (was that really a name?) bent down to retrieve something out of view.
A diaper.
Immediately Nadine shot up in place.
“No!” she yelled, “N-no! Don’t!” The warm bathwater had calmed her down a little, but all of her worries were now right back into her head.
The stranger pushed a finger to her own lips. When Nadine continued to struggle, the stranger made a motion with her left hand. Plush-looking arms, matching the aesthetic of the room, appeared. They held Nadine’s legs up and her arms down.
Nadine wriggled and squirmed. She tried to pull against the arms, but it was of no use. It was horrifying, being spread wide open for this stranger to assault her. She felt every movement against her body — the fingers moving the wet wipe along her privates, and the palm that rubbed in both the powder and the rash cream.
Hot tears rolled down Nadine’s face. She couldn’t even find it within herself to scream. She was in a place she didn’t know, being mishandled by a stranger and bound like she was some sort of criminal. There was nothing else for her to do but cry.
So all consuming was her sobbing that she welcomed the back-rubbing and little kisses that came after the diaper change. And when her captor produced a bottle, Nadine latched on weakly.
She couldn’t afford to throw a food tantrum when she didn’t know where she was, or even if help was coming.
* * *
It felt like a new day. Nadine had no way of knowing — the last thing she remembered was falling asleep. But she felt well rested, and presumably, that meant she had gotten a full night’s sleep somehow.
She sat up groggily, sand and mucus in the corners of her eye. Running her tongue over the pacifier in between her lips, she studied the room.
It was different from yesterday’s.
Her dark brown eyes landed on the beds pushed against the walls. Five on one half of the room, and five on the other. She counted nine other people — one person for each bed, excluding herself. The bedding — big and poofy sheets coloured in pastel blues, pinks and oranges — rose and fell with each inhale.
Everyone else was still asleep.
Nadine moved to slip out of her bed, but a sudden movement from her far right sent her back beneath the covers. She tried her best to stifle her breathing and to make herself still look like she was asleep.
She didn’t know how convincing she was, but it didn’t matter. The footsteps she heard soon after went away from her. Nadine very cautiously opened an eye.
Now she counted four people. She recognised one person as Rhyomi. The other three were foreign to her, but they were all crowded around one of the beds at the other side of the room. Rhyomi led the three strangers down the line, then stood at attention.
Nadine heard a series of quiet chirps. They went back-and-forth, like a conversation. Some light, some heavy. Some inquisitive, and others not so much. Then one part of the trio nodded towards the third bed. Rhyomi seemed to smile; they made another chirp, this one complimentary-sounding.
Nadine wanted to study these newcomers more, but they looked ready to leave. So she curled back up in bed, and squeezed her eyes shut until the footsteps disappeared.
She had a gut feeling. They’d be back.