Chapter Text
Chapter 7:
Y/N’s POV
You feel hopeless as you stare at the camera in front of you. The red light is still blinking, as if taunting you. There’s no clear way for you to be sure that Jacobson is telling the truth about the squad watching you. You silently throw out a message to every deity you can think of that Jake and everybody else can see that you’re alive. The desperation must be evident as you continue to stare at the beautiful teasing red light, eyes wide open barely blinking, you couldn’t pull your eyes away from the camera if you wanted to.
You try to imagine yourself in reverse scenarios. Jake being the one kidnapped, you not knowing if he’s alive or dead for hours, and then finally when you do see him, he’s tied up broken and bleeding. A shiver runs down your spine just at the thought of it. The pain and longing in your heart when you think of Jake increases tenfold at the thought of how he must feel seeing you like this.
What you wouldn’t give to have your team with you right now.
Jake would wrap you up in his arms and hold you, Gina would try and make you laugh, Amy and the Captain would have a plan to help you get Jacobson behind bars for this, Terry and Rosa would already have planned a way to get Jacobson alone in a room with no cameras, and Charles would be fussing over you and your injuries. You even wish Hitchcock and Scully were here, they’d say something to make you laugh for sure.
You don’t know how long it’s been since Jacobson left but a steady stream of tears has been soaking your cheeks ever since. The gag is thankfully muffling your sobs, you don’t really want the whole team seeing you so unfiltered.
You’re so uncomfortably vulnerable your body aching to curl up in a ball and protect your most sensitive areas. Being beaten has put you into fight or flight mode and having your neck and stomach so exposed is sending ice picks directly to your throat.
The psychological effects of the kidnapping are starting to get to you, you feel scraped out, boneless, like your heart has been ripped out and thrown on the floor in front of you. Your hopes for survival leaked out of you hours ago. You’ve never felt this exhausted in your life, yet there’s no possible way you’d be able to sleep, your arms uncomfortably tied above your head remind you of this every time you move.
You can barely breathe as your gag fills with a disgusting mix of tears, snot, spit, and blood. The fabric is tied just tight enough that it’s uncomfortable but not too tight that there’s no chance of you wiggling it off. You debate on trying to move it, you know taking it off will surely leave you with another punishment from Jacobson, but your face aches. The cloth is pressing slightly on your swelled lip; blood has been pooling in your mouth ever since Jacobson hit you with the butt of the knife. Your teeth have torn through your bottom lip, leaving it a ragged mess. You drag your tongue lightly across the broken skin, the copper taste is grounding and nauseating all at once.
You can feel the cool façade you’ve crafted slip the longer you stare into the cold dead lens of the supposed streaming camera. You desperately wish for a sign, anything that tells you this isn’t a trick, that your team really is watching over you.
You’re so cold and everything hurts, and you want a hug so badly. You would kill to be dressed in comfy pajamas, fuzzy socks, and wrapped up in a blanket in your bed. You close your eyes and try to imagine you’re there; safe and warm in your bed, surrounded by familiar scents, engulfed in Jake’s arms, your safe place.
Anything would be better than this hell hole at this point. You have no idea what to do, no way to let the team know where you are (besides you don’t even know where you are) and no way to alleviate any of the pain you’re in.
You’re brought out of your imaginations of warmth and love when your body is racked with strong shivers, the cold draft in the basement coupled with your lack of clothing and being soaking wet from the water dumped on you is not helping. You’re sure your teeth would be chattering if your mouth wasn’t covered. Your bare feet burn as they painfully press into the hard cold as ice cement below.
The only warmth in your body is the shallow groove Jacobson left on your stomach, the blood has been steadily dripping since he left, and it’s finally slowing down now as it starts to congeal. The thick blood leaves viscous streams down your stomach as the droplets slide down your front and hit the floor. A pool of blood has slowly built underneath you; you can hear the steady drip of the droplets hitting the cold pavement.
You’ve tried to avoid looking at the wound but what you have seen isn’t good. It probably needs stitches; the clean slice is placed right above your belly button and stretches a few inches on either side of it. Though the cut isn’t very deep you can see where the skin has split leaving a space large enough that the skin will need to be pulled back together to heal properly. Though the wound itself isn’t deadly your first thought is of infection. This basement is not clean, there’s dirt and dust everywhere and the open wound is a breeding ground for bad bacteria. Regardless there’s no point in worrying about it until you get out of here.
If you make it out of here alive. Your brain intrudes.
“Shut up.” You mumble out unintelligibly behind your gag. You hate being concussed your brain feels so muddled as you get mad at your own thoughts.
Every inch of your body pulses with pain. The slice on your abdomen burns every time you twist your body trying to relieve your aching feet. It’s been tingling slightly, and you can feel the heat radiating off the inflamed skin.
You fail to hold back a whimper as a particular move pulls hard on your torso, the more the blood dries the more it hurts when you move, the taut skin pulling on the tender wound.
You need your team to find you fast, you don’t know how much more pain you can take at this point. You want to believe that they’ll save you, but the longer you’re here alone the more hopeless you feel. Your body screams for the release of sleep, or something far more sinister in the deeper darker parts. Anything to not have every nerve burning every second you’re awake. Another fresh wave of tears begins to fall at your thoughts, a sob loud enough to make its way through the gag fills the silent room.
You try to hold back your cries but the complete desperation you feel begins to cloud your mind and fill your bones with a deep depression. You want to stay strong for Jake, for the team. You can’t let them witness your slow demise, but it’s just so hard when everything seems out to kick you when you’re down.
You’re trying to hide it, but you just feel hopeless.
AMY’S POV
Amy doesn’t know what to do with herself. She feels so useless, normally thinking about situations analytically helps her to stay calm. She is a damn good cop, one of the best in the precinct, but all the training and mentoring and grinding in the world can’t help her know how to handle this situation.
They don’t teach you how to mentally process the kidnapping of your best friend in the academy. Of course, they also don’t tell you how close you can become to your squad. There’s something so intimate about knowing your colleagues have your back when a situation can be life or death, it makes work relationships stronger. The 9-9 will always be like a little work family.
At this moment Amy would give anything and everything to help you.
Amy prides herself on being a put-together detective, heck she’d go as far as saying she prides herself on being a put-together person in general. But no rules or regulations she has memorized can help get you back to them. No organized desk, closed past cases, or beautifully organized binders will help her to comfort Jake in what is an unimaginable devastating situation.
Amy feels so far out of depth she’s drowning.
When Jacobson had started streaming, she just stared at you being beaten on the screen in front of her. She couldn’t even keep a hold of Jake’s hand to stop him from hurting himself. She also did nothing as Jake had the worst breakdown she had ever seen. He was completely inconsolable when he thought Jacobson had killed you, all she did was sit there helplessly as Jake was barely even breathing. Thank God for Gina taking control of the situation.
But Amy still feels like she’s drowning in uncertainty. She’s wringing her hands and alternating between staring at your shaking form on the screen, and worryingly watching Jake through the breakroom window as Charles and Gina try and take care of him. She really needs a cigarette.
She’s trying to think of how to help, but Amy just feels useless.
CHARLES’ POV
After witnessing Jake’s anxiety attack Charles feels so desperate to help. The pure animalistic pain he witnessed from Jake makes Charles think about what he would do in Jake’s situation. If he’s being honest with himself, he knows that he’d probably be dead by now if their roles were reversed. He thinks about having to watch the woman he loves in pain as he spectates helplessly sitting in front of a screen, that’s pure torture in Charles’ opinion.
He has no idea how to help Jake, no idea how to help you. As Jake had begun to panic Charles had so desperately wanted to hold Jake as he sobbed out his pain, but Charles didn’t know what the best course of action was.
Charles had been so happy to see you alive and breathing. But the horror that filled his heart at seeing you so injured and damaged weighed him down and has made his body sluggish ever since. His thoughts move too fast to process and his limbs feel like they weigh a thousand pounds. They need to find you and fast, but no one knows what to do. Charles just hopes that the captain can find something with the help of cyber crimes.
He still can’t get over how broken Jake has seemed ever since the parking garage all those hours before. Charles isn’t sure how long it’s been, but every second has felt like hours and every hour has felt like days. Charles hates seeing his friend like this, but nothing he does seems like enough.
At this point his extremities buzz with a need to do something, anything. You and Jake are some of his favorite people and Charles has a burning need to help in any way he can.
He had no hesitation as he immediately jumped at helping Gina take the ghostly pale Jake back to the break room after his breakdown. He looked 5 seconds from keeling over right there in his chair. They had both helped him out of his chair and grabbed an arm each to lead him to the couch in the break room. Charles doesn’t know what to do to fix this, but he knows sitting by the computer watching you try to hold in your pain wasn’t what he needed.
Right now, he’s delegated himself as physical and mental support for his best friend.
The panic has drained every bit of fighting spirit from Jake’s body, he had been so uncharacteristically quiet after Gina had talked him down. Charles can still hear the utter pain from his friend as he choked through his panic.
Charles would do anything to make Jake feel better, but he doesn’t know how he can help. Jake is now sitting on the couch haphazardly, looking like an empty shell of a person, they had deposited him rather clumsily. It was a rushed drop as they could see Jake’s shoulders droop with exhaustion. He had begged Charles and Gina to let him stay by his desk to watch the link, but the pleas fell flat as Jake could barely keep his eyes open.
Charles looking for something to do excuses himself to get a warm cloth to wipe the sticky tear tracks off Jake’s cheeks. He knows he can’t get you back to him, but Charles will do everything in his power to help Jake through this ordeal.
He’s trying to stay calm, but Charles just feels desperate.
GINA’s POV
Gina works on getting Jake situated while Charles gets a cloth to wipe his face. Gina is very worried as she helps Jake take off his shoes and helps him lay down on the couch. He looks so out of it, like his mind is miles away while his body stays here on earth a husk of a person.
Using her softest voice Gina tries to coax a response out of the man in front of her. “I’m gonna get you comfy Jakey. You let me know if you want something a certain way, okay?” She waits a second for his response but is honestly grasping straws at this point.
Gina lays Jake on his back, a blanket under his head, she wraps him up in a second blanket as Jake continues to stare off into space eyes unblinking.
“You wanna give me a sign you’re okay in there man.” Still no response, at this point her worry for her two oldest friends is indescribable. Jake is so lost mentally, and with you lost physically she doesn’t know what to do with herself.
Gina isn’t a cop; she doesn’t have any skills that can aide in finding you. She would never say it out loud, but having so many of her friends putting themselves in the line of fire like they do leaves her constantly thinking about their safety. Normally she tries not to let things bother her, she’s Gina freaking Linetti. She pretty much hit the lottery for looks and personality, but everyone’s human, so she keeps her worry to herself and tries to keep herself and everyone smiling. But right now, she can’t see any way she can smile, can’t see any way she can help, even if she is a genius, physically she doesn’t have much to offer in this situation.
If she wasn’t so worried, she’d totally be bragging about how freaking humble she’s being right now. Tragedy does bring out your true colors, and Gina knows she’s the humblest person on the squad, honestly, she’s probably the humblest person at the NYPD…
Gina is cut out of her thoughts by Jake’s breaths picking up again. She sits at the bottom of the couch resting her left hand on Jake’s legs. If there’s one thing she can always do, it’s talk. And at this point she doesn’t think anything she can say could make the situation any worse. Maybe she can annoy Jake into talking to her.
“Did I ever tell you about why Y/N and I are banned from any and all NSYNC concerts?”
She’s trying not to show it, but Gina just feels worried.
JAKE’S POV
Jake stares off into space mind disassociating from the pain he feels in his body.
He’s trying to fight it, but Jake just feels nothing.