[Discontinued] Ghosts all Around | Danny 'Jed Olsen' Johnson x Reader

Chapter 11: Sweetheart

All at once the world comes to a grinding halt. The suddenness of the stop is jarring, ripping the breath from your body and sending a wave of hot terror roiling through you. You hadn't heard the footsteps, hadn't seen the shifting of shadows as someone approached, hadn't spotted your oncoming demise as it pounced, and now that it had happened your brain had short circuited. For no more than a second all thought escaped you, leaving nothing behind but that pure, searing horror, and then your mind resurfaced from it's prison of panic and information clicked together one piece at a time. 

The first thing you realized was likely the most obvious. There was a hand around your face, clamped tightly over your mouth and evidently planning on staying there. Your feet were pulled from under you as that hand and another dragged your to the side, away from the main street and toward a shady alleyway that screamed danger danger danger! 

The next thing you realized was that your headphones were being ripped violently from your ears by another person, this one you could see- it was a man with mean brown eyes and a scar splitting his upper lip. Along with the headphones, your cellphone was torn from your hands and thrown away back towards the street, far, far out of reach.

Lastly, you registered voices- the men were talking, maybe to you and maybe to one another, but your brain refused to retain any traces of what their words might have been. Your brain finished booting back up. Your fight or flight instincts kicked in. The breath went barreling back into your lungs and your sense of hearing came back full force all too suddenly, painful, almost, and frightening because now everything felt too real, too actual, and it connected that this was happening right here and right now.

"Hurry the fuck up, back here!" Words sounded foreign, just barely familiar enough to mean something, but the meaning was terrifying. A scream ripped from your lungs, muffled almost entirely by the hand over your mouth, your own hands springing up to scratch and claw desperately at it. You plant your heels against the concrete, flinging yourself around as wildly as you possibly can but your attacker held tight, strong and sturdy and malevolent and not letting go, not fucking letting go. The alleyway engulfs you, crossing the threshold out of view, swallowed by the encroaching darkness. Your mind is threatening to melt again, an automatic response to too much going on and too much panic, too much fear but you force it to stay together and grasp for any rational escape attempts you could possibly make. Danny, Danny seems like your best option because you can't fight these two alone and there's no way you could possibly outrun them for long, but your phone is way over there and you're way over here getting close and closer to missing your chance to run. The men stop, and you catch a flash of red out of the corner of your eye, a pattern that reminds you of camping rope and scares your mind to bits for just one more second. You regather your pieces, you regather your calm, collected self, and you form the best plan you can in two seconds flat. 

You swing your head violently backwards. It collides with the nose of your captor and he cries out in tandem with the crack you create, breaking his nose or at least dislocating it. Your head swims with the force of the attack but you don't have the time to fight off the wave of pain. Swinging back your foot, it slams into the guy's crotch and his hand moves away just enough for you to finish this off. In a moment of animalistic desperation you twist your head, shoving it forwards and locking it around his fingers. You crunch down hard, hearing his scream and tasting the metallic tang of blood before you see it, and even then you don't stop biting down until you don't have the strength to bite any further. The other man hasn't even been able to register what was happening by the time you were able to pull free, throwing yourself into a run and wiping at your mouth with the sleeve of the hoodie Danny had lent you. You see your phone and go right for it, propelling yourself forwards and hearing the outrage of the two behind you. The one you had sunk your teeth into was screaming at his companion, chewing him out (pun intended) for not doing anything to stop you from almost biting off his fingers and then yelling at him for not chasing you. You bend down, scooping your shattered phone off the ground just as the uninjured man came running.