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Entry tags:	all that time silent still

AI FIC: All That Time, Silent Still (2/29)
TITLE: All That Time, Silent Still
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17
PAIRINGS: Mavid, Tiedam, miscellaneous hints of others both slash and het.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own this sandbox, and all of the sandbox games played within are entirely fictional.
SUMMARY: Civilizations have crashed before under the impact of one great catastrophe. Make it two, and what’s left behind is barely recognizable. Slavefic AU.
CONTAINS: Coercive themes by definition; sex, violence, language, and torture both onscreen and off. Contact me if you want or need to know more.

Part One



Part Two

If Lady Abdul had glanced David’s way at the same moment that he caught sight of her, she would have seen him naked. He paused for half a step and then finished tucking away the slip of paper smoothly without looking at it, covering it under the pretense of adjusting his pants once again. David slid his jacket back on and was doing up the buttons as she turned to face him. If she asked, he was simply going to say that he had gone to take a leak. He had told enough lies over the course of his life to make such a simply one convincing.

“Lord Cook.” Abdul had a strange smile, vacant on the surface, but always making David wonder what was going on beneath it. The long white dresses that she tended to wear did little to discourage the impression, for they were the mostly wildly impractical garments that she possibly could have worn in public, amidst all of the wind-blown dust, and yet she somehow managed to still avoid getting a single speck on them that David could see. He focused hard at the end of Adbul’s dress, trailing in the dirt and yet still somehow managing to remain spotless, and wondered if she wasn’t secretly some kind of witch. The burden of past favors kept his mouth shut of anything save for a polite smile.

Abdul’s eyes ticked past him, into the shadows that he had just exited. She let out a moue that was nearly disapproving, and David could just imagine what was going through her mind. Maybe the magic that kept the edges of her dress clean did not work once it was taken into a darkened alley.

“Bodily needs,” David said delicately, without bothering to explain further. As Archuleta had been left to stand outside the alleyway alone, that left very few bodily needs in the running.

Abdul’s eyebrow rose very slightly as she hooked her arm through David’s without asking for permission. She also crooked her finger very slightly at Archuleta to follow them as she began leading David away from the alley and back towards the throngs of civilization. Archuleta looked David’s way and waited for the slight incline of David’s head telling him that it was all right before he did so.

“Needs,” Abdul mused in a tone that could have meant anything at all, though it was at least friendly on the surface. She pinched at the inside of David’s arm; he barely felt it through the thick blue wool of his coat. The gesture was intended to be playful, though, almost certainly. “I love Parisian perfumes, did you know that?”

David cocked an eyebrow at her. “I never smell them on you,” he said with a slight smile. And he saw Lady Paula Abdul often, at nearly every large function at one estate or another. They were tied together by both the bonds of their class and the bonds of personal affection, with all that she had done to keep his family out of overt danger over the past twenty years.

“It’s an unwise vice to air in public,” Abdul said lightly. She made an airy gesture with her free hand, as if she was not admitting to a very serious breach of trade law right in front of him. “Not to mention an expensive one.”

“Even when you’re not going through the proper channels,” David answered, dropping his voice even lower now that they were back among the throngs that could possibly overhear, even though every last one of them who had the money to do so was dealing.

“The proper channels would cost as much as my estate, and probably include a few favors that I don’t feel like repaying,” Paula answered him in a voice every bit as light and teasing. “And I don’t like to loan out my property, it always comes back broken.”

Just like that, David felt cold again inside of his coat, though he was too experienced to show it. “It’s easily replaceable.”

“The good china is never easy to replace.” David finally realized where Abdul was leading them, and all of the stealing himself in the world could not stop his step from hitching, just for a second. She glanced up at him curiously.

“I’m not finding myself in need of new china at the moment,” David said by way of explanation. “And I’ve already put in several ration orders today. Leave them alone too long, they’ll be stolen right off of the vehicle.”

“I’ve broken several pieces recently, unfortunately,” Abdul said. She pulled her arm free of his of her own accord, saving David from having to put in the effort of keeping still and managing not to shudder. He might not be much, he reminded himself, but he was at a bare minimum better than this. “And you might find something that you like.” Lady Abdul was a small woman, which made it easy for her to look at men coquettishly from beneath her lashes. David had seen her do it many times before, and often with men that he knew full well she had no interest in. He was among them.

“Maybe,” David allowed. “Maybe I can just go for the company.” Even though Abdul certainly knew that there was no heat behind David’s flirting, she smile back at him as sunnily at him as any barely-adolescent girl. “Stay close to me,” he added over his shoulder to Archuleta, even though the closer they got to the slave market the more the boy was nearly stepping on the backs of David’s shoes in his haste not to be left behind. If there was any place where it was not terribly dangerous to be an unclaimed slave, then surely this was the worst among them.

The slave market was a big white building that had maybe been a courthouse, before. The stone was white, and more marked over with wounds from bullets and mortar rounds than any of those surrounding, even if the marks were old and faded. It had been a very long time since the Resistance had come this close into the urban areas, and the seat of government was in a big steel building several miles away that had once been the home of a corporation; the high rise made it safer. David walked slowly up the steps amidst the swirls of color and felt heated air start to buffet him yards before he reached the opened doors.

Inside, it was warm, so warm that David felt a prickle of sweat beginning beneath the high woolen collar of his coat almost immediately. It felt clammy as it eventually started to make a path down his spine. There was so much that hurt the eye in here, and not just the fact that he had yet to meet a member of the aristocracy who could appreciate a fucking neutral. It was also more crowded than it had been anywhere else that David had been that day, even when he had been struggling to put in a medical order through the clean, aboveboard lines. He was jostled more than once, and put his hand out behind him so that Archuleta would know to stay close. He intended to do nothing more than waggle his fingers, but found a hand clasping his almost immediately, and in a nearly bone-breaking grip at that. David had not purchased Archuleta through the market. Didn’t mean that the boy had never been here, though.

Abdul blended in here, too, save for a trace of grunge at the lower hem of her dress that was now visible that she was standing on a pristine marble floor rather than the gray-death dirt of the outside. David saw her glancing down and scowling at the evidence that she was human, after all, before she attempted to put her arm back through David’s. He skirted her and pretended that it was due to the jostling of the crowd, thought that he actually got away with it. Maybe Abdul was having one of the days when her breeziness was not an elaborate game, but was instead simply because she could not do any better.

The building was warm, and it was white from its floors up to its ceiling, the floors constructed of marble that had to have been quarried before the wars and lovingly cared for, polished, and repaired since then. The bullet scars that marked the outside of the building didn’t dare come in here. David could almost smell the bleach that was used to keep it so sparkling, and he had to lower his eyes to the floor for a few seconds in order to keep himself from being blinded, only to discover that the floor was not much better. There were forms standing up on sleek white podiums standing up from the floor, with aisles running between them for the patrons to walk. The ones towards the front of the building, the trained body slaves, were not chained, for they did not require it, no matter how close at hand escape might look to be. Before each of them was a small placard detailing their height, their weight, every dimension of their body documented to such detail that David could not help but wonder if they were required to take a shit first, just to make certain that nothing changed. Their behavioral quirks, such as they were, were also listed on the placard along with their skills. There was not much in the way of variety there. They were all amiable, well-behaved, able to give a perfect impression of being dead inside and maybe even living it. Adbul paused in front the body slaves, head tilted slightly to one side. She did not seem to notice when David drifted away from her and further on down the line. None of the slaves in here where wearing clothing; it interfered with seeing what they were buying. The impractical and expensive warmth wasn’t for their comfort, either. No one wanted to see the canvas that they were purchasing marred by the unsightliness of gooseflesh.

David had no need of a body slave, not today. He drifted further down, dipping his shoulders so that he would have to touch as few people as possible on his way. Most of the bodies were underfed, too, in the angular and rangy way that had once been deliberate vogue but now just meant that there was not enough to eat. It was hard enough keeping enough food in the stomachs of the poor free to keep them moving; after oil had, if not run out to the last drop, at least made it abundantly clear that the days of cheap and easy were over, then it was easy to turn political dissidents and economically desperate over to others’ hands and pretend that it wasn’t going to be murder or something worse, in the end. It had taken David a long time to realize that the things that his parents whispered to him as a child were not the same stories that his peers were getting, and longer than that to realize that the stories told for him were not for others to share. He remembered days and days of his parents wearing pinched and wary looks, and talking amongst themselves about “what if it happens to him” when they thought that he could not hear.

The body slaves were amongst the most physically perfect of any of the flesh for sale. David had no doubt that they were well-trained, too, in the way that they could look from beneath their lashes in a way that did not quite skirt against the edges of propriety or good training, but invited all kinds of liberties to be taken with them, for the price. They were good; it reached their eyes. He made eye contact with each among them only long enough to see the lashes lower automatically towards the floor before he moved on, deeper into the complex. It was even more crowded in with buyers in here than usual, considering how cheaply flesh ran. Probably people needing more bodies to bring in the short run of winter crops that before it became truly, deeply cold, and nothing else would be coaxed out of the ground again until spring. The lesser slaves, those who were not intended to keep a bed warm through the winter, were further along towards the back of the building. The heat there was still every bit as thick, and the slaves were still without any clothing. They were not quite as physically lovely to look upon, and perhaps also thinner than even those towards the front, but the expression, the lack of it, within their eyes was the same. David had need of none of them, either, or anyone in this building, but it would look strange if he were to bolt now. He for once did not look around to see if Archuleta was remaining close as David had instructed him to do. As much as the boy had all but been trying to fit into David’s clothing along with him ever since they had come out, surely there was a point at which it became redundant.

And at the very back of the building, where one almost had to be hunting for them--and David did not like to think about the sort of people who would be hunting exactly the kinds of dregs that were stuck back into the far corners of the market, where they could not mar the pretty flesh at the front and center by way of association, what sort of purpose they might have for them--were the leftovers. The slaves too broken down for hard manual labor any longer, and so broken down on the outside as well as on the in that they were welcome in anyone’s beds or within the nice houses where the slaves were ornaments as much as the furniture. They had two possible stops waiting for them: shipment to the mines to the east, where there was still some coal to be found, or the fields to the south where there was an increasingly pitiful amount of oil, or to the labs that no one quite knew the locations of and no one wanted to ask, either. Missouri was not a nationality large enough to involve itself in the sporadic wars with Europe, but there were allies to the east who were, and new forms of bio-warfare were being developed all the time.

David had hated looking at the body slaves and those slaves destined for manual labor based upon how smoothly they had managed, it seemed, to both exit their own bodies entirely and still look upon him with a particularly damning kind of reproach. The dregs, the ones that no one wanted unless they wanted them for ends that even the most callous slave-owners amongst David’s acquaintance would cough politely and then change the subject upon hearing, were difficult to look upon based upon their bodies alone. The best among them were underfed and exhausted to the point that there bodies had simply decided that enough was enough, and begun the process of aging them into shapes decades beyond that of their actual ages. The gray of the skin and hair here was not the cause of thick dust that probably provide excellent camouflage if one should need to get away quickly. The worst among them were the chronically defiant and the runaways. David thought that maybe he could understand why the slaves towards the front of the building, the ones who were heading towards slightly better futures in the short term if nothing else, preferred to stare straight ahead while their flesh was being prodded and judged rather than look this way. The slaves at the far end of the building were all in chains, on what limbs that they had left. David counted several missing feet, a few hands, more than a few facial mutilations that would make it impossible for them to escape again, for they would stand out everywhere that they went even if they did by some miracle manage to hide or get their collar off. One slave had obviously been caught with a woman to which he was not allowed access; David turned abruptly and nearly left then and there. There was no purpose to his being down here. He was not intending to buy any poor piece of flesh this day, and he knew his own mind and motives for the dangerous little games that he played. He did not need to see the effects of that which he opposed in bloody, torn person in order to understand.

He noticed the slave in passing by his relative lack of trauma rather than any outstandingly gruesome scar. David paused in spite of himself, never mind that Lady Abdul at this point had to have either made her purchase or groped to her satisfaction and would be looking to move on. The man was tall, probably an inch or so taller than David himself when he was standing fully upright. At the moment he was hunching protectively around an ugly red-purple bruise that had been painted across one of his sides, as if he had been recently kicked. David could already tell that it would darken into nearly black before the sun fell. The man’s hands twitched as if he wanted to cradle the injury, but restraints holding both of his wrists together and then running into a Y chain down to his tightly bound ankles kept him from doing so. His ankles were held together so tightly that he would not be able to even take the short, careful steps of most the other slaves who were kept chained due to their own past histories of misbehavior.

“Hope the building doesn’t catch on fire,” David said, half to himself. Just for a moment, quickly enough and then gone again that he was able to convince himself that he was imagining it, David thought that he saw the slave’s eyes, a particularly dark shade of brown, flashing towards his own before he went back to staring at his feet, the wall, nothing at all. He was even better at it than most. Around one of those eyes was another deep bruise, this starting to shade from purple into green and with a promise of that particularly noxious jaundice-like yellow approximately a week after that. David was amazed to see fresh bruises on a slave being offered up for sale at all, no matter how cheaply and how obvious it was what his expected end was to be. It was generally preferred to wait until the newest marks had faded if at all possible, giving the impression that any past misbehaviors on the part of the slave were strictly that. Scars were another matter.

And the slave--the man, he corrected himself, with a half-guilty flush--standing before David was certainly not lacking for those, either. He was standing facing David, but David could still see trailing scars, nearly like fingers inching forward from a malevolent presence at the man’s back, curving around his shoulders, waist, and thighs. It left little doubt in David’s mind that he was see the mark of a whip across the slave’s back if he were turn, and applied liberally at that. The only scars on his front were a long, curving mark starting to make the change from pink into white down his thigh--he was lucky that he had not bled out from it, if it had been as deep upon delivery as it looked--and several shorter ones on his torso, as if he had been stabbed. He was still in possession of all of his limbs, all of the body parts that he had been born with.

And his face had been left unmarred. David studied it without caring if he appeared rude, as the man was doing an excellent job of staring both at and through David as it was. He was good-looking, and perhaps that was why; he could have been someone’s body slave, once. Even though David would hazard a guess and say that he was approaching thirty, if not for his scars and the restraints suggesting that he still had severe behavioral problems, he perhaps still could have been. Not everyone favored slaves so young that they were still nearly children.

He needed to be getting back to Abdul before she grew curious and came looking for him here amongst flesh that was clearly one step away from being sold by the pound. Instead, David caught himself stepping forward and leaning over the slave’s placard so that he could read his documented information more clearly. His breath caught in his throat.

The slave had tried to run twice. The second time had apparently been punished severely enough to put all thoughts of a third try and a prayer for luck straight out of his mind, for it had been nearly four years before and there was hardly a mark of undesirable behavior standing against him since. David would wonder why he was still being bound so tightly, when he had apparently been beaten into reform, and would have shuddered to contemplate what could have possibly been done to him that would have caused that turn around and yet hadn’t required mutilation, if his eyes had not been immediately drawn towards the last line of the slave’s notable information, set into a typeface so small that David had to strain in order to see it. The slave had, once upon a time, been a member of the Resistance.

David stepped back abruptly and tilted his face upwards to try and catch the slave’s eye before his brain was able to catch up with him and begin its klaxon screaming of stupid, stupid, stupid. It didn’t matter; the slave managed to look directly into David’s eyes and yet still give the impression that he was not looking at anything at all. The only proof that there was still a person inside of the flesh lie in the way that he still could not straighten up from the ribs that had in all likelihood been broken before he had been shoved up onto the dais for anyone who would make an offer on him, the fine lines of pain around his mouth.

“I’ll give you thirteen hundred for him,” David said without thinking to the small little man who had been in the corner, watching everything, because there was always someone like him in places like these. He thought that he saw something in the slave’s eyes change, moving towards him, but it could have just been the lights flickering as the generator faltered for a moment.

The man’s mouth had been turning downwards before David had even quoted an amount, just as David had known that it was. There was someone like that in every place like this, too. “I can get double that selling him Eastland,” he said, referring to the large conglomerate of states-turned-nation that took up most of the North American coastline beyond the Mississippi River.

David snorted. “There’s only one thing that you would be selling him Eastland for,” he said. “And they’ll be buying by the pound.” It didn’t take much in the way of skilled labor--in or out of bed--in order to be strapped down and have whatever the latest chemical weapon was poured down your throat or dusted over your body. Just like before, David thought that he saw the slave looking towards him, and just like before, he could not be certain by the time that he turned his head. “That’s what happens when you underfeed your slaves.”

The man’s face bowed down even further. “He can work--” he started.

“The fact that you have him chained so tight suggests that he doesn’t want to.”

“And then why the hell do you want him, then?” the man finally exploded at David, and seemed to remember that he was all but yelling at the aristocracy a moment later, and he himself merely a poor free whose state could be amended from that at any time. His complexion took on an unfair and still entirely accurate resemblance to curdled milk.

“It’s none of your concern why I want him,” David said stiffly.

The man all but bowed from the waist in his haste to nod his head in agreement, though David still saw danger in the way that he was holding his mouth. “As you wish, as you wish,” he said. The unhappy bow turned into a smile that David didn’t like much better, for it had snakes and slime behind the surprisingly well cared-for teeth. “Some like bed mates that buck. I don’t judge.”

“Thirteen hundred,” David repeated softly, and forced himself to put out his hand for the man to shake.

“Thirteen hundred.” His hand certainly didn’t feel as though David was clasping onto scales, which so far as he was concerned only proved that no one was trustworthy. “I’ll enter the changes into the database, Lord Cook.” David managed not to start at the realization that he had been so easily recognized. “And arrange to take the funds from your account?”

“Yes,” David said vaguely, mind turning. “And bring something to get these irons off, at least on his legs. I don’t intend to carry him out across my shoulders.” He had been startled thus far to get even eye contact; when the corners of the slave’s mouth turned down, David could have fallen over. As the trader hurried away to make the changes, assuring a group clad in black that David could only assume were the spoken-of Eastlanders that he would be back to help them soon, David started up at his purchase and asked, “Who are you?”

Proving that there were more ways to disobey than outright violence, the slave stared back at him and did not speak.

End Part Two

Continue to Part Three