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AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (5/29)
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
Part Three
Part Four



Part Five

David slept with the curtains on his bed pulled back, so that he would always have a clear view of the door. That likely did him very little good, though, when he did not hear his bedroom door being opened and a person padding softly across the floor, did not realize that anyone had joined him at all until he felt the bed dip beneath their weight.

“Fuck!” David exploded, sitting straight up and going from sleep to wakefulness in less than the span of time that it took his heart to beat twice. Considering how quickly the realization that someone was in the room with him caused it to lurch, he thought that that was an accomplishment. There was a knife beneath his mattress. David started to go for it, and only stopped when he recognized the silhouette.

Carly did not move from the seat that she had taken on the foot, watched him with her cat eyes and said nothing. She had even turned on the electric lights; David glanced out the window and saw that the sun was rising, so that the solar panels could start storing energy for a new day.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Carly,” David said when he realized that it was her, and not a phalanx of gray uniforms and blank expressions. “You do realize that I don’t have any heirs, right? That it’s probably not a good idea to scare me into a heart attack?”

One corner of Carly’s mouth crooked up. “For a spy, you’re an awfully deep sleeper,” she said. She pulled her legs up and onto the bed so that she could cross them, arranging her skirt demurely over her knees. David saw that there was already flour ground into her knuckles and wondered how long she had been up as it was. “I think that Archie saw me coming in here.”

David made note of the nickname that the boy had apparently earned among the rest of the household and then lifted his shoulders into a shrug. Carly was not and never had been a body slave, but it was not unknown for any member of a household to slip into the master’s room early in the morning in order to take care of those certain needs that tended to rise right along with the sun. It was going to make it powerfully fucking hard for Archuleta to believe David’s sincerity when he had told him that no one was forced into any beds that they did not want to be in in this house, but maybe the kid would stop being quite so jumpy if he thought that David simply was not interested in men.

And he’s barely old enough to qualify as that, David thought sourly, but he didn’t have anything near at hand to throw save for his pillow. He didn’t think that it would make nearly the satisfying noise that the manacles had made the night before as they had rebounded off of the study wall.

Carly had been monitoring the changes in his expression from her seat at the end of the bed. “Didn’t go anywhere pleasant?” she asked when he focused on her again.

“Not particularly,” David admitted. He pushed himself further up in the bed and was glad that he was not prone to sleeping nude. “Mayer will be coming tonight, with some others.” He couldn’t stop himself from making another face. “Business.”

David had known Carly for years, and she knew full well the dual meanings that “business” held whenever he had guests over to the house. She nodded once, her expression growing even more solemn, but said, “That’s not what I came in here for, actually.”

“Carly.” David felt a smile crooking up one corner of his mouth. “Just because it’s a good cover story--”

“I know good and well that you won’t do anything if I sock you, either,” Carly threatened before she shook her head. “No. The new slave. Michael. You don’t bring in new people unless you have no other choice.” Because he didn’t wear them out and then sell them off or bury them the way that other estates did, and it was a constant wear to keep them self-sufficient enough to escape notice. Not for lack of trying, though, even if he would have had to run the risk of picking up a government plant along the way.

“Had no other choice, Carly,” David said. He shook his head. “He was with the dregs, it was last stop before mines, nuclear work, or medical experimentation.”

“Hmm.” Carly pursed her lips together and looked displeased, but David knew that he had won the argument as to whether or not he should have bought Michael with that particular trump card. Carly pretended at being as hard and flinty as Kristy Lee herself; it had helped her survive years where a hell of a lot of others had fallen and been unable to get back up. When it came down to it, though, she was one of the softest touches that David had ever met, once she had been won over, and easily the gentlest person residing in the house. He was amazed that Archuleta was still so thin, as often as he had seen her slipping him food from the corner of his eye.

“And anyway,” David said as he started to slide his legs over the side of the bed and rise for the day. Carly did not move from her seat. David was now incredibly glad that he did not make it a practice to sleep nude. “He used to a part of the Resistance, Carly. He deserves a fuck of a lot better than glowing in the dark for six months before he dies of an unidentified form of cancer or foaming at the mouth.” He had his back turned to Carly once he had risen from the bed; it took him several seconds to realize how still she had gone.

“He was a what?” Carly asked softly. She shook her head so hard that her hair, normally tied back neatly from her face so that it would not get into whatever she was cooking, fell loose and free about her shoulders. “David, no. That was a bad plan.”

“He deserved better,” David insisted.

“He should be dead,” Carly shot back. He hadn’t seen her this agitated since she had brained him with her own chains. “Members of--of the Resistance--” None of the slaves that David had met ever liked to say the words out loud, even though it was their best chance of ever being free. He had not been the original owner of any of the slaves on his estate, either, and there were some secrets he had no right to ask of them. “They’re killed upon capture, David. The end. Michael should not be alive right now unless something extraordinary happened, and that--” Carly broke off and pressed her lips together hard.

Sighing, David sat down again on the edge of the bed. He thought of how Michael was able to make his dark eyes appear as if there was no one standing behind them at all even while his body was still moving. “Is probably not for his sparkling skills as a conversationalist.”

Carly snorted. “Not likely, no.” She took a seat next to him on the bed. Without thinking, David put his arm around her, and she leaned her head against his shoulder. He could feel her collar, warm from her skin, pressing against his upper arm.

“Were you able to get a feel of him when you were helping him get settled in last night?” David asked. He shook Carly gently when she did not respond right away. “He show you his secret government microphone?”

Carly shook her head without lifting it, so that David felt the links rubbing against his bicep. As far as arguments towards his being more circumspect in saving as many people as he possibly could went, that was not a terribly good one. “Didn’t take the walls down for even a second,” she said. “Not even when we were alone. He’s been in a house where the slaves were encouraged to sell each other out.”

“Lovely.” Michael wouldn’t be the first, not by a long shot, but still. David clenched his hands into fists, one against his thigh and the other against Carly’s arm where he had it draped. He could feel her shift as she felt the difference.

“I could barely even have told you if he had a head injury or not last night, he was giving me so little,” Carly said. She lifted her head long enough to look at him. “And you saw the scars.” It was not a question.

“There was no way not to.” David forced his hands to relax and took a few deep breaths through his nose until he felt steadier, Carly watching him all the while.

“He’s been tortured,” Carly said flatly. “I know the look.” She peeled David’s arm off of herself and stood in one smooth movement, abruptly refusing to make eye contact with him again. One of the secrets that he was not allowed to ask for; it was David who knew that look. He watched her without speaking. “So I’m just warning you: there’s a certain kind of broken that you don’t come back from.” When Carly finally looked at him again, David saw a flash of the woman who could have happily beaten his brains out if Kristy Lee had not been able to get between them and get the chains away from her, and even then didn’t seem any problem with using her own bare fists.

“Watch my ass, in other words,” David supplied.

“Watch your ass.” Carly muttered an obscenity when she realized that her hair had fallen loose and twisted it back up into the knot that normally kept it out of her way. David thought that there was a certain anxiety to her movements now, as if she was reliving memories that she would rather not, but she didn’t share and he didn’t ask. “Sometimes I don’t think you understand what’s at stake here at all.”

“Trust me,” David replied to her. “I know exactly what will happen to me if I’m caught.”

Once Carly had slipped out with as much quiet as she had slipped in, David dressed and exited his bedroom. It was gloomy and cloudy out, but every window in the house still had the thick, insulating curtains pulled back as far as they would go to take in all of the natural light now that the sun had risen above the horizon with no chances of changing its mind and slipping back down. David ate a quick breakfast in the dining room and then asked Carly to have Michael come to him, ignoring the way that her eyes were not so much asking him not to be a dumbass as demanding it.

It took Michael less than five minutes to arrive, and he appeared in the dining room with a silence that if anything even put Carly’s to shame. David was facing the door and saw him; he didn’t startle, but neither did he find it hard to believe that this man could have been a member of the Resistance once upon a time, either, especially when that time was five years previously, before a series of crushing blows had driven them almost entirely underground. He still moved like someone who was intimately in-tune with the capabilities of his own body, even if David noticed that he was favoring his right side slightly in the morning, bruised rather than broken or not.

Michael was wearing jeans and a black sweater that Carly had procured from somewhere, possibly even from old clothing of David’s own before he had become lord of the manor and had no longer been allowed to go slouching about in whatever was most comfortable at the given moment. The sleeves were pushed up to Michael’s elbows, letting David see that he had not been wrong in guessing that the weals at Michael’s wrists would wind up becoming bruises once they were given a night to think about it. Upon noticing that David was looking at them, Michael clasped his hands behind his back and stood with head slightly bowed, perfect and proper. He did not speak without David speaking to him first or giving him leave.

Fought in the Resistance? David could not stop himself from thinking, looking at him, and wondered if the handful of brief flashes in the market the day before had been solely the product of his own imagination, looking for any excuse to get a questionable purchase out of there.

“Have you eaten?” David finally asked. Michael lifted his eyes; there was a faint line drawn down between them. So he didn’t entirely require the hand of someone else winding up a key in his back, after all. David nodded towards Michael’s wrists and watched as Michael automatically unclasped them from behind himself and placed them against the chair in front of him so that David would have a better view. Still proper, still perfect. Five years was a long time for someone who had been through even half of what Carly had hinted at and David had seen with his own eyes. “And do those need attention?”

Michael tilted his head to one side very slightly, the most overt assessment that David had been able to catch him at yet. David could not shake the feeling that Michael had to be either startled or tired for David to have seen that much. “Anything that doesn’t break the skin by definition doesn’t require attention,” Michael answered evenly. “Thank you for your concern.” Almost as an afterthought, the pause between sentences so long that David could not tell if Michael was skating in the furthest amount of insolence that he possibly could or if the intent was genuine.

As if required medical care could possibly be a gift, David thought. He cleared his throat and thought that he saw another phantom expression move across Michael’s face before it disappeared again. “What are you good at?” he asked, rather than chasing down that expression the way that he wanted to, to see if it was a fluke. Somewhere off deep in the house, he was certain that Carly was cringing without knowing why, the way that he was laying it bare and not acting like....not acting like a master, but. It was his house, goddamnit, and it was exhausting enough to play the role in public, and he...had a feeling about this.

Michael had been resting his wrists fairly lightly against the back of the chair, holding himself open for David’s display almost unconsciously, but David’s question made him twist suddenly and then clench at the wood hard. David didn’t think that he even realized that he was doing it until the knuckles were already whitening. “I am good at...whatever you would like me to be good at. Sir.” He was staring down at the table rather than at David, but that didn’t mean anything. David didn’t have to see his face to know.

“Stop doing that,” David said automatically, jolt of pain that was very nearly physical running through him, and Michael’s fingers immediately released the back of the chair. “No, that’s fine, that’s not what I meant.”

Michael didn’t grip the chair again. He still looked as if he wanted to, as he asked, “I don’t know what you mean.” You knew what a slave was really thinking by watching their shoulders, David remembered, and sometimes not even then. Michael looked as if he was expecting to be struck, and bracing himself for it in case showing a reaction would only make it worse. When there was still a greenish-yellow ring circling one of his eyes, David didn’t guess that he could blame him.

“My name is David, not ‘Master’ or ‘Sir,’” David said. “In this house, it’s what I prefer to be called.” Michael’s head came up, watching him. If Jason or Kristy Lee came across Carly mid-stroke on the kitchen floor, David knew that it was going to be his fault.

“David,” Michael answered in a voice that was not quite even; before his capture, David had a feeling he had worn his emotions as plainly as any garment.

“Do you know your way around horses?” David asked. He didn’t imagine Michael’s minute flinch, either, or the way that his head tilted the other way for just a second so that he could regard David with what had to be the closest thing to suspicion that David would ever see openly expressed on his face. The Resistance hadn’t ridden horses in years, but prior to Red River they had been skilled raiders.

“I’ve worked in stables, David,” Michael finally answered. David almost wished that he had not told Michael to simply use his name rather than a title, if the inflection was still going to be exactly the same.

“Good.” David nodded and repeated, “Good.” Fuck him, Archuleta made David feel less out of sorts and off-balance on his own feet than this. “Head out to the barn, find a blonde woman named Kristy Lee. She’ll tell you where to go from there.”

“As you wish, S--David.” Michael looked uncertain for a brief second, and then his knees started to bend. David put out his hand quickly before Michael could get more than halfway into his kneel, feeling uncharacteristically panicky.

“I don’t need you to do that,” he said. “Just go find Kristy Lee.”

“As you wish.” Michael left the dining room with the same silence with which he had entered. David rubbed at his mouth and looked out the windows, at the fall clouds that were slowly rolling across the sun and destroying the promise of a decent day.

End Part Five

Continue to Part Six