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AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (6/29)
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



Part Six

The clouds persisted throughout the day without actually carrying through on their promise of rain, until David wanted to poke at them with a stick just to make them fucking do something. He retreated back into his study by the early afternoon, though he left the curtains drawn back from the windows so that he could get as much light as possible without resorting to the electricity, and so that he could watch the road for people coming up to the estate. David didn’t know if his father and mother had ever done the same thing, sitting in this room and trying to find the balance between idealism and a safe family. He knew that Andrew never had, at any rate; there were days when David wasn’t certain whether he wanted to emulate him or hit him in the mouth.

The house was a little chill, but David still didn’t bother setting a fire in the grate as he sat at his desk and went slowly through the accumulated documents of a century on this land. The forest was coming back, behind the pastures, and putting a lie to the official story that they were simply running out of spaces with which to grow food. Didn’t mean that there was enough wood for them to waste it. There had been war and shortage for longer than David could remember, and his parents, and his grandparents before that. Maybe there had been a handful of souls born further back than that who could remember what it was like when things had been cheap and easy, but they had all been long dead by the time that David had been in a position to talk to any of them. All that he remembered was that there had always been this estate, and that even with people under them--slaves, and real ones, even if they had never traded them away like broken furniture when they became old and inconvenient--and there had been years when they had had plenty and others when things had been pinched and worn, and his parents had spent hours in this office, trying to make things work. They had looked pinched and worn, too, all for the sake of believing that people were not things to be traded away. Both of their sons had known that long before they had reached the age of maturity.

Andrew certainly had not made things easier, when he had left them.

David sighed and shut the big, leather-bound book that contained lineages, the deeds to the land, everything that made him and his family different from the people that they were legally allowed to own. It was a fat book. Still didn’t seem like all that much to David. He put it away and then set that fire in the grate in acknowledgment of the night that was coming on, set up the guard to catch sparks. He didn’t close the door to his office open, so that the heat could crawl down the hallway and do its part filling up the rest of the house. Though David grabbed his coat before walking out the kitchen door and down the path to the barn, he still shivered slightly. Fall was through fucking around; they were going to have winter riding their asses before more than a month went by. The last winter crops that they were going to be able to pull from the land should be stored indoors within the next week or so; David had run the numbers over and over again, remembering the looks that his parents had worn when the amount that they needed didn’t agree with the amount that they had, and they would be all right. Even with that extra mouth in the household.

David could hear hooves beating out a rhythm from the exercise paddock, but he ignored it for now and went into the barn instead, listening to the whickers of the horses in their stalls as they recognized his scent. None of these animals were flighty, well-bred racers; what they were were sturdy as hell and capable of living on not much more than the people in the house during those lean years. The ears that pricked up at David as face after face poked themselves over the edges of their doors were over-large and shaggy, the eyes large and kind.

“Hey, quit that,” David murmured to an old mare when she laid her ears back briefly and then sniffed suspiciously at his jacket.

“She’s been cranky all day,” Kristy Lee said, coming up behind him. “Watch that she doesn’t try to take a piece out of you.” Right on cue, the mare pinned her ears back even further and clacked her big yellow teeth shut on the air where David had been standing a few seconds before. He had seen the ears turn from crankiness to business and had moved back before Kristy Lee had even had a chance to finish speaking.

“Nice,” David said with a raised eyebrow. “She coming up lame or something?”

Kristy Lee made a frustrated noise; David turned just in time to see her running her fingers through her long, golden hair. It might have been neat in the morning, but after a day in the barn it was a wild tousle around her head. She made a few half-hearted attempts to pull it back and tie it in a knot at the base of her skull before she gave up and flapped her hands, the gesture no angrier than any of those that Kristy Lee made. The mare in the stall seemed to take the gesture as a personal affront, because she made an aggravated noise and disappeared to the back.

“New guy took her out this morning,” she said. “She’s not limping, she’s not throwing heat off of any of her legs. Might be about to go into her breeding time, though.”

“Hmm. That’ll sweeten her mood.” He and Kristy Lee shared a look. Barn or not, a fall foal’s chances dropped dramatically over the chances of one born in the spring or early summer. David had seen stallions charge straight through fences, never mind if they wound up impaling themselves, to get at a mare in a separate pasture; proof that animals and humans were about as rational as each other when it came to sex. The mare would have to spend her days inside until her ovulation had passed if Kristy Lee was right and she hadn’t simply picked up a bruise on the frog of her hoof or something.

“So,” Kristy Lee said as David stepped back from the stall. Unlike every other slave on the property, she had a pair of guns strapped to her hips. That was the case for at least one slave on every remote property that David had ever stepped foot on, even with the grim reprisals that would be handed out to any slave who dared to raise hand to their master. The gun was not meant for anyone who lived on the estate, though. “I know and you know that I’m not stupid, so let’s not insult either of us and pretend that you came out here to check on a horse.” Anyone listening in on the two of them would have wondered who was the master and who was the slave, and David could not resist cocking an eyebrow at her before he answered.

“Nope.” David leaned back. “Came here to check on a person.”

“Had a feeling.” Kristy Lee ticked her head for David follow her down the barn aisle towards the other door, and leaned up against him when he put his arm around her waist. She leaned up against him even more easily than Carly had that morning, even allowing that with everyone else she was too steps away from baring her teeth, even allowing that David kind of wondered if he still shouldn’t keep an eye on her to see if she was going for one of her guns. Kristy Lee had been the very first, in so many ways. “Where’d the hell did you pick him up, anyway?”

“Same market where my parents picked up you,” David said softly, because he knew that Kristy Lee would stiffen against him with memories, just like she always did. He felt her hand creep a little bit closer to her weaponry. They were always loaded; David thought that she might even sleep with the belt on.

“Well, that explains a lot,” Kristy Lee muttered under her breath. She didn’t sound as if she was being sarcastic. David loosened his grip upon her, gave her the opportunity to untangle herself, but she did not take it. “Are you asking for my opinion?”

“You got one?”

Kristy Lee let out a short laugh. “I always have an opinion, you son of a bitch.” She twisted so that she could sock him in the shoulder, harder than was entirely comfortable. David had a feeling that that was about memories from being in the market, too, and let it pass. “Okay. Only time he ever calms down is when he’s on the back of a horse. Couple of times I thought that he was going to take my guns from me--” David looked at her, not liking what he was hearing. “Like that would ever happen, sweetheart, I don’t care if you have a fucking crush on him.” And he didn’t like hearing that he was being so incredibly transparent, either; he needed to get his shit together again before the estate was overrun with unfriendly faces in a few hours. David made a face at her. She made a face back.

“Seriously, though,” David brought them back as they walked into the cold sunshine together and he watched the figure cantering the sturdy, boxy stallion about the exercise paddock. He could have taken his arm from about Kristy Lee’s waist, now that they were within sight. He didn’t, and he felt her tensing very slightly as she made note of this. “He going to be dangerous?”

“You’re talking about him being in the Resistance?” Whereas Carly would have smiled, Kristy Lee studied Michael as though she really would be capable of shooting him to protect the estate, should it be required of her. “No. I can’t tell from one second or the next whether he’s going to be feral or freaking the fuck out, but he’s not a plant. He couldn’t be. Every single thing that guy’s thinking, you see on his face.”

“Really,” David said dryly. Michael noticed them, and reined the horse towards the fence. Even though David and Kristy Lee were still touching, Michael’s face registered not a second of surprise. “I definitely see how you would get that.”

“You just don’t know what you’re looking for,” Kristy Lee said as she finally unraveled herself from him and opened the gate so that Michael could ride out. The stallion shifted restlessly while Michael swung down, was quietened by a hand laid against his neck. Whatever it was that Kristy Lee saw that David was still obviously missing, the shoulders were looser, anyway.

“You’re good at that,” David told Michael. Michael dipped his head in acknowledgement of the compliment. “Are you happy doing it?”

“I am happiest wherever my master requires me to be,” Michael said simply. The horse shifted abruptly beside him and threw its head, nearly jerking the reins from Michael’s hand before he was able to calm it; without the animal there, David doubted that he would have been able to pick up the extra tension in Michael’s body at all. He saw Kristy Lee’s expression becoming slightly triumphant. Maybe Carly had a point, and it was a wonder that they had been able to get away with what they were doing for this long in the first place.

“All right, then,” David said finally. He waited until the stallion was calmed and Michael had no choice but to look at him again. “You can help Kristy Lee in the stables. She’ll show you everything that you need.” Another very slight tilting of the head. David felt even more unsettled as returned to the house than he had coming out. He ducked into a lukewarm shower and, when he emerged, found that Archuleta was already in his bedroom with him and carefully laying out the clothes that he would wear that night.

David paused in the doorway to his bathroom with his towel about his waist. “Hi,” he said slowly. On the other hand, he was the nude one and Archuleta the clothed. It was forward momentum.

Archuleta looked up at David and then immediately dipped into a bow, proper and perfect even if he did not go into the following kneel and position of obeisance. “You favor blue,” he said when he saw David looking over the clothing that was laid across the bed. “I’m sorry, if it’s not correct--”

“It’s fine,” David said, and then amended, “It’s perfect.” He put his hand out to briefly grip at the back of Archuleta’s neck before he went to dress and only startled for a second as Archuleta helped him with his jacket. “And you’re wearing pants. I approve of the pants.”

“I, um.” Archuleta looked at him kind of sideways for a moment before he said, “I approve of the pants, too. Sir. David.” David saw him holding his breath to see if what he had done was correct.

“Everyone is approving of the pants. I definitely like the clothing-mandatory thing that we have going on right now.” David finished buttoning up his jacket himself and then smiled Archuleta’s way. “You mind helping Carly serve tonight?”

“Yes--no.” Body slaves ordinarily knelt beside their masters. David could see Archuleta weighing all of the possible implications of this, the fact that it was a request rather than an order, the chance that it might mean that David was displeased with him, against what David had said to him the night before. “Okay.”

“Atta boy.” David sighed and brushed lint of the sleeve that he knew for a fact had been spotless since long before Archuleta had laid the clothing out. “Let’s go do battle, kid.”

And for one of the first times since meeting him, David thought that he saw Archuleta’s lips lifting up into a smile.

End Part Six