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AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (8/29)
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
Part Seven



Part Eight

The lights were out, the curtains drawn down over all of the windows in order to conserve the heat, and the house was cold. David laid in bed and stared up at the canopy that he could hardly see, unable to stop his mind moving long enough so that he could sleep. The wine had long since burned off; his meal was sitting unhappily in his stomach. He doubted that it was from Carly’s cooking.

From where David was lying, there was only one rational solution to the problem: he had to let Carrie fall. He could not possibly put himself in a position to save her himself, and it was an incredibly risk to be taking for just one person even if he could. That was the pragmatic solution to the problem. Outside of the books in his office, David knew that every single actual spy that he would have been able to find would have given him the same answer: the pragmatic solution was all that mattered.

David obviously had more in common with his little brother than he had guessed, because he already knew that he was a terrible pragmatist. He slid from the bed, wincing a little as his bare feet hit the cold floor, and dressed quickly so that he would at least be comfortable while he roamed about the house. He didn’t need to light or flick on any illumination, not after he had lived in this same house for his entire life and knew every inch of it as well as he knew his own body. It creaked and groaned as David walked slowly down the hallway towards the kitchen, shifting more comfortably into its foundation, and the furniture was nothing more than dark humps in the shadows.

David had to cross through the dining room in order to enter the kitchen, and he trailed his fingers across the long, sleek table as he went, unable to shake the feeling that he was standing in the place where a crime had been committed earlier. If he didn’t do anything, he was not certain if that would still make him merely a witness, or if he would then be moved irrevocably into the role of conspirator.

Someone had been careless as the house had been closed down for the night, and had neglected to draw the curtains across the window nearest the pantry, letting a dim glow spill throughout the kitchen. David paused with the door pushed halfway open and watched while Michael moved across the kitchen with that eerie battlefield grace, open the back door, and slip out into the night without making a sound. He paused for even longer as he weighed what he should do, turn right around and head back for his room without acknowledging that he had seen Michael go, hope that he wasn’t trying to run, wish him all of the speed in the world and delay reporting it for as long as he possibly could if he had. In the end, David found himself crossing the kitchen and opening the back door so that he could follow Michael out into the night.

It had been cold enough at night to watch one’s breath fog up for weeks. The light was also starting to develop that sharp and strangely crystalline winter quality, the stars a silver and malicious glitter. The pastures were turning brown, those that had not been cut for hay throughout the summer, and David was already leaning down to test the ground every time that he stepped out in the morning, checking for the first signs of frost. Wouldn’t be longer than a few weeks, at most. They were lucky in that the late fall crops only needed a few more days.

Michael’s dark sweater would have made him nearly invisible on the path ahead of David, if it had not been for the moonlight glowing off of his hair, the silvery metal collar that was just visible over the edge of the wool. When he didn’t realize that he was being watched, he stopped walking with his shoulders hunched up and as if he did not know from which direction he was going to have to be fending off an attack next. David followed at a discreet distance and wondered if his feet were making crunching noises across the hardened ground, and then if he shouldn’t just turn right around and go back inside, as a concern for secrecy ought to mean that he knew good and well he was not doing the right thing here. Michael did not turn around, though, as he ultimately reached the barn, opened the door far enough to admit a thin sliver of buttery light, and then slipped inside. David waited for several moments with his hand braced against the door before he opened it and entered himself.

The barn was not heated except under the most extreme cold, allowing it to remain lighted at all hours of the day and night without wearing upon the solar panels thrown up on the roof. While the house itself was sometimes lit with candles or lamps, David did not allow them in the barn, seeing them as nothing more than a very good way to watch the entire structure burn down with most of the horses and supplies inside.

“Whoa, baby,” he said very softly, putting his hand against the nose of a gelding who was poking his head over the edge of the stall to whicker at him. The other horses were making shuffling sounds as they retired to the backs of their enclosures again, presumably after having come to the front in order to greet Michael as he passed them. “He makes friends with horses better than people, does he?” The gelding sighed and pushed his face more fully into David’s hand, dropping his eyelids to half-mast and looking as if he wouldn’t mind going back to sleep there. “I guess that the worst any of you can do is kick someone, though, and even then you probably wouldn’t mean it.” David gave the gelding a final scratch in the hollow where his jaw met his throat and was followed by a slightly disappointed stare as he continued down the aisle.

He found Michael by following the sound of his voice, not entirely sure that he was even hearing correctly at first, so unused was he to listening to the man use it for an extended period of time. Michael was in the stall of the same mare who had been acting irritable earlier in the day, kneeling in the straw so that he could run his hand slowly up and down her foreleg. He was murmuring a series of endearments and nonsense syllables to her in order to coax her ears back up every time that she wanted to flatten them back against her head in warning, and even though he was crouching light on his feet in order to jump out of the way if she should decide to kick him, it was the most relaxed and even happy that David had ever seen him.

“Easy, easy, pretty miss, easy,” Michael whispered to her, continuing to run his hand slowly up and down her foreleg from the knee down to the hock. “I just want to see what’s making you feel so much like biting, I know it’s not your personality, pretty miss like you.” While David crossed his arms over the top of the stall door and watched, Michael gently squeezed at the mare’s foreleg, the signal for her to lift up her hoof so that Michael could then also inspect the frog. Her ears went from pricked up David as if to ask what he was doing there and if she could expect an audience of men in her bedroom all night to flattened back against her head so tightly that she didn’t look to have any at all in less time than it took David to breathe, let alone call out warning to Michael. She squealed and kicked out hard with the foreleg that Michael was holding, delivering a kick that would have sliced open the skin, at least, at the place where Michael was, or where he had been. He had reacted with such swiftness that David could not help but wonder if Michael had not known that she was going to kick even before she had, jumping nimbly to the side and out of the way. When Michael straightened, he finally could not help but notice that he had an audience.

David watched Michael’s face tighten, watched the way that he measured the distance between himself and the door and saw that David was irrevocably able to block any attempts at fleeing that he might have made. “I wasn’t checking the horse so that I could run, David,” he said. David was starting to think that he would much rather Michael not refer to him by any address at all.

“I know,” David said, not unkindly, swallowing back, You don’t have anywhere to run even if you wanted to. He gestured towards the mare instead, who laid her ears back against her head again at the movement. “What about the horse? And you might want to get out of there, she doesn’t look as if she’s enjoying our company.” He stood to the side so that Michael could exit the stall without being crowded, still feeling not a little as if he were dealing with something as temperamental and wild outside of the stall as the animal within it.

“She’s hurt.” And that, too. “Pulled a tendon, that’s where the fever feels as though it’s coming from.” Michael looked at David sideways and added, “Kristy Lee couldn’t have caught it, earlier, she hadn’t started throwing heat yet, and you can’t feel the limp unless you’re riding her.”

David shrugged. “I wasn’t going to take it out on Kristy Lee, horses are notorious liars.” When Michael was still tense, David stepped back even further, so that Michael would not feel quite so much like he was being trapped.

Michael followed the movement with his eyes. “You shouldn’t,” he paused and looked at David for a long moment, giving David the feeling that he was being measured, and that if he was found wanting he was never going to see who, exactly, Michael was when he was not wearing the shutters bolted so carefully across his eyes. “You shouldn’t be so open with your kindnesses, David.”

“Don’t call me ‘David’ if you’re still going to make it sound like ‘Master,’” David responded automatically.

Michael lifted his shoulders very slightly. Being in the stall with the horse must have had a soothing effect that lingered; his shoulders were barely telling David anything at all. “I don’t know any other way to call you,” he said, before his voice turned solemn again. “I mean it. You think that you’re being subtle, but you’re not. Lord Mayer knew that you were pulling me away to get me away from him, not because he was touching your property.” His eyes were hooded as he watched David for his response, and David knew that he was waiting to see if the hints that David had given him were true, or if he was going to be punished for speaking so freely.

“I have it handled,” David insisted, not certain if he should be rattled or appreciative that Michael was becoming a person again, even temporarily. “I can deal with Mayer being a little suspicious of me.”

“No, you can’t!” It was nearly a shout, and Michael seemed as shocked as David to realize that his voice had become so loud. David leaned forward without quite realizing what he was doing, eager to see more of this real man who could replace the nearly-perfect machine. Michael rocked back onto his heels for a moment as if to take himself out of David’s immediate reach, took a deep breath, and continued, even though his face was pale. “You can’t handle anyone being suspicious of you, not as suspicious as you seem determined to make them.” Michael looked into David’s face for a long time and didn’t seem to realize that he was leaning forward, further into David’s space than he had ever come before willingly. If they had not been wearing such thick clothing, David swore that he would have been able to feel the heat that Michael was throwing off. “It’s not just you at stake here, David.” When Michael was speaking quickly and nearly in an outright panic, he forgot to make David’s name into an unearned title. His voice was slightly raspy and his accent thicker with urgency, and both of these things struck David directly in places that they had not business striking him when he was standing in front of someone who did not have the power to tell him ‘no.’ He inhaled and leaned back, and for once Michael was not so in-tune to David’s every twitch and sigh so as to notice the movement before David had even completed it.

“If you fall under suspicion, so does everyone here under your protection.” Michael stumbled slightly over the last word, as if he was having some trouble believing that it was true, that it might not be a trick that David was going to reveal at the very last second. “And we can’t go before the House and defend ourselves the way that you can.” Michael looked at David long and hard, shifting himself from the balls of his feet to his heels and then back again, before he finished, “Whatever it is that you’re thinking of doing, don’t. Mayer will be watching everyone that he told, once he sobers up and realizes what he did. He’s thorough like that.” Michael’s hand twitched in the direction of his back, even though it was a clarification that David doubted either one of them actually needed.

“Will she die quickly?” David asked Michael. It didn’t mean that he was going to follow Michael’s advice, and do nothing. We wasn’t certain that he could follow Michael’s advice.

Michael drew in his breath before he said, “They will take every single thing that she knows or even thinks that she knows, and they won’t stop until she gives it all to them. They know how to do their work without leaving marks.” Michael was holding his hands very still by his side, too still. Just because Mayer was the type who didn’t mind leaving a few marks did not mean that Michael had not also encountered a few with more finesse.

“You’re not exactly talking like a slave, here,” David said, barely realizing that he was leaning closer again. Panicked or not, agitation was putting a light behind Michael’s eyes that had not been there before, a person that had not been there before. Oh, David thought, so that’s who you were. A faint glimmer, maybe not even more than a ghost, but something.

“I am talking exactly like a slave,” Michael said. “If you really--if you really don’t want to hurt anyone who lives here, stop acting so much like you give a shit.” Cheeks glowing, Michael started to turn away, even though David had not given him leave to go.

“Wait.” Michael wheeled back automatically at the sound of David’s command, even though David could see in his face and in his body that he did not want to come. “What happened to you, Michael? You used to be a soldier.”

Michael actually let out a short laugh before he was able to stop himself, and put the back of his hand against his mouth as if he thought that David might him for that. David didn’t think that he could show his hand even more plainly than if he were to fly Resistance colors above his house, and yet Michael still matched every move that he made against the possibility that David might still hit him.

“You do what you want,” Michael told David calmly, finally, keeping his eyes cast down towards the straw. “But leave me out of your romantic ideas of revolution.” Those dark, dark eyes came up to meet David’s, and suddenly they were alive, and casting all of David’s thoughts about knowing Michael before out into the fields. He thought that this man might hit him, not the other way around. Michael took a few steps back, towards the mare, who put her ears against her head and pulled her teeth back as if she meant to bite him before she snaked her head abruptly back into her stall.

“Stay out here for as long as you want,” David said, even though Michael looked as though he needed to be pursued and soothed as surely as the mare, because he looked as if he would react in exactly the same way. “Come back into the house whenever you’re ready. I know you’re not going to run.”

Michael’s smile was short and mirthless. “Where would I go?” he asked David before he entered the stall again.

End Part Eight

Continue to Part Nine