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Entry tags:	all that time silent still

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (10/29)
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
Part Nine



Part Ten

David slammed the carriage door behind him as Jason clucked to the horses and started them off so quickly that David nearly lost his balance, and had to brace his hand quickly against the roof in order to keep from tumbling to the floor. Which was already occupied, David noticed at the very last second as his shin impacted something warm, by Michael, kneeling in a perfect position of obeisance that made gorge rise into David’s throat. He swore, violently, and did not realize what he had done until he saw Michael flinch. The tremors were becoming the earthquake, leaving David in a position of not knowing whether Michael would take a swing at him or leap out the door when David put his hand beneath Michael’s elbow.

“Get up,” he said, more roughly than he had intended, and felt the epicenter rolling through Michael’s skin. “Jesus, don’t...don’t do that. You don’t ever, ever have to do that with me.” He sounded as if he was going to be sick.

“Sometimes I do.” Michael spoke so softly that David barely heard him, and then Jason above proved that he was following David’s orders to the letter by taking them over a particularly hard patch of road without care for the axles of the carriage or the two people inside who were riding upon them. David was hurled hard into Michael; he stopped himself from falling only by grabbing for both of Michael’s shoulders hard. Michael only took back the seat upon which he had ridden into the city because he was finally breaking, scrambling back away from David, and there was nowhere else for him to go. Jesus, David didn’t know how Jason, the horses, and random people that they were passing on the road where not able to feel how hard Michael was shaking, because David thought that the entire carriage was rattling with it. Kristy Lee had shaken like this, once or twice at the very beginning, whenever she could not maintain the cool facade of being furniture that moved upon demand any longer. That had been before David had been able to convince her that he was not running an elaborately cruel game upon her for his own amusement, and she had no history of running or of the punishments that followed when a slave was caught.

David knelt down in front of Michael in the carriage’s cramped floor and took his hands into David’s own in an attempt to provide some kind of anchor. He would have thought that he had done something more akin to jolting Michael with electricity, if the speed with which Michael jerked his hands out of David’s own and stared at him with wild eyes was any indicator. “Okay,” David said slowly. He wasn’t fast enough to dart out of the way if Michael should decide to bite him. “Calm down.”

Michael’s laugh was short and bitter, and his hands resting upon the tops of his thighs curled into fists. “Do you--” He stopped, shook his head, tried again. “Do you even know what you do?”

David rocked back onto his heels in spite of himself and felt the seat at his back, less anchor and more reminder that he did not have anywhere to go. “I’m trying to help,” he said.

Michael laughed again. David heard in it that he had used to laugh a lot, probably, but now he wished that he would give up the practice altogether if he kept sounding like that. He had still the natural disaster in his body only so that he could replace it with one in his eyes. “You’re confusing the fuck out of me,” Michael said. He spit out the obscenity as if he wouldn’t mind hitting David with it. “Do you think that you’re doing good work, playing your little games out on your inherited land with your inherited money?”

David went still and felt cold. “It’s better than being the kind of man who left those scars on your back,” he said.

“Better’s still not good,” Michael said. He unclenched his hands and rested them flat across his knees, even though David could still see the bones playing beneath the skin and was not about to mistake that for relaxation. “Not owning slaves at all would be good. What I did with the Resistance, that was good.” Something bitter entered Michael’s voice that David for once did not think was directed at him, but he could feel too much blood rising up in his face to pause and take a catalogue, just yet. “What you’re doing, it’s--” Michael stopped, looked at David for a long time. David still had not gotten up from the floor, and was shifting his weight softly from one leg to the other in order to keep his balance amidst the rocking of the carriage. Michael was the one looking down at him.

“I ran twice,” Michael began again. David realized that this was not about a biographical accounting of the facts, and didn’t mention that he had known that before he had even purchased Michael, from right there in his file. “By the time that they were finished after they caught me, I didn’t think of running again.” Smile like old coffee grounds, curdled and bitter. “The third run would have either put me on the gallows with those poor bastards that we watched die, or else strapped down in a lab.” Michael took time for another smile best not seen. “Though I was probably going to wind up strapped down in a lab, anyway, if you had not come along, so I guess that I should still be thanking you, Master.” And the person in front of David was not Michael the slave any longer, for a few seconds at least.

David kissed him. The carriage was too low to stand upright and too unstable in which to keep one’s balance while moving, throwing David up against Michael again, obliging him to put his hands against the seat to either side of Michael’s head or else wind up sitting in his lap. David was hardly asking for permission, but Michael was still parting for him all the same, tilting his head back so that David could access him better. He tasted like the fruit that he had probably eaten that morning; the skin of his neck was warm when David put his hand against it.

The collar was warm, too, from being so close against Michael’s skin, but that did not mean that David did not know what it was immediately, or that it couldn’t do the job of knocking him straight back into his good sense and what he had previously thought was a not-terrible sense of ethics. Gasping and ashamed of himself, ashamed even more of how much he still did not want to stop, David pulled himself away from Michael’s mouth and into his seat.

Michael only watched him go for a second before he repeated, “You confuse me,” and followed. They were nearly the same size, and Michael could have pinned David down to the seat if he had so wanted, made it hard for David to push him away the way that he knew he need to be doing, any minute now, but Michael’s hands fluttered across the front of David’s clothing like birds. He didn’t know how Michael was keeping his balance so easily when it had been all that David could do to keep from falling on his ass even while he had been kneeling, but he was moving with the carriage the same way that he would have moved with a horse. David did not want to think about Michael and beautiful rhythms in conjunction, and Michael’s mouth was scarcely on his for a second before David pushed him away.

“Don’t,” David said. He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have kissed you if you couldn’t say no to me. I’m sorry.”

Michael had not returned to his seat even though the carriage was not high enough for him to stand. It wouldn’t take much effort on either of their parts to meet their mouths again. “I kissed you, too,” he pointed out.

“But you can’t say no to me,” David answered again. It was an important distinction, a damned important distinction, and one he intended to hang onto for as long as Michael insisted upon being so close and so looking at him like that. “I want to hear a yes.”

Michael settled back into his seat, finally, though he continued to study David hard. “David,” he finally said. David didn’t realize that Michael had said it like an actual name until Michael was already continuing. “You can’t change the fact that I’m a slave.” And was quiet for the rest of the ride back to the estate, at which point he was out of the carriage and disappearing into the barn before David could even think of calling him back, form becoming blurry within seconds under the veil of the hard rain that had begun to fall.

End Part Ten

Continue to Part Eleven