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AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (13/29)
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
Part Eleven
Part Twelve



Part Thirteen

The pain was like being in love with the most vicious woman who had ever walked the planet. Every time that David half-consciously shifted his weight, trying to satisfy her, she would only retreat for a matter of seconds before she was back again, louder and more demanding than ever. David finally gave up and opened his eyes, stared at blank-faced gray walls that still managed to have more life in them than the blank-faced gray uniforms had had. He remembered what had happened.

“Oh, fuck,” David said as he pushed himself up to his hands and knees and felt his stomach roil accordingly around several maybe-broken ribs. “Oh, fuck.” The next thing that he did, when he was certain that he was not about to vomit out his own insides, turned his head slowly from one side to the other to make note of the fact that no one had answered his obscenity with a handful of their own. No. He was alone. The other person who had been in the room with him when the soldiers had burst in, the other person who had just finished warning him that this exact thing was going to happen, he was nowhere to be found.

“Oh, fuck,” David finished, more softly than before. He took a few more seconds to gather himself and then pushed up slowly to his feet, wincing as every single muscle in his body felt as if it had already been worked over with feet and fists. He didn’t remember anything after taking the rifle butt to the face, but that didn’t mean that some spleen hadn’t been vented on him while he was unconscious. Since he was a traitor to the state, some would tell him that he was lucky he still had a spleen at all. David put his hand against his cheek where the door had hit him and found the skin swollen and hot. It didn’t feel misshapen, though, and he could still work his jaw when he tried, so he was going to take that as an optimistic sign and hope that nothing was broken. The wall was cold when David put his hand against it in order to brace himself, and he was already starting to shiver. The only light in the room was a single bulb placed well up in the ceiling, and covered by a wire cage so that David could not break the bulb and use it as a weapon. The only furniture in the room was a heavy wooden chair with its back turned towards the door; David had been dumped without ceremony on the floor in one corner. Even though the chair had no visible stains or marks, David still found himself cutting a wide circle around it as he went to examine the door. It was thick, unpolished metal with no grooves or handles on the inside; there was a small pad manufactured out of precious plastic set into the wall beside it. There was a red light gleaming from the center of the pad that David didn’t like looking at within seconds, because it felt as though it was looking back at him. He distracted himself by tugging on the door, where it only took a few seconds of experimentation to decide that he would have better luck with the chair.

As he brushed too close on his way back to his wall, David’s dizzy head pitched him sideways and brought his hip into collision with the elderly wood. He watched in a mixture of surprise and outright alarm as hinges that he had not noticed previously tipped the chair back towards the floor at such a steep angle that whomever had the misfortune to be sitting in it would be held almost upside down.

“Don’t think that’s for pony rides,” David muttered to himself. He shivered and retreated back towards the wall.

The door made an irritable noise when it was forced open, as if it would much rather they throw their prisoners in here without any fussing about it and then simply forget about them from that point forward. Had the room not been so scrupulously, carefully, clean and gray and blank, David would have wondered if that was not exactly what had happened to the last occupant. It seemed a good room to bury someone. He straightened with his back to the wall and faced the door, not entirely certain who was going to come through it.

David was so cold in part because his coat had been left behind in his study at the estate, stranding him in nothing more than his hastily buttoned, too-thin shirt. It was white drifting into a smudgy gray by now as the result of the dirt and residue that he had been dragged through in coming to this place. David stood in marked contrast to Mayer’s brilliant jewel-green and even the immaculate, smoky color of the guards who came in with him, and David could not help but think that that was the point. See and be seen, they were all like peacocks feinting at each other and hoping the opponent didn’t realize how small they really were.

“No fool like a noble fool, I suppose,” Mayer said by way of salutation as he stopped just inside the door and let the guards fan out from behind him. David twitched to hear Michael’s words thrown back at him, and Mayer noticed, of course. Mayer noticed and eventually used everything. There was a small plastic card hanging from his belt, so far away from David’s reach that it might as well have been across the ocean. He gave the door a single, irritated glance over his shoulder when it had the audacity to clang, like it was destroying the majesty of his entry or something like that. Mayer’s coat was so bright that it all but reflected against the walls, and David felt a small and smudgy stain against the opposite wall by comparison. That was the intent, he knew, see and be seen, the dance that they were all culpable to. So David straightened, looked Mayer in the eye, and for the first time since he could remember, let his face show nothing other than exactly what he was thinking.

Mayer was not a stupid man. His lip curled upwards for a moment before he adjusted the lapels of his coat, making certain that it was as pristine and imposing as possible before he approached David. The uniforms behind him were ghosts; the faces drifting above the wool hardly even mattered.

“Though I guess that you’re answering the age-old debate of nature versus nurture,” Mayer continued. He didn’t have to move like a tiger when he had the force of the entire government resting at his back, he was more than imposing enough walking like a normal man as he came to rest with his hands clasped behind his back, standing directly in front of David.

Andrew was gone. His parents were gone. The only people who possibly had to bear the weight of his mistakes were...it didn’t bear thinking about. Not now, when there was slim to nothing that he could do to save himself, let alone them. David swallowed hard and saw Mayer’s eyes ticking downwards to follow the movement, and it didn’t have to be Renee Connick who was standing in front of him in order to read what that meant.

“I would like to believe that it’s both,” David said finally. He drew his lips back into a smile that he knew full well looked like a snarl.

Mayer sighed. He sounded genuinely regretful, genuinely sorry about what was going to transpire next. David didn’t miss that Mayer’s body was angled towards the chair in the center of the room, and he did not forget that Mayer was a slave-breaker by trade. “How did you get involved in the Resistance, David?” he asked, slow and gentle, as if he was actually trying to help David and didn’t have a phalanx of pseudo-people spread out behind him.

“Where’s Michael?” David asked instead. He wanted to put his hands back against the wall, but didn’t. If they shook, and Mayer saw it, then so be it.

“The slave you were fornicating with,” Mayer said slowly, and tilted his head to one side. David went even more still. It was not fornication to use your slave for physical release; it was fornication, unlawful sexual conduct, to pretend that they had rights and releases of their own. “Yes, him. I didn’t learn his name when I had him last. He’s irrelevant to this.” Mayer leaned in. David could smell that he was wearing expensive cologne that was probably French, right here in a government building and trade laws be damned. “David. Did you make contact with them--” Slow smile. “Was it something that you read in a book, how to be a hero? Did you know that that’s the only place where empires are toppled by own person thinking that he can lift up the world?”

“Of course not,” David answered smoothly, though he had not missed what Mayer had said, and doubted that Michael was resting quietly wherever he was in this building. “They rot from the inside out in the real world.”

Mayer was not a patriot. However much he might have been employed to do government work, he did it because it let him be a man that he could not have been anywhere else, and he was not going to bristle just because David had the audacity to question the perfect empire. His smile was small, sardonic, asked David what he really was doing with his rebellion when he had his back pressed up against a cold stone wall with nowhere else to go.

“That they do.” Mayer tilted his head in another one of his questioning nods, like he was reading David without giving David the privilege to know. “But not anytime within our lifetimes, my friend. How did it happen, David? Did they reach out to you? Because of your family? Because of your brother?”

David had tilted his head back against the wall even though it made his skin crawl to touch and closed his eyes, but he opened them again when Mayer spoke. His brother was dead, almost certainly. Mayer was only fucking with him because he could, because it was an easy wound in which to press his finger. Didn’t stop David from wanting to snap that hand off at the wrist, with blunt force or even teeth if it should prove necessary. He said nothing. After a few moments, Mayer went on.

“Or did you find some secret that your brother had left and contact them instead?” The bright green of Mayer’s jacket was the most brilliant thing in the world, and impossible to turn away from. Knowing that Mayer had planned it that way did not stop David from being drawn into it. “How did you contact them? What do you use to keep in touch? Not your phone--” David stopped looking at Mayer’s jacket and stared at his face instead, sullenly. Mayer chuckled. “No, you’re stupid and naive, but not quite that much.”

“What did you do with my slaves?” David asked.

“Worry more about your furniture,” Mayer said, rolling his eyes. “It had been in your family longer.”

“What did you do?” David cracked, snarled. He took a step forward towards Mayer and was stopped by one of the blank gray uniforms abruptly ceasing to be a swirl of smoke and malice and became a man again, with lines radiating out from his eyes and driven deep around his mouth. He grabbed David hard by the throat and slammed him back against the wall so hard that David’s head rang and for a few seconds it was difficult to keep his knees hinged before he was just as abruptly released, and the man stepped back. Message delivered and message received. The man became smoke again just long enough to return to his place directly behind Mayer’s shoulder.

“Look, David.” Low and soothing and not using David’s actual title, not any longer. Turn against the government, and not only did you no longer have one if you were aristocracy, but you stopped being a person altogether, stopped being even a number in one of the remaining moody, creaky computers, just became a mistake quietly shuffled off and pushed away. Even slaves still had a number. “Just tell me where they contacted you. Tell me how you get them their information.”

Low and sweet, Mayer was good at that. David would imagine being a slave and hearing that voice after so much pain and degradation that anything made up of its absence was the sweetest feeling in the world, and wanting to please. He wasn’t there. The scariest thing was how easily he could imagine himself being.

“Go to hell,” David answered Mayer with his chin dipped down towards his chest, doing his best to avoid looking anyone in the room in the eye. This was dangerous ground, desperately dangerous ground where he did not know where the next Renee was around the corner to see all and struggle to know all on the basis of it.

Mayer sighed as if he was disappointed in David, as if he had expected better. David could imagine himself unfolding towards that, too, if the right set of weights had been applied to him first. “Don’t you even want to know who turned you in?” Mayer asked.

David could not stop himself from looking up at that, and as a result could not stop himself from catching Mayer’s look of faint triumph. He was the one who still needed to hide what he was thinking; it was obvious that Mayer could do whatever the fuck he wanted and no one would ever make him pay for it.

Throat working up and down for a few moments, David answered, “Why don’t you just get on with it?”

Mayer dropped the mask of joviality as abruptly as a curtain falling away, and the mask beneath it was even less hospitable. David wasn’t certain that Mayer had a real face at all, or if he was just a series of masks and facades, one after the other, until there was nothing there but a wisp of government-gray smoke. “How do you contact the Resistance?” he asked.

“Through my wireless,” David said. He tilted his head back to look up at the ceiling. “Rigged it to send as well as transmit.”

Mayer made a soft, low sound that didn’t even try to hide his eagerness. Looking up towards the ceiling, David didn’t realize right away that the guards were moving; they made no sound. He was grabbed roughly by his upper arms and then to the center of the room, to the chair. David didn’t bother to fight, but he didn’t help, either. His feet dragged uselessly against the floor. The guards hurled him into the chair with such force that it rocked back on its hinges, would have slipped him back down to the floor if he had not been grabbed by the front of his shirt with such force that the collar twisted about his neck like a noose and gagged him. He didn’t fight while his wrists were strapped down to the arms of the chair with thick leather straps, his ankles the same. The guards might as well have not been people at all, they were just shades doing their jobs. Mayer was the single point of color in the room and the only one other than David himself who had living eyes, and it was he that David watched over the guards’ shoulders.

“You do have a chance to save yourself, you know,” Mayer said while David quietly tested the straps to see how much give he had and discovered that it was not nearly enough for him to get smart with anything, even if it had been only Mayer and himself in the room. David looked up at him. Mayer smiled. “Oh, you’re not going to walk away from here. But you might die quickly. You might even be sold as a slave, if you have something to tell us good enough.” His teeth were clean and even and glittering, the product of years of good care and nutrition. David’s were the same. That was probably rare among the people in this room. “I would really like to train you myself, you know.”

David tilted his head back up to stare at the ceiling again, hoping that his face was not showing how hard his heart was beating. The wood was rough when it cut into the back of his neck. “Like I said,” he answered calmly. It was going to hurt. He knew that one way or another it was going to hurt. If he knew that much, then it didn’t matter that he didn’t know the details just yet, he could still brace himself against the important part. “I rigged my wireless so that I could transmit as well as receive. The channel changed every day, I was told the night before what the new one would be. Don’t know what the channel would be now.”

“You’ve only been here for a few hours, David,” Mayer said, smiling. “It’s barely noon. What’s the channel?”

“Eighteen,” David answered automatically. He watched Mayer’s eyes go up, almost thought that he was going to be believed, and then had the thoughts dashed when Mayer laughed.

“That government issue wireless?” Mayer asked. David didn’t move. Behind him, he heard the door being opened again and something being dragged inside, but he did not turn his head to see what it was. “Been in your family for years, right?” Mayer tilted his head to the side and said, “Do you think that those radios don’t send out a signal the moment that anyone tries to tamper with them?”

David smiled even though he didn’t feel it and would have shrugged if he had been able to move enough. “Worth a shot,” he said.

Mayer shook his head. He gave no other visible signal, and so David had no warning whatsoever before the chair was abruptly snapping backwards on its hinges, the combined weight of David and the chair itself making it move with a dizzying speed. He choked on the startled yelp that he wanted to give, heard the back of the chair clang against something that sounded like metal, and then he was under cold water. David was caught midway through drawing a breath and sucked down water instead. It burned all the way down and filled with a panic born of millions of years of evolution, and the surge of adrenaline-strength that came with that. In spite of having no place to brace his feet and gather momentum, David threw his body upwards and felt the chair start to move. He could not be that far from the surface, the build of the chair would not allow it--

David’s nose and mouth broke the surface of the water into air that was nearly as cold as the water itself, struggled to suck in a ragged breath of air, air, air. A hand came down on his chest before he could do more than begin his inhale, and David only wound up sucking more water into his throat and lungs. He couldn’t punch or kick, but he could dig his nails in hard to the arms of the chair and watch the world through a shimmering patina that was only inches above his face, and struggle to keep from giving in entirely to the urge to scream. There were dark gray shapes moving about above his head. With the water obscuring the world’s sharp lines, they really were like ghosts. Under water, and more and more David’s body was on fire.

He could not take it any longer, and was just opening his mouth to scream when the same hand that was pushing him down beneath the water grabbed him about the throat and hurled him out of it again. The chair made a sound like a gunshot as its front legs slammed back down to the concrete; David would have been hurled out of it and onto the floor entirely if the thick leather straps had not been holding him into place. David sagged as far forward as he could and tried to breathe again, but couldn’t as he had to retch up a thick beige cloud of vomit and water first. His throat continued to burn as if the few desperate gulps of air that he pulled down into his lungs were on fire themselves.

“You’re not even asking who turned you in,” Mayer said in a wondering voice. Several faces flashed through David’s mind, and one or two of them even stood out, much as he wished that they wouldn’t, before Mayer went on, “That’s very forgiving of you. How is the Resistance contacting you, David?”

All he knew was a dead drop. Someone still had to visit it, though. David choked, gagged when a few more drops of the filthy water rolled down the back of his throat, and wheezed, “Fuck you.”

“They might let you live,” Mayer said, even though from where David was sitting he was full of shit and they both knew it. The thing that made his skin crawl was that Mayer was hoping that David would be allowed to live, because that would be the point at which Mayer was really allowed to ply his trade.

And then David was in the water again. He thought that he could anticipate it enough this time enough to hold his breath, but he was wrong, and he was vomiting and choking and half-crying all over again when Mayer finally decided to let him up again. And then again. And again. And finally David stopped trying to anticipate when he was going to be underwater and when he was going to be breathing air like a man and started expecting the water all the time, taking the smallest pants that he could possibly get away with, his entire body taut against the chair even though there was nowhere that he could go. His whole world was made up in the brilliant green coat in front of him and the man in front of it, the one who decided whether he lived or died. There were no people inside the gray uniforms; David doubted that he was any more real to them, either.

David didn’t realize when he started talking. The words started low in his throat and stayed there for a long time before they finally escaped his mouth, out into the air so quickly that he was scarcely even left with time in which to draw breath, those seconds in which Mayer was actually allowing him to breathe. Someone has to check that drop. David didn’t know who or when, but the messages for him didn’t magic themselves behind the brick any more than the ones that he left magicked themselves off to the Resistance, and if one link broke, it would be so easy to find and break the others one by one, too.

In all of the books in his study, the spies held up nobly under torture and said nothing at all, and died good deaths as a result. David was finally starting to realize that just maybe those books were a little bit of shit, and he only managed to save himself by telling Mayer every single thing that popped into his head except for the truth.

“By the free-born veterinarian’s,” David wheezed when he was allowed, shivering and wheezing, back into the air again. “There’s a wagon.” Was there a wagon? David couldn’t remember and didn’t guess that it mattered. “Messages are left under the wheel-well.”

“There is no wagon,” Mayer said coolly. “Abandoned wood would not be left alone for that long.” And into the water again, this time for such a long period that David really did believe that he was going to die. Anyone who had ever said that drowning was the easiest of all possible ways to die had never experienced anything like this, either; fire spread from David’s lungs all the way up his throat and into his belly, and he could not stop trying to breathe even though he knew that it was useless. The fire turned to lead, slowly, while every aborted thrashing movement that David tried to make against the straps holding him down took at least an hour. He didn’t stop fighting until he couldn’t fight any longer, and then the water flowed down his throat easily.

His chest was not strapped back to the chair. It let someone lean him forward as far as the bonds against his arms would allow and pound him hard in the center of his shoulder blades, muttering curses. David recognized the voice immediately as his eyes fluttered open again, but he wouldn’t have thought that Mayer had it in him to utter oaths quite that strong. Somehow, it seemed terribly plebeian of him.

“Breathe, damnit,” Mayer hissed against David’s ear, and David obeyed reflexively, trying to suck in a great gulp of air and winding up choking on it instead as all of the water in his lungs decided to rush out of him at precisely the same time. He was a mess; he got some small satisfaction out of the fact that at least a little of the watery vomit splattered up against Mayer’s boots. David hung his chin down against his chest and listened to his own whistling breath while Mayer rubbed circles against his back that could have been interpreted as soothing. If he threw up any more, he was going to shatter his ribs; if he didn’t give Mayer what he wanted, it was going to be more of the water, and David already knew that Mayer was too smart to just let him drown in there and be done with it.

Almost as if he was reading David’s mind, Mayer took his hand away from the center of David’s back so that he could stand in front of him. “It stops any time that you want it to, David,” he said calmly. His voice wasn’t kind, Mayer could never be kind, but the worst part was how much David wanted to believe him, caught himself wanting to please him, when Mayer controlled everything down to the very air that he breathed.

He was not going to get out of this cell under his own power. He would have to be a fool to believe that he could. Slowly, David said, “There’s an alley in one of the poor free neighborhoods.” Mayer’s eyes lit up, as if he could already smell the difference between this and David’s previous lies. “With a loose brick. I slide messages behind it whenever I can, and they slide messages back telling me where I need to listen next.”

“How often is this alley visited?” Mayer asked quickly.

David would have shrugged, his entire body felt too weak and wrung-out to move even if he had not been strapped down. “I don’t know. Sometimes there are no messages. Sometimes there’s almost a dozen. It’s to the northeast of the medicine office, six blocks.”

“Good.” Mayer stopped and looked at David for a long time. David wanted to lower his eyes, but didn’t. “That’s good. Maybe you’ll live.”

I won’t bet my mother’s books on it, David thought, and then realized that the books were probably already being burned. They wouldn’t be used as evidence against him; they wouldn’t be needed, and getting rid of the taint was more important.

“Good,” Mayer murmured, half to himself. “Get him into a different cell, we’ll need this one again.” David’s stomach clenched. One broken link, all that it took was one, and every one of them afterwards would find a way to break, too. Michael might be right when he called David naive, but he still knew that much.

The gray people unbuckled David swiftly from the chair, one to each side of him, until it was only David, Mayer, and the two guards holding him who remained. The others were smoke. David guessed that there were a lot of other people in this blank stone building who needed to be held underwater until they vomited across themselves and gave up ever secret that they had. He tried not to think about it too hard. David was carried as much as he was walked to the door, which screamed its protest at being opened again as loudly as it ever had.

David had grown up on a farm where there was enough food to go around, and under parents who held to an ethos of working the land as hard themselves as others worked it for them. He was not perpetually malnourished and reedy like most of the poor free, and neither was he soft and blinking like a great many aristocracy. The guards expected him to be these things. David twisted and sagged as though he was losing consciousness again, felt the hand about his arm tighten and start to roughly drag him back up without any particular alarm over the fact that David was now within reach of the gun. The metal was cold and oily-slick against his fingers as he dragged it from the holster, spun, drew his finger back twice in such quick succession that he hardly realized what he was doing. It wasn’t like hunting rabbits or deer, but the thud of two bodies hitting the ground was the same. Now they really were nothing more than their uniforms.

Mayer started to yell and threw his arm about David’s throat from behind, pressing down hard on his windpipe and making David gag, but he had already been well-acquainted with oxygen deprivation and knew exactly how far he could go. David retched and flipped the gun about in his hand so that he was gripping it by the scorching barrel so that he could bring the butt of it as hard as he was capable into Mayer’s skull. It sounded like slamming a door. David asked himself if he had really been waiting for something more like the frame of that door breaking as the arm about his neck loosened and slid away, thought of the scars that he had been learning with his hands as much as his eyes hours before, and didn’t worry about his answer. He flipped the gun about in his hands so that he was holding it properly before turning and watching Mayer’s chest continue to rise and fall exactly as it was supposed to beneath the rich green cloth of his jacket.

It would be easy. It would be the easiest thing that he had ever done; David was not even sure that his conscience would be able to catch up to him at all, let alone before he had found a way to get out of this place. He pulled his lips back from his teeth as he thought about it, but then alarms began to wail, and with a muffled oath David only stooped to snatch the small magnetic passkey from Mayer’s belt before he spun and ran down the hallway.

End Part Thirteen

Continue to Part Fourteen