InsaneJournal

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (14/29)
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



Part Fourteen

The gun burned his palm; he threw it away from himself within a handful of steps, unable to conceive of actually using it again. The alarms were loud enough that they made it hard to think, and the lights began flashing in a pattern off--on--off--off--on that changed just as soon as David thought that he could get used to it and made him want to cover his eyes again within moments to make it stop. That would be terribly stupid of him, and that was undoubtedly the point. Like flashing a bright light into an already-startled animals eyes, encouraging him to run right into the snares of the hunters who were waiting. Panic had been riding directly beneath David’s skin and waiting for him ever since the true use of that chair had been revealed, and it was only by biting at the inside of his mouth until he tasted blood that he was able to prevent it from seizing him now. He wanted to run off like a madman; he wanted to find Michael. He couldn’t do either of those things until he knew where the fuck he was, but that didn’t stop the acrid taste from rising in the back of his throat. All of the walls and hallways looked the same, gleaming and gray, until David thought that one of the guards could have stepped out him from the cement and stone and surprised him then and there.

But I lied to you, you son of a bitch, and you didn’t know, David thought, remembering Mayer’s hand, holding him back down beneath the water with no effort at all when the air had been so close, for no other reason than because it could. So how’s that for your all-seeing power? David didn’t realize how hard he was shaking until he had to put his hand against the wall or else risk falling down. He took several deep breaths and told himself that the wailing siren was just being used to disorient him, it was also an effective way to mask the sound of anyone who was running towards him. It was not a hallucination, it was not, David felt the press of those leather straps around his wrists again and could not stop his feet from taking him off down the hallway blindly, not caring where he was going. He nearly dropped the precious keycard in his hand, which was a hell of a lot more important than the gun that he had already thrown away. The hallway was as endless and without character as the parade of people who guarded it, and David didn’t know how he was possibly going to find his way out, or find Michael. It was a near-miracle that he had not been snatched up again inside of thirty seconds, but he was not in a place where he could feel religious.

Even though time stretched out like taffy, it could not have been more than a minute before David’s irrational, adrenaline-fueled need to be away without actually stopping to ponder the intricacies of how he would make something like that happen faded, and he had time to realize just how much trouble he was actually in. He had committed high treason. He had struck down, and seriously thought about murdering, one of most highly-regarded pets of that same government that he had been betraying for the past year and a half, longer than that if one took into consideration the games that he had been playing with his slaves out on his remote estate since he had been barely an adult.

And he had pulled Michael into it with him, along with everyone else on that self-same estate, after Michael had explicitly warned him more than once. If by some miracle he ever made it out of here, he was not going to be able to look himself in the eye ever again if Michael was not right beside him when they reentered the sunlight.

The taste of blood was stronger the second time that David bit the interior of his cheek. He swallowed it rather than spitting to the side and giving a sign of where he had been and didn’t dare slow down, but did actually start paying attention to the quality of the blank-somber doors that he passed. Each one of them had a small black box to the side, red light looking out from its center without blinking. David darted to one, pressed his precious keycard against it, and watched as the light went from red to green before the door creaked inward on the same irritable noise that the door to his own cell had made. Nothing inside, inert or alive. David drew that door shut so that it could not betray where he had been, either, and already despaired of being able to check all of the cells for Michael before he was caught himself.

Three more cells yielded nothing in quick succession, save for one of them a dark-complected woman that David knew at a glance was not going to be within his power to save, before David swore that he heard shouts behind him signaling that he had been discovered. He whirled and saw no one, or for that matter any of the ever-present security cameras which dominated the outside world and might have given his location away to someone that he could not see, but the damage was done. David’s nerves were officially ordering to him that they had been through far too much as it was today, thank you, and he was going to stop right the fuck now unless he wanted to have a complete breakdown right there in the center of the hallway. The next door that he saw, David slapped the passkey against it so hard that his palm stung and barely waited for the click-ting of red turning into green before he was wrenching the door open without caring for how it screamed. He let it part only far enough to slide his own body through before he tugged it shut behind him. David didn’t particularly care that he was trapping himself; the rabbit had done more than enough running from the hawk and now wanted only to dive into the shelter of the ground.

It likely would have proven a disastrous instinct if the cell had proven as empty as the others that David had searched, but he found instead that he was being looked back at by row upon row of wide eyes and frightened, pinched faces. They were all wearing somber and threadbare shades.

“Please,” David started. “I need--”

“Come here,” a woman old enough to be David’s one mother said hurriedly, and grabbed him by the wrist. She dragged him down amidst a crush of bodies that smelled like old dust and obligingly covered him with her body and that of several others, hiding him from the sight of the door. He had barely been protected in this manner for thirty seconds before he heard the door give its shrieking warning. David cringed down further amidst the bodies in anticipation of being yanked out from among them at any moment.

“Did anyone enter here?” The voice carried plenty of threat as to what would happen to anyone caught lying.

“There is no one here but us.” It was another voice from the crowd, male, on the opposite end of the cell as the woman who had pulled David down and saved him. The alarms cut off abruptly, leaving nothing more than the sounds of the many people in the room breathing. David didn’t dare breathe himself until he heard the door slamming shut again. After the people in the cell themselves had started to move about again, David cautiously lifted his head and found that the blonde woman was looking back at him with an impassive expression. Up close, she was not so old as David had supposed, perhaps no more than ten years older than himself, but her face had been chiseled and scraped into new dimensions by spending all of those years living hard. After studying David’s eyes, she deliberately dropped her gaze down to the cuff of his shirt. His clothing might be ripped and stained by this point until it was a gray that nearly matched that of everyone else in the cell with him, but there was no mistaking the quality of the stitching.

Before others could notice that detail, too, and David be ripped apart as one of the hated aristocracy, he held out the passkey that he had stolen from Mayer. “Please,” David repeated. “I’m here because because I opposed them, just like you.” He thought that he saw someone stir in the far corner of the cell, but when maintaining eye contact with the blonde might well determine whether or not he lived through the next ten minutes he was not about to look that way.

“Wish that we were here because we opposed them,” the blonde said. She took the passkey from David’s hands though, examined it, and then gave it back to him to tuck among his clothing. “When it all dies down, when they think that you’ve made it outside, you open the door and you take us with you.”

“Absolutely,” David said, aghast that the blonde would think that he would just...just leave them here to what he had already faced. “Yes.” She gave him a wan smile and then shifted back from him subtly, telling him without words that their conversation was finished. Though the cell was so crowded with bodies that David had barely seen how he would be able to fit among them when he had first slipped in, they now all aligned themselves away from him amidst a quiet stirring of fabric, leaving a small but distinct circle of empty space surrounding him. David watched the realignment of forms and realized that he was the only one wearing clothing that ever could have even remotely been considered finely made.

In fact, the brightest spot of color in the entire room belonged to a pair of eyes which David now realized were watching him from one corner of the cell, untroubled and somehow knowing. They belonged to a man with black hair that fell down over one eye, and they had a feline cant to them which made David think that somehow the man knew things about David that he himself had not figured out. The tilt of his head was an invitation for David to come closer, and was probably the strongest one that he was going to get while everyone else in the cell was wearing hostility like clothing. When David cross the distance, he noticed that the man had an eighth of an inch of ginger-colored stubble marking his cheeks and jaw, and that one of his eyes was nearly forced closed with a purpling bruise. The swelling in his lower lip bookmarked it and would have made him look awkward if he had attempted to smile at David as he sat down.

“You’re aristocracy,” the man said flatly as David settled gingerly against the wall next to him. He was not leaning away, but neither was he leaning closer. When the man shifted, the sleeves of his shirt slid up and allowed David to see both that his skin was deeply freckled and that it was deeply bruised with marks of various ages and colors, but the injuries didn’t register in the way that he moved.

“I am,” David allowed slowly. He had never gotten an answer from Mayer as to who had turned him in, and the list of people that he could trust was very short against the list of those that he could not. “And what are you?”

The man finally smiled, or at least made a pretense of it. Only the un-swollen half of his mouth obeyed him. “I’m Adam,” was all that he said. He rubbed at his neck, moving the collar down as he did so and allowing David to see that there was a deep red line of chafed skin circling his throat, though no collar.

“I’m David,” David said. Adam’s eyes flicked up to his and then down again before David could determine what he was meant to see. He heard something in the hallway that made him go very still and made David wonder if he should not dive for the cover of the bodies again, but then Adam relaxed again and looked at David with a strange half-smile fixed upon his face.

“Lord David Cook, you mean,” Adam said slowly. He rolled the words through his mouth as if he were tasting them, just this side of mocking. The cat eyes looked David up and down again. “I know who you are.”

Being in the presence of that many bodies, that close, was doing enough to fray David’s nerves for him, he didn’t need ambiguity coming from this new, quasi-dangerous figure. He eyed the door and wondered if enough time had gone by to make his break for it. There was no way of knowing what was happening to the rest of his estate, to Michael, while he was hiding down in here.

“No,” Adam said when he saw where David was looking. “Not yet. Settle in, sweetheart, we’re going to be here for a few hours.” He went back to rubbing at his neck, exposing that red circle of flesh again, but this time David did not think it was an accident that he was seeing it.

“Who are you?” David asked him. He kept his voice low; the list was still weighing heavily on his mind. “Are you a slave?”

When his mouth wasn’t swollen from being hit, Adam probably had a smile like quicksilver. “Look like a runaway, don’t I?”

David weighed the direct and nearly bossy way that Adam had directed their interactions thus far against the way that Michael had gone almost two days without even making eye contact unless David had him on the verge of rage. He said calmly, “No. You really don’t.” And he couldn’t see why anyone would possibly want to play at being one, either, not when the very dimmest members of society knew what happened to slaves even after their first recapture. David’s eyes widened. “Fuck. Me.”

Adam stiffened when he heard how loud David was determined to speak, and then gripped David hard by the back of his neck so that he could drag David’s head down. He pressed his lips against David’s ear and whispered fiercely, “For fuck’s sake, do you think you have to yell it?”

David pulled back from Adam’s grip only so that he could whisper against Adam’s ear in his own stead, “Why not, anyone who’s ever been around a slave knows that you’re not one.”

Adam tilted his head back from David’s and released his grip upon the back of David’s neck. “No one in this room is going to stomp their feet and point fingers if I hurt the people who locked them in here in the first place,” he said, “but we’re both fucked if you yell loudly enough to be heard out in the hallway.”

“Right.” As if he needed one more thing in this world pointing out to him that he was not quite the spy that he had thought he was. “Right. Just tell me that you do not act like that when you’re in front of Mayer.”

Adam’s smile stayed in place, but all of the glitter went out of it, and his eyes changed from blue to a flat and dangerous color like metal standing in the winter sun. “Mayer and I have not had the pleasure yet,” he said in a calm tone that David did not believe for a moment. “But he’s visited with a few friends of mine. We’ll chat, when it’s time.” All of this without the smile fading or changing character. “I can fake being terrified and humble well enough to fool anyone else.”

Another member of the Resistance, sitting right in front of him. It was good to know that they existed as more than faceless ghosts who removed his messages from their hiding places and then put new ones back into their place. “Have you seen a slave move through this cell?” David asked.

“There’s been several slaves through here,” Adam murmured back. He went very still again, watching the door for a signal that David could not decipher, and then relaxed again as it apparently did not come. “They move on as soon as their owners are located, for...for the next step.” The next step that involved the kind of scars that Michael had on his back.

“I’m looking for someone specific,” David answered. “A man, little older than me, little taller, with brown hair and brown eyes. His name’s Michael.”

Adam jerked, the first unrestrained response that David had seen out of him yet, and David guessed that he still was a good enough spy to know that that was a reaction worth noting. “He hasn’t been through here,” Adam said calmly. He didn’t give David a chance to press further, though. “Guards change shifts right about now. You want to use that passkey of yours before it’s deactivated, this is the time to do it.”

David wanted to argue that they couldn’t possibly have been in the cell long enough, but the truth of it was that with no windows and a single bleak and unchanging light, he had no idea how long he had been in there. It could have been all night. It could have been more than that, even; he was not even certain of how long he had been in the chair with Mayer’s hand upon his chest and water rushing down into his lungs.

“You’re in charge,” David said by way of agreement. He pushed himself up to his feet, using the wall as a brace and wincing; the bruises that had hindered him earlier had since solidified into an ache that made his entire body recalcitrant and not terribly eager to obey him. As soon as David moved, everyone in the cell seemed to ripple, all eyes centering on David at once. Those eyes then switched over to Adam as David pulled the passkey from his clothing and gave it over to the other man.

“Never thought that I would hear one of the aristocracy say that,” Adam said. The smile faded and left a lean hunter’s look behind, but he took the passkey from David’s hand and slapped it against the flat, dark gray pad beside the door. It was the same as when David had used it to enter the cell, red to green and then the screech of the unhappy door opening...until the alarms that had been heralding David’s entry into the cell and then shut off abruptly came back on again.

“Well, that was efficient,” David said, barely able to hear his own voice above the wailing. He pressed himself back hard against the wall as everyone else who had been in the cell with him streamed past in a wild stampede, cutting down each side of the hallway without rhyme or reason. “Wait!”

“Let them go,” Adam said as he pressed himself against the wall beside David. “They’ll be our distraction.” While his face was ashen, his voice did not shake, and if David had doubted that this man could also be a soldier, those doubts vanished. Adam grabbed for David’s wrist and gripped it tight. “Come on, we’ll only have a window of a few minutes.”

It might make David a crappy soldier, when it was all said and done, but that was one tactical advantage that he was not willing to take advantage of, not just yet. “There’s someone that we need to find first,” he said.

End Part Fourteen

Continue to Part Fifteen