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Entry tags:	all that time silent still

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (15/29)
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



Part Fifteen

“You’re an idiot. You’re an idiot, you’re an idiot, you’re an idiot.” Adam was either not trying to keep his voice down or was doing a truly shitty job. The sirens were still wailing. Since Adam wasn’t outright yelling at him, David was only able to make out what he was saying by leaning close and reading his lips. Adam threw him a look when David invaded his personal space; guess that answered the question of who Adam was calling an idiot.

“You can leave,” David said with teeth gritted, though Adam had the keycard now and David was not entirely certain how he was going to navigate without it.

“Kiddo,” Adam said easily. David blinked and tried to decide whether or not he ought to be offended, as Adam was maybe a year older than David, if that. “I leave you here, and you’re going to get eaten up by the big, bad wolf inside of five minutes.”

“Get eaten by the what?”

“Fairy tale law-abiding citizens aren’t supposed to tell anymore, in case it gives them ideas about the proper response to tyranny.” Adam didn’t seem to have any of the difficulties that David had experienced in adjusting to the disorienting pattern of the lights. He glided through the hallways as if his joints had been oiled, more than once grabbing for David’s wrist without preamble and then shoving him into whichever shadow happened to present itself before following close behind. Every time that he did, footsteps and raised voices proved him right.

“We’re probably not going to make it out of here,” Adam murmured after the latest such occurrence, his eyes gleaming slate as he untangled himself from David.

“I’m not leaving without Michael,” David said flatly. Adam seemed as unruffled by David’s anger as he was by the chaos of the lights. One of his eyebrows ticked upwards slightly, and that was all. “So why don’t you help me out here, throw some hypotheses to the wall and see what sticks.”

“You were brought in on a charge of treason,” Adam said. He shrugged. “Likely Michael was, too.”

“Because of course the furniture can have a will of its own to act against the state,” David couldn’t resist muttering to himself.

Another liquid and strangely graceful shrug. “You’re talking to the wrong person if you want me to defend the philosophies behind it. I’m just an escaped slave whose master hasn’t come to claim me yet.”

“Right,” David drawled. “You’re just a pretty ottoman.”

“I love that you think I’m pretty.” Adam was halfway through dragging David roughly back around a corner as he said it, but he obviously was not the type to let a little thing like his potential violent death get in the way of his flirting. David started to fire back, was stopped when Adam cut him a glare. Adam stepped smoothly back around the corner and put his fist into a guard’s face, his elbow into his throat. David barely realized what had happened until the man was on the ground, gagging as he tried to breathe.

You killed two people just earlier, don’t forget that, David told himself as he watched Adam grab the guard by the lapels of his uniform and slam him up against the wall. Yeah, but he still wasn’t quite able to believe that it had really been him--it seemed like something that had happened while he had still been underwater, something that his body had done while his mind had been elsewhere. Watching Adam move, there was no doubt that he was shrewdly in control of every single thing that his body did.

“Hi,” Adam told the guard calmly, and then slammed him back against the wall again hard enough that David heard the sound of his skull impacting and could not help but wince. It had been Mayer’s hand that had held him beneath the water rather than any of the guards, but neither could David bring himself to feel anything that wanted to be a full-fledged sympathy, either, no matter how Adam’s sleek self-possession might be unnerving him.

“How did you know he was there?” David asked instead. “I can’t hear anything over those fucking sirens.”

“I have a sixth sense for these guys,” Adam answered. He flashed his grin at the guard and then lifted the gun off of him with a smooth movement, just as the guard was recovering his senses enough to reach for it. Adam held it out to David, handle first. “Here. Just in case.” When David took the weapon, Adam went back to his new friend. “Where would the slave of a traitor be kept?” David cringed again. Adam didn’t look around before he said, “I wasn’t insulting you.” Man wasn’t kidding when he said that he had a sixth sense.

The guard’s lip was bleeding slightly. He glanced over Adam’s shoulder at David, and his mouth tightened. “A dog food factory,” he said.

Adam punched the man in the mouth again, this time putting a real split into his lower lip. Blood rushed down over the man’s chin. “Oh, look, now we match,” Adam said conversationally. No one would have been able to tell that he was not having the time of his life from his voice alone, but David saw fine lines threaded into the skin around his eyes that had not been there before. “David, point the gun at his kneecap.” David took a deep breath and did as he was told. In the meantime, Adam punched the guard three more times, twice to the abdomen and once to the face in quick succession, until he was using his body weight to hold the guard up as much as to keep him in place. The sirens cut off as abruptly as they had before, leaving David’s ears ringing in order to fill the silence. The lines around Adam’s eyes were deep enough now for anyone to see and understand, whether they knew him or not.

“Let’s cut ourselves a deal here,” Adam said when he was done. He leaned in close to the guard’s face, grabbed his wrist and deftly twisted it when the guard wanted to dig his thumb into Adam’s eye. “Me and Lord Cook over here, we really, really believe in what we’re doing here, and that gives us an advantage, ‘cause we’re crazy.” Eyes, voice, face had all gone equally flat, so that David highly doubted that the guard needed much prompting to believe it. “You want to bet on a fight, always bet on the crazy ones. Trust me, sweetheart, always. We’ll have you eight different kinds of fucked up, none of which were the ones you had in mind when you put the money on the dresser, before you even realize we’re there.” The guard looked over Adam’s shoulder at David again, as if he thought that David was going to be able to intervene on his behalf. As if David would want to intervene on his behalf, when it was all said and done, while he was thinking at the moment that even two other people being in this hallway with him was too many.

“Keep the gun up,” Adam brought David back sharply. “If you have to shoot him, hit him in the knee.” Leaning in close again, Adam continued, “You, on the other hand, I can tell, aren’t crazy. Because if you were crazy, you would actually believe in what you were doing here and you would dig in your heels pretty fucking hard about not telling us where Lord Cook’s slave is, and that would just be bad all around. I’ve already gone to all the trouble of making it look like you resisted us hard--” The guard was going to be lucky if he could see out of his rapidly swelling eye again at any point within the next week. “So all you have to do now is just tell us where he is, and you’re golden.” Adam’s mouth thinned for a second. “And if you’re thinking of telling me now that you really are a true believer and you think all of the shit that goes on in here is just the neatest? I wouldn’t.” The guard was silent as Adam leaned back and out of his personal space again. Adam waited for several seconds, and then asked over his shoulder, “You still have that gun aimed at his knee, David?”

“Yes,” David replied.

“Two levels up, cell 256,” the guard said quickly. “I saw when they were bringing him in.”

“Cool, we’ll ask him if he remembers you,” Adam said, and then held his hand out to David without looking around. “Give me the gun.”

“Wait!” the guard started. David handed the gun over, reluctantly, and Adam had barely taken it from David’s sweaty fingers before he flipped it in his hand so that he was holding it by the barrel and struck the guard hard in the temple with the butt. The man slipped down to the floor without even bothering to sigh.

Adam kept the gun and gestured for David to follow him. “Did you think that I was going to shoot him?” he asked over his shoulder. His voice was guarded; David didn’t know which answer Adam was hoping to hear.

“Thought you might,” he said, deciding that honesty was the best policy.

“Thought I might, too,” Adam answered softly. He made a disgusted noise from the back of his throat. “Learn the layout, my ass, Neal just sent me in here because he’s kind of a prick sometimes.”

David had no idea who Neal was or what, exactly, the prickish qualities of his personality might be, and he elected not to press the matter further. He followed Adam in a roundabout path up to the upper reaches of the building, nearly finding religion yet again as they were able to travel mostly unmolested. He thought that that had a certain something to do with the number of prisoners that they had willfully used as distractions, and it wasn’t something that he could feel good about.

“256,” Adam said. David thought that he was talking to himself until Adam grabbed him by the elbow and pointed to one of the doors. The numbers stamped in the metal were so work that they were barely noticeable.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” David exulted. He snatched the keycard from Adam’s hand and pressed it against the small pad beside the door. The red eye didn’t so much as blink, let alone switch over into that friendly green that David was looking for. “Oh, come on.”

“Think they figured out your magic trick, Lord Cook,” Adam said in a low voice. He curved his fingers around David’s elbow and rolled his eyes when David shook him off. Adam called David Lord Cook the same way that Michael had used to say his name, meaning something completely other than what the letters themselves signified, except that David got the feeling that Adam was mocking the shit out of him. “Come on.”

“Michael’s in there, and it’s my fault,” David snapped at him.

The lines of displeasure returned around Adam’s eyes. He muttered an oath, looked off down the hallway, and then grabbed David’s arm again in a grip that was not taking no for an answer. “He’ll cry crocodile tears when you wind up being thrown in there with him,” Adam snapped at him. He dragged David down the hall and drew the gun back out of the waistband of his pants. “We’re going to need another.”

David rubbed his fingers together and thought that he could still feel the gunpowder from the last time that he had held a gun. He didn’t protest. He didn’t make a sound when Adam hunched back against the wall and waited, cool and calm in face while the fingers of his free hand still drummed a restless pattern against his thigh, for the first gray bird to come flying around the corner. He got a mouthful of his own teeth as Adam put the butt of the gun solidly into his face and then bent down as one movement to take the gun and toss it David’s way. David snatched the weapon from the air with a grace that he did not know he possessed and pointed it at the guard on the ground. Another man came around the corner a second later, and Adam shot him. For a few seconds, David thought that Adam was cringing because he had just taken a life; the unhappy lines were back around the corners of his eyes.

“And we’re on the upper floors,” Adam said as the gunshot echoed away, ruining David’s optimistic fantasy. “I really hope that your friend appreciates how much more complicated he’s making this.”

“Do you think somehow he planned it?” David snapped, exasperated, and could not read the look that Adam threw him.

Adam knelt down and grabbed the guard with the ruined teeth by the front of his jacket. “Guess you’re the lucky one,” he told him as he dragged him over to the door so that he could use the guard’s own keycard to open it. “Hey, hold on, you don’t--” David was rushing through the door as soon as it was open. “Civilians,” he heard Adam utter darkly from behind him, and then the thump of a body being dropped just inside the door.

This room had a single light set out of reach in a cage, like David’s had. This room did not have a chair set on convenient hinges, though, and David didn’t realize how tense he had been until he heard all of the breath whooshing out of his lungs at once. This room had a body, it was not moving from where David could see, and he abruptly drew it all in again.

“Michael.” David forced himself not to yell--fuck what Adam clearly thought, he could make at least a few gestures towards stealth, when he had to--as he dropped to his knees beside the figure sitting slumped against the wall, chin lowered. “Michael, come on.” If he was unconscious, they were probably pretty fucked. If he was dead, then they were really fucked, because Adam could just go on ahead without David, hell and the House both would freeze over before David left Michael’s body to rot here after it was David’s fault that they had been taken in the first place. With that in mind, he might even make it all the way outside again before he had his breakdown.

Fingers trembling, David slid them into the crook of Michael’s neck to check his pulse, tilted his chin up and saw that Michael had a matched set of bruises to match the ones that David and Adam were sporting, only fresher. There was a cut below his eye still oozing blood.

“Why bother with creativity when you found something that clearly works, right,” Adam said in a toneless voice, as if he was reading David’s mind.

“He’s not dead,” David said by way of response. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw that Adam was looking at Michael with obvious recognition, and his eyes had gone metallic. “Michael, come on, wake up, we gotta move.” Michael shifted under David’s hands and made a soft sound; his eyelashes fluttered. David looked back and saw that Adam still had not moved. “Are you going to help me or what?”

Adam twitched irritably and strode forward so that he could kneel beside Michael and shake him, not terribly gently. David was about to protest until he saw that Adam at least slid his hand behind Michael’s head so that he would not crack it against the stone. “Johns,” Adam said sharply. “Wake up. We don’t have time to die for you.”

David glared. “You’re not going to help--” he started, but Michael sucked in a deep breath and finally opened his eyes, and Adam looked faintly triumphant. “I don’t think that I like you.”

“Everyone likes me better when I’m not thigh-deep in enemy territory,” Adam sent back without rancor. “Trust me, then I’ll be downright cuddly.” David doubted it, but he didn’t have time to voice that opinion before Michael was looking at Adam, and his expression was far more bleak than joyous at the reunion. “Hi, Johns.”

“Hey, Lambert,” Michael answered. “Been a while since I saw your face.”

“And we never thought that we would see yours again,” Adam answered. He slid his shoulder beneath Michael’s to help him to his feet while David did the same from the other side. “Can you walk on your own?”

“It’s not that bad,” Michael said. As soon as he had gotten that confirmation, Adam released Michael and stepped back, David noticed, and saw that Michael had noticed it, too.

“Then I suggest you also run on your own,” Adam said. “Because they are going to be breathing down our necks in--” Adam’s head snapped towards the hallway. “That ought to be them, actually.”

They exited the cell quickly, Adam holding onto the new keycard and carefully locking the guard in behind them, even though he didn’t look as though he was going to be fighting with anyone any time soon. Michael leaned heavily up against David for a few steps before he took back his weight, though he didn’t go so far as to break contact between their bodies. David held onto the guard’s gun with his free hand, hoping that he would not have to use it and somehow doubting that he was going to be that kind of lucky. If he could be counted as that kind of lucky, it was only because Adam ranged a few yards ahead of them, cutting down every guard who saw them with an almost offhand efficiency.

“Jesus,” David couldn’t help but mutter as the third fell without making a sound.

“It’s war,” Michael said quietly. He hadn’t asked to take the gun from David, even though he probably had much more experience in firing it. “You either keep it together and do what you have to, or you die.”

Adam turned back just in time to hear the last part of that. His face clouded for a moment as he leaned down and deftly pulled a knife from the latest dead guard’s boot so that he could slide it into his own. “I think you just boiled down three thousand years of major military thought into one sentence,” he said, and then jerked his head to indicate that they needed to pick up the pace. “I’m not taking us through the front, they’ll have that sealed by now,” he said over his shoulder. “But I swear I’ve been in every cell here over the past week, and they ought--” He ducked around a corner, fired three shots in rapid succession, darted back as one came back to answer him, leaned around to fire two more.

“No one ever thinks to protect the stomach,” Adam said, half to himself, as he led them around the corner. “Why not? What’s best place to hit someone?”

“In the head,” David answered. He expected to see a series of grievous gut wounds when he went around the corner, but Adam’s aim had been clean. Instead, he found them jogging rapidly across a small kitchen, and all of the guards dead of shots to the neck or face. The door on the other side had another of those ubiquitous keypads installed into the wall beside it.

Adam gave David one of his smiles-that-wasn’t. “And I would dearly love to do that,” he said, “but damned if the House doesn’t make themselves just slightly hard to get at.” He took a deep breath, passed the keycard over the door, and whispered something under his breath that might have been a prayer. The red light flicked over into green...for possibly three seconds at the most before it flashed into angry red again, bringing with it the sound of another siren going off, but Adam already had the door open and the three of them slipping out into the cold night air by that point.

“Wait!” Michael called before they could go more than a few steps. “Wait.” He gestured to the collar at his neck. “Can’t go anywhere with this on, they’ll track me.”

“Fuck!” David exploded. To come all this way to get Michael out, and then to be stopped by that fucking collar. He spun towards Adam. “Is there anything you can do?”

“Yep.” Adam knelt and drew the stolen knife smoothly from his belt. “Turn around,” he told Michael calmly, and when Michael obeyed him, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, David, I told you: I’m motherfucking cuddly. Wait and see.” While Michael bowed his head, Adam went for the back of the collar, continuing, “Do you think that there’s anyone who fights harder for the Resistance than an escaped slave? This is not the first time that I’ve seen one of these. There’s a weakness in the clasp--” Michael flinched and hissed. “Sorry.”

“I’ll bet you are,” Michael answered, turning his head in an attempt to make eye contact with Adam. Adam stared back without blinking.

“Don’t make me out to be more vindictive than I actually am,” he said, surprisingly quiet. Michael faced forward again. “And stop wiggling, I don’t want to cut your throat.” There was a soft clink, and then the collar fell to the ground at Michael’s feet, clasp gleaming just slightly red with blood where Adam had nicked him. It seemed like an occasion warranting a speech, but all that David could manage was a soft, awestruck, “Oh.” Michael rubbed at the mark left behind at his throat and couldn’t seem to speak, either.

“Come on,” Adam interrupted them, surprisingly gentle. “We’re not in the clear yet.” They headed off through a city that had grown hostile since the last time David had walked through its streets.

End Part Fifteen

Continue to Part Sixteen