InsaneJournal

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (16/29)
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



Part Sixteen

David would have said that he knew his city; obviously, he had been wrong. At night, it was a very different place. While most houses were shuttered and dark, conserving power, there were streetlights on at every corner and in every doorway, making certain that the irritable, dyspeptic cameras need not strain as they turned their heads slowly back and forth and talked softly amongst themselves in their screeching language. David’s ears were still ringing from the sirens in the prison, but speakers set directly beneath each of the cameras were broadcasting at a volume that no one could miss.

“Government sources report that three-quarters of all escaped slaves and dissidents have already been recaptured,” the pleasant, don’t-you-worry female voice said. “With promises that all will be within custody again by first light, as our illustrious police forces are already extracting whereabouts from those already in custody.” David thought of the blonde woman who had been kind to him in the cell. He had not asked her her name. He doubted that it was going to be broadcast, anyway. “But remember, they cannot do the job of keeping you safe without your help. Report all suspicious activities and persons to your nearest precinct immediately, several of those still free are considered extremely dangerous. Among them is Lord David Cook, guilty of treasonous acts against the House--”

David swore and tucked his chin down closer against his chest, even though the three of them were the only people standing in the alley, where even the sallow lights could not reach. “So much for letting me die without comment in an unmarked grave,” he said.

“Oh, no.” Adam sounded disturbingly cheerful, considering their predicament. “You pissed someone off with a vengeance.”

“You sure that it wasn’t you?” David snapped back. “I seem to recall that you shot a lot more people than I did.”

“Do you hear my name being shouted?” Adam gave the roving patterns of the searchlights a speculative look, as if he was considering trying his luck by running directly between them, bruises be damned. David was about to pull him to the side and ask him if the secret to his energy wasn’t drugs of some kind. “And I gave them several to choose among, too.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Michael told David calmly. Everything that he had said or done had been calm since the collar had been removed from his neck; he continually touched at the reddened mark left behind as if not sure that anything going on around him since then was quite real. “It’s Mayer, he just wants to make sure that you can’t go to the aristocracy, they know you.”

Adam wore a grudging expression at the prospect of having to agree with Michael. “To the rest of us, your face doesn’t mean much,” he said. “Come on, let’s move before we count as ‘suspicious activity.’” As Adam led them deeper into the dark, behind them the broadcasts continued, the loop interrupted on a triumphant squawk so that a live voice could inform all those listening that two more escapees had been recaptured.

“It was a lost cause in the first place,” Michael muttered, just barely loud enough for the other two to hear. David was used to Michael’s fatalism unbroken except for the odd burst of emotion akin to a gun going off, but Adam spun about abruptly and for a few seconds looked as if he was strongly considering decking Michael right in the mouth.

“Unbe-fucking-lievable,” he finally said, dragging his hand across his mouth before holding it in a tight fist by his side. “I’m really glad that everyone’s going to get to see you again, Michael, because they’re not going to believe me otherwise.” Michael made a slight face and said nothing. David could feel himself making a larger one, and wondered if this was a conversation that he really wanted to wade into.

“There’s someplace we need to go first,” he said. Adam canted his feline eyes towards David, while Michael stayed silent, though David detected a hint of the “you’re an idiot” look creeping back onto his face. He was learning the signs. “It’s for another of your people, Lady Underwood. I was trying to warn her that the government was onto her when I was caught.”

Adam gestured them all abruptly back into a safe pocket of shadow just when they had been about to cross through a patch of light, as a phalanx of men in dark gray uniforms strode rapidly through where they would have been. After seeing so many of them die earlier that night, they were painfully human to David; he doubted that he would ever think of them as ghosts again. The three of them held their breaths for a long moment, and then Adam went on in a whisper, “I don’t recognize the name as one of ours, but--” He shrugged. “That doesn’t exactly mean anything. A lot was kept from me before I went in, in case...” Another shrug. “Where’s your drop?”

“About a mile and a half north of here.” David let out a short, rueful laugh. “I told them that I was a spy when they...when they had me. I even told them that there was a dead drop.” Adam went very still, looking at him sideways from beneath his hair. “The only thing that I was lying about, in the end, was where it was.” David rubbed his hand over his mouth as he swore that he could feel the water rushing down into his lungs again, as if that was going to be able to keep it away. “Who the hell knows how much longer I would have been able to keep that up, either.”

Adam looked as if he wanted to say something, shook his head to swallow it back, and ultimately went with, “You wouldn’t be the first, that’s kind of why it’s torture. Congratulations, anyway. I wouldn’t be nearly so nice to you if rescuing you meant that I was going to wind up putting my own ass in a sling. Now shut up, you might have lost the bright clothes, but you still move so much like aristocracy that you’re hurting me to look at you.”

David snorted but fell back and obliged, until he found himself walking abreast of Michael while Adam continued his job just ahead of making sure that the next move they made was not going to be directly into a trap. They had not had a chance to exchange three words solely between themselves since Michael had left that cell; David found himself more than a shade nervous as to what Michael was going to say to him, when everything that he had warned David about had been proven so calamitously right in one fell swoop. He caught himself watching the line of Michael’s neck whenever they were in enough light for it, struggling to recognize it when there was not a sullen gleam of steel.

“You’re going to have a scar,” David wound up saying softly, reaching up to touch at the sticky place on the back of Michael’s neck where Adam had cut him. It was scarcely more than a nick, not worthy of much in the way of even deliberately over-solicitous attention, and David found that his fingers were in short order moving northward and through Michael’s hair, stroking the scalp. He hadn’t had time to touch nearly as much of Michael in order to convince himself that the man was real and whole and not too badly damaged while they had been in the government’s hold, and while even a tenuous safety was within their grasp he found that he could not resist the urge any longer.

Michael’s chuckle was raspy and started from somewhere down low in his throat. It was nearly smothered altogether by the time that he tilted his head forward to allow David greater access to the curve of his skull. It’s like I’m petting a cat, David thought ruefully. Cats weren’t meant to be collared any more than people were, after all. There was a touch more color in Michael’s cheeks as he lifted his head again to look David in the eye.

“Mate,” Michael told him calmly. If his voice was slightly thick, then for once it was with humor rather than all of the things that that he had seen and did not yet want to share. “After all that I have already, do you really think that I’m worried about that little bee sting?”

“Point,” David had to admit. He put his hand against the small of Michael’s back and then, after a moment’s hesitation, beneath his shirt to touch warm skin and the first of the faint ridges in the flesh. David thought that the skin was even slightly cooler there than it was in the surrounding untraumatized surface, and could not quite convince himself that his mind was only playing tricks on him. Michael went stiff for the barest of seconds when David first laid his hand against the scars, then leaned further back into the contact with a barely perceptible sigh.

“So, I need to apologize to you,” David said, and when Michael didn’t ask why, went on, “For not listening and fucking everything up.”

“Think saving me might have gone a pretty good ways towards ‘sorry’,” Michael finally said, and then flinched David’s hand away as ably as if he would have shaken off a fly before speeding up to catch Adam again. Adam had already turned partway back around so that he could watch them with an expression that David was fairly certain counted as amusement, shadows or not.

“You were doing that wrong,” Adam told David in a deceptively sweet tone. “You’re supposed to go in from the front.”

David rolled his eyes and even felt a traitorous blush starting to pink his cheeks. “My hands were cold,” he defended himself. Adam’s eyebrow went up. “Yes. Just one of them. Shut up.”

“What kind of slave would I be if I let my master wander around cold?” Michael answered. He wandered a few yards up ahead of them, taking up Adam’s position as scout as if he had done it before.

Adam stared after him, lips parted slightly. “Never thought that I would hear the day when Michael joked about something like that,” he said. Adam threw David a look, as if he somehow thought that it was David’s fault.

“I never thought that I would hear him joke, period,” David answered. “Hey.” Adam, starting to catch up to Michael, turned back. David kept his voice low. “Hey, I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but lay off of Michael already, all right? I would think that you would be fucking glad to see him all in one piece again.”

Adam’s eyes were blue--the color had been unmistakeable when they had been standing underneath the bright florescent lights earlier--but when he was angry they flashed back in pure silver. “You’re right,” he told David evenly. “You don’t know what’s going on. So how about you try shutting the fuck up about it on for size?” Shocked by the vehemence, David rocked back on his heels. Adam was already turned away and gone by the time that David could formulate a reply, and the rest of the trip to the dead drop passed by in an awkward silence.

“You guys should wait out here,” David said when they reached the appropriate alley, acutely aware now of the fact that his chosen location didn’t have any other points of escape if the mouth of it should be blocked.

“No,” Michael said flatly, and refused to give any other response beyond a raised eyebrow when David looked at him.

“I’m starting to think that that collar was injecting you with something,” David said, and added when Michael began to rock back in the old way, “I like it.”

“We’re too visible out here on the street,” Adam said. When David kind of thought that he might like to argue that point a little more, Adam put his hand in the center of David’s back and bodily pushed him into the shadows of alley where the cameras could not follow.

“So you’re kind of bossy, good to know,” David said before going to the brick behind which messages were stored. Michael snorted and sounded as if he was going to say something that he instead chose at the last minute to swallow back, prompting another raising of one of Adam’s insanely limber eyebrows.

“He’s kind of a boss,” Michael said finally.

“I’ll draw you the flow chart later,” Adam told David, sounding aggrieved, and gestured for David to draw the brick, already. David did so; there was a small square of paper forced down inside. The short list of people weighing on David’s mind grew that much heavier as he unfolded it, and he could not stop himself from glancing Michael’s way from beneath his lashes. Michael was looking off down towards the mouth of the alley and did not appear to see. Adam saw, though, and David felt his face coloring slightly even though the other man’s face did not change.

David unfolded the scrap of paper. She’s not ours. On a long sigh, David crumpled up the paper and shoved it into his pocket. “Good instincts,” he told Adam brusquely.

Adam nodded, though David noticed that he glanced Michael’s way, too, and that his expression turned slightly guilty. He coughed into his hand and said, “It was possible that they wouldn’t tell me a name, but--” Adam shrugged.

“But you’re a boss,” David finished. “Must be a pretty big one.”

“Have a head for names.” Adam didn’t deny it as he waved Michael back from the mouth of the alley and led them on.

“I’m sorry,” David said again as Michael walked beside him. He reached out to touch Michael lightly on the wrist and then drew his hand back. Michael looked at him askance.

“For what?” he asked. “I told you, rescuing me goes a long way towards making up for not listening to me.”

“I thought that you might be the one who turned me in.” David didn’t look at Michael. “I’m sorry about that. I should have known better.”

“Don’t put me up on a pedestal, David,” Michael said softly. He ran his hands through his hair, touched at the abraded skin on his neck. “I don’t like heights.” They didn’t speak again as Adam took them to a small house that could barely still be called such; the only part of the building that was not creaking and tilting from where David was standing on the edge of the street.

“You know where the meeting place is?” Michael asked, voice low and surprised.

“Have to trust sooner or later, or else we wind up like them.” But Adam still kept his gun drawn as they entered the house, placing their steps carefully and listening to the wood talking back to them all the same. David was surprised when none of them went through the floor. He was not surprised when he rounded a corner and found a gun abruptly shoved into his face. It was held by a short black woman, her hair held back from her forehead with a ribbon of bright red.

“We were only going to give you another hour,” the woman said to Adam. She saw Michael standing just beyond David’s shoulder, and David knew the moment of recognition by the way that her eyes widened, but she spoke to David instead, “And who the hell are you?”

“You’ll recognize his name, Syesha,” Adam said. He put his hand lightly atop Syesha’s wrist until she lowered the gun. “This is Lord David Cook, been helping us out for the past year or so.”

“Hmmm.” Syesha put the gun back into the waist of her pants and pushed roughly past David as if they had already said everything that needed to be said to one another, and to Michael instead. If he had seemed nervous when he and Adam had first recognized each other, then he was on the verge of bolting from the house altogether now. “Michael.”

“Sy,” he returned. Michael made a vague gesture at the air, one of the few spontaneous movements that David had ever seen him make. “I--”

Syesha did not allow him to finish. She rushed the final few steps separating them and grabbed Michael in one of the hardest hugs that David had ever seen before in his life, mumbling something incomprehensible against the side of his neck. After a few seconds of hesitation, Michael returned her embrace, gripping her back with such force that even in the dim light David could see how his knuckles were turning white.

End Part Sixteen

Continue to Part Seventeen