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Entry tags:	all that time silent still

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (17/29)
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



Part Seventeen

There was a blindfold over his eyes. David couldn’t exactly say that he was moving with grace. Not to mention that he knew that he needed to be quiet, what with not knowing how far they still were in hostile territory and all, but increasingly loud and more creative obscenities escaped his mouth every time that he barked his shin on some new piece of detritus in his path. David had the overwhelming feeling that he was being laughed at every time that he stumbled and swallowed back a curse, too, making it even more likely that he was about cut loose. He could hear Michael, also blindfolded at the onset of the journey, breathing quietly beside him; it was an anchor. No one warned David, but he could feel it when the ground started to slope downhill at first a gentle angle and then an increasingly stiff one, and he knew that they were heading underground.

“I thought that that was only metaphorical,” David whispered, and Syesha answered, “Shhh.” She could not prevent him from noticing that he had abruptly ceased colliding into random objects in his way with his shins, though, letting him know that they were close. The air changed, as well, becoming dense and warm, and even from a distance smelled of smoke and many bodies. He could feel eyes on him even if he could not see them; the curious, not entirely friendly gazes seemed to go on forever before Syesha said softly, “Okay.”

David drew the blindfold from his eyes and looked about at many faces sitting around many fires, watching him with their heads tilted to the side in curiosity. David was not certain how the ventilation within the structure was being handled, as the room smelled heavily of smoke and the cement pillars and walls were painted black near the ceiling, but he could still bring clean, sweet air down into his lungs when he breathed deeply enough. He had known from the changing angle beneath his feet that they were moving lower, and he had known for some time that the Resistance was being driven ever more deeply underground by the forces of the House bearing upon them, but he had not known that they were going to take that advice literally, and apparently right in the heart of the city. David swiveled his head slowly from side to side to take in his surroundings and ignore the stares that he was being given for now, and saw that the walls and ceiling of the structure were thick gray concrete, marked with age instead of violence like the rest of the city. There were pillars thicker than David himself spaced apart every ten yards or so, taking up part of the weight of the ceiling and what must surely also be the activities of the people above. David listened hard, but could not detect any signs of that inevitable activity. They were down deep. Taking another look about at the people watching him and realizing that they had by now noticed that, dirty or not, his clothing was not that of a poor free and that Syesha and Adam were each staying very close to his side, David didn’t guess that any scream he made would be loud enough to rise back to the surface, either.

“You standing so close to me to keep me from running, or to keep them from running at me?” David asked Adam in a low voice.

Adam’s lips formed a smirk that did not reach his eyes, which were scanning the crowd and ordering them all to settle down without saying a word. The hell of it was that the people obeyed, all of them dropping their gazes within a few beats of Adam staring at them and then going back to strained versions of the conversations that they had been having before the new arrivals. “Don’t flatter yourself, sweetheart,” Adam answered finally, after David had the feeling that a fire had just been put out even beyond the one that he had been able to see. “Not worried about you. Worried about them rushing him.” Adam jerked his head to indicated Michael, who was still and quiet, staring back at the people who were looking at him with what was obviously recognition and, no matter how Adam might be ordering them without words to behave themselves, hostility. Michael didn’t register any surprise or anger at such treatment when his return after five years ought to have been, to David’s mind, a near-miracle warranting an immediate celebration, only a resignation that David would not have thought Michael capable of even when David had first purchased him.

Before David could ask Adam what in the hell he meant by that, and why he had been working an attitude where Michael was concerned so thoroughly ever since he had laid eyes on him, Adam said abruptly, “I have to let him know that I’m back, what I learned.” He gestured towards Syesha and grinned when she raised her eyebrow. “This is your baby now.” Adam turned and disappeared among the fires towards a small cluster of structures within the structure, giving privacy to all those who entered.

“Does that mean he expects us to cause a shitstorm?” David asked Syesha. She made a soft sound from the back of her throat.

“You already have,” she said, and then touched Michael lightly on the arm. “Come on, I’ll show you guys somewhere where you’ll be safe.”

David made note of Syesha’s wording and wondered what, precisely, they were to be kept safe from, when they were supposedly standing in the safest place that the Resistance had to offer as it was, but another glance at the eyes that were following them and he decided that it was a stupid question. Syesha led them down the same way that Adam had disappeared, amongst a clutter of small, makeshift buildings that rose out of the concrete like mushrooms. David could smell food cooking in some of them, heard the muffled sounds of love-making coming from a few others, and he flushed. Syesha and Michael, though they had to have heard the noises, as well, looked straight ahead and seemed to be willfully pretending that they heard nothing out of the ordinary at all. David guessed that that was a necessity of living so tightly packed into so small a space; he had always had room to roam.

Your study is probably on fire by now, David told himself. The books that had taken generations to accumulate, the furniture, but more than that: the entire record of his family since the caldera had blown and the oil had run out had been written down in that room. Once those records were gone, it would be as though the Cooks had never existed at all. And that’s exactly how the House wants it to be. It would be damned hard to make a martyr out of him when within a few years no one would be able to prove that he had ever been in the first place. He wasn’t even sticking around to placed in the public records as a tried and convicted traitor.

Syesha led Michael and David to a small building far away from the hub of activity that had greeted them upon first entering. The interior was dark, but there was an oil lamp hanging on a hook beside the door, which Syesha handed to David. “We don’t do guests,” she said bluntly. “But it’s a place for you to rest until Neal needs to see you.”

Michael let out his breath on a long sigh and looked up towards the ceiling, so high above them and so smudged with smoke that it might as well have been the night sky. “There’s a meeting that I’m looking forward to.”

Syesha looked no more pleased at the prospect herself. “Why do you think that Adam went ahead to prepare him for it?” She threw a glare around at the handful of heads who had found reason to poke out of their doors and stare at Michael, and just as abruptly they all found equally good reasons to go and do something else again. “I dare anyone to come after you until then, I swear I do.”

Michael’s smile startled David, it was so slow and private, so real that David for several seconds could not believe that he was seeing it on Michael’s face at all. It transformed him, made him look like the imaginary man that David had drawn up in his dreams days before. David stirred before he realized what he was doing.

“You always were meaner than your size,” Michael told Syesha.

Syesha tossed her hair and grinned. “And it’s only gotten worse since the last time that you saw me,” she said. Her words seemed to catch up with her a second later and she paled, but rather than apologizing reached out to grab Michael up in a hug that was if anything even harder than the one she had bestowed upon him in the shack earlier. Michael was slightly more hesitant to hug her back this time, and he touched his lips lightly to the top of her hair as if he honestly thought that he would not get the chance to do it again.

“You did what you did because you had to do it,” Syesha told Michael finally as she pulled away. “And I’ll fucking fight Neal on that one if I have to, you see if I don’t. Getting you back at all is near enough a miracle.”

“Thank you, Syesha,” Michael said. “Though you might be the only one out there who thinks so.”

“Do all of the others have Neal’s ear the way that Adam and I do?” Syesha asked. She looked at David, who didn’t even know who this Neal person was yet, but still seemed to take his silence as an acceptable answer. “That’s what I thought.” Syesha turned and left, slamming the door behind her without about as much force as David thought their little building could take. He lit the lamp before he decided to ask Michael once and for all what all of this tension was about, and see the interior of where they were being held until this mysterious Neal decided what he wanted to do with them.

“She reminds me of Kristy Lee,” David said as he lit the lamp and then held it aloft so that he could better view the furnishings. The little building was made of spare scrapwood and tin, and the floor was the same pitted and worn cement that David had been walking across while standing outside of it. There was a small table, a single bed shoved up against one of the walls. The bed was large enough for two people only if they had already solved the peculiar problem of how to wrap their limbs about each other for maximum comfort. David set the lamp down upon the table.

“Only on the surface,” Michael said. “Kristy Lee burns hot. Syesha burns cold. They’re very different.” He sounded wistful as he said it, making David wonder if Michael and Syesha had not been much closer than David had seen before...before the once upon a time whatever that made Michael jump like a cat whose tail had been scalded every time that someone brought it up, never mind that Syesha had behaved towards him more warmly than anyone else that Michael had seen thus far.

Speaking of. “Michael,” David started, unsure if asking about the whatever was going to get him the blank-faced and proper slave that Michael became whenever he was on the retreat, or that burst of fury and life that was so much more interesting.

Michael shook his head as if warding David off and said, “I only recognized about half of the people out there, if that. New faces arriving, old ones disappearing.” He sighed from down deep in a place which sounded as if it hurt. “I’ve been away for a long time.”

Hell, Michael looked so alone and dejected in a place that ought to have been his a thousand times over more than it could ever be David’s, that David couldn’t have stopped himself from kissing Michael even if he had given his brain a chance to catch up to his body and realize what he was actually doing. He parted Michael’s lips gently and put his hand against the back of Michael’s neck to encourage him closer, relishing the warm skin that no longer had that hated band of metal sneaking beneath David’s fingers at every opportunity. Michael flinched minutely, for the skin was still raw, and then leaned further into the contact with a soft, pleased sound. Michael twisted his hands through the loops at the front of David’s pants and gave David only that amount of time to realize that one of them was not interested in particular gentleness, here, before he dragged David down hard onto his own mouth and bit at the already-bruised lower lip, encouraging more blood to the surface. David sucked in a ragged breath and tried to remember if his dream had been like this, furious and hot, and could not tell. He pictured Michael hear and now, though, pinned down beneath David’s weight and whispering at him to fuck him harder, damnit, and suddenly found that he could not breathe.

“The bed,” David said as Michael rolled his thigh between David’s knees, not being gentle with David’s bruises and clearly not expecting David to be gentle with his own in return. “I’m not fucking you on a cement floor.”

Michael bit at David’s lower lip again, seemed almost shocked at his own boldness, and then dragged his tongue across the tiny hurt in atonement. “You wouldn’t be the first.”

“Please don’t say things like that, you have no idea what it does to the mood I’m trying to make here.” David backed Michael up against the bed, but Michael refused to sit just yet, his hands flexing hard against David’s sides. Definitely not playing gentle, or expecting David to be gentle in return. David didn’t find that he was in a mood to argue.

The door to their little shack was tin, and the knock at the door echoed and made them both jump. David put his head down against the crook where Michael’s shoulder met his neck and let out a long stream of obscenities while Michael tilted his head back towards the ceiling and slowly, almost cautiously, curled his fingers through the hair at the nape of David’s neck.

“Guess I should answer that,” David said finally when the person on the other side of the door knocked a second time, more insistently than the first.

“Don’t ask for my permission,” Michael said. “This isn’t my place any more than it is yours.” And was perfectly cool again, blank and proper in such a way as to make David think that he had had to rearrange his features more than once before when a master had had his fill of him and abruptly gone back to business, while David went to the door and opened it.

A short redheaded girl who didn’t look as if she was any older than Archuleta stood in the doorway and looked brightly back and forth between Michael and David. David swore that he didn’t have any clothing out of place. The girl still grinned as impishly as if she had discovered the two of them naked.

“Neal’s ready to speak with you,” she said, gesturing them to come out of the little room and follow her.

End Part Seventeen

Continue to Part Eighteen