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AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (18/29)
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



Chapter Eighteen

The girl had a band of scar tissue around her neck where a collar had once been, so faint that David didn’t notice it was there until the light hit her just right. She caught David’s attention and, rather than coloring and turning her eyes away, stared right back at him with a frankness belying the idea that she ever could have been anyone’s slave.

“You’re a spy?” she asked David bluntly as she led Michael and himself through the maze that made up a makeshift village. David had no idea if it was day or night, down here; there seemed to be lights on in every structure and several fires, regardless.

“I was a spy,” David corrected the redhead, who had told him some moments before that her name was Allison. “After getting caught out like that, I kind of think that my days of spying are done. People with titles tend to have memorable faces, so far as the House is concerned.”

“Oh.” Allison studied Michael, who was wearing clothing that clearly did not belong to any aristocracy even if it was warm, and then looked at David’s stained and by now no doubt fairly fragrant shirt. “We don’t get a lot of owners down here. I know there’s more than one spy out there, but no one ever said your name or anything, you know--” Allison lifted her shoulders into a shrug. She was wearing a thick dress of black wool that ended just below her knee, and boots that looked as if they might have been liberated from a soldier with particularly small feet. “In case one of us is caught and tortured.” She stated it with a blitheness that made the hair on the back of David’s neck rise in spite of himself. “What was being a spy like?”

“Right up until the end, not that exciting,” David admitted. “I don’t think that I really understood the kinds of risks that I was taking, my job was just to watch a lot and then report back what I saw.”

“You reported on your friends?” Allison paused in mid-step and looked back over her shoulder at David. She looked at Michael, too, clearly curious, though she did not appear to recognize him immediately the way that Syesha, Adam, and so many others had, and if his face was anything to go by then she was one of the new people who had moved in in the years that he had been gone.

“Yes,” David answered automatically, and then winced when Allison’s nose crinkled slightly and she tilted her head to one side. “And no. They weren’t really my friends, I knew that they were doing something wrong and that they wouldn’t even begin to understand if I tried to explain to them why it was wrong. I don’t--” He thought back hard and reminded himself that he couldn’t exactly count any of his slaves as friends, either, no matter how they had indulged him by pretending. You couldn’t be friends with someone who held the power of life and death over you like that. “I don’t guess that I have a lot of friends.”

“That sucks,” Allison said bluntly. She scratched at her ear, temporarily lifting back more of her incredible hair and showing a greater expanse of the band of scar tissue that marked her neck. It was thicker towards the back. David glanced Michael’s way, frowning, as the skin on Michael’s neck might be raw at the moment, but it was never going to heal to leave a mark behind like that. “What’s it like to own people?”

David jerked in his step. Allison looked at him curiously, like she had asked him nothing more than why he liked peaches but not strawberries, red wisps of hair lying across her neck accentuating rather than hiding her scar. “...tiring,” David said at long last, when he realized that he was going to be able to come up with nothing better. “It was very tiring.”

“Huh.” Allison turned to keep walking with a line drawn down between her eyes. “You’re probably the only aristocracy who thinks so.”

David thought of the tight stranglehold that was kept on everything that anyone did, said, or even thought, and how the only time it had even occurred to him to trust another member of his own class had turned out to be his undoing. “I hope not.”

“Hmm.” Allison’s hum spoke volumes. “I only know what it’s like to be owned. Got lucky, though. I was only twelve, I didn’t really have boobs yet when they--” Vague gesture about her that David took it was mean to encompass the Resistance as a whole. “Got me out of there. No one wanted to fuck me yet.”

David was aghast at hearing someone so young speak so casually about their future as an orifice that could cry out on cue. And Allison was pretty, there was no doubt in David’s mind that she would have done a turn as a body slave, and clearly no doubt in her mind, either. The beautiful, striking hair alone would have guaranteed it even if she had not had round, button-like features that would have kept her looking young long past her years.

“Your collar scarred you pretty deeply,” David finally found the voice to say. “That doesn’t usually happen.” He was well aware of the irony of the statement when he had Michael of all people walking directly beside him.

Allison touched at the band of white tissue around her neck and then dropped her hand again, casually, as if it wasn’t something that she thought of all that often or that bothered her all that hard when she did. If he could somehow ask her for permission to siphon off that level of assurance, David thought, and then find a way to slip it into Michael’s food, that would be great. It had been hours, and Michael still wasn’t walking any straighter or with any greater ease at his surroundings.

“Oh, there was a fire,” she said as lightly as David heard some of the wealthiest girls--women now--that he had grown up with state that this season’s wool wasn’t up to standard, they were going to have to pay the shipping, bribes, and protection to obtain some from another region. “The metal got a lot hotter than we did, and Adam wasn’t very good at prying the collars off yet. I was at Red River.”

“Son of a bitch,” David breathed before he remembered that he was in the presence of a lady, and a very young one at that. “You’re lucky that you’re not dead.” Even the slaves who had been re-taken during the failed Red River raid of old Lord Clive Davis’ estate--dead now of his own excess rather than by any House or Resistance hand--had been killed immediately, none of the dithering about of giving them three chances to give up and accept their fates. It had been an utter failure for the Resistance on all counts.

Except that there was at least one person who had been freed because of it, standing right here in front of him and behaving many times over less jumpily than she would have if she had still been a slave. David didn’t know, or think that he wanted to know, how many people had died at Red River versus how many had been freed. Doubtless for Allison it had been a victory.

“Here you go,” she said, bringing them to a set of quarters that from the outside, at least, did not look any larger or more luxurious than any of the others that flanked it. Allison knocked twice on the tin door and then hopped lightly from one foot to the other until it was opened by a tall, ginger-haired man with intricately inked tattoos appearing both over the collar and from beneath the sleeve of his shirt, hinting at a much greater expanse of marked skin beneath. His neck held no band of scar tissue to state that he had once been a slave; since Michael’s would not, either, within a week, David wondered if that actually meant anything. “Here they are, Neal.”

Containing his urge to startle was difficult. David didn’t even answer his own door on his own estate, and he hadn’t been hiding his liberality nearly as well as he had previously thought. It was harder still to school his face into a mask of impassiveness as Neal first looked him up and down, clearly taking his measure, and then moved on to study Michael. Neal’s face moved in recognition the same as all of the others had done, but David could not read what he was thinking.

“Thank you, Allison,” Neal told the girl, stepping to the side in wordless explanation that David and Michael should enter his quarters. Allison grinned and took off again at a gate that was damned near a skip. No matter how long they had been on his estate, David knew that he had never seen any of his own slaves doing that.

David’s assessment from the outside had been right, and Neal’s quarters weren’t any larger than those to which he and Michael had been shown an hour before, though there was much more in the way of furnishings and personality within these walls. Rough, handmade shelves had been nailed into the tin, containing a multitude of books, with racks upon racks of guns and other weaponry making space everywhere that the shelves were not. David recognized some of the titles, and others sailed directly past him; Neal did not seem to favor fiction to the same extent that David did. Doubtless, everyone within the House’s reach at this point knew of Il Principe. It was also on the banned list; do as they said yet not as they did, and perhaps you could escape the consequences for a little while. There was a table covered with a green fabric that looked as if it had once been used for something else, covered with so many reports and maps that no portion of the surface was visible. David craned his neck on an instinctive curiosity in order to better see what Neal had been studying before David and Michael had been shown in, before he remembered that the quarters to which they had been introduced upon arrival had also functioned very well as an isolation unit, and perhaps he should not assume that the year and a half in which he had served as a spy had earned him anything in the way of trust quite yet. There were two chairs in front of the desk, the cement beneath them scuffed and scratched as if they had been pushed back suddenly many times before.

Beyond all of this, in the back half of the room where the bed had been located in David’s and Michael’s own quarters, there was also a bed, and on that bed was Adam. He was wearing different clothing; his hair was damp and falling in loose, undisciplined strands that David could already see was annoying him in the way that Adam repeatedly used the back of his wrist in order to push them back. Adam was attacking a plate of food as if he had given serious consideration to the possibility of never eating again while he had been held on suspicion of being a runaway, and he showed no signs of getting up again even though Neal was conducting business at the desk, nor did Neal show any signs of asking him to.

“Sit down,” Neal said, waving at each of the chairs in front of the desk before he took his own behind it. While David made himself comfortable, Neal put the scattered papers into some semblance of order again, a process which took several minutes as Neal paused several times in order to study one and then add his own notations to that which had already been written before setting it to the side. They noticed at the same time that Michael was standing behind his chair rather than taking a seat, gripping its back in an eerie imitation of the way that he had done in David’s own dining room only---so much had happened in only a handful of days. David frowned, thinking that Michael hesitated because slaves did not sit in the presence of free men, but Neal’s frown was for an entirely different reason. He saw the truth.

“You really think I’m going to stand on ceremony like that with you, man?” Neal stopped pushing around his maps. “Seriously? Put your ass in that chair.”

The corners of Michael’s mouth twitched up, just for a second, as he obeyed. “It’s been a long time,” he said. On the bed in the background, Adam shifted, threw his arm across his face in the same studious attempt not to eavesdrop that David had seen others outside doing, space at too much of a premium to draw out of hearing range altogether.

“You’re damned right it has,” Neal said, but not before studying Michael for so long that Michael began to grow visibly uncomfortable. “How about you never do something like that to us again?”

“No,” Michael answered back. “Next time, I’ll take the option to die first.”

And this was all getting just a little too fucking pointed for David’s liking, thanks so very much, and he was about to ask everyone if they wouldn’t mind stop all of this cryptic shit and at least letting him have a peek at the answer key. That stopped as soon as it was David’s turn to get stared at with a pair of blue eyes that nearly rivaled Neal’s for sharpness; what they didn’t quite manage in color and knowing feline gleam they made up in sheer refusal to blink.

“So you’re Lord David Cook,” Neal said. He leaned back in his chair, folded his hands across his stomach, took a long time looking David up and down, and let David know without a word further needing to be said that David’s commentary was not going to be necessary while Neal finished his assessment. David found himself bristling just slightly all the same, not accustomed to anyone telling him when to speak or to be silent, even the people who had saved him from what had probably been a gruesome and prolonged death. The fact that that salvation had been mostly accidental as Adam had spotted David towards the conclusion of whatever his other mission had been and figured what the hell, might as well pick up a stray. Neal said David’s former title in the same slightly mocking way that Adam had done, rolling the word about his mouth as though he were tasting it and not much liking what he found. But then Neal smiled finally, even if the assessment did not quite fade away, making David wonder who, exactly, he was dealing with here at the same time that he wasn’t exactly trying to figure out how it was that this man got an army of individuals to follow him against people that they already hated.

“You’ve heard of me?” David asked, trying on a smile for size, and Neal laughed.

“I don’t have so many spies that I forget the names,” Neal said, mouth twitching a little, and then folded his hands across each other and leaned over the desk at David. He looked slightly wrong sitting there, as if pushing papers to and fro, and people with them, until David realized how hard Neal was focusing upon his face and decided that there were very few people who would have been able to stand up to the face of that scrutiny when Neal was focusing on a task at hand. “Do you know mine?”

“No,” David answered. “I never knew anyone’s names.”

“Good.” Neal seemed pleased, and a little of that scrutinizing, judging uncertainty as to what was going to happen to David next went out of his face. He leaned back in his chair, studied an impassive Michael. David threw Michael a slightly nervous look from beneath his lashes, as this was Michael’s game far more than it was David’s, but Michael didn’t seem to know what was going to happen next any more than David did. “Then my people are doing their job.”

“Are you planning on killing me?” David asked. “If you are--” He was back in the tank again, and coughed to bring water up and out of his throat that was not there. “Don’t play any games with it, all right?”

That statement earned him more sharp, blue-eyed scrutiny, and David had the feeling that Adam dozing on the bed in the background was not nearly as sleepy as he seemed. “I don’t play those games, David.” At least Neal was using David’s actual name now, and really using it, not substituting it for a title the way that Michael had done for so long. “So here’s how we are going to play. Tonight you rest, you eat, you clean up. You’ll both be safer if you keep your distance from everyone else until they get a chance to get used to you.” Neal was looking at Michael as much as he was David, and was close once again to demanding that explain to him just what in the blue fuck was going on, before Neal went on in a tone that didn’t even hint at the possibility of disagreeing with him. “Tomorrow, one of my people is going to pick your brain for every single thing that you’ve ever known or thought that you knew about those people that you grew up with.” Neal stared David down for so long that David began to wonder if part of the secret of Neal’s charisma was that he had mastered the art of no longer needing to blink. “That going to be a problem?”

Andrew or not, David had a mind that his parents would have been proud, when it was all said and done, and he wasn’t about to let that be taken away from him. The other people that he had grown up with...he could hope with every fiber of his being that there were some of them who knew, some of them who understood, that what they built their labor force upon was the single most rotten foundation that the human race had ever conceived of, and just needed someone else to throw the spark. He could hope, but he had also known Carrie since the two of them had been two small to sit astride a pony unassisted, and he thought that it was a little past the point of running on hope when the bruises from his beating were making themselves known across every inch of his body.

“No,” David said flatly. “I’ll tell you everything that you need to know.” He was fairly certain that he was wearing a rictus far more than he was a smile.

The upward tick of Neal’s eyebrow was so faint that it could have been imaginary. “And after that, we’ll talk long-term.” That intensity again, and Neal’s hands gesturing through the air above his papers with a grace that was nearly musicality. “We don’t support dead weight here. We can’t afford to. You want to stay, you’re going to have to work.” Neal’s tone suggested that he was a little dubious as to David’s ability to actually do that.

“He works his own fields,” Michael said, the first time that he had spoken since he had taken his seat. Neal and David were equally surprised to hear him.

“Well, there’s that.” Neal shrugged, looked back over his shoulder at Adam, who was propping himself up on one elbow and watching the goings-on now without any pretense of sleeping. He wasn’t leaving the bed because he and Neal slept in it together, David realized, and could have cheerfully smacked the back of his own skull for taking so long to figure that out. “We don’t generally take in very many members of the aristocracy. I’m sorry if your habits are something of a mystery to us. Short-term, you can stay here for the night. Long-term, you can either be a hunter of a gatherer. All the options on the table are up to you.”

Known her since they were both too small to have their own mounts, and it still hadn’t stopped--David had been so busy running off of adrenaline and physical hurt to fully process the all of the events that had led him here. The rest of his household could have been in that building, too, and even knowing that there had barely been enough time to get themselves out--David was aware that he was breathing slightly faster, that his throat was closing up, and that the time for him to answer without awkwardness was long since gone.

“Hunter,” David said. “I used to shoot deer on my estate. I know how.”

“Killing people who have it coming is different,” Adam spoke up from his position on the bed. The fine lines were still there around his eyes. David was now aware that his face had not been made to carry them.

“Have it coming,” David repeated. He could remember how the water had felt running down his throat, and the hand upon his chest, and the way that the gun had jerked when he had shot the two guards down. Neal lifted his eyebrows at him. “I can handle it.” Time came, there was a good chance that David would be able to more than handle it, and that scared him a little bit, too.

Neal clearly considered the manner closed with a tilt of his head, and looked towards Michael. “Just so you know,” he said in the horse-gentling voice that David had used on Michael more than once. It was more than a touch surprising, hearing it coming from someone else’s throat. “I know that you did it under duress. I’m not holding a grudge.”

A short laugh, and then Michael was rubbing his hand across his face. Outside of his breathing, more ragged and short by the moment, the loudest sound in the room was his callused hand against the stubble. “Think that you might be the only one in this whole setup of yours who feels that way, mate,” he said. Michael jerked his chin in Adam’s direction. “And that’s including your lieutenant over there.”

“I didn’t like you to begin with, Johns, don’t get a swelled head,” Adam said. He settled himself back down onto his back with this arm thrown over his face, going back into at least the illusion that he was trying to sleep. Unbelievably, Michael’s lips curved into the very tiniest of smiles, but David was not in the mood to note it.

“Okay, enough.” He slapped his hands across his thighs hard enough to make a ringing sound like that of a gunshot, drawing the attention of everyone in the room. “What the hell is everyone tip-toeing around?” To Michael, “What the hell did you do?”

Michael drew back slightly in his chair, while Neal looked stunned. Adam lifted his arm just far enough for David to catch a glimmer of silver-blue before he lowered it again.

“I told you I didn’t like heights, David,” Michael sighed, saying David’s name again in the old way, and leaning back as far in his seat as he could and avoid slipping down to the floor, as if he expected that David might hit him. “I’m a traitor.” Neal flinched and opened his mouth as if to protest, only to shut it again.

“Turning against the House is hardly--”

“I was taken on a raid four days before Red River,” Michael rolled over David as if he had not spoken. He was looking at Neal; whatever it was that he wanted to say, it was obvious that Neal was one of the most important ones who needed to hear it, the one that he had not seen in five years. Adam sat up on the bed and drew his knees up towards his chest. Michael was speaking to him, too. “I was tortured, and I talked.” Michael’s accent had grown harsher, for the first time becoming ominous rather than nearly musical. “So I got to live. That was my reward, after I told Lord Mayer everything that I knew about my people, where they would be, and what they would do. I got to live.” Michael snorted and rubbed his hand over his mouth. Dumbstruck, David could say nothing. “Didn’t take me very long to realize that I had made the wrong choice. The number of people who died because of me--”

“Was a lot,” Neal said bluntly. “It was two years before we could even think about fighting back again, instead of just surviving with what we had.” David stayed silent, thinking hard over what he had thought that he had known about a hell of a lot of things before his whole plan had gone off the rails. “You, I didn’t really have figured for the quiet type, somehow,” Neal said to David, and then to Michael, “And you I know aren’t.” Michael shrugged and rose to his feet. He put the chair back where he had found it, matching the feet to the scuff marks on the floor with a precision that made even the disinterested Adam sit up, crane his neck to see what Michael was doing, and then develop a deep line of unease down between his eyes.

“A lot’s changed,” was all that Michael said. He started to the door, hesitated, and then added, “You know, I know you’re not my commanding officer any longer, but it still seems weird to just go.”

“Fuck you, you know that I don’t run this place like a slave market,” Neal said. He didn’t seem to care in the slightest maybe that was the real reason for Michael to be reluctant to exit without leave, and neither did he seem to give a shit that Michael was projecting “don’t touch me” in nearly tangible waves. He pulled Michael into a hug as hard as the one that Syesha had bestowed on him earlier, saying, “Whatever happened, it happened. I’m still glad that you’re alive.” Michael’s hands twitched by his sides, but unlike with Syesha, he did not raise them to embrace Neal back.

End Part Eighteen

Continue to Part Eighteen