abit_unsettlin

The first time he stole food from a place where people gathered, he was caught around the arm by a man in black. He remembered the word for black because someone had shouted it at him and because he heard it in the songs that she sung. He understood that his hair was as black as the night sky but he did not know what the word meant.

The man took his arm and took the food from his hand and shook it at him, and made sounds. Shaped sounds with intent and thought behind them. He knew the patterns that some of those sounds made, words like 'brother' and 'holy' but he didn't understand. All he could do was stare at the man in dark robes with his eyes wide and uncomprehending.

The man sighed. He squeezed his arm twice, the way he himself had checked an animal for meat to see if it was fat enough to eat. Was this man planning to eat him?

No, this man was planning to drag him. Into the building. Larger than any building he had been in before, with bells that rang loud above his head. He didn't want to go. People cooked things in buildings this large, they cooked and they would cook and eat him. He resisted, but not very well. He was too hungry for that.

The man in the dark robes dragged him in despite his best efforts to escape. It wouldn't have been difficult. The other man was as tall and broad as the shack in which he'd spent his childhood, and though he was a grown man he was still young and terrified. His knowledge of fighting was limited to getting out of the way of incoming blows, mostly by the expedient of running. He hadn't the first idea what to do to break the hold on his arm. And he expected to be beaten, abused or thrown into the pot.

No such thing was forthcoming. He was sat on a hard bench behind rows and rows of people whose heads turned to stared at him, and under whose varied gazes he shrunk down into himself. The man seemed about to admonish him in some way, but he crawled under the bench to hide. Under the bench was dark. He was alone, and safer.

All around him there was the drone of words he didn't know, voices and people were talking about things he couldn't picture in his mind. The words strung together like stars in the sky or beads on a string (though he didn't know what those were, either) but they had no meaning for him. They were sounds. Beautiful sounds. Sounds like she had made when he was tired or as they ate or when she mended his clothing. When they were out picking leaves to eat and drink. One of the songs he knew. One of those, she had sung. His mouth moved to make the words but he did not give them breath to remind the people that he was there.

Then there was the sound of many feet on the packed dirt floor, and there were voices less pleasing but louder, and many of them. He put his hands over his ears and wanted it to go away.

It did, in time.

Then he was alone. With the cool dirt packed solid and clean, more clean than he was used to. A solid plank of wood over his back, enclosed and safe in darkness as long as he didn't look over his shoulder or turn to his left. He closed his eyes so that he couldn’t look and tried to make it all go away.

He woke because the other side of the bed was empty, but he didn't get out of bed until the indentation in the sheets had cooled and he could smooth his hand over the soft Egyptian cotton sheets and not feel where the other had been. Then he levered himself out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom.

Something clattered downstairs. Guy was up, making breakfast, or getting things out to make breakfast. Man was fussier than any wife in the kitchen. Didn't let him near his pots and pans, didn't let him make anything but the simplest of cooked meals, but that was all right. He ate better if he let the werewolf cook, anyway.

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[from this]

This time, he doesn't drive Dean to a hotel room. This time, he drives him outside the city, to a hill. Probably privately owned land but he doesn't exactly give a shit. It's obscure. It's out of the way.

It's private.

He isn't sure what Dean expects of him, tonight. He thinks he's made it clear enough that he isn't putting out for the kid, so if Dean starts trying to get into his pants he'll have another few thoughts coming his way. But he isn't sure what else the kid expects of him. Hell, he isn't sure why he's doing this. He's never been entirely sure.

Creature of whimsy, he is. Something of a wild creature. Not entirely human. But Dean should know that by now.

Every so often Murphy asks him something. It's only natural; there's a lot of history there. He doesn't even know how old he is, but he's damn old. Only natural for people to get curious.

That, he hadn't expected. That kind of question seemed natural once she'd asked it, sure, but he hadn't expected it. Didn't know what to say to it. There were reasons he didn't mingle among high society, lots of them. Most of them stemming from the fact that he was an uncouth bastard, didn't know when to keep his mouth shut sometimes, had no problem saying things that would make a sailor blush.

The deep-down reasons were like that, only worse. The deep-down reasons were because he was an uncouth bastard who didn't know how to behave among people, who spent the first fifty, a hundred years or so of his life faking it. His best friend had been literally raised by wolves and he was still more civilized than the man Murphy knew as Alan Donnelly. That man didn't even have a name of his own. Hadn't learned to speak until he was full grown. Barely knew what the difference was between one human being and another, man or woman, apart from looks. Which, hell, birds all looked different from one another, he knew that. Didn't know why.

He damn well hadn't known the difference between a rich man, a poor man, beggar, thief. Between a priest or a crafter or a trader or any of that sort of thing. Those were the kinds of imposed ideas that came with being raised among people. He'd been raised by one woman, crazy woman. Never told him anything of his life. Never told him anything at all.

He's grown up some since then. Grown up a lot. Hundreds of years of living will do that to you, now it's impossible to tell he ever grew up rough at all. Looking at him, hell, it's impossible to tell he ain't quite human. But he remembers. He remembers real well; it's the difference between him and everyone else, and he's never managed to get over that.

He went straight over to Murphy's, still wondering what the hell was up with the kid, still roiling around inside from what her friend had given him. Still missing Guy harder than he had when the wolf had actually left. He just wanted his friend around to talk to him, make things be normal again. Not like he was going to call Guy up and say so. That really would be being a pussy.

Still. He finished his cigarette in the car on the way over, clothes thrown on, windows down. Music off, still. Distracted, still. Goddammit. His thoughts were running around in circles and he hated that, he hated when the noise inside his head was greater than the noise out.

He pulled up, saw the smoke rising. Smiled slightly as he walked up to the door. Fire in the fireplace, huh. And whiskey waiting. Now he really was glad he hadn't done anything with the kid. Some girls were worth the trouble, worth keeping.

He still wasn't too sure what he was going to do with this kid, but he was a firm believer in the idea that actions had consequences. And if the kid was going to call him out and give him a put up or shut up ultimatum, well. No skin off his cock to put up.

He grabbed the boy by the fabric of his sleeve and dragged him out to the parking lot, to an old but well cared for blood red Trans Am, a relic of the early 80s. Couple pop cans in the front passenger seat, but remarkably clean nonetheless. And smelling of tobacco smoke. Not cheap cartons of cigarettes, real tobacco.

"Get in," he told the kid as he walked around to the driver's side.

6. She was laughing. He liked it when she laughed. He liked to look at her when she laughed, all jiggling above him with soft flesh over curvy muscle. She really was a damn fine woman, and somehow she'd agreed to come along with the likes of him. Not that he was looking too closely at it. Not when he had better things to look at.

"Now what are you smiling at, old man?"

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1. He laid her to rest under the rock.

After three days he had decided she wasn't going to get back up again, like the beast they had had once, and some of the birds and beasts he had seen. He laid her in a shallow place on the earth and piled rocks over her like she done with the beast, and then he pulled the house down around her. This place would not let him live. It had barely been enough for the both of them.

He chose a direction at random and started walking. After two days of eating nothing but berries and leaves he came across his first village.

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The light was blinding when they brought him out. Something like an approximation of daylight; he wondered if he was in the world again or still in the Never Never, as they called it these days. Or whatever half-realm he'd been dragged to.

They'd knocked him out again, and when he woke up he still couldn't move, limbs weak and unresponsive as though he was still asleep. They dressed him in something that felt homegrown, homespun. Soft, but handmade. Spun from real sheep or real cotton plants, spun by human hands (or non-human, but the point was, not by machines) and woven on looms. Cut, sewn. Not tailored. Parts of it hung loose and it was tight across the chest and shoulders; built for someone not as broad as he was. Someone slightly taller, too. He wondered if that was just what they had on hand or if they'd meant this for someone else. He wondered what color it was. All he could see was blinding whiteness.

His vision adjusted slowly. They came out to trees standing in the sky, a sky that was kind of blue but darkening fast. Night was falling. An unnatural night, judging by how fast and the lack of stars coming up, the lack of a moon. Even if it was a new moon, he'd seen night fall often enough to know what it looked like out of doors in a wooded area, and this wasn't it. They were still in the fae lands.

Goddammit, Guy, where are you.

He was being carried by something big. He was starting to be able to move his hands, too, twitch his fingers, toes. Not enough to be able to do anything, but it was more than he had a while ago. He was being carried on some kind of make-shift stretcher. By two big ... things.

And they weren't the only ones. He was surrounded by fae, most of them smaller and goblinoid, chattering in a language he didn't understand, the few words he could make out sounding mostly like "Mine! Mine!" or "Yes!" or "Now!" One of them sounded something like "Blood." One of them like "Fight." He wasn't sure what they were talking about. There were others. A couple humanoid-looking ones, and one that might have been anything in a cloak and cowl. And from the looks of the pillars looming in front of him they were taking him to a stone table.

He'd heard stories of stone tables. They're not good. They're used for sacrifices and nothing else, and the only one here who's trussed up like a Christmas turkey is him. He tries to struggle. The best he can manage is opening and closing his hands.

They slide him off the stretcher and onto the stone table and he lays there, one leg kinked up under his body, unable to shift. His head is rolled to one side and he can see the little goblin things pacing back and forth along the side of the table. One of them glared at him and looked like it was going to spit on his face. The other cuffed it upside the head.

The sky went dark just before the droning and chanting started. He still didn't know what was going on but he could feel the power seething along his skin, like ants crawling. He didn't feel the first cut but he felt the body-heated liquid running down his arm and it didn't take him long to realize what was happening. They'd opened up his wrist. They'd opened up both wrists. He was going to bleed out if they'd done it the right way, but he couldn't tell, there was no sensation. Just the heat and the liquid dripping down and the impending sensation that at this point he would likely be dead by the time anyone got to him.

He was clean again. Sort of. He'd been scrubbed down by someone who had only a vague notion what they were doing, cleared of all the surface dirt but his hair was still greasy, and there was still dirt under his fingernails. It was like someone had turned a hose on him, and he didn't remember it.

They'd done it when they'd left the food, while he'd been unconscious. That question of how exactly they were going to feed him and if they intended to at all had been answered by his abruptly feeling woozy and tipping over, followed an indeterminate amount of time later by waking up with a metallic taste in his mouth and a plate of bland on top of bland food in front of him. They did that four more times, which would have told him something if he had any idea what schedule the feedings were taking place on. Twice daily, three times daily. Once a day probably wasn't it, he wasn't hungry enough by the time the food came around. Then again, time was going wonky here. He was going wonky. He was going stir crazy.

He knew the number of paces across the room lengthwise, widthwise, and diagonally. He knew the number of paces to every pillar from every side of the room. He had dug deep into the dirt with his hands and nails until he wore his fingertips red and hit what felt like stone. It wasn't worth digging any further. He'd probably be dead before he got anywhere with it.

What did he know so far? Not much. He knew this was magic. He knew they wanted him alive for something, they were feeding him and cleaning him like livestock. He knew ... they had minions shaped like goats. Beyond that... nothing.

So much for dream-Murphy's helpful advice. Though the rest of her stay...

No, that wasn't true. She hadn't given him any reason to think he could get out on his own, probably because he couldn't. But she'd reminded him that he had friends. And he had faith in his friends. Friend. Guy would move heaven, earth, and all the realms in between to get him back. And he would do the same for the wolf.

Guy might bitch and moan endlessly about it, but he would. They'd gotten each other out of war zones, prison colonies on islands, even the Crusades once, or was it twice. They'd gotten each other into and out of more trouble than he could conveniently think of; he could probably spend the rest of the time until he was taken out and killed remembering all the times they'd saved each other's sorry asses. I'm sorry, man. I'm sorry to put you through this. If he managed to get killed before the wolf got there.

"You're not going to die," he muttered. He'd given up trying not to talk to himself by now. "Dumbass." He would have tried to say it in Guy's voice but their voices didn't match up and it didn't much matter anyway. It was the kind of thing Guy would have said.

Poor Murph. She was caught up in their crazy life now, and she didn't have to be. Shouldn't be. They should talk about that when he got back. If he got back.

He paced up and down the cell some more. Leaned against the wall, cool against his skin, and banged his head slowly on the wall. This ... walls closing in, no doors, no contact with anyone, nothing to do but pace and thing and pace some more, sleep and eat and he was going mad. Hallucinations. Nightmares when they knocked him out. Thoughts going in circles ranging from the suicidally maudlin to the homicidally deranged. The urge to scrabble his fingers against the stone walls was driving him mad. He wanted out. He wanted to feel the wind on his skin, see the moon over his hands, hear the sounds of the world again. Not this, not ... not this.

He wanted out. He wanted out, out, "I want out!" Roaring. Banging on the wall with his fists. "Let me out you pig-fucking sons of bitches!" He wasn't even sure whether he was speaking English or Irish or French or what. "Let me out!"

Silence. Of course there was silence. He could beat his fists bloody against the walls, the stone wouldn't care. He bashed his fists and then he bashed his head and then he dropped to the floor, crying, shaking, cold and unaware of just how bad he was because there was no one there to show him if only in the reflection of his madness in their eyes.

He'd managed to wrench his shoulder out of the socket for absolutely no-goddamn-thing. His wrists were bloody and raw and the rope stung when it rubbed against them. He had planted his face in the dirt twice. His jaw hurt where his chin had slammed into the ground.

"Sonofabitch," he muttered, staying still and quiet in place while he tried to think of what else he could do. These were damn good knots. And the beer he'd had not long ago was making its presence felt in a big way. This wasn't the best position to be in when a guy had to piss. "Stupid sons of bitches..." The walls were smooth. The floor was smooth, there was nothing to cut the ropes on.

"What the hell do you want from me?!"

He wanted to pace. He should have been pacing, up and down, up and down. He would have been pacing if he hadn't been fucking hogtied and dropped on the ground like a sack of potatoes. He started to struggle, feeling the ropes cut into his wrists further, his ankles, falling over sideways and writhing in the dirt. His shoulder ached and moved in ways he knew to be unnatural.

In another few minutes he felt it before he smelled it. No matter how many times he'd been thrown into jails, into pits, pissed himself or worse from the conditions he was kept in, it just wasn't something he'd gotten used to. Now there was that mixed with the blood and sweat and filth, and even he was starting to get sick of the smell. Hell, he was getting sick of the smell, the position, the...

... rope. The rope was finally slick enough to give way.

He struggled further. There was a trick to the way he struggled, there was an angle in it, he knew which way he had to pull to slip the rope off his wrists and when he finally fell over with one wrist free all he could do was lie there and pant. Breathe.

The other wrist came free with much less effort, and then he could twist around and undo his ankles. He tried to stand, almost toppled, remembered as he dropped to his knees that his muscles needed time to come back to life. Dammit. The second time he stood it was leaning against the wall, and shaky.

"All right," he muttered. "Let's see what I got to work with."

Not much, as it turned out. The room had no door as far as he could tell, though it was big. Really big, the size almost of a high school gymnasium, a rented out ballroom for a discount bargain bin wedding. The walls were stone, the floor hard-packed dirt all around. There were, there seemed to be four pillars of petrified wood or stone towards the middle of the room, but other than that there was nothing. No sign of how he got in there. No sign of how he could out. No light. No food. No water, which was now starting to be a concern.

No idea how he had gotten in there. No idea how he was going to get out. Fucking magic. He didn't have magic, centuries of Guy calling him fairy boy hadn't told him what he was, he had no magic and therefore he had no way out of here, and no idea if they were going to feed him or what they were going do to with him or even if they were going to do anything with him ever again, whoever they were in the first place.

For the first time in a very long time, he was starting to feel the edges of panic.

He was cold when he woke up. Cold and damp and naked. His hands were bound to his ankles behind him, and he was on his knees. He'd been in situations like this before, but usually they involved beautiful women and more warmth. And sex afterwards.

In a moment he drew breath to ask if someone was there, and decided against it. He didn't hear anyone. Couldn't see anyone, not that he could see much of anythign anyway, but if someone had wanted their presence to be known they'd make their presence known. Evidently they preferred to keep quiet.

Fucking goat-demon-things. Whatever the hell they'd been.

Time to take stock. He couldn't have been in this position very long, his muscles weren't cramped. His wrists weren't chafed. He wasn't as cold as he would have been if he'd been exposed this long, and it was cold and wet enough that it'd probably make him pretty sick if he stayed out here for hours, days on end. He had no idea where his clothes were. Maybe they'd been taken away on account of how he could have had a weapon in them. He didn't remember being stripped or searched. And he didn't feel bruised or injured; his body had healed. Quick, even for him.

What the hell...

He chuckled after a second as one thought occurred to him, why they might do all this. "Buddy, you got yourself just about the ugliest sex slave this side of the country," he said nonchalantely to thin and black air. Not that he believed it. People kidnapped pretty girls to be sex-slaves, not grumpy old men. His virtue, or what ragged bits were left of it, were probably intact.

No one answered the bait. There was no sound, not even the distant dripping of water. Whatever was causing the dampness in the air was stagnant. It didn't smell stagnant. Flowing up, then, instead of dripping down. He needed to focus. With the cold, most likely he was underground, it had that kind of dirt and metals tang to it. The floor was packed dirt with something even more solid underneath. He scuffed one knee against the ground, almost overbalanced and fell over. There were no walls against his back. There had to be walls somewhere, but he couldn't find them.

"All right..." he murmured. "All right, you bastards. Let's see how long you can keep this up." He'd gotten out of worse situations before.

Slowly, he started to rub his wrists against the rope. Enough stretch, and enough blood to make his wrists slick, and he could pop his shoulder and get a hand free. And then... well. Then they'd just have to see.

It was an ordinary afternoon. He'd got done early, headed back to the hotel, sprawled out after checking the lack of messages (clearly his friend was still pissed at him) and stared at the ceiling for a second. Then he called Murphy, just to bother her.

"I'm busy," she told him, once she knew it was him.

He chuckled at her through the phone. Her tone wasn't as annoyed as it would have been if she'd been really busy, he could push it a little. "That what we're calling it now?"

She snorted. "That doesn't work nearly as well when you're not leering. What do you want, Alan?" All right, so maybe she really was busy.

"Nothin." He was just bored. She knew what he got like when he was bored, probably, by now. "Hey, what are you doing Saturday?"

"Working. As usual. Why?"

"I was just thinking, new Terminator movie's opening up soon, could go grab some popcorn, sneak in a couple beers, hit ..." he stopped. Something wasn't right. There had been someone walking by the hall outside his door a second ago. Someone with big boots. And then the footsteps had stopped.

"Hit... what? Or who?" Her voice held the dry amusement of someone who knew him well enough to know that, but he wasn't paying all that much attention.

"Call you..." was as much as he got out before the door slammed in.

It was a goat. It was a giant goat. Walking on its legs. It was a fucking goat or something that looked as close enough as made no never mind and it made him stop and just stare at it with the expression of are you out of your fucking mind long enough for it to charge him and scoop him up over its shoulder. Like he'd done... Never mind.

"FUCKER," he shouted, and simultaneously kneed it in what he hoped was the nose and punched it in the ear.

It was startled enough to drop him, which was all he'd had in mind. He scrambled out of the way, reaching for the knife he'd never remembered to put back on his belt sheath after the airplane. Fucking airplanes. The goat couldn't be faster, it was so damn big, it'd have to go around...

... over. It went over the damn bed, slammed into him with what felt like a fucking freight train, and he felt a couple of ribs crack. Suddenly it hurt to breathe. He liked breathing.

"Mother fucker..." He stopped scrambling for the knife and reached out to grab the nearest thing to hand, which was his entire damn bag. There wasn't anything hard in there to hit the thing with. He kicked it in the knee instead, what looked like the knee, kicked it hard in the ankle and it went sprawling. Top-heavy bastard. It went sprawling across his legs, though, and now he'd have to pull his legs out from under it and there was another one in the damn doorway. This one small enough to actually fit in the doorway. "Oh hell no, not tw..."

That was as far as he got before pain exploded inside his head and everything went dark.

1. Age sixteen

He laid her to rest under the rock.

After three days he had decided she wasn't going to get back up again, like the beast they had had once, and some of the birds and beasts he had seen. He laid her in a shallow place on the earth and piled rocks over her like she done with the beast, and then he pulled the house down around her. This place would not let him live. It had barely been enough for the both of them.

He chose a direction at random and started walking. After two days of eating nothing but berries and leaves he came across his first village.

( Read more... )

He was pissed. Possibly more pissed than he would have been had he been the one shot. But it was Murphy who'd been shot. Coming out because of a fight he'd started. If he started fights, he was supposed to be the one who got shot. Not her.

His fingers creaked the leather of his sleeve, fingertips clutching at the edges. Back to the bars. Back to beating the tables, asking questions. Cops, yeah, they were looking for cops, a cop had been shot. The police didn't like it when their people got shot for no goddamn reason. Hell, he didn't like it when his people got shot for no goddamn reason. He just didn't have much in the way of people. Usually girls.

Murphy was his girl. There'd be hell to pay.

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