AN: This is the second in a short series of one-shots that adds a backstory to Ulfric Stormcloak and his character in my story "Hero by Mistake". I will be posting the one-shots separately due to their varied ratings. This particular one-shot briefly narrates Ulfric's time as a captive of the Thalmor during the Great War.
CONTENT WARNING: Mature readers only. This story narrates in detail natural bodily functions, captivity (prisoner of war), restraint, physical and psychological torture, sadism, female-on-male rape, and rape by object. Please do not read beyond this note if you are sensitive to these topics.
The Elf's Toy
His wrists were raw from rubbing against rusted, iron shackles. His torso, back, arm and leg muscles ached from rarely changing position, something that the cold, dank air of the dungeon did nothing to help. He was naked, stripped of his soiled loincloth long ago. The lack of clothing allowed him to relieve himself hands-free from where he stood. Every morning, he was awakened by bucketful of cold, stale water that was meant to be his bath. Until then, he was forced to stand in whatever filth his weakened and underfed body produced.
After the bucket-bath came the force-feeding. A curved metal pipe the width of a finger was slid down his throat with the aid of some flower-scented oil. The warm gunge that entered him against his will smelled like fish and boiled carrots. It bloated his abdomen until the evening, when he had his single, daily bowel movement which remained around his feet until his morning bucket-bath. He had long since become accustomed to the stench of his own feces.
The other prisoners weren't force fed. They behaved. Sometimes in the evenings he smelled baked cheesy potatoes and venison. He wondered if this was what the weak were rewarded with. Platefuls and forks. Beds and waste buckets. All for the price of information. He didn't allow himself to fantasize about such luxuries.
They tried, his captors. They tried to get information out of him, but he knew better. His mentors had trained him well. Patience, patience... He knew his captors would soon realize his tenacity was unending.
After his forced meal - the only one he received for the day - came the actual torture. The force-feeding, while unpleasant, at least relieved the void in his stomach, so he didn't really mind the procedure. The knowledge that his captors had to work that much harder to keep him alive gave him a small amount of pleasure. A small amount of revenge.
A small victory.
Torture sessions consisted mainly of being nearly drowned in a giant tub of water over which he was suspended, lowered, and raised by a series of chains. He hadn't grown up near the coast, nor by any swimmable rivers, so he didn't know how to drown properly. Any sailor, he knew, was taught this. He tried, however, to inhale the liquid when he was lowered, but his captors sucked it out of him every time. His captors, a bunch of mages, used magic to heal his burning lungs, and dry the water out of them.
On special occasions - he wasn't sure how often, and had lost count how many times this had occurred - his interrogator took it upon herself to violate him in ways some men might actually fantasize about (though perhaps never admit to doing so). He barely felt the lashings, at least after the first few times. He couldn't know, since he couldn't feel or see himself, but he thought perhaps scar tissue had formed on his back and buttocks to defend his body against the leather whip. Those wounds weren't healed as thoroughly.
The most painful was perhaps the branding, particularly because different parts of the body were more sensitive than others. His back, buttocks and thighs were quite muscular and could withstand more pain. But held in a T position either standing or laid on a table, his more sensitive areas were easily accessible by red-hot implements of varying size and shape. On her birthday, a fact she so proudly announced when she entered the torture chamber, his interrogator branded her name onto his left side, along his ribs, with a malleable coil of some sort of metal. She showed him the metal as she shaped each letter of her name before heating it over the fire.
She later healed it away. It was their little secret.
Indeed, most of his scars had faded over the months, leaving little evidence for all that he had endured. He was told that this was intentional - that even should he escape, no one would believe him. He was merely a prisoner of war, the same as the other men in the facility. None of them had scars.
On one very special occasion, his interrogator had apparently grown tired of his stubbornness and decided the usual torture tactics would not work for him. He was special. Strong, prideful, clever. He knew that his captors knew something about him was worth torturing him for, and the longer he held out, the more satisfactory his small victories were. But on this very special day, he questioned himself for the first time how much longer he could hold out. He actually asked himself, "When will I finally break?"
He was blindfolded and turned away from her. He heard her walking around, stoking the fire, choosing an iron tool. He braced himself as he waited for his neck, or armpit, or perhaps the bottoms of his feet to be singed black. When that didn't happen, when he had to wait, and wait and wait for the pain, this was how they broke him. Unexpected. New.
Unbearable.
This special occasion proved so successful, it happened countless more times, but never on a schedule. Each day he expected it, and almost every day, it didn't happen. Sometimes it happened more than once a day. Sometimes the session lasted but a moment, and yet others, hours.
This was how they broke him.
He was never told why, why his interrogator changed her method of torture. It just happened. He was blindfolded, but he knew it was her. His interrogator. She always smelled the same. Without notice or reason, one day, her leather-gloved hand casually found itself wrapped around his manhood, pulling and stroking methodically until he was painfully aroused. Release never came, however. He heard her walk out of the chamber and close and lock the door. That was it. He stood there, chained to a wooden X, blindfolded and cock throbbing from the stimulation.
Hours perhaps, he wasn't sure, passed until his interrogator returned. She repeated the procedure in the same way. Stroke. Stroke. He could do nothing to avoid an erection. While he cursed at the woman, she continued her movements until he nearly peaked. But again, she left him there in his sorry state, perhaps for a few more hours until she returned a third time and repeated the procedure. Nothing changed. After she left, he was taken back to his cell.
The next day in the torture chamber, he smelled the familiar burning irons and knew he was about to be branded again. He prayed silently that she would not burn off his manhood.
He had never known the touch of a woman until his intimate encounters with his interrogator. He had however experienced some pleasure-filled nights as a young soldier, exploring what his own body had to offer from receiving another man inside of him as well as entering another. They did it out of physical or emotional need, most of them, even the married ones. There was nothing inherently wrong about it, not in the north anyway, though some of the southerners were greatly offended by just the thought of two men coupling.
Where the greatest pleasure is felt, so too is the greatest pain. When the red-hot iron entered him, he knew that his interrogator understood this. Perhaps she even knew he had enjoyed sex with men in his young life. The rape was not violent - she did not want him dead - all it took was a gentle insertion to bring forth a scream so guttural, so complete, he sometimes lost consciousness.
This form of torture only had one constant - the level of pain. The variation came from the duration, or number of subsequent insertions, or whether or not his interrogator would manually stimulate his manhood while the rape occurred.
Every time the rod was removed from him, his interrogator healed him with her magic. Sometimes, the session would start again immediately after he was healed, and a freshly-heated rod was slid ever-so-gently into his anus. A couple of times, he vomited up his daily meal, which brought on a series of smacks across the face from his interrogator.
The day they broke him, he had just received his splash bath when he heard a familiar voice. His interrogator walked into his dungeon, something she had never done before. The moment she walked in, he became noticeably aroused. His shackled hands and nakedness prevented the event from being hidden, much to his interrogator's amusement. Her laughter infuriated him. The cackling that escaped her mouth incessantly that morning gnawed at his pride, swallowed his sanity, and shat out his convictions. He felt his face burn with his own boiling blood.
He knew he shouldn't use his talent in this way. Up until that moment, he had kept it as deeply hidden as his identity. He had walked away from that life, but had still sworn to his mentors to never abuse his power. He took his oath seriously, and had successfully fought back the urge to call upon this power countless times.
As he watched his interrogator hold herself tight against her side-splitting laughter, he felt his insides screaming to be unleashed. The power begged to be set free, avenge his humiliation, and seek revenge on those that had wronged him.
The power spoke to him. He felt the words in his heart, and soon in his lungs. Finally, in a whisper, the power he had studied up until the day he left to join the army found their freedom. Three simple words that took seconds to utter but years to fully understand.
Fus.
Ro.
Dah.
The whisper was not heard but the effect was ear-piercing, even to him. His interrogator flew from his dungeon door and into the circular guard's room. Her flailing body took several other captors with her. The sound that resulted from the empowered words ricocheted off the quaking stone walls in an echo.
He heard the other prisoners scream or laugh, or shout unintelligible words. He grinned when he saw that one of the impacted captors had been impaled upon the sword of another. His interrogator, however, rose unscathed. Her pride, however, had been knocked down a peg. Her slack jaw told him she did not expect such verbal onslaught from a teenager, and did not know what to make of it. She stood there, in the circular guard's room, a safe distance from his chained self.
He laughed.
Small victories.