Ah, I gave in. ASpotofBother took up this meme with such an interesting twist I couldn't resist. I know most song memes include the song on which they were based, but her version gave me an idea. The chapters submitted here will be snippets inspired by particular songs, not long enough to be their own stories, not short enough for me to say "screw it" and put it in the digital recycling.
Rating is for this chapter. It's not explicit, per se, I think I was actually pretty stealthy about it - but it still feels very dark and dirty to me, so I gave it the high rating. Sorry kids!
Chapter One: Dirty Deeds. Inspired initially by the AC/DC song Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap but I was actually unable to find that song, so it was written to Done Wrong by Ani DiFranco.
Really, I don't know what to make of this one. Enjoy if you can! (there are probably plotholes).
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Impenetrable darkness crowded the closet like a thousand slithering fingers groping for light and life and freedom. Shut away in the stuffy air surrounded by the scents of musty shelves, dusty apparatuses and the comforts of a hard, cluttered floor and not a bare wall to rest his back but the flat, wooden door, is a teenage boy no longer wrinkling his nose at the scent of bottled bleach and soiled mops.
They don't keep him swaddled in shadow so he'll forget the color of his hair or the pigment of his skin. Blond with blue eyes settled like gemstones in a gently curving, boyish face for eighteen, he's a toy with no price tag, no inventory catalogue from which he'll be missed. They keep him for the paleness of his skin, the pleasantness of his shape when he's cleaned up and finely dressed and the satisfaction of renewed dirtiness and nudity.
Clean and safe, dirty and abused, they lock the closet door behind them only when he's on the other side. From the bed he can see its contents exposed to the lurid golden light of poor bulbs in the hall fixture. Naked, exposed, existing for the dark pleasures of its owners.
So dark inside until laid bare in the artificial light scraping away the edges of shadow and night.
"Let's take a consolation prize, then. No one will miss him."
Light travels in slivers between the closed closet door and the worn frame of the threshold. Sounds that don't mock him, that don't moan and chuckle in the midst of his unwilling submission—
"Hold him down for me – he's feisty! Didn't you drug him?"
--pass under the door and through its dark wood, teaching him what their taunts and hard screws cannot. Teaching him the boundaries of their prison and therefore his own. They captured him the way lab rats capture and hoard cheese. Both, in the end, are prisoners.
Daily they crowd into the hall, sometimes as a unit, sometimes individually at intervals. They speak of putting up struggles and fighting to the bitter end and clean shots and messes that will anger someone named Tseng. Their tongues swear at stains that are still dark blots on the ruined carpet when they pull him from the closet to ease their woes and stress. One, a more intense man with tenor tendencies to his voice and a playful demeanor, talks specifically of Rude and Rude's injuries and occasional progress in his healing. The second, a laid back man with a teasing lilt in his voice, one just deeper than his companion's, and a bitch of a temper, answers these things with non-committal grunts and generalized inquiry. On jovial nights, their banter is genuine, their bond is brotherly and their pleasures sated in their pet boy are whimsical, almost casual and tolerable. On rough nights, when their voices return coarse and angry and raspy, when struggles are put up and they're beyond joking that concrete shoes sometimes just won't sink, when the blood is so thick on the floor it squelches beneath their boots, the boy remembers they are his wardens. They still reek of blood when they take him – it's still smeared on their faces and hands. These nights there's no laughter, no teasing. It's all about the hardest fuck, the loudest scream and how much blood nails can draw from biceps and shoulders.
Hard nights and they drag him back to the closet and let him fall to the floor of it, swearing at all the blood on the walls that came off their coats while fumbling for the keys to his cage. He spends the night or two of intermission naked, dirty and cold. The food gets narrow and intermittent, and the analogy begs update: the lab rats are now the scientists, impounded by their talents and loyalties, and he is the lab rat, hoarding cheese and crackers and stale bread.
Tonight the first – called Reno – came back before the second – Axel – and wordlessly began the ritual even with the sun still sinking into the red nest of the horizon. The boy, beginning to feel having eighteen years holds no meaning to the passage of time as it slides coldly by, unmeasured, loses himself just a moment – they only bring him out at night, careful to only allow exposure to city lights and the chill of midnight city sounds, as though to starve him of natural things.
The setting sun and the robust colors of rich twilight are as water to a man dying of heat and thirst in the desert. Riches he cannot cradle in his fingers or carry in his arms or pockets, he is left to drink it in with his eyes. Hesitation is enough, and he is shoved roughly to the bed and the ritual begins anew, painted gold-toned crimson. He knows three things as he withdraws from his abused physical form behind his usual wall of nothingness: Reno is early and alone and absolutely reeking of alcohol in ways he has not smelled on his tormentors before. Their body odors are never quite the same – he can only identify "drunk" and "blazed" – but the pungent stench now is of both, with a generous mix of colognes and perfumes that wage war all over his skin.
Reno's closet key is on the bedside table, next to the lube that they rarely use. It glimmers in the spectacular glow of the dying daylight like a beacon of hope he has never seen before. And he hasn't, but somehow he knows it's the key – remembers the sound it made striking the wood as Reno dug for the handcuffs he never found. Now the man's swearing, pulling out not yet sated and falling over the side of the bed to begin a torrent of vomiting.
Leaning over the side of the bed, he watches briefly as his captor empties his guts, marveling at the tangle of track marks up the arms that shake so badly trying to keep him from drowning in his bile. Then he looks up, eyes wild, and snaps for the pet to roll over and play dead, you little shit.
Complying, he reaches during the next heave for the key still glittering and glowing in ethereal and paling gold and traps it in darkness, locking it in the contrasting heat of his mouth and tucking it beneath his tongue.
They never kiss him when they fuck him, anyway. Well, Reno never does. Axel does it for laughs.
Reno never gets up off the floor and when the boy finally gets the guts to take a peek, the man is either dead or unconscious, neither facedown in his putrid and cooling stomach contents nor rising to reprimand the disobedience. Emboldened by the pathetic reduction of his warden, he rises stiffly from the bed and slips back into the closet, shutting and locking the door to complete the picture of the uninvolved pet, the forgotten lab rat locked in a cage.
He's still naked and searching for a good hiding spot for Reno's key when the front door strikes the hour on his clock – the time is now Axel is Home.
If it is possible, he sounds worse off than Reno did. Raucous thumps lead to the living room where a distinct thump is followed by a cry of pain, to the kitchen where the faucet begins to run and a cupboard is opened and pint glass after pint glass is fumbled to a loss on the tiles en route to the sink. Defeat rings in the sudden silence of the falling water. More swearing defines shifting between rooms, occasional and loud thumps betraying a definite lack of equilibrium as Axel moves aimlessly through the house. The bedroom door opens and remains so, the beds crammed into the space lit by the same light pressing beneath the boy's closet door. Then it closes again, and Axel's footsteps are just a bit steadier, his muttering a bit more sober.
You'd think he'd be angry, furious with his partner for his carelessness. But his footsteps, however uneven, get him back to the kitchen. More noise, more broken glass and one final thump.
For an agonizingly long time, there is silence. Still safe in darkness, he eats enough of his stored food to fill his surprised belly. It takes less than he remembers. The rest of it is returned to the cache against him being recaptured.
Raising the lowest shelf in the darkest corner from its support, he slides the key from the narrow strip of wood pinning it beneath the shelf and resettles the board, determined to be a silent as a mouse.
He's good at it, even now after all this time being cooped up in a cage, away from the city he knew and stole from so well.
A rat is what Reno first called him, and a rat is what he is – a scavenging orphan banded with other scavenging orphans refining a trade designed to benefit best those who practice it with the most skill and the least loyalty to anyone.
He would not be missed, and had not been missed, certainly.
Not even by these men who abuse him so well.
If silence was all that stood between him and absolute freedom, so be it. He could be silent. He could be already gone, a soundless echo of what had already come to pass.
With a familiar burst, his five senses rise to the challenge, heightening to the adrenaline seeping into his veins.
He has touched the door handle many times, but never to open it successfully. Inserting the key, he turns the knob and the sacred act is done – the hinges comply and swing silently outward.
The kitchen is nearest to the closet door, the threshold opening directly in front of him revealing the blinding touch of artificial light to burn his dark-accustomed eyes. Squinting, he searches for shapes and freezes abruptly, eye to eye with Axel where he sits against the far wall where a dining table might have been, clutching an enormous bottle of booze and little coherent thought.
His warden doesn't stand a chance, stupid with the effects of the alcohol and whatever else coiled in his stomach and waiting to escape, to slide past the threshold of his mouth the way the boy stood now, one bare foot on the carpet of forbidden territory and no man's land stretching like acres, like millimeters, between him and the one man left to stop him.
Deafened by silence, deadened by fear, he can only stare. Axel breaks the silence with a sloshing swig of the bottle's contents and a rumbling belch. He fixes again his eyes on the escaping prisoner, and a frigid stillness falls again, blanketing them in silence. The boy gives a shiver. The man with the booze and the bloodstains on his shirt and skin slouches further against the wall, curling in on himself. Tears slide down his cheeks, smearing the blood there, and he's laughing. A rich laugh emitting dishonestly from a curling mouth beneath sad, hollow eyes.
He never thought he'd want to retreat back into the closet based on anything but fear. But the man before him, created by the world outside that created orphans and hunger and backstabbing and survival of the fittest, gives his mind all the reason it needs to lock that door from the inside.
It surprises him to find he's turning back toward his safe, dark cell only to be interrupted by Axel's familiar voice.
"'m Axel. Who're you, anyway?"
He turns, the hair before his eyes is no memory – it's blond, evidence that his name still means him. "Axel. I'm Roxas."
"Roxas." He licks his lips, and the boy has neither the impression of anticipation nor sexual hunger. Just dry, chapped, blood-stained lips. "You wanna drink before you go?"
Confused, he meets the man's eyes again. "You're not going to stop me?"
Beneath those green eyes, Axel's smirk is terrifying. "We're not gonna be here much longer."
"Why not?"
Axel takes another swig. "We've been replaced. And now our replacements are coming for us. Alive, dead, I don't know, but we won't be here." He held out the bottle. "So drink to my health, eh? Come on, it'll warm your belly."
He's got nothing to lose, and neither do I. Gingerly avoiding the shattered fragments of beer glasses and liquor bottles, Roxas narrowed the gap between them until the closet door was a lonely sight across the room, a sliver of darkness gaping into the world of distilled light. Settling next to Axel with his back against the wall, Roxas took the bottle when it was offered and poured a couple of swallows down his throat, handing it back when the burn overwhelmed him.
"That's better," Axel approved, taking another generous swig of his own. "You want some clothes?"
"Why are you helping me?" Roxas demanded, finally unnerved by the friendliness exhibited by the man whose single purpose had once seemed to be pleasure taken in another's pain and helplessness. Cheeks still streaked by tears, Axel lifts his head toward the ceiling.
"I don't know. It doesn't really matter to me. Fun while it lasted, history now that it's over, you know? Maybe…." He paused, turning words over in his head and taking another swallow. "Maybe a gorgeous fuck like you has a better future. Maybe you're the one life outside all their bullshit that'll draw more breaths than I will. I should kill you, but you'll just do the usual thing. You'll cry, or you'll cuss or hit or scream – and then you'll get real quiet. Then the floor'll get wet. And after a really long time, you'll get smelly. It all ends the same. Maybe it's good we've been replaced. I don't know if I could do it anymore anyway."
Roxas frowned, processing the information as well as he could. "You're… an assassin?"
"Nothing so glorious. I do the dirty work – and I do it almost for free. Reno and I work for the same rich fuckholes, and they paired us off when Reno's partner got capped. He's the real assassin. I'm just a dirty murderer – you know, the kind that does it for the trip. But now I'm bored, you know? It's just as well they want something new. Even death would be a good change. Then… maybe…" He curled further in on himself, tears falling anew. "Maybe I'd get quiet too… Maybe all those dead screams'd get quiet too…"
He didn't sob. Eerily still, he clutched his face in one hand until the water falling down his cheeks slowed to a halt once more.
"You don't… want to kill anymore?"
Axel didn't look up. "No. Should probably kill Reno to spite 'em – they didn't order his death, just mine. He's talented, and they'd feel that before they got me."
Roxas snared the bottle for another drink. "But you're not going to do it?"
"Nope. I'm a pretty big pussy, huh?"
"Cowards live to see another day."
Sidelong, Axel gave him a very deliberate appraisal. "You insu…insini…hinting at something, kid?"
Shrugging with more casualness than he felt, Roxas took another drink from the bottle before passing it back. "You used lube most of the time. I feel like I owe you."
Axel gave a series of barking laughs, unaccompanied by tears, giving way to true chuckles as he settled back down to conversation. "And what would you return that generosity with?"
"A bargain."
"Name it, street rat. This sounds interesting."
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Dawn grayed the world in a dim imitation of the dark pavement flashing by. The world blurred beyond the rain-streaked glass, the cool grey smoke from Axel's cigarette oddly warming as it drifted lazily up from the ashtray insert pulled free of the nook beneath the radio.
Axel had instructed him briefly on the driving of a car as he understood it, and Roxas had insisted on very specific details defining the difference between automatic and manual. Axel was not concise, just drunk, but managed a description Roxas could use. And he did use it, slipping no longer naked into a peaceful, honest residence to filch the keys from the hooks by the door. The vehicle wasn't expensive, but it had power locks and a remote control key, and that, according to Axel, meant it was an automatic transmission and wouldn't die under an unsure foot at every fucking stop light.
For Roxas, theft was child's play. They'd stolen more food than they'd bought two cities later, though what they did purchase came off of Reno's stolen credit card. Axel had emptied his private bank account against more dire situations.
Roxas's clothes had long disappeared, so still in Reno and Axel's humble abode Axel had unearthed some smaller clothes that fit him better than those of a lanky, full grown assassin on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Axel hadn't explained where the smaller clothing had come from, only that they now belonged to Roxas. They were unexpectedly clean, and a little small – as though a girl had been wearing boy's clothing, for Axel attested the previous owner had been around his age – but they were comfortable and his.
The blissful charcoal stillness of predawn began to give slowly to the brightening, unmistakable sunlit blue of true dawn, casting the world in fantastic tones of gold.
Eventually, the license plates would be hot and they'd have to find another anonymous car to steal.
Sooner or later, traveling an endless road would get boring. Roxas would have to uphold his end of the bargain.
With time, he'd have to find something more entertaining for them to do.
For the moment, he drove, heedless of his former tormentor curled in light sleep in the passenger seat. His body was no temple; this man was no threat now, but an ally. He'd get as far as he could on the ticket of an assassin's breakdown and loss of interest in murder.
And then he'd steal the key and unlock another door. It was as simple as that.