A/N: I really enjoy torture/recovery fics and I've never gotten to write one before, so (with a bit too much encouragement from some friends) here we go! Warnings for torture (mostly only physical), but this is a recovery fic so *most* of it isn't too explicit.
Also, a special thanks to Nightfoot for betaing this! Her help was really appreciated.
Chapter One: Just a Dream
It hurt. Damn, it hurt. As he stirred, his whole body hurt and suffering filled him until it overflowed and escaped through his lips as a soft whimper. It hurt, no matter how much he was used to the pain. He didn't care about silencing himself, so a low, dry moan followed the whimper. He couldn't focus on anything else for a few moments, only the blood rushing through his ears and the pain that had taken root throughout his body.
The majority of his pain centered around his right side; his arm and leg, specifically. They both throbbed and when he tried to move (dimly he heard something as he attempted, but it was overwhelmed), the pain became even worse. There were also some assorted pains, here and there, but they didn't hurt as much as they usually did, oddly enough. The absolute worst of the pain, though, was on his face. In his eyes. Focusing on it made it intensify; the terrible throbbing turned into thousands of sharp needles piercing his eyes, and it made him want to scream. The gears of his mind turned and he remembered the last time he was conscious. Through the haze of diluted memories, he recalled a person raising something—what had that been?—and then a gap in his memories, followed by agony, horrible and raw. He had screamed until his throat ached, because it had hurt so fucking much, and then… nothing.
Flynn heard something, again. A voice. Something, someone, crying out. It wasn't him screaming and shouting for once this confused him. It was probably just a dream, his mind reasoned. His dreams usually didn't hurt this bad, but reality had always hurt worse than this, and he had no explanation to what he was feeling, nor what he was hearing. He was too busy thinking about whether or not he was dreaming to hear even more voices around , something touched his right arm.
Flynn's left hand wasn't restrained. Clearly, a mistake on his captors' part. He jerked his fist in their direction, and a burst of adrenaline hid the pain that shot up his right arm when he put weight on it. Something caught his left wrist with ease. Flynn pulled, struggling against whoever had grabbed him. They had a hand on his chest, now, and were pushing him slowly back down.
"No! No, not again, don't—don't fucking touch me!" Flynn shouted at the top of his lungs.
A soft voice replied, but he wasn't listening.
Something pricked his arm while it was held exposed, and terror rose, constricting his chest like a serpent. He breathed shallowly, quickly, as he was held in place. He could still hear the voices—how many were there?—but he didn't really register what they were saying. Actually, now that he tried to focus, it was getting harder every second. It was like he was trying to listen to them from underwater, and it was only getting worse.
"What... what did...?" he mumbled, but he couldn't get an answer. His arm had been released, he numbly noticed, but it now felt like it weighed fifty pounds and he could barely move it at all. His breathing had relaxed, too, and it was getting hard to think about how terrified he was. Well, it was getting hard to think at all. Everything slowly dissolved, slipping away from his mind's fingertips into the void of unconsciousness.
When he slowly fluttered back to the waking world, he didn't hurt. Not as bad, at least. He knew the pain was there, but it was distant, and the only source of it that was strong enough to make him hiss in pain was in his eyes. It still felt like someone had driven a white-hot knife right into his eyeballs, but it wasn't as intense and horrible as before. In fact, it was enough that he could think, or more accurately, wonder.
He was blindfolded. He knew this because he could feel something around his eyes, but he wondered why he was, because even when he opened his eyes (which caused a spike in the pain that nearly caused him to cry out again) he couldn't see any red light filtering through the fabric, which must mean he was in a dim or dark room. He was laying on a bed or a mattress of some sort, and it was soft , more soft than anything he'd slept on in the past... however long it had been.
He found it was very difficult to focus on what he was trying to think about. Every now and again, his mind would slip and either wonder about something entirely different, or he wouldn't think at all before remembering he was supposed to be doing something. It was like his thoughts were swimming through syrup. Syrup. He was hungry. He could really go for something to eat...
"Flynn!"
The call of his name snapped him out of his thoughts and he jolted. His response to that was to whine softly. Though his pain was limited, his brain was fuzzy and he didn't see a reason to muffle his whines about the brief, deep twinge of pain.
"I'm sorry, Flynn. I didn't mean to scare you. Can you hear me?"
That voice. That voice. He knew that voice! It was Estellise. Lady Estellise, the princess, it was her lovely, lilting voice. He couldn't mistake that voice for anyone else's. But... why was she here? Why could she talk to him? Had his tormentors captured her, as well?
You're dreaming, his mind lazily supplied. Obviously.
"Es...tell...ise?"
"Flynn!" Lady Estellise's voice was something between happy and excited, an emotion Flynn's mind couldn't currently comprehend with any degree of success. "Oh, I'm so glad you're awake... I've been so worried about you."
"Nnh," he moaned. "Where...?"
A dream, said his mind again.
"The Zaphias Royal Hospital," she said. "You were brought here a few days ago, and gosh, you were in such bad condition. We didn't know if you were going to make it... but you're gonna be ok. I know it."
Flynn was silent for a few moments. He tried to gather his thoughts. The royal hospital... he'd heard of it, maybe, but it was a distant memory. If he was in a hospital, though, he was certain Estellise couldn't see. What with how uniform the darkness was in his eyes, he doubted there was any light in the room at all. Why wouldn't there be light in the room? He was a hospital. (See? It doesn't make sense. You're dreaming.) Yes, that must be it. He was dreaming. Perhaps, though, Estellise had a logical explanation for why all the lights were off.
Maybe she also had answers for the attack the last time he'd been awake. He couldn't quite remember it, though. Trying to focus on that particular set of events gave him nothing but a head full of white noise and more questions.
"Flynn?"
Oh, right, he'd been talking to Estellise. Dream-Estellise, he was sure. He'd been trying to ask her something, because she probably knew a lot more than he did. He spoke up. "Why... am I wearing a blindfold?" His voice was soft and there was an edge of muted concern to it.
Estellise was quiet for a moment, but Flynn barely noticed her silence. "Oh, that."
Why did she sound so disheartened? Had he done something wrong? Was that not the right question? His heart skipped a beat in fear.
"It's not a blindfold. They're... bandages. Over your eyes."
Bandages. That did make sense. He was in a hospital, after all. He forgot his earlier question about why the room was so dark; his fuzzy mind accepted 'bandages over your eyes' as a good answer and moved on. There was also the question of why he was here, and what had happened the previous... well, whenever he'd been awake before.
"What happened...?"
Estellise was silent again.
"Lady... Estell...Estell-i..." That name was simply too hard for his cotton-headed brain to manage to say at the moment. "Lady... Estelle? What's wrong?"
"Sorry, I just... do you want me to explain it all?"
It was a yes or no question, but Flynn said, "Ok." Estelle apparently took this for confirmation, and began.
"Ok, well... you had to go to Heliord for some... knight business. I think you were going there to oversee some peace contracts with the Union and also to inspect the knights posted in the city. You were supposed to only be there for a week, and then you'd come back to Zaphias. But... on your third day there, you were kidnapped."
Dimly, Flynn registered that he knew this information. He didn't feel like gathering the energy to speak and say that he knew it, though, so he let Estelle tell the rest of the story.
"The Knights were... really panicked after you disappeared, 'cause no one saw where you went. You had just... disappeared. We were all really scared, and I sent a letter to Yuri. He and some of the knights in your brigade started looking for you. They looked all over, but they couldn't find any leads or anything and... we were so worried . We were sure you'd been killed. The search was getting kind of hopeless in the last week... it'd been three weeks since you had been kidnapped. And... and then we got a letter, an anonymous letter, and it said you were in Ghasfarost. It said it was signed by a traitor... and we knew it could be a trap or... or something, but we were scared and desperate and thought you were dead.
"So Yuri and Brave Vesperia and some of your knights went. They arrived at Ghasfarost and... Yuri found you in the basement. There wasn't anyone there—"
"There wasn't?" Flynn didn't mean to interrupt, but his mind had shouted at him. Why? What had that been about?
"...No," Estelle quietly said. "Whoever had kidnapped you... they ran, I think. There wasn't anyone there, and most of their stuff was gone, too. I'm sorry, Flynn."
His head turned, 'staring' in her direction for a few vital seconds. Realization dawned on him at once, and he swallowed hard, so hard his throat ached, and a visceral kind of fear ran through his veins. "I remember." His voice was dry, filled with a terrified sort of coldness. His fingers twitched and his left hand's fingertips dug into the sheets. Pain shot up his hand as the skin where his nails used to be brushed the fabric, irritated by the texture. He felt, however, the need to ground himself before he lost his thoughts to the clouds in his brain.
"I remember them," he choked. "The kidnappers. They were knights." This seemed to awaken that animalistic terror even further. "They were knights. I can't—E-Estelle, they were knights, they were damned knights—they worked right under me and I didn't even know they planned to do—to do th- this!"
"Flynn, it's ok, you're safe—"
Flynn ignored her words. "They're going to find me. Th-they're going to be here, I know it. I-I know—I kn- know it—" His hand suddenly left the mattress and raised to run through his hair. His fingers knotted into the blond locks and a desperate noise left him, and he continued to stammer on. "It's going to be even worse! Estelle, you have to go!" He reached a new volume, a new pitch. "You need to get out of there. They're going to—they're going to catch you—"
"Flynn, please calm down —" He could hear the distress in her voice.
"They're going to catch you and—and they're—they're going to kill you... please... please..."
He quieted into shallow, quick breaths and a noise like a sob left his mouth. His shoulders were shaking but he didn't really feel much pain from it, numbed by another shot of adrenaline and the previous numbness of his body. He mumbled something under his breath before he fell completely silent other than his labored breaths. Estelle was waiting for him to calm, but she hadn't touched him, hadn't spoken again yet. He could barely think anymore, though. He felt dizzy and confused and a bit light-headed, and he shuddered with fear.
"Fl-Flynn, please. I'm ok. You're safe," she murmured finally.
"Mmm." He didn't believe it. "M-mhm. Safe." It was a nice word. He wished it was true. "I'm... I-I'm safe." Saying it aloud helped calm him down and reassure himself. His mind was half-gone, but he could say these words and they helped. "I'm safe." His breathing slowly, slowly evened out, and he forced himself to breathe deeply. "G-go... go on."
She was quiet and he was sure she was staring at him. With uncertainty, maybe, or... maybe she thought he was crazy. Messed up in the head. He kind of was, really. "Are you sure?"
"...Please."
"Um... ok. There's not a whole lot much to tell after that, though. They found you and you weren't responding to anything, so they got you the best they could and you were in Heliord to get immediate aid... they took you here, afterwards, since this is the best place you could have gone. Plus, I helped heal you some. You woke up once yesterday, but... you were freaking out and you were trying to fight some of the nurses. They... had to sedate you."
He was sedated. Oh. That meant... he'd been put to sleep after trying to fight off the nurses, who he hadn't known were nurses. But sedated? Hell, it would be so, so easy for someone to make him helpless. Just a tiny pin prick and he would have no hope of fighting back against whoever wanted at him. He'd have no way of defending himself. It was truly terrifying, but he tried to even his breath before he panicked again.
"Then... that's about it, until you woke up just now."
Flynn nodded and tried his best to relax against the bed. His left hand lowered and pulled the thin hospital blankets a bit further over himself. He felt safer being covered, even if it was only marginally more than before, and inhaled deeply. "Ok. Yeah. I... sorry, I'm... I'm sorry." He felt bad for freaking out on her over the escaped knights. The paranoid thoughts still plagued his mind, but he did his best to keep them at bay.
"It's ok."
"So... how bad is it?"
Estelle paused for another beat. She sure did do that a lot, Flynn noticed. "Your injuries?"
"Mm-hmm."
"It's..." She sighed. "It's pretty bad. I healed what I could."
"How... how bad?" He might as well learn the sources of his pain, even if it was numbed. Maybe that would help him cope with it better when he could feel it. Hopefully it wouldn't overwhelm him so much like it had the first time. He wasn't eager to relive that.
He heard her draw in a long breath, and exhale it even slower as if she were preparing herself to tell him all that was wrong. Silence stretched between them. At length, she finally began to explain.
"You had a lot of cuts and scratches that I could heal up pretty well," she began. "Those were the least serious, since I could heal those pretty well. You had some deeper lacerations, but... they're gone now. Um... you had some burns, mostly on your neck and chest, and I healed them as much as I could, but there's only so much I can do for those. A couple of them are pretty severe but they should heal up fine as long as they don't get infected."
Infected. Oh, lovely; another problem that may arise. Another pain.
"You're missing fingernails, which... I can't help. I'm sorry. They also said you had a mild concussion... again, they're pretty sure you're going to be fine about that, but nurses have to keep checking up on you to make sure you're ok. You're also... pretty sick. You had an infection in some of the cuts, but they should clear up pretty well with some medicine."
It almost sounded like she were reciting it, like she were reading it off of a clipboard with a list of all his misfortunes. He briefly wondered why he'd asked Estelle to tell him all of this, anyway. It only made him feel more hopeless, more helpless.
"And you were dehydrated and malnourished. And... your right forearm was broken pretty badly. And right shin. It was in a similar condition." She fell silent for another stretch, and this concerned him, because she hadn't said anything about the most glaring issue right now for him: his eyes. She hadn't said anything about them, like she'd forgotten that they were covered in tight bandages and caused him pain every time he tried to move them. Estelle didn't say anything, so Flynn asked the question for her.
"What about... my eyes?"
She made a small, uncomfortable noise, and from the way it sounded, her head was turned away. She didn't speak and anxiety gripped his chest.
"What's wrong with them?" he repeated firmly, though worry fluttered in his stomach. How serious was it? She wouldn't be this quiet for nothing.
"I..." she murmured softly, hesitating. "It's... I-I'm sorry, Flynn. It's... really bad. It's really, really bad."
The anxiety that squeezed his chest hurt even worse. "What's wrong with them?" he repeated slowly, quietly, that low tone of terror in his voice never ceasing.
"You had... acid burns in your eyes. They damaged your eyes and skin around them... really, really bad. The doctors, they're... they said it... probably won't heal. That... they'll never heal completely."
Time stopped.
"What?" Flynn breathed.
He could hear the pain in Estelle's voice as she gave him the final explanation. "Flynn... you're blind."
He knew the answer before she had said it, but it still took him like gale force wind to a shrub. Blind. Blind. Completely, probably permanently, blind. Her words repeated in his head. Probably won't heal... will never heal completely. He wasn't going to be able to see? Even after he took off the bandages that pressed so tight against his temple they gave him a headache, he wouldn't be able to see?
His breathing came quick again. Blind. It was such a stupid, small word, and it was a word that was going to ruin his life.
No, some resurfaced part of his brain decided, a part desperate to rationalize why this simply couldn't be the case. He couldn't be blind. It's not. You're not blind.
(I'm not?) He needed confirmation. This couldn't be right. He couldn't be blind . That was a silly thought.
No. Remember? Remember? You're dreaming. You're just going to wake up back there. Back there; this isn't over. It's not over, you're not safe.
Somehow, he didn't care about waking up. All he cared about in the immediate time was that it was just a dream. His mind had caved under the last torture he'd had to endure, and he was dreaming, dreaming of being rescued and waking up in the hospital with one of his favorite people in the whole world. The blindness was just something weird about this dream. Dreams were always odd, after all. Anything could happen in a dream.
Nothing about this is real... you haven't been rescued. This isn't Estelle. This is just your mind. You're sleeping.
Some rational part of his head screamed that dreams didn't hurt as much as this had, but he ignored it. A dream... Oh! Maybe, this could be explained by... the last time he was "conscious", someone had pinned him down and injected him with some sort of... drug, or something, so he would have such interesting dreams. Or something like that. That's why this dream didn't hurt so badly!
He wasn't sure. But one thing he was certainly sure of was that this was a dream.
There was no way this could happen.
He relaxed against the bed and took a deep breath, feeling a sudden calm. Estelle was quiet, and then he smiled.
"Flynn...?"
He wasn't talking to her anymore, though. He didn't need to humour a dream. A falsity, a lie, a hallucination his weary mind had come with to try to cope with his circumstances. He took a deep breath and kept smiling. "I wonder how long it will last," he said softly.
"The blindness? It—"
"No," he interrupted. "That's not true. None of... this is. This is a dream. You're a dream, Estelle." His words were slurring slightly. Now why was that? Another odd side effect of this strange reality, perhaps. "I wonder how long it will last. This dream. Before I... have to go back there."
"Flynn, what? No! You're not in a dream, this is real..."
Her words were taking on the same fuzzy effect that he remembered dimly from earlier, the voices as they held him pinned (he noticed vaguely that this softness to her voice had been present the whole time, but now it reached new levels). He felt so good, so relaxed, because he'd accepted his coming fate and was just waiting for all of this to end. Perhaps he would enjoy the rest of the dream, but enjoying it meant not letting this dream-Estelle convince him that he'd lost his vision, his arm, his leg... so much about himself.
"You can't convince me that. You can't..." Flynn yawned, "...prove that..."
She said something else, a sentence, but he could only make out a few words. He heard his name, and he mumbled something in return, something like a half-conscious protest of her trying to convince him so hard that this was not a dream. It was getting harder and harder to focus on his thoughts, but he didn't have that many more now. He just wondered what his tormentors were going to try on him next.
The slight smile on his lips, dark and humourless, didn't leave until he had fallen completely into unconsciousness.
