Arcade woke slowly to a red fog. He closed his eyes and groped for the most painful spot on his head. He felt a lump just above his left ear, large enough to suggest that had it landed two inches forward on his temple, he wouldn't have woken at all. He blinked a few times and the fog dispersed to reveal Honor's father bending over him in the faint predawn light. "Are you all right?" James asked.

Arcade felt his head again, then looked himself over. Blood from the wound had already dried on his clothes, but that seemed to be his only injury. He tried to rise. "Where's Benny? God, I promised Honor-" He gripped James's forearms as the older man tried to restrain him.

"Right here." Arcade shifted where he sat to see Benny and Boone leaning against a length of cyclone fencing. "Just waiting for you to wake up and join the clambake." Benny's tone was light, but the tightness around his eyes betrayed his fear. Arcade quickly took in the rest of their surroundings. Lengths of fencing divided a larger area into smaller pens, all on bare dirt. All the pens were occupied- men, women, children. They were capture pens. Slave pens. Honor had insisted upon leaving the fort that Arcade, like everyone else in the party, abandon his usual clothing and dress like a typical wastelander. At the time it had seemed paranoid. Now he was grateful. The Legion didn't need to know they had captured educated men, doctors.

They just as surely didn't need to know they had the "king" of New Vegas, and the key to the "queen's" absolute compliance. He shuddered to think what horrors the Legion could wreak with Honor as their unwilling champion.

"She'll find us," Benny said softly, as if reading Arcade's thoughts. "We won't be here long."

"And where exactly is here?"

"Nowhere," Boone replied. "We're dead in the middle of the wasteland. There's no reason to come looking here."

"Could've used a different turn of phrase..." Arcade crawled over to Benny's side- he didn't quite feel steady enough to stand just yet- and took his wrist to check his pulse. "Are you all right? They got you pretty good, too."

"I'm fine," he replied, but he didn't pull away. Arcade counted- a strong pulse, but rapid- and noted the cold sweat beneath his fingers. Benny's pulse jumped wildly, and Arcade looked up to find a quartet of Legion soldiers approaching. "Stay cool," Benny murmured, and Arcade nodded

One of the Legionaries was detailing the list of prisoners in one of the pens to a man who, while physically unassuming, was a superior officer judging by his regalia. The tally paused for a moment as the soldier looked their way. "Ah, the newest captures are awake."

The officer strolled their way around the fence line. Their pen complex was surrounded by tents; Arcade couldn't guess how many soldiers camped here, but besides these four, a good two dozen of the bastards roamed the area, making haste to move aside if the officer came near them. The man paused outside their cage. He wasn't particularly tall, or particularly handsome, or particularly anything. Utterly forgettable except for the fact that he apparently held the power of life and death over them.

He looked down at them as if they were something a mole rat had just coughed up onto his boot. "Three able bodies...what about the elderly man?"

One of his entourage leaned forward. "He speaks like he has an education."

"Hm." He turned to nod at the soldier "Four for one, then? Not a bad effort."

Arcade frowned, but didn't dare ask for clarification. He was afraid he'd find out soon enough as it was.

The officer looked at each of them in turn, but stopped when he got to Benny. Arcade felt his shoulders knot, as if he could hope to do anything should they recognize just whom they had. The officer knelt and narrowed his eyes. "Who are you?"

"Apparently," Benny replied, slurring a little, "I'm a slave of the great and mighty Legion."

"Your name."

"Isn't that the place of my master?" Benny cocked his head, an unsettling gleam in his eye- Arcade thought he was actually enjoying baiting their captors, the lunatic. "To tell me who I am now?"

"You have the right non-answers." The officer raised one hand, and one of the soldiers gestured a few more their way. "Let me help you. I know who you are. Benjamin, leader of the Chairmen, formerly the Boot Riders, head of New Vegas, co-conspirator in the murder of the great Caesar. I was there when Lucius laid bare your secrets for him." He licked his lips and smiled. "I was there when he laid bare your spine."

Benny twitched, but said nothing.

"I left Fortification Hill the morning before the great man was murdered. By that- woman. And you." The other guards had reached the pens now, and the officer gestured them forward. They began unlocking the gate. "You are going to pay for that crime in kind. And while you're dying, you are going to tell me how to get to the cunt who helped you kill him."

Arcade had never seen Benny flinch, let alone look terrified; he did now. But he jutted out his chin and his voice was steady as they hauled him to his feet. "You might as well kill me and get it over with, 'cause I'll never squeal on her, dig?"

They started to shove him out of the pen. Arcade leaned forward to jump the nearest one but Boone wrested him back. Benny looked over his shoulder as they pushed him through the gate. "Don't be a sap. This hand is dealt. Wait until the Lady's on your side."

They locked the gate behind them, and all Arcade could do was hope Honor found them in the next few minutes...otherwise, he would fail the most serious promise he'd ever given.

~#~

Normally Benny prided himself on his collection and poise; very little broke his cool or his stride. But there was nothing normal about the goddamned Legion. He was terrified, not just of the oncoming pain (though that was dire enough), but that he wouldn't die soon enough to keep from giving them any useful information, even by accident. He knew well enough from experience with the Boot Riders, the wasteland, and the Legion that the right leverage- the right torture- could set a person talking, sometimes without them even knowing it. He'd heard plenty of NCR soldiers, rangers, some of them, raving on their crosses to their Legion captors- names, dates, troop movements, passwords. By that point, most of them were in a state of delirium that likely robbed them of the awareness that they were even talking: their bodies and what was still functioning of their brains were just looking for the thing that would make the pain stop. If the point of the torture was information, once the consciousness could no longer guard it, the subconscious began spewing it out in good measure.

Anything to make the pain stop.

He'd given up the Strip, New Vegas, and the Chairmen to do just that. It had saved his life, sort of, but he'd made that trade solely to make the pain go away. He'd suspected Caesar would still kill him, but he'd been willing to roll the dice on that one.

But tell them how to kill Honor?

If this jackass was telling the truth- and he certainly seemed to be- he knew what had ultimately broken Benny, and he knew everything leading up to it. Bile rose in his throat- he couldn't do it. He couldn't take this again. Not again. He started to shake in his captors' hands, and they laughed at him, tossing insults at him that he didn't hear. He was too lost reliving the memory of an incision made in his side, in the feeling of a hand plunging into his gut, the sight of his skin bulging and contorting as Lucius felt around inside of him.

That one had killed him, too.

His vision of the real world swam and he stumbled. One of them punched him in the small of his back. He hardly noticed.

They dragged him to the largest tent in the compound, the officer's, presumably, and within minutes had set a number of iron rods into the ground in an impromptu framework. Concerted kicks to his kneecaps brought him to the ground. Manacles pinned his ankles to the earth behind him while they wrenched his arms up and back along a crossbar, his wrists chained at either end. The contraption, a simple frame, held his arms stretched taut just above and behind his shoulder line and useless for leverage- in effect, he was crucified on his knees. His knees barely brushed the ground, so as he struggled- and he knew he would, would not be able to stop himself no matter how useless it was- he would wear away the dirt until his shoulders bore all his weight. It was cruel, and already painful, and they hadn't even started yet.

And even after Honor's heroic efforts and self-sacrifice to protect him from Caesar, he had still, in essence, wound up on a cross.

He began laughing at the irony. It struck him as a bad sign, but he let himself do it, anyway. It seemed to unsettle his captors, and even if it signified that his mind was about to crack altogether, so what, really? So long as it bothered them- and locked up the information they wanted like Honor's lost memory- it was probably worth it.