So... This... I just... I don't even have words other than I'm sorry...
Warnings: Please read at the risk of your own feels... This scene is rather... intense to say the least.
Ludwig's muscles were cramped from the awkward position he was forced to stay in. So far, Ivan had yet to reappear, something he was grateful for, though he didn't dare think he'd get off that easy. Even though he was alone more now than ever before, the feeling of crushing loneliness and abandonment had lifted. He suspected it had something to do with all the nations that had tried to rescue his brother for him. He didn't have long to marvel at the realization as Ivan entered the room with a dark, sinister grin. Indignant cerulean eyes glared at the Russian, his entire frame radiating defiance and hostility at the sight of the cold hearted man wearing full SS uniform, identifiable as one of his own. Ludwig was so filled with rage at Ivan's mockery that he strained against his shackles trapping his wrists, fury and crushing grief alight in his blue eyes. "You have no right to mein uniform!" Came his snarl, echoing around the prison chamber and reverberating off the sinister walls.
"You be being such bad prisoner. Hold your tongue, da?" Ivan growled, lashing out with the crop in his hand. It struck the German harshly across his cheek, instantly swelling and leaving a dark red welt. "I should be killing you... A murderer deserves his own murder, da? It is good thing for you that it is no fun killing you off so easily... Or maybe not so good. Kol kol kol." His deep chuckle was unnerving and before Ludwig could stop it, a shudder ran down his spine. "We will be having fun." He said with a grin, lashing out at Ludwig's face again with the riding crop.
Ludwig glared at Ivan, but he held his tongue, knowing it wouldn't get him anywhere. Arschloch! Ficking commie bastard! I agreed to stay, not to be tortured and beaten! He thought furiously, struggling to keep his mouth shut as he strained against his shackles, wanting nothing more than to beat the smirk from the Russian man's face.
Ivan narrowed his eyes after a moment, regarding his German prisoner critically. "What is being with you Germans and your pride?" He snapped, exasperated. "It won't be mattering... I saw blood stains on your uniform... How any of them are being from murdered Italians?" He goaded, wanting to get a rise out of Ludwig as he inspected the sleeves of the foreign uniform and ran gloved fingers over the blood splotches he found there. "How are you supposing your Feliciano felt about the murdering of his people? You think it was hurting him?"
"Halt die ficking klappe!" Ludwig snarled furiously, straining against his shackles again, the chains that looped down from the roof chattering and trembling with his terrible anger. "I will kill you!"
"Kol kol kol" Ivan chuckled darkly, pulling down a wicked looking, curved knife from the wall. The blade was steal, splattered with dried blood from prisoners before. It was a good half a meter long, curved back over the handle and razor sharp, deadly looking. The more Ludwig looked at it, the further his heart dropped in sickening dread. "You are looking nervous Luddy. We haven't even started!" Ivan said, voice dripping with sickly sweet malice as he ran the very tip of his blade down Ludwig's stomach, starting at the hollow of his throat and running down between his abdominal muscles, ending just above his waistline. The blade cut hungrily into Ludwig's flesh, cutting from him like butter and leaving a glistening line of scarlet to trail behind it. A hiss of pain escaped from the German's throat as the hot, sticky blood rolled down him to stain his waistband crimson.
"I have a plan for you, Luddy. One cut, for every one hundred thousand lives you are being responsible for dying. German,Soviet, Jew, American. Anyone." Ivan giggled, licking Ludwig's blood from his knife with a sadistic gleam in his eyes.
"Sounds like a plan, if you are intending on killing me. There were over sixty million casualties in that war." Ludwig spat vehemently. The long, shallow cut stung, though he had been through much worse.
"One down. Five hundred and ninety-nine more to go then." Ivan said with a dark giggle before slipping behind Ludwig with his knife and began to trace the planes of the German's back with the tip of his knife, digging into his skin a little deeper with each new cut he made, until he was pressing nearly twenty centimeters of the wicked blade into Ludwig. Blood quickly pooled around the chained up German, his back covered in the hot, crimson liquid.
The pain he felt wasn't nearly as intense as it had been when he had endured his whipping a few years prior, but that didn't mean it wasn't bad. It was more a creeping agony than a sudden, piercing one.. The pain was tolerable until the Russian moved back in front of him, continuing his torment but slicing up the planes and contours of his stomach and chest. He gritted his teeth against the pain, a low groan rising from deep inside him.
Ivan grinned in an innocent style at Ludwig's trembling and his pained noises that he clearly tried to hold back. "What is the matter? Is it hurting? Kol kol kol." He returned the knife affectionately to the wall and returned to his German prisoner, where he took out a bottle of vodka from his pocket and dumped the entire contents over Ludwig's blonde haired head.
The vodka seeped into Ludwig's wounds, liquid fire burning through the weeping lacerations that covered his upper body. He growled in agony, causing his Russian torturer to grin down at him. "It is burning, da?" Ivan giggled, though his dark smirk quickly turned into a sneer of contempt as the only response he received was a snarl. "You know what else burns?" He whispered, drawing close to Ludwig's ear and fishing something from his pocket.
Ludwig heard a soft click and suddenly his scream of unimaginable agony split the air as flames licked across the German's ravaged stomach. He screamed again, the pain doubling as the hungry tongues scorched through the vodka still on his skin and caressed his skin with starved, burning fingers. The pain was worse than anything he had ever felt before and he could stop the tears from falling down his cheeks. Defeated, and wanting nothing more than to get the tongues of fire off of his skin, he looked up at Ivan wit begging, pleading eyes. "Ivan! M-Mein Gott! Put it out! Bitte! Bitte put it out." He begged, straining hard enough against the shackles around his wrists that the cold metal bit into his wrists, cutting them open gleefully.
Ivan wore a sadistic grin and casually pulled a metal tipped whip from inside his borrowed jacket. "Nyet." He purred before unwinding it and striking Ludwig with all is strength across his stomach. Back. Face. Chest. All the while the flames cackled and consumed Ludwig's strong frame.
""Bitte!" He screamed, the sound reverberating around the room, echoing and mocking it's owner. He tried hard to hold back his screams of agony, but his already tattered control shattered as a new horror set in. The flames licked along his skin, burning, blistering, ravaging, but they also licked along the metal band around his stomach, heating it up until it turned a cherry red, the skin melting around the band, grotesque and torturous. "B-Bitte! Gott BITTE!" He half sobbed, half screamed, as he burned alive.
It wasn't until the band had heated up that Ivan moved to put out the fire, not wanting the German's skin to blacken. He pulled a chain the looped down from the wall and water, sweet, relieving water rained down on Ludwig's skin, sizzling in it's attempts to quench the flames. Steam mixed with smoke, blood and water with charred bits of flesh. The German was covered in patches of fire damaged skin, lacerations, abrasions, blisters and a sickening band of blistered, melted flesh, hidden still behind the slowly cooling metal band.
Ludwig hung by his wrists, unable to stand under his own power, his legs wouldn't support his broken body. The pain was too intense to block out and tears streamed down his face. "Arschloch..." He rasped, blue eyes glaring up at the Russian with all the defiance he could muster.
Ivan's booming laughter filled the room, dark and sinister. "You brought this on yourself, da? I didn't force you to stay Ludwig. You will be suffering for what you did to my Baltics and my Soviets. My Russians. Kol kol kol." He laughed again, dark and sinister. He produced a second bottle of vodka and doused the smoldering German with it, a dark sadism in his violet eyes. With a toothy grin, he clicked the lighter again and flame blazed across Ludwig's skin a second time.
Ludwig could feel another scream bubbling to his lips, splitting the smoke filled air. Flames licked across his skin a second time, burning off the vodka as quickly as it had the first time and catching his skin. His pants had been scorched the first time, blackening in places. His chest blistered, his stomach and back as well. The fire kissed every part of him, spreading it's damaging affect quickly. His lungs were filling with smoke and the room smelled of his molten flesh, similar to the stench of a Nazi death camp. Suddenly, it all made sense in Ludwig's mind. Each new torture Ivan presented him. "I know what you are doing!" Ludwig shouted agony and fury lacing through his words.
Ivan, surprisingly, put out the flames immediately and fixed his prisoner with curious, critical amethyst eyes. "Oh? And what is it that I am doing, Fatherland?" He asked with an amused smile, holding the whip loosely in one, black leather gloved hand, a silent reminder not to offend him.
Ludwig panted for a second, breath ragged and raspy as he fought back the pain that only intensified when the flames were quenched once more. "You... You are tormenting me. Torturing me... In all the same ways my soldiers had to the people they captured and imprisoned. All the ways they had to your people. The people they murdered. The people my soldiers murdered." He said, growing more enraged with each statement.
Ivan grinned, looking impressed despite himself. He honestly hadn't expected the German to get his plans so quickly. "Very good Ludwig. Very good/" He chuckled. "That is what I be planning to do. You are needing to know how it feels to be fearing for your life every day, da? We should play lat- Oh." The Russian had turned away from Ludwig, heading towards the door, but he turned back around to look at the German with a bright grin. "I was forgetting... Kol kol kol." He laughed.
A chilling fear was gripping Ludwig's spine as Ivan turned around, fearing the bright happiness in Ivan's tone as he remembered some new torture. The broad shouldered Russian walked over to the wall and pulled down a black machine of some sort, small enough to fit in his hand. Ludwig thrashed weakly, knowing exactly what the small machine was. In most cases, a tattoo gun wasn't something that would frighten people, though somehow the unoffending machine with its thick needle and bottle of navy blue ink was the most sickening thing Ivan could have pulled out. With a dark smile, the flaxen haired, sadistic purple eyed man turned to Ludwig and drew closer to him.
Ludwig tried his hardest to shy away from the needled gun, a blister bursting and bleeding as it rubbed against the metal band, now cool, that was around his stomach. He didn't want to be branded like this. Marked as something impure, traitorous, tainted. He didn't want to be marked for things deep down he already knew about himself. He had the blood of millions staining him from the inside. A visual reminder of that was more painful than any amount of physical torment.
Ivan forced Ludwig's left arm to him, carelessly gouging the metal shackles into his already mutilated wrist. He shoved the needle into the skin on the German's forearm, drawing out a hiss of pain from him. A hiss of pain and beads of blood as he slowly tattooed the code, "Eh29659" In neat handwriting. "You know what that number is meaning, da?" Ivan's voice asked hi, sounding distant and echoing as Ludwig tried to block out the world. The man had his back to his prisoner as he returned the machine to the wall.
"I was one of the ones who had to develop the system... Ja. "EH" Erziehungshaftlinge. Used to label people who didn't do a good enough job in their labors... Why would you choose that for me?" Ludwig asked in a voice dead of any infliction. He didn't really care, but if he somehow appealed to the Russian, maybe he'd be more likely to leave him alone. He tried to keep his bright blue eyes from the dark blue number etched in his skin, but for some reason he couldn't look away.
"As a nation, you failed to protect your people. I will be reeducating you in how to be doing that, da?" Russia said, returning to Ludwig's side with yet another object in his hand. It was a rectangular piece of fabric, an industrial grey color. He produced a spool of black thread and a needle as he came to stand in front of Ludwig. Humming softly, Ivan fixed the fabric onto Ludwig's bare chest, making quick work of sewing the fabric to him.
Ludwig looked down at the patch and felt bile rise in his throat. On the offending cloth, an inverted pink triangle stared him in the face, a little black "G" in the center. The shape preceded the same number that had been etched into his arm. A small pink bar stretched across the top, above the triangle, labeling him as not only a gay man, but a repeating offender as well. Why Ivan had chosen to point this out, Ludwig didn't know. He was just about at his limits though. His head spun, his vision blurred in places, blacked out in others, and his heart beat sporadically, first fast and hard, then slow and faint. He let go, slumping completely, kept upright only by the shackles and the metal band. The last thing he was aware of by the time he finally passed out was a freezing cold tear rolling down his cheek.
So... How many of you hate me now? *raises my own hand* Ja... Me too. Thing's get better... Eventually. I'm sorry for that... I'd rather you guys not flame me for this chapter, but if you feel you must I understand. Until Chapter 10
