Author's Chapter Notes:
This part contains slash, violence, foul language, and descriptions of torture. The usual disclaimer applies. Anybody from Batman belongs to DC Comics, anybody I created, belongs to me.
OOO
She was almost terrified to turn around. She wasn't certain what sort of expression he would have on his face. He'd told her so much, in so short a time, she couldn't stand the thought of having him go cold again, clam up the way he had before. The distance between them would be unbearable. She wouldn't be able to stand it.
"I'm so sorry, Captain… I lost… track of the time…"
"I should be going," he says, softly, and she can barely restrain the cry of frustration as he begins to rise.
"No!" she squeaks out, hands reaching out for him before she snatches them back. "Don't stop," she whispers, painfully conscious of the glimmer of humor in his eye… she knows how that sounds… she doesn't care. "Please."
"Since you asked so sweetly," he whispers in return… she remembers when he said it before, knows that is exactly what he himself is picturing… for all of his agitation, his smile says he'll do it again if she likes, and she shivers, unable to hold his gaze. Her pen is trembling on the paper.
"Please continue, Captain…"
OOO
He'd heard so frequently from people that he was childish he'd ceased being irritated by it (being called crazy, now that one still stung), but they, the ones who'd told him he needed to grow the hell up, well… they'd never met THESE clowns.
"Oh my god," Brandon moaned. "I am so hungry! Why the hell are we still out here? Are you trying to kill us?"
"I'll kill you myself if you don't shut the fuck up," Owen whispered, sighting his rifle in on the target Jack had instructed to be set up one mile away. It should be a baby shot for him, but Jack knew the effect he could have on people. What was it that the one… what was his name…Benjamin… something or other…? He'd always been horrible with names. What had he said? That he had a presence among the men. He rather liked the notion, the weight of the word.
And he rather liked that Ladue, that was his name, smart kid. Had beaten his CO into a temporary coma after a particularly brutal day on the course, which was what had brought him here with these misfits.
A general contempt for authority wasn't a typical trait for a soldier… then again, he'd always hated the typical.
He'd been too much of an asset to lose, which meant probation with the dregs, just like Jack. He found it funny how often he could find a bit of himself in others, when they all claimed he was so different. Crazy, just because they couldn't catch up!
Jack dragged himself back to reality, shaking his head just a little as he leaned in close, could catch sight of a piece of the target through the scope…Owen never quite put his eye to it, left a bit of the shot to chance… Jack respected that.
"Bring it down just a little," he whispered… the rifle moved imperceptibly, finger tightening on the trigger in a way that involved the tensing of his entire arm, the shot ringing out with a clear crack, echoing off the hillside. He had time to straighten and bring the binoculars to his eyes to watch clearly before the wooden head splintered into a perfect shower, leaving the dummy dangling, quite effectively decapitated.
He clapped Owen on the shoulder, nodding in approval as he sank to one knee.
"Nice, now, the next one, mile and a half o—"
"What the hell is that?"
His face fell, lips pursed in irritation. "I am getting… thoroughly… tired of being interrupted, Private…" he said, in a high, thin whisper.
"He's gonna kill you," It was Ladue this time, sing-songing the line they tossed about habitually from some abhorrent excuse for a comedy that Jack had never bothered to watch. He was stretched lazily on top of a boulder, sunning himself as though he hadn't a care in the world, like he was at the beach and not in the middle of a war zone, shirt folded over his eyes.
"Yeah, well, you kill me if it'll get your rocks off, either way I'm getting tired of being hungry! We ran out of food a day and a half ago, and that's a fucking rabbit!"
Wentworth tipped his head slowly, just like he did everything slow, looking down the sight of his own Browning.
"That's… the scrawniest excuse for hare-flesh I ever saw…" he mumbled. He never bothered to raise his voice, never bothered to increase the speed of his words no matter how dire the situation. Jack hated the North Texas drawl and found the man to be a hazard to his health: he bored him to death.
"I don't care," Brandon was saying, stretching himself prostrate upon the ridge. That one was from Connecticut. Some Senator's punk kid, too much pull from Daddy for a dishonorable discharge, but no interest in his duties whatsoever. He was whiny, always looking for a way to piss someone off, hoping they might finally see fit to get rid of him. He pulled the trigger and Jack kicked him in the shoulder roughly.
"Ow! God dammit, I missed! What the hell was that for, Napier?"
The rabbit, already spooked by the first shot that rang out overhead, took off running at the second shot that buried in the ground in a small plume of dust, some twenty feet off target.
"You'll waste the meat," Jack hissed. "Hit it with that, and there won't be anything left to eat, you moron." He was digging inside his jacket, and Owen had already caught on.
"That's fifty yards and a moving target, come on, Cappy, can't nobody make that shot!" He was protesting right up until the moment Jack had the pistol free and aimed, firing his shot with the whistle of the silencer less than a second after lowering the Mark 25 into position.
Owen stared speechlessly as the rabbit let out a small screech, the small brown body spinning through the air before landing, still. His mouth was still hanging open when he turned it toward Jack, shaking his head.
"Ain't no damn way…"
OOO
It was hard to breathe with broken ribs, hard to take a breath without disturbing them when he couldn't stop shivering, shaking with the pain.
"They call it al-falaka… they use… steel cables… and they beat the bottoms of your feet until they're bruised so badly… you can't possibly walk on them, till you can't stand it… I think that's a little juvenile for you, though, so we'll have to bring things up a notch."
They'd seared the bottoms of his feet first with a blowtorch, pulled back before they reached third degree, and then carved diamonds into the soles, each individual line agonizing, worse as they connected endlessly, one over the other.
"Feeling talkative, pretty boy?"
"Yes, actually," he whispered. His voice sounded nasally, even for him (he'd always had such a high voice for a man) and he had to laugh at himself. His nose was still broken, but it was clotted now. Some skinny, mousey bastard had given him an injection and… just like magic, the bleeding had stopped. Lucky him."How's the weather today? Lemme guess, hot as hell? How's the old woman? She like it from behind? I'd just like to get a few ideas of what to do when I get outta he—"
"Alright, smart-ass."
It took five tries before he could get all three shards of molar out of his mouth.
"That… that was a good shot. That tooth's been… killing me for days… I've been putting it off for a long time. I hate my dentist… see, he's really a sadistic fuck… You'd probably like him, I bet you could learn a thing or twoo-hoo-oh, you never let me finish a sentence, do you? Did I hit a nerve this time? Cause I see you're still searching for one of mine."
The door opens and the little brown mouse in his little white doctor's coat is in the doorway. There's blood splattered across the front of the coat. It isn't his, and it isn't Jack's, and he fights the urge to gag, to scream, to find a way to tear his hands free of the manacles and tear him apart. How dare they… how dare they even touch… and he'd been hearing the screaming for hours…
"The others haven't revealed anything."
"I didn't think they would. You're too smart to have told them anything, aren't you?" He grins amiably at the prick. There is brown between his teeth now, old dead blood beneath the fresh red. "Or are you? Let's have some… individual sessions… see what turns up, right?"
He's sure the prick notices when his eye twitches.
OOO
He has become visibly very agitated, little repetitive motions that from eye witness accounts she knows signal the beginning of an episode.
"Jack," she says quickly, "Jack." He's not hearing her, is still speaking quietly, entirely to himself and his muscles are tightening all over in a way that terrifies her, sends alarm bells all through her head and she springs at him, darting around the desk and grasping him by the face. She can feel the scars beneath the palms of each hand, the strands of his hair tickling her fingertips.
"Jack!" Louder now, but there's some recognition in his eyes, even as his hands close reflexively over her wrists, nails digging in, drawing blood. "Come back! It's over, it's just a memory… come back to me, Jack," she whispers, holding back the whimper as his grip tightens.
She can feel the bones in her wrists grinding together.
"He knew," he says gutturally, almost choking, and suddenly the hands on her wrists are gone, fisting into his hair and she snatches them away before his grip is good enough to tear and cradles them to her stomach. He pulls her close and her skirt rides high on her legs as she quickly tucks them to the side, narrowly avoiding straddling his lap.
Bad enough just to be sitting here… bad enough that it felt so good.
"Shh, shh," she whispers, and strokes her hands over his hair, trying to soothe him, trying to ignore her heart pounding in her chest. This… this is only to stave off another violent episode… it won't do anyone good were he to hurt himself or another, it is her only choice, her only option to ground him and bring him back to reality.
It has absolutely nothing to do with just how strong his thighs feel underneath hers, nothing to do with how parts of her tighten as each warm, ragged breath sinks through the fabric of her blouse, her bra, nothing to do with the way his hair smells of soap and something more, something that's just him, and how something so simple, so boring could smell so intoxicating.
"God help me," she whispers, hoping the Captain does not hear her. His arms are locked around her waist immovably, so she cradles his head against the pillow of her breast, and tries to make herself comfortable as she waits until he is ready to begin speaking again.
It's much easier than she wants to admit.
OOO
It's such a rare thing to find himself stretched out on a thoroughly comfortable bed, and he's nearly comatose with relief, relaxed because his body and mind is stringy, and thin, and stretched to its limits, and he can only lay there in the half-light of the impromptu curtains that are hung over his bunk and listen to the others talk in the room beyond him. This is the last bunk in the room, the only one pressed against the wall, and he lies with his back against it, soothed, protected enough to begin to let himself drowse, dozing lightly.
"See that, that right there is the real love of my life, my better half." Nunez is saying, talking to Benny who, from the sound of his voice, is still lounging, draped across the bed over his, one leg and arm dangling over the edge.
"You might as well be looking in a mirror."
"Yup. That's my brother. We were born on the same day, we gonna die on the same day. We always used to say we gonna share the same coffin."
"So, where is he?"
"Ah, well, see, he only enlisted… He's over here somewhere, he's with Armored, but I haven't laid eyes on him in at least a year. I miss him… worry about him. Wish I could talk to him regular, you know."
"Yeah," Benny says softly, and his mind wanders.
Jack remembers a night they spent in a cave together, both angry, seething, enraged, Jack almost angry enough to forget why he brought them out there in the first place, skidding down a mountainside to the bottom of the riverbed.
He remembers the shadows the torch had cast on the walls, illuminating ancient designs carved and painted (the damned kid still hadn't gotten the joke), and he'd been forgiven (Jack couldn't have cared less about that) but he was just so full of awe at what Jack had shown him that he'd forgotten to give the kid a proper upbraiding for being so willfully obtuse.
He remembered the shadows that had been cast over his face a full year later as they stood pressed together, positions switched, blue eyes as full of steel as the blade at his throat and…
"Is that what you want?" he'd jeered.
"I can't take this anymore…You can tell them I forced you," he'd whispered and Jack pressed into the blade until he'd had to let up the pressure to keep from opening the artery altogether and, when he was close enough, he'd whispered back, "You won't have to."
He imagines being able to reach up and feel a familiar hand just on the other side of the curtain, the way he feels it so often through his clothes, clandestine snatches of time together, and he finds he enjoys it so much more when he doesn't need to hold back. No gentle, yielding limbs that bruise so easily under his hands, no tiny, boring whispers of 'You're hurting me', no, something strong and resisting, hurting as much as being hurt, and he thinks he'd have been enjoying this pastime long before if only he had known. He thinks of how it feels to bring the blood up, red beneath the skin and so warm, what it tastes like when it finally escapes into his waiting mouth.
The room has quieted, nothing but the deep rumble of sleeping breaths.
He curls into the soft mattress, and tries to think, instead, of stone.