Author's Note: I tried to upload this earlier, but the formatting was really screwed up. Hope it works this time.
Marik stuffed the offending pillow into the void of the toilet, and then hunched at the wall fountain scrubbing his face until a dull sting told him he should probably stop. By the time he finished blotting his face dry on his waist wrap and emerged from the bathroom, the other two hikaris had washed up, placed the platter on the floor, and arranged their nest of pillows in a semi-circle around it. Marik stumbled over and dropped onto a pillow next to Yugi.
"There are only two drumsticks..." Yugi let the implied question hang in the air.
Marik stared at the bird as Ryou delicately peeled three portions of meat from the bones. Meat white like Ryou's fingers. Marik wasn't used to eating meat. It didn't keep well in the tomb. No refrigeration. He'd tried a bite of burger after he'd left the tomb and the feel of chewing cooked flesh had just... put him off. Melvin knew all of that. Now here it was. Their first real meal in a week. Primarily chicken. He must've known Marik would be conflicted. "You two can have them." He shoved a carrot and a potato into his mouth as he tried to work up the courage to try the chicken.
Once granted permission, Yugi and Ryou dropped the patient politeness. They each ripped off a drumstick and tore half the flesh from the bone in one bite. The first bites hit their respective stomachs, radiating relief. With the immediate discomfort abated, they chewed their second bites more slowly.
For a while there were only the sounds of eating. Marik focused on psyching himself up. Ryou and Yugi focused on sucking every edible fragment from the bones in their hands. The food left a strange feeling in the pit of Yugi's stomach, after being so empty for so long. He paused to let it settle. Slowly, the others paused as well, staring blankly at the ground.
The silence between them was thick. Poisonous. They were all trying not to think about the same thing. Melvin's parting words. 'We can stop there for now.' For now. Yugi sniffled and took a deep breath.
Ryou looked at him sideways.
Yugi bit his lip to stop it from trembling. It didn't work. "I don't want..." Yugi struggled with the words. "To never speak again..."
"Why would we stop speaking to each other?" Ryou asked.
"Because things always get all quiet after he... and he's going to..." Yugi's voice cracked. "He's not going to stop. He's going to keep..."
Ryou glanced at Marik, who still hadn't looked at either of them. The silence with Marik was different, but he wasn't sure if now was the time to talk about it. "We'll be fine, Yugi," Ryou whispered.
The tears spilled over. "You keep saying that, but we won't. It's going to be this! Forever! Until he gets bored and decides to- to- I don't know cut off our hands or- or something..."
Marik's voice was dull. "He wouldn't cut off our hands," he murmured as he shoved another carrot into his mouth. "We need our hands to be entertaining. He'd cut off something boring. Like an ear."
"Marik," Ryou chastised.
Marik didn't respond. It was true. Not talking about it didn't make it any less true. He was just surprised to hear Yugi of all people bring it up.
Ryou glanced back and forth between them. Marik's exhausted distance. Yugi's shaking shoulders. He'd be lying to himself if he didn't admit that losing the almost impossibly optimistic Yugi to the hopelessness shook him. "Yugi, no matter what he makes us do to each other, I promise I will never stop talking to you." He paused. "I'll tell another story. Um... Okay, so the movie starts with a point of view shot moving around the outside of a two story house in a nice neighborhood. It's night time and all of the windows are lit up. The point of view looks through one of the windows, watching a young woman and a young man giggling together..."
As Ryou went on describing the opening for Halloween to the best of his recollection, Yugi's sobs calmed to soft sniffles. Marik barely reacted at all until Ryou mentioned the title screen. As the story went on, he found himself more interested in the background details of the holiday itself than the plight of the main characters.
He'd never even heard of the holiday until he was twelve or thirteen. Even then, he'd had far too many things on his mind to think about it much. Running the Ghouls, looking for the Puzzle, getting revenge. It saddened him to think of all the things he'd never get to try, now. All the things he could've used his freedom for instead.
"Did you ever go trick or treating?" Marik asked when Ryou's story was over.
"A few times." Ryou picked at a loose thread on a nearby pillow. "When I was much younger. After my my mum and sister died, father wanted to move back to Japan, so... I mean, it wouldn't have been the same without Amane, anyway..." And there was always the Ring, but he never felt comfortable talking about that in front of Marik. Marik who had such a different idea of the Spirit than Ryou did.
"Oh." Marik fell silent. He didn't want to talk about dead family members. None of them did.
"It's strange," Ryou continued in a lower voice. "I'm sort of glad they got out in time to miss..." he gestured vaguely, "this. Is that weird?"
"No," Marik shook his head. "It's not weird."
###
They all woke up to a sudden shock of pain. Realizing that Melvin had entered the room, and woken them up with their collars, they all disentangled from their sleeping puddle to line up at his feet.
"Sleeping comfortably with your full bellies, my little things?" Melvin purred.
Ryou hesitated as he wondered if he should say 'yes' or 'no.'
Marik piped up with a low, "Thank you for feeding us."
Maybe Marik could be better at this than Ryou thought.
Melvin focused on Marik and grinned. "Listen to you, princess. Falling in line. If I didn't already have plans today, I'd make you show me how grateful you are." He turned his grin on Ryou. "But you already know who I'm here for. Stay down and follow me, my pretty little pale thing. I'm going to put some color on you."
He turned and headed toward the torture room. Ryou crawled after him, trying to control his fear. Yugi's screams filled his thoughts. He'd never found out exactly what Melvin had done to Yugi. The short hikari hadn't exactly wanted to talk about it, and Ryou hadn't forced him to, but remembering those screams terrified him even more now that he would be the one screaming.
Melvin stopped in the middle of the room and looked down at Ryou. "Get up on your knees and put your arms out."
Once Ryou was in position, Melvin moved around him attaching chains to each of the five D-rings on Ryou's person.
"Have you ever been free?" Melvin asked. "Or have you been a puppet your whole life?"
"I was eight years old the first time I put on the Ring," Ryou answered. It was a vague answer, but he didn't feel like discussing the intracies of his relationship with the Spirit. Not with Melvin.
"So you do know what freedom tastes like." Melvin drew the Rod from his belt. "Good. This wouldn't be quite so much fun if you didn't know what you were missing."
The Rod glowed. The chains attached to Ryou's neck and wrists retracted into the ceiling, drawing him up on his toes with his arms spread in a Y above his head. The chain at this neck stopped just short of choking him.
Melvin wore the same hungry leer he'd had the first time he raped Ryou. "Look at you, puppet." He pulled the cloth from Ryou's waist with a flourish, revealing the universe of bruises decorating his thighs, butt, and stomach. "I'm going to make you dance on your strings." He giggled as he unsheathed the Rod.
Ryou flinched as the blade poked into the middle of a bruise. Then he cried out as the metal parted his skin in a short, precise line, connecting the first bruise to a second. A drop of blood tickled his thigh. Melvin connected the second bruise to a third, and the third to a forth, tracing red constellations between blue and purple stars. Ryou's breath wheezed as he tried to balance on one foot, instinctively squirming to escape the blade.
Melvin attacked him from alternating sides, laughing as he wiggled and twitched back and forth. His eyes followed the bloody rivulets as they crept across Ryou's flesh, intersecting and feeding off of each new slice. Once he'd finished Ryou's outer thighs and bum, the Rod glowed again. The chain attached to one of Ryou's ankles forced him into an arched arabesque.
Ryou coughed as the pressure on his neck shifted. He held as much of his weight as he could on his arms and lifted leg. His muscles quivered in protest. When Melvin began carving slow, careful constellations on his inner thighs, he couldn't pull away at all. His eyes watered steady streams, but his breathing was too uneven to sob properly.
Melvin paused to run a finger up the flat side of the gory blade. "A funny thought occurs to me." He smeared Ryou's blood between his thumb and index finger. "The chibi begged me to stop when I tortured him. I'm sure he knew it was useless, but that didn't stop him from trying." He looked at Ryou's face. "You don't even try."
Ryou blinked. What response did Melvin want? The flat tone didn't tell him if the observation was a good thing or a bad thing.
"Oh, don't get me wrong. You make all kinds of fun and pretty noises. It's just... interesting."
The pale hikari swallowed awkwardly past the pressure on his neck. "Can't..." he wheezed. "Speak..."
"Neither could he," Melvin smirked. "But you would beg if you could?"
"What... you want..."
"Mm. What I want..." Melvin grabbed the chain at the nape of Ryou's neck and pulled.
The hard edges of the collar dug into Ryou's jaw and throat. He gagged as his tongue lolled out. His fists scrabbled at the chains attached to his wrists, trying to lift himself up enough to breathe. Melvin merely responded to his efforts by pulling harder. Ryou felt his face go warm and tingly. His vision started to swim. Then Melvin let go and the chains jerked at Ryou's shoulder joints as he resettled. Swinging slightly. Wheezing. Coughing.
Melvin moved around behind him. Fingers smeared red nebulae and galaxies on Ryou's sticky flesh. "I don't think you would beg if you could speak. Not if I didn't tell you to."
A hand stroked up the inside of Ryou's thigh. It rubbed over his balls as a thumb slipped into his ass.
"You've always been at the mercy of the whims of the people around you, and you've never complained. Am I wrong?"
Ryou's eyes were wide. "No," he rasped.
Melvin cackled. "Now that's funny. Even if that answer wasn't true, it would be true, because it would mean you'd never dare to tell me I'm wrong."
Ryou's heart pounded. He didn't understand where Melvin was going with this. He didn't understand what Melvin wanted. He sniffled as fresh tears rolled down his cheeks. Melvin's dangerous grin brushed against his ear, all eager teeth.
"Why are you crying, puppet?" Melvin hissed in a way that sounded like he already knew.
"Don't know... what you want..."
The chains shifted again, pulling both of Ryou's feet to an even level with his hands. The tension on his neck slackened, but the new position was awful on his shoulders and hips.
Melvin removed his shendyt and stood between Ryou's lacerated thighs. "It's about what I don't want, puppet." Cruel hands spread Ryou's bleeding cheeks. "I don't want to hear a single peep out of you. Not a yelp. Not a whimper. If I do hear a sound, I will show you something to yelp and whimper about."
Ryou took fast, shallow breaths as he tried not to sob. When Melvin crammed his cock into him, Ryou had to grit his teeth and shake his head until his neck hurt to keep from crying out. He wished he had something to bite or squeeze or pound his fists and head against, but all he could do was clench his fists until his nails dug into his palms.
The monster remained surprisingly quiet as he reamed out the pale hikari. Lest Ryou sneak a noise past him somehow. The only sounds were the jingling chains and the slapping of skin and the panting breaths. Ryou poured all of his energy into twisting and writhing, inhaling sharply to force back his screams. By the time Melvin finished, the pale hikari was a sticky, sweaty, bloody, exhausted mess.
Ryou went limp in the chains, muscles shuddering and twitching. He wanted down. He wanted down, and he might have begged for it, but he was too scared. Fortunately, Melvin decided to lower the pale hikari's feet to the ground on his own. Ryou's breath hitched when the semen trickling down his thigh stung the cuts.
The mad god stepped in front of him. Ryou's blood stained his hands and abdomen. "You've got quite the mess to clean up this time."
Ryou didn't answer, unsure if he was allowed to make sounds yet. Melvin never told him one way or the other, so Ryou remained silent. It was just the kind of trick Melvin would pull.