Gifts From the Sea, a Batman fanfic by Raberba girl
Batfam Bingo 2019: AU: Zoo
Chapter 30 - Settle In (rough draft 2)
The next time he was taken for a walk, Jason defiantly stopped in the middle of the path. The guards waited, patiently at first, then one of them frowned and prodded at him.
"Maybe I don't want to walk that way," Jason said loudly. "Maybe I want to walk this way instead." He headed in the opposite direction. The guards looked disgruntled, but followed him.
Jason walked all over the compound and found some courtyards and gardens to explore. A lot of doors were locked, and the guards forced him away from some others, but for the most part, he was allowed to wander as he pleased. It both amused and annoyed him when some of the servants they passed looked alarmed to see him and skittered out of the way like they thought he might bite.
Jason paused on a walkway above a large, open-air training ground. There was a group of about twenty people practicing some sort of martial arts, most of them teenagers but a few of them actual kids. Strangely, the smallest two seemed to be the most skilled, and were sparring viciously at the moment. Jason winced at the spray of blood when the girl got knocked to the ground, but she scrambled to recover immediately. Two moves later, a woman's voice rang out, and both kids halted and stood at attention like little soldiers.
Jason jolted and backed away from the railing when he realized that the woman was the lady who'd bought him. She gave some rapid instructions he would have been too far away to hear even if she'd been speaking English, then she gestured sharply. The kids bowed to her and then faced each other again, taking up ready stances.
Then she looked up at Jason. He felt his flesh creep at her attention even though she was so far away. After a moment, the kids looked at her, then up at him. He ducked away and hurried down the walkway. When he glanced back, all three had gone back to what they were doing. He still shuddered and escaped into the nearest corridor, trying to find the way back to his room.
o.o.o
Dinner that night was different than usual. Jason frowned at the chunk of meat wrapped in bread and drizzled with some sort of spicy, meaty sauce. He was nearly halfway through it when he suddenly realized it was meant to be their idea of a chili dog. "Wow. Just...wow." It didn't taste anything like a chili dog, but it...wasn't bad, so he finished it off, sulking as he tried to process his mixed feelings.
o.o.o
Two days after the preferences and background interview, a parade of servants came in with crates of books. Jason stared as they filled his shelf to the brim and stacked the remainder on the floor. A couple of the servants gave him contemptuous looks as they left; the rest practically fled as if they thought they were feeding a monster.
When he was alone again, Jason went to look. Every single book he'd asked for was there in shiny new editions, even the ones he'd already been given used copies of. For the first time since coming here - since being kidnapped - he felt...not horrible. Kind of excited. He ran his fingertips greedily over the spines and pulled a book from the shelf to look at.
"You're still fucking traffickers and you suck!" he yelled at the door. Then he pulled more books off the shelf and took them to his bed. The next time he blinked and looked up, a little drunk on the story he'd been sucked into, it was long past nightfall.
o.o.o
The walks and the food and the books made life...better. That scared him in a different way, though, because if his captivity became more tolerable, what if he started seeing it as his new normal? What if he started being grateful to his OWNERS, like all the other brainwashed people around here?
He was stress-reading when he started to turn a page and was startled at the smear of red that appeared. He stared at his fingers. He'd anxiously bitten and scratched at them so much that they were...bleeding.
He wondered how his captors would react to that. The thought of them wrapping his hands so thickly that he could do nothing for himself made him sit up and squeeze his hands between his thighs as if he could somehow crush them out of existence. He was already so helpless, they already were so contemptuous of him, he couldn't give them another reason to restrict him, he couldn't...
TBC
