Content warning: It's mostly not graphic and largely only discussed in terms of its aftermath, but this chapter does contain torture. Clay's new friends don't like him.
Clay comes back to consciousness lying on his back on a cold stone floor. He stares at the ceiling for a while before his scattered thoughts coalesce enough for him to actually register that he's awake.
His head hurts. To be more precise, it feels like his brain has had enough of this shit and is attempting to exfil through his left eye and temple. Judging by that, the dried blood making his face itch, and the lurking nausea telling him he'll puke if he tries to move, he's got a concussion.
Maybe a bad one, because the last thing he remembers is getting captured just before dawn, and now it's night again. The room is dark, which Clay's headache appreciates, but he can see stars, desert-brilliant, blazing through a crumbled hole in the roof overhead.
After a while, he puts together the rest of the pieces - dry mouth, shaking hands, molasses-slow thinking - and realizes most of the lost time probably wasn't due to the head injury. He's been drugged, presumably so he could be moved somewhere away from the village.
He takes stock of himself. He's been stripped to his boxers and T-shirt. His hands are bound in front of him, but his feet are free. The relentless throb of his swollen ankle tells him why they probably aren't much worried about him trying to run anywhere at the moment.
Clay shivers, desperately thirsty, too disoriented to even try to figure out if they've left him any water. He drifts, opens his eyes again to find moonlight streaming through the jagged-edged opening overhead. The moon is almost full; there's just an edge of it missing, like a page someone has folded over to mark their place in a book.
He stares at the moon and imagines that it's in a cage and he's the one who's free, but it moves on and leaves him behind, sliding beyond his sight. Clay looks at the stars, and wonders how long it will take before someone comes to drag him out of this room, and shakes with the force of how desperately he wishes his team would find him before that happens.
He pictures them: Sonny, wearing an open, relieved smile, teasing him about the stench of sour sweat and blood. Trent, confidently wrapping his ankle and checking his eyes and telling him he'll be fine. Brock, holding an eager Cerberus back from licking his face. Ray, patting his shoulder, calling him brother. Jason looking straight into his soul: You good, Bravo Six?
But they don't come, and eventually Clay falls asleep, or maybe passes out. When he next opens his eyes, the sky is pale with dawn and two men are none too gently pulling him to his feet. He throws up on their shoes, which earns him a gut punch, which makes him throw up again, so it's really just a good time all around.
They drag him out the door and up a dank stairwell, obviously annoyed that they're forced to support most of his weight so he doesn't faceplant into the floor. He ends up in a wide, open room with a bunch of windows. There are a lot of unfriendly faces waiting there, but there's also a breeze that smells of sand and morning, so he closes his eyes and breathes until an open-handed slap forces him back to reality.
They ask questions, wanting to know who he is; how many men were with him; how they found out where Ashli Mayers was being held. Clay initially just doesn't say anything at all. That receives the expected response. He eventually spits blood, takes deep breaths until the urge to vomit passes, and then tells them patiently in English that he doesn't understand what they're saying.
That buys him a brief respite as they confer, then send for someone, an elder uncle who speaks better English. Left bound in a corner, Clay tries and fails to blink away the double vision while idly listening as his captors debate whether he's lying about not being able to understand them.
The new interrogator arrives and repeats the questions in heavily accented English, at which point Clay very politely explains in French that he doesn't speak any English.
He almost grins at the look on their faces. What's even the point of getting captured and tortured to death if you don't manage to have a little fun along the way?
Later, after they drag him back to his cell, he regains consciousness with an even worse headache. He lies on the floor, cradles his newly broken fingers to his chest, and gazes up at the brass blue of the midday sky showing through the hole in the roof.
How long has he been here? Between the drugs and the concussion, he isn't sure how much time he's lost. Has it been long enough for Ashli Mayers to make it back home?
He decides to believe it has, and that her mother will be hugging her right now. She'll be settling into her childhood bedroom, a place where she's always felt safe and one day will again.
Her sister will be braiding her hair. She'll be starting to remember what it feels like to be touched by someone who isn't trying to hurt her.
She's safe now. It's okay, because she's safe.
As the day stretches on, Clay's room heats up like a furnace. His lips crack and his mouth turns into a desert. He finds that they've left him a bowl of water that even seems more or less fresh, but he's careful with it because he doesn't know when they'll give him more.
He lies on the filthy floor in a pool of sweat, closes his eyes, and goes to the beach to hang out with Brian.
Time passes in fits and starts. He closes his eyes and it's night; opens them and it's day. They ask him questions. He answers in French, if at all, and later comes back to find himself shaking on the floor, teeth clenched so tight that his jaw spasms.
The thing about the whole village being related is that it means the men holding him now are the brothers or cousins or uncles of the ones he shot so that Bravo and Alpha could get out alive, could take Ashli Mayers home.
(Sometimes his captors don't even ask him any questions at all.)
Eventually, Clay starts just going away as soon as they drag him out of the room so that they can hurt him.
He gets very good at that, to the point that he sometimes wakes up back in his room without any clue how long it's been since they hauled him there. He then has to try to piece together whatever it was they did to him based on the evidence it left on his body, which is pretty disconcerting, but, he figures, better than the alternative.
Denial might not be healthy, but that doesn't mean it isn't sometimes useful.
There are a lot of beatings. His concussion lingers, maybe worsens. He bruises. His ribs break, and he's pretty sure his left arm does too. Sometimes there's water in his lungs and he coughs for hours. At some point, the knives come out; he wakes with half a dozen shallow, bleeding gashes.
None of the damage is fatal. It's clear that his captors aren't ready to kill him just yet, which means they must have something planned, which is … worrying.
It occurs to him more than once that he could decide to just not come back. Just go to the beach and stay there. If he remains catatonic long enough, eventually they might just get tired of it and dispose of him.
He considers it, but decides he isn't ready to give up yet, so he tries to pay attention during the times when they're not hurting him badly enough that he has to disappear.
He watches the guards. There's one that's younger than the others, mid-teens maybe, short and quiet with big eyes. They send him to Clay's cell with water, with scraps of food; as their prisoner's condition worsens, sometimes they even leave the kid alone on watch. Clay can't understand it. Don't they know what they've captured? What they're risking by leaving a child on guard with no backup? How can they value their kid so little?
Clay looks at the boy and sees an opportunity, a way to maybe not die, and the fact that he hates himself a little for that doesn't mean he won't take the chance if it comes.
As other injuries pile up, as he weakens from the relentless heat and the lack of food, his sprained ankle begins to heal. That's another mistake Clay's captors shouldn't be making. He has some broken toes courtesy of a hulking guard that really, really doesn't like him, but he isn't crippled.
They should have crippled him.
He hopes like hell that they're gonna end up being sorry they didn't.