Dragon Age: Where the Light Enters (nsfw, Cole x female Inquisitor) Series Masterlist (20/20 chapters posted)
Baldur's Gate 3: Without Expectation (sfw, Astarion x gn reader)
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: Intertwined (nsfw, Daeron x reader) Series Masterlist
Date Everything: A Matter of Time (nsfw, Timothy Timepiece x reader) Series Masterlist (9/9 chapters posted)
Series
The Death of a Squire (princess x monsterous knight x squire) (nsfw) Series Masterlist
The Shapeshifting Detective (male shapeshifter x fem character) Part 1 (sfw) Part 2 (sfw) Part 3 (sfw) Part 4 (sfw) Part 5 (sfw) Part 6 (sfw) Part 7 (sfw) Part 8 (sfw) Final Part (sfw)
Proper Etiquette (male demon x fem reader) Part 1 (nsfw) Part 2 (nsfw) [requested drabble] [request: adjusting to the cold]
The Witch’s Apprentice (male demon x afab reader) Part 1 (sfw) Part 2 (sfw) Part 3 (nsfw) Part 4(sfw) Part 5(nsfw) Part 6(sfw) Part 7(sfw)
Vows (male vampire x afab reader) Part 1 (nsfw) Part 2 (sfw) Part 3 (nsfw) Final Part (nsfw) Oliver(prequel)(nsfw)
Deep Water (male siren x fem reader) Part 1 (sfw) Part 2 (sfw) Part 3(sfw) Part 4(sfw) Part 5 (sfw)
Oneshots
Far from shore (nsfw, merman x afab reader)
Willing Sacrifice (nsfw, male monster x fem reader) [a requested follow-up drabble] [requested drabble: period sex]
Ace in the Hole (nsfw, shadow monster x afab reader) The Morning After (sequel, nsfw)
Ghost Stories (nsfw, male specter x afab reader)
In the Name of Science (nsfw, male werewolf x afab reader)
Hunting Season (nsfw, fem jackalope hybrid x afab reader)
On the Altar (nsfw, male dragon x male knight x fem reader)
cw: medical horror, suicidal ideation, dissociation, depersonalization, memeory loss, amnesia, forced nudity, ivs, restraints, memory loss, gunshot wounds, mutilation, surgery, sensory deprivation, losing time, loss of sight, whump
Work count: 4k
Masterlist
Ao3
Spike’s main distraction from the pain, currently, was the fact that he was trapped in here with a girl so far separated from reality she couldn’t seem to stay coherent long enough to finish a sentence.
He wasn’t quite sure what had done it. If their current situation at all resembled her typical living situation, he imagined the darkness or the solitude would have gotten to her first, though the inability to move certainly followed close behind.
Or maybe it was something else they’d done to her, whoever was keeping them here. He was fairly certain, at this point, that he was being kept. The nameless girl was clearly scared of someone and his death that he’d been previously quite certain of was seeming less and less likely.
And now she was going on about horse blinders, forgetting sentence to sentence what they’d been talking about. It seemed increasingly unlikely that he’d manage to glean any useful information from her.
Fine. He’d escape on his own, leave her to her darkness and her rambling.
Before he could press further, until the girl who wasn’t supposed to know her name either snapped her thoughts back into place or broke fully, he heard a door opening and a new person entering the room.
They were walking with a steady gait, likely one of his captors.
He opened his mouth to speak to them, words halfway out before his jaw snapped shut as if wired that way, teeth pressing into each other, the pressure uncomfortably firm.
He pulled and fought against the force pressing his jaw up but could gain no ground. He couldn’t feel the hard press of anything solid on his face but his senses were certainly less than reliable right now. All he knew was he’d been able to talk before, until the footsteps had sounded from across the room.
Maybe the nameless, docile girl he’d been planted with had done something, though he had heard no movement from her and, if pressed, would bet that she too was bound.
Something else then, something new he didn’t understand. Fine. He supposed he’d add it to the list of things he couldn’t make sense of in this god forsaken place.
The footsteps approached and then, with no warning, he was being moved, carted out of the room like some object without so much as an uttered word.
He wondered if the girl had been forcibly rendered mute like he had. He doubted it. If whatever control they had over her had seeped into the allowance of memory, he imagined they’d trained her into silence without much difficulty.
The footsteps trudged on behind him, taking him to some new room. The world remained dark.
He took stock of the cadence of the steps, of the weight of them. They were confident, steadfast. Not the kind of steps one took in pitch black.
So he was missing something. Maybe it was not dark and instead they’d blinded him, him and the girl he supposed. Or maybe there was some device on him he’d managed to not notice. Or it was dark and his other assumption was wrong. The people carting him around could be able to see in the dark, likely machine assisted. Or maybe they were accustomed to navigating this way for bizarre reasons beyond his current understanding. Considering the way things had been going, it would just be one more odd thing to add to the list.
They jolted to a stop suddenly, Spike’s head banging forwards into his restraints.
He strained his ears, trying to pick out anything that could help him orient himself or give him a clue as to what was going on.
And then the tension in his teeth faded and he tentatively opened his mouth, finding himself mercifully able to do so.
Before he was able to ask any questions or throw any insults at whoever was carting him around, shrouded in darkness, something was being shoved into his mouth.
It was definitely metal. He could feel the cool smoothness of it, the sharper ends digging into his gums, forcing his mouth open. A hand, cool and likely gloved, from the feel of it, touched the side of whatever contraption rested in his mouth and it cranked it impossibly wider.
A stick prodded the back of his throat, scraping, a dull pressure. The pain that should have come with it didn’t register.
It didn’t stop him from gagging.
The stick pulled away at that, the person molesting him seemingly wanting to avoid being thrown up on.
And then, a spotlight was being shone into his eyes, the word going from pitch black to a blinding white.
He blinked rapidly, trying to make sense of what he was seeing, trying to get the world to click back into focus.
The light shifted and he realized with a start that it was a flashlight, small and focused, directed right into his pupil. And then it clicked off and it was like the darkness had never been there.
The room he was in was medical, that much was obvious. It was white and sterile, the metal instruments surrounding him all looking vaguely surgical though mostly unfamiliar. There were some things he knew, monitors he’d seen before in passing in hospitals, syringes, scalpels, but nothing that helped orient him.
Even without the flashlight, the lights were too bright for eyes adjusted to the dark. He knew it would give him a headache, it probably already had. Not that he could feel it, the all encompassing bodily pain overriding anything else.
In front of him, jotting something down on a clipboard, flashlight dropped carelessly in a lab coat pocket, was a person. A woman, he’d guess, based on her build. But it would be a guess. She was covered in protective gear; big goggles, a face mask, a hair net, a lab coat over shiny clothes that looked waterproof. Gloves came out from under her sleeves and her shoes were covered by a protective coating, likely to either keep germs out or in.
She leaned over him once more, peering into his eyes. He still couldn't speak, mouth now wired open instead of closed.
He focused instead on looking angry, channeling everything he had into the emotion. He was certain it wouldn’t help matters but when left with no method of communication, he would do what he could.
She didn’t even seem to notice at first. He thought he could tell when she did, her gaze behind the goggles losing focus for a moment before darting between his eyes, taking note of the scowl gracing his features.
She jotted something down about that too.
More than anything, he wished she’d engage with him, or at the very least that he could try and taunt her into it. He’d been in something resembling her position before, had had plenty of captives in his life, but at the very least he let them talk.
Well, for a while at least. Sometimes someone would be annoying enough to get some piece of fabric shoved in their mouth, but at the very least he’d had the good grace to give them the freedom to annoy him first. It was common decency.
Someone else entered the room. Probably a man, if the broadness of his shoulders was any indication, but he was in the same getup as the woman was so it was impossible to be sure. He glanced at the notes before giving Spike a once over, seeming, at most, vaguely interested. “He’s still stable?”
The woman nodded, picking up a wooden stick and pressing it into his mouth. He could feel the faint pressure of it, if he focused, fighting to compartmentalize the screaming of the rest of his body. “Still stable, no rejection of anything. Just getting some baseline vitals now.”
Baseline. This could not be his new baseline; this horrible, suffocating pain, this immobility, this fear. He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Surely that would affect some results, surely it couldn’t be what was expected of him from now on.
Another light in his eyes. He held his breath until it left him. His vision remained.
“Seems responsive,” he said. “Alert. Conscious. High pain tolerance. Most people are unconscious for longer.”
Spike glared at the man. He got no reaction.
Part of him wished he was still passed out, that all of this could cease for a while. And to think, he could be dead right now.
At the very least, he was now fairly certain that he was not dead, that whoever worked in this lab had found him and wretched him back into a life he was increasingly averse to living. For what reason, he remained in the dark.
Despite his wishes, he knew it was for the best that he weather this storm and remain conscious. At least with him conscious he could gather information, start to work on forming a plan of escape.
Not that he’d gained much ground there. In the state he was in, these people’s control over him seemed unbreakable, unyielding. Absolute.
But there would be an opening. Someday, at least. There always was. The trick was making sure you were looking when it came.
He wished he could move his head, that he had any freedom to shift around, to see more.
He strained his eyes as much as he could, trying to observe his surroundings, but was simply met with more white wall, more sterility.
For the first time since he’d regained his sight, he gave up on gathering intel and tried to look down at himself, glean what condition he was in and get something resembling information about the state of him.
It was harder to look down than he’d initially anticipated, his head craned slightly up in a way he hadn’t noticed by touch, leaving his neck exposed.
He was still naked. He’d known that, been able to tell that much at least, but seeing it made it click into place properly. He felt vulnerable, exposed, mourning the fact that he couldn’t turn or curl in on himself a little.
He could see glimpses of marks of injury, edges of bruises on the sections of torso he could catch, some sort of clear coating over the places where the bullets had buried themselves in his skin.
More notably, beside them, there were tubes, threading themselves through his stomach and chest, some horrible tar looking substance running through most of them. A few of the thinner ones were clearly blood, winding around the more substantial piping. The larger ones he couldn't understand how he hadn’t felt before, diligently pumping something putrid through him.
Maybe it was for some malfunction inside of him, an organ shutting down or perforated, hit by a stray bullet. More likely, it was for some other purpose, for some test or procedure they wanted from him.
The male doctor leaned closer, taking one of the smaller tubes in hand. He attached some contraption to it, some sort of vial, and he watched it fill with blood, one end of the tube emptying as his blood was diverted from its course.
There was no reaction he could have, really, rendered imobile and mute. He could glare at them again but any expression he’d made was summarily ignored so he didn't see the point in it.
“Should we start today?” the male doctor asked as he tucked away the newly acquired vial of blood, sending the rest of the fluid back on its original path back into Spike.
“I don’t see a reason to wait. He seems sturdy enough. Besides, we have to get something done before…” They looked at him and it felt like they remembered he was sentient for the first time since this had all begun. “He’ll want to see results when he sees him. Best to get him started now. If he reacts atypically, we’ll adjust dosage and supplementary drugs as needed. We can empty him out pretty easily, should the need arise.”
They were hiding something from him, that much was obvious. What he couldn’t imagine was why. What was he going to do with the information, bound and imobile, unable to speak? Was there someone they didn’t want him to reveal it to, maybe? Or maybe him knowing itself could cause problems, could skew results of whatever tests they were clearly going to do on him.
And then an injection was being prepared, clear liquid sucked up a syringe, the bottle holding the liquid covered in tiny words he couldn’t quite read. He imagined it wouldn’t help even if he could read them, he’d never been particularly good at that sciencey shit.
It wasn’t ideal but it certainly wasn’t unexpected. They jammed it into the side of his neck and he couldn't feel it, not the pressure nor any pain.
Afterwards, no reaction came. Not that he’d expected one, especially not so quickly, but part of him had been bracing for something awful to happen.
The doctor; the smaller, more feminine looking one; reached toward his mouth. And then the machine uncranked, compressing down and no longer stretching his mouth impossibly wide.
She pulled it out of his mouth, a string of saliva connecting him to it. It was disgusting but there wasn’t much he could do about it.
He shifted his jaw from side to side, stretching it after being held taut for so long.
He swallowed, or at least he tried. There wasn’t much for him to swallow, his seeming dehydration leaving his mouth drier than usual, even with the spit his mouth had clearly been fighting to produce in response to the intrusion of the strange device.
He gave the doctor what he hoped was a wry look. “Come on doc, take a guy out to dinner first.”
And then his mouth slammed shut with no warning, locking itself closed once more.
“Mouthy.”
The man sighed, fiddling with something outside of Spike’s line of sight. “They warned us about him.”
“We’ll be fine. He’ll be docile before you know it,” She patted Spike condescendingly on the cheek and he could do nothing but glare.
The lights went out again, the darkness absolute and unforgiving.
The doctors didn’t speak much after that. He wished they would. At the very least it would be something. As it stood, he was left desperately clinging to the scratching of pen on paper and the occasional shuffling and clinking that could have meant anything.
The only productive thing he could find to do was track footsteps, try and maintain a sense of where each doctor was. One left after a few minutes, the exact time difficult to tell with so few senses to rely on.
And then there was one.
He sat there, knowing how his senses had betrayed him, knowing he could be going through any number of tests or injections and would have no idea.
And then he was moving again. That, at least, he could feel, his stomach lurching as he was suddenly tipped back in his chair. Alongside that he could hear the footsteps, one sense not disturbed by this place.
He braced properly this time, trying not to bang himself around in the little room he had in his restraints this time. He couldn’t feel the pain of it but it seemed a bad time to be extraneously killing off brain cells.
And then he heard them leave. It sounded like the footsteps from the first time, the ones he’d now connected to the female doctor, but he couldn’t be sure with such a small sample size and with his observation skills as stunted as they were here.
“You’re back?” asked the girl from the room, the one they’d trapped him with for reasons beyond his current comprehension.
He found himself able to open his mouth, unsure how long it had been that way. It seemed somewhere in the journey he had stopped checking. “Seems that way. Listen, what are they keeping us here for?”
“I don’t know.”
He was getting really sick of hearing that. “Shocking. Come on, you must know something. What do they do to you?”
“I’m not supposed to know that. Not supposed to talk.”
“Look, no one else is here right now, and I say you are supposed to, okay? I’m telling you to know.”
“You have no authority here.” Her voice was light, like she was helpfully reminding him of something he’d forgotten. It was ludicrous, how far her passivity extended.
Something in him hoped she’d always been this way, a little broken and easy to mold. The alternative was that this place had turned her into this, and that was a far more harrowing thought.
“How long have you been here?” he tried, hoping eventually he’d find a way past her maze-like mental defenses. The worst she could do was not answer.
“You already asked me that.” She sounded more offended at the repeat question than she had been at him trying to brute force his way into getting an answer out of her.
“So what, I can’t ask the same question twice?”
“I suppose. It just seems silly."
“Listen, it’s not like we’re up to much else.”
“I suppose.”
“You’re like a broken record,” he informed her.
“You’re the one who keeps asking the same questions.”
“Well, it’s hard to come up with new things to ask when you don’t know the answer to anything,” he huffed.
“I don’t know. A lack of an answer is information too.”
“So you are capable of thinking on your own! Look at that.” His tone dripped with condescension.
She seemed irritated at that, happily settling into the quiet darkness.
That was one area where she had the upper hand. He didn’t know how long she’d been here but she had clearly become accustomed to this, the solitude and isolation of it all. She seemed to have no problems just sitting there endlessly. Spike wasn’t quite there yet. He hoped he never would be.
One of her more irritating habits, amongst many others, was whenever he tried to vocalize that feeling, she told him to rest. She said it like it was obvious, like he was the stupid one for not doing it.
He was good at sleeping anywhere, he’d picked up the skill for years of hard living. He could sleep sitting up, hell he could probably sleep sitting up in a metal chair.
The pain proved more of an obstacle. It was unceasing, unyielding. Everpresent and oppressive. There was nothing he could do to escape it and any time he tried to sleep, it almost seemed to amplify it, like trying to rest was putting the condition of his body under a microscope.
It almost felt like a blessing when they came to haul him away again. He knew he’d likely regret the feeling but any change in his surroundings, any distraction, was welcome at this point.
Once more, it was hard to tell what was happening to him, if things were touching or poking him. He could hear rustling and clanking and shifting once they stopped but had no idea what images to put to the noises.
There was pressure on his arm.
It was the first real sensation he could pick out, the first thing he could make sense of. He latched onto it, desperately tried to imagine what they were doing. Maybe just touching him, maybe some sort of intensive restraint.
Movement. Pressure.
He realized he hadn’t even tried to open his mouth again, assuming it would be stuck shut. Was the pressure there? Maybe he was just grinding his teeth.
He tried to open his mouth. It remained clamped shut.
There was some sort of muted light, something red, creeping into the dark.
After an embarrassing moment, he realized he’d closed his eyes in the dark and not realized it.
It wasn’t dark anymore, leaving the harsh, white lights of the room trying to worm their way through his eyelids.
He opened his eyes to see himself. His arm, in front of him, ripped open down to the bone.
He doubted they’d given him any anesthetic. It didn’t matter, he hadn’t been able to feel it anyway, his senses still overloaded from whatever was causing this agony under his skin.
He stared at his arm, carved open. He could see blood rushing through veins, open muscle. He was no stranger to gore, not with the lines of work he’d been in. It should have been different, being him. It should have sent waves of nausea through him, should have disturbed him more.
Somehow, it didn’t. His nakedness was bothering him more than anything, pain imperceptible now but somehow the cold still reaching him, still feeling exposed as he saw the edges of his naked body through blurry eyes.
And that was an odd reaction, he supposed. Seeing his muscle and bone in front of him and that making him feel less exposed than a lack of clothes did.
He admittedly wasn’t well-versed in complex medical procedures but it didn’t seem like they were doing much. His arm was just there, strapped down and open. They occasionally poked at it, touching bits of his muscles that caused his fingers to twitch, looking or writing notes. But they weren’t really doing anything, not adding things to him or taking away. It seemed more like observation than anything, but that seemed more trouble than it was worth. Cutting someone open just to poke at them.
As the doctor touched something inside of him with an unfamiliar metal tool, his muscle twinged, played like an instrument instead of a part of him.
He tentatively tried to flex his fingers. They moved, the mechanisms of it visible in front of him. Skinned, laid bare.
“Stay still,” the doctor barked.
The pressure in his mouth dissipated. He opened his jaw, the side of it cracking as he stretched it open.
Footsteps behind him, a hand tightening the restraints. He hadn’t even noticed the two sets of footsteps. He was growing incredibly reliant on his hearing, he could not be ignoring it like this.
Both doctors both stared at him, inspecting him. It made him feel more dissected than being carved open had.
“Lack of reaction to stimuli,” one of them said. Not to him, of course, but he could hear it.
“The muscles seem to be reacting fine,” he said, playing at lightheartedness.
They did not dignify him with a response. He got the distinct feeling that would continue on for however long he was here.
He wondered why they bothered to allow him to speak on occasion when they never seemed to care enough to listen.
“Nothing you want to ask?” one of them prompted him.
It was like they could read his mind, intentionally proving him wrong.
“Nothing you’d be willing to answer.”
It probably wasn’t advisable, behaving like this. He should information gather, should try and trick them with some tricky, circular questions. He was just so tired.
The lights went back out. He was wheeled back to the irritating girl.
He didn’t try and spark up much conversation this time. The silence drew on.
The footsteps came back too soon. Or maybe not. His sense of time was fleeing him rapidly.
He braced himself as the rhythmic patter approached, muscles tensing under unforgiving bindings with little else he could do to brace.
But they didn’t come for him. He waited for his chair to tip back, for the sinking feeling in his stomach, but it never came. Instead, he heard the creak coming from somewhere in front of him, no lurch in his stomach, no sensation of falling, and then heard the rolling of someone else.
It was the girl. No noises came from her except those of the chair being moved. There were no protests, no noises at all. Even her breathing seemed level.
He wondered once more if her mouth was sealed shut too or if this was a silence she had been trained into.
And then he was well and truly alone for the first time since he’d arrived here.
Part of him was relieved that it wasn’t him being experimented on this time. From a practical standpoint it wasn’t a good thing. He was far more likely to be able to escape in transit that he was parked here, securely locked away. But still, there was some animal part of him that was relieved to not be in danger.
There was some dread too. What if they didn’t bring her back and he was stuck here, alone? She hadn’t been particularly helpful but he was not conceited enough to think he could remain sane in the lonely darkness. He didn’t think anyone could, not if they were stuck there long enough.
Maybe that was why they’d taken him. Maybe their other lab rat was nearing her end and they needed someone fresher.
Or maybe not. He supposed there was no point in speculating.
So instead, he sat and he waited. He had no other choice in the matter.
cw: medical horror, suicidal ideation, dissociation, depersonalization, memeory loss, amnesia, forced nudity, ivs, restraints, memory loss, gunshot wounds, mutilation, surgery, sensory deprivation, losing time, loss of sight, whump
Work count: 4k
Masterlist
Ao3
Spike’s main distraction from the pain, currently, was the fact that he was trapped in here with a girl so far separated from reality she couldn’t seem to stay coherent long enough to finish a sentence.
He wasn’t quite sure what had done it. If their current situation at all resembled her typical living situation, he imagined the darkness or the solitude would have gotten to her first, though the inability to move certainly followed close behind.
Or maybe it was something else they’d done to her, whoever was keeping them here. He was fairly certain, at this point, that he was being kept. The nameless girl was clearly scared of someone and his death that he’d been previously quite certain of was seeming less and less likely.
And now she was going on about horse blinders, forgetting sentence to sentence what they’d been talking about. It seemed increasingly unlikely that he’d manage to glean any useful information from her.
Fine. He’d escape on his own, leave her to her darkness and her rambling.
Before he could press further, until the girl who wasn’t supposed to know her name either snapped her thoughts back into place or broke fully, he heard a door opening and a new person entering the room.
They were walking with a steady gait, likely one of his captors.
He opened his mouth to speak to them, words halfway out before his jaw snapped shut as if wired that way, teeth pressing into each other, the pressure uncomfortably firm.
He pulled and fought against the force pressing his jaw up but could gain no ground. He couldn’t feel the hard press of anything solid on his face but his senses were certainly less than reliable right now. All he knew was he’d been able to talk before, until the footsteps had sounded from across the room.
Maybe the nameless, docile girl he’d been planted with had done something, though he had heard no movement from her and, if pressed, would bet that she too was bound.
Something else then, something new he didn’t understand. Fine. He supposed he’d add it to the list of things he couldn’t make sense of in this god forsaken place.
The footsteps approached and then, with no warning, he was being moved, carted out of the room like some object without so much as an uttered word.
He wondered if the girl had been forcibly rendered mute like he had. He doubted it. If whatever control they had over her had seeped into the allowance of memory, he imagined they’d trained her into silence without much difficulty.
The footsteps trudged on behind him, taking him to some new room. The world remained dark.
He took stock of the cadence of the steps, of the weight of them. They were confident, steadfast. Not the kind of steps one took in pitch black.
So he was missing something. Maybe it was not dark and instead they’d blinded him, him and the girl he supposed. Or maybe there was some device on him he’d managed to not notice. Or it was dark and his other assumption was wrong. The people carting him around could be able to see in the dark, likely machine assisted. Or maybe they were accustomed to navigating this way for bizarre reasons beyond his current understanding. Considering the way things had been going, it would just be one more odd thing to add to the list.
They jolted to a stop suddenly, Spike’s head banging forwards into his restraints.
He strained his ears, trying to pick out anything that could help him orient himself or give him a clue as to what was going on.
And then the tension in his teeth faded and he tentatively opened his mouth, finding himself mercifully able to do so.
Before he was able to ask any questions or throw any insults at whoever was carting him around, shrouded in darkness, something was being shoved into his mouth.
It was definitely metal. He could feel the cool smoothness of it, the sharper ends digging into his gums, forcing his mouth open. A hand, cool and likely gloved, from the feel of it, touched the side of whatever contraption rested in his mouth and it cranked it impossibly wider.
A stick prodded the back of his throat, scraping, a dull pressure. The pain that should have come with it didn’t register.
It didn’t stop him from gagging.
The stick pulled away at that, the person molesting him seemingly wanting to avoid being thrown up on.
And then, a spotlight was being shone into his eyes, the word going from pitch black to a blinding white.
He blinked rapidly, trying to make sense of what he was seeing, trying to get the world to click back into focus.
The light shifted and he realized with a start that it was a flashlight, small and focused, directed right into his pupil. And then it clicked off and it was like the darkness had never been there.
The room he was in was medical, that much was obvious. It was white and sterile, the metal instruments surrounding him all looking vaguely surgical though mostly unfamiliar. There were some things he knew, monitors he’d seen before in passing in hospitals, syringes, scalpels, but nothing that helped orient him.
Even without the flashlight, the lights were too bright for eyes adjusted to the dark. He knew it would give him a headache, it probably already had. Not that he could feel it, the all encompassing bodily pain overriding anything else.
In front of him, jotting something down on a clipboard, flashlight dropped carelessly in a lab coat pocket, was a person. A woman, he’d guess, based on her build. But it would be a guess. She was covered in protective gear; big goggles, a face mask, a hair net, a lab coat over shiny clothes that looked waterproof. Gloves came out from under her sleeves and her shoes were covered by a protective coating, likely to either keep germs out or in.
She leaned over him once more, peering into his eyes. He still couldn't speak, mouth now wired open instead of closed.
He focused instead on looking angry, channeling everything he had into the emotion. He was certain it wouldn’t help matters but when left with no method of communication, he would do what he could.
She didn’t even seem to notice at first. He thought he could tell when she did, her gaze behind the goggles losing focus for a moment before darting between his eyes, taking note of the scowl gracing his features.
She jotted something down about that too.
More than anything, he wished she’d engage with him, or at the very least that he could try and taunt her into it. He’d been in something resembling her position before, had had plenty of captives in his life, but at the very least he let them talk.
Well, for a while at least. Sometimes someone would be annoying enough to get some piece of fabric shoved in their mouth, but at the very least he’d had the good grace to give them the freedom to annoy him first. It was common decency.
Someone else entered the room. Probably a man, if the broadness of his shoulders was any indication, but he was in the same getup as the woman was so it was impossible to be sure. He glanced at the notes before giving Spike a once over, seeming, at most, vaguely interested. “He’s still stable?”
The woman nodded, picking up a wooden stick and pressing it into his mouth. He could feel the faint pressure of it, if he focused, fighting to compartmentalize the screaming of the rest of his body. “Still stable, no rejection of anything. Just getting some baseline vitals now.”
Baseline. This could not be his new baseline; this horrible, suffocating pain, this immobility, this fear. He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Surely that would affect some results, surely it couldn’t be what was expected of him from now on.
Another light in his eyes. He held his breath until it left him. His vision remained.
“Seems responsive,” he said. “Alert. Conscious. High pain tolerance. Most people are unconscious for longer.”
Spike glared at the man. He got no reaction.
Part of him wished he was still passed out, that all of this could cease for a while. And to think, he could be dead right now.
At the very least, he was now fairly certain that he was not dead, that whoever worked in this lab had found him and wretched him back into a life he was increasingly averse to living. For what reason, he remained in the dark.
Despite his wishes, he knew it was for the best that he weather this storm and remain conscious. At least with him conscious he could gather information, start to work on forming a plan of escape.
Not that he’d gained much ground there. In the state he was in, these people’s control over him seemed unbreakable, unyielding. Absolute.
But there would be an opening. Someday, at least. There always was. The trick was making sure you were looking when it came.
He wished he could move his head, that he had any freedom to shift around, to see more.
He strained his eyes as much as he could, trying to observe his surroundings, but was simply met with more white wall, more sterility.
For the first time since he’d regained his sight, he gave up on gathering intel and tried to look down at himself, glean what condition he was in and get something resembling information about the state of him.
It was harder to look down than he’d initially anticipated, his head craned slightly up in a way he hadn’t noticed by touch, leaving his neck exposed.
He was still naked. He’d known that, been able to tell that much at least, but seeing it made it click into place properly. He felt vulnerable, exposed, mourning the fact that he couldn’t turn or curl in on himself a little.
He could see glimpses of marks of injury, edges of bruises on the sections of torso he could catch, some sort of clear coating over the places where the bullets had buried themselves in his skin.
More notably, beside them, there were tubes, threading themselves through his stomach and chest, some horrible tar looking substance running through most of them. A few of the thinner ones were clearly blood, winding around the more substantial piping. The larger ones he couldn't understand how he hadn’t felt before, diligently pumping something putrid through him.
Maybe it was for some malfunction inside of him, an organ shutting down or perforated, hit by a stray bullet. More likely, it was for some other purpose, for some test or procedure they wanted from him.
The male doctor leaned closer, taking one of the smaller tubes in hand. He attached some contraption to it, some sort of vial, and he watched it fill with blood, one end of the tube emptying as his blood was diverted from its course.
There was no reaction he could have, really, rendered imobile and mute. He could glare at them again but any expression he’d made was summarily ignored so he didn't see the point in it.
“Should we start today?” the male doctor asked as he tucked away the newly acquired vial of blood, sending the rest of the fluid back on its original path back into Spike.
“I don’t see a reason to wait. He seems sturdy enough. Besides, we have to get something done before…” They looked at him and it felt like they remembered he was sentient for the first time since this had all begun. “He’ll want to see results when he sees him. Best to get him started now. If he reacts atypically, we’ll adjust dosage and supplementary drugs as needed. We can empty him out pretty easily, should the need arise.”
They were hiding something from him, that much was obvious. What he couldn’t imagine was why. What was he going to do with the information, bound and imobile, unable to speak? Was there someone they didn’t want him to reveal it to, maybe? Or maybe him knowing itself could cause problems, could skew results of whatever tests they were clearly going to do on him.
And then an injection was being prepared, clear liquid sucked up a syringe, the bottle holding the liquid covered in tiny words he couldn’t quite read. He imagined it wouldn’t help even if he could read them, he’d never been particularly good at that sciencey shit.
It wasn’t ideal but it certainly wasn’t unexpected. They jammed it into the side of his neck and he couldn't feel it, not the pressure nor any pain.
Afterwards, no reaction came. Not that he’d expected one, especially not so quickly, but part of him had been bracing for something awful to happen.
The doctor; the smaller, more feminine looking one; reached toward his mouth. And then the machine uncranked, compressing down and no longer stretching his mouth impossibly wide.
She pulled it out of his mouth, a string of saliva connecting him to it. It was disgusting but there wasn’t much he could do about it.
He shifted his jaw from side to side, stretching it after being held taut for so long.
He swallowed, or at least he tried. There wasn’t much for him to swallow, his seeming dehydration leaving his mouth drier than usual, even with the spit his mouth had clearly been fighting to produce in response to the intrusion of the strange device.
He gave the doctor what he hoped was a wry look. “Come on doc, take a guy out to dinner first.”
And then his mouth slammed shut with no warning, locking itself closed once more.
“Mouthy.”
The man sighed, fiddling with something outside of Spike’s line of sight. “They warned us about him.”
“We’ll be fine. He’ll be docile before you know it,” She patted Spike condescendingly on the cheek and he could do nothing but glare.
The lights went out again, the darkness absolute and unforgiving.
The doctors didn’t speak much after that. He wished they would. At the very least it would be something. As it stood, he was left desperately clinging to the scratching of pen on paper and the occasional shuffling and clinking that could have meant anything.
The only productive thing he could find to do was track footsteps, try and maintain a sense of where each doctor was. One left after a few minutes, the exact time difficult to tell with so few senses to rely on.
And then there was one.
He sat there, knowing how his senses had betrayed him, knowing he could be going through any number of tests or injections and would have no idea.
And then he was moving again. That, at least, he could feel, his stomach lurching as he was suddenly tipped back in his chair. Alongside that he could hear the footsteps, one sense not disturbed by this place.
He braced properly this time, trying not to bang himself around in the little room he had in his restraints this time. He couldn’t feel the pain of it but it seemed a bad time to be extraneously killing off brain cells.
And then he heard them leave. It sounded like the footsteps from the first time, the ones he’d now connected to the female doctor, but he couldn’t be sure with such a small sample size and with his observation skills as stunted as they were here.
“You’re back?” asked the girl from the room, the one they’d trapped him with for reasons beyond his current comprehension.
He found himself able to open his mouth, unsure how long it had been that way. It seemed somewhere in the journey he had stopped checking. “Seems that way. Listen, what are they keeping us here for?”
“I don’t know.”
He was getting really sick of hearing that. “Shocking. Come on, you must know something. What do they do to you?”
“I’m not supposed to know that. Not supposed to talk.”
“Look, no one else is here right now, and I say you are supposed to, okay? I’m telling you to know.”
“You have no authority here.” Her voice was light, like she was helpfully reminding him of something he’d forgotten. It was ludicrous, how far her passivity extended.
Something in him hoped she’d always been this way, a little broken and easy to mold. The alternative was that this place had turned her into this, and that was a far more harrowing thought.
“How long have you been here?” he tried, hoping eventually he’d find a way past her maze-like mental defenses. The worst she could do was not answer.
“You already asked me that.” She sounded more offended at the repeat question than she had been at him trying to brute force his way into getting an answer out of her.
“So what, I can’t ask the same question twice?”
“I suppose. It just seems silly."
“Listen, it’s not like we’re up to much else.”
“I suppose.”
“You’re like a broken record,” he informed her.
“You’re the one who keeps asking the same questions.”
“Well, it’s hard to come up with new things to ask when you don’t know the answer to anything,” he huffed.
“I don’t know. A lack of an answer is information too.”
“So you are capable of thinking on your own! Look at that.” His tone dripped with condescension.
She seemed irritated at that, happily settling into the quiet darkness.
That was one area where she had the upper hand. He didn’t know how long she’d been here but she had clearly become accustomed to this, the solitude and isolation of it all. She seemed to have no problems just sitting there endlessly. Spike wasn’t quite there yet. He hoped he never would be.
One of her more irritating habits, amongst many others, was whenever he tried to vocalize that feeling, she told him to rest. She said it like it was obvious, like he was the stupid one for not doing it.
He was good at sleeping anywhere, he’d picked up the skill for years of hard living. He could sleep sitting up, hell he could probably sleep sitting up in a metal chair.
The pain proved more of an obstacle. It was unceasing, unyielding. Everpresent and oppressive. There was nothing he could do to escape it and any time he tried to sleep, it almost seemed to amplify it, like trying to rest was putting the condition of his body under a microscope.
It almost felt like a blessing when they came to haul him away again. He knew he’d likely regret the feeling but any change in his surroundings, any distraction, was welcome at this point.
Once more, it was hard to tell what was happening to him, if things were touching or poking him. He could hear rustling and clanking and shifting once they stopped but had no idea what images to put to the noises.
There was pressure on his arm.
It was the first real sensation he could pick out, the first thing he could make sense of. He latched onto it, desperately tried to imagine what they were doing. Maybe just touching him, maybe some sort of intensive restraint.
Movement. Pressure.
He realized he hadn’t even tried to open his mouth again, assuming it would be stuck shut. Was the pressure there? Maybe he was just grinding his teeth.
He tried to open his mouth. It remained clamped shut.
There was some sort of muted light, something red, creeping into the dark.
After an embarrassing moment, he realized he’d closed his eyes in the dark and not realized it.
It wasn’t dark anymore, leaving the harsh, white lights of the room trying to worm their way through his eyelids.
He opened his eyes to see himself. His arm, in front of him, ripped open down to the bone.
He doubted they’d given him any anesthetic. It didn’t matter, he hadn’t been able to feel it anyway, his senses still overloaded from whatever was causing this agony under his skin.
He stared at his arm, carved open. He could see blood rushing through veins, open muscle. He was no stranger to gore, not with the lines of work he’d been in. It should have been different, being him. It should have sent waves of nausea through him, should have disturbed him more.
Somehow, it didn’t. His nakedness was bothering him more than anything, pain imperceptible now but somehow the cold still reaching him, still feeling exposed as he saw the edges of his naked body through blurry eyes.
And that was an odd reaction, he supposed. Seeing his muscle and bone in front of him and that making him feel less exposed than a lack of clothes did.
He admittedly wasn’t well-versed in complex medical procedures but it didn’t seem like they were doing much. His arm was just there, strapped down and open. They occasionally poked at it, touching bits of his muscles that caused his fingers to twitch, looking or writing notes. But they weren’t really doing anything, not adding things to him or taking away. It seemed more like observation than anything, but that seemed more trouble than it was worth. Cutting someone open just to poke at them.
As the doctor touched something inside of him with an unfamiliar metal tool, his muscle twinged, played like an instrument instead of a part of him.
He tentatively tried to flex his fingers. They moved, the mechanisms of it visible in front of him. Skinned, laid bare.
“Stay still,” the doctor barked.
The pressure in his mouth dissipated. He opened his jaw, the side of it cracking as he stretched it open.
Footsteps behind him, a hand tightening the restraints. He hadn’t even noticed the two sets of footsteps. He was growing incredibly reliant on his hearing, he could not be ignoring it like this.
Both doctors both stared at him, inspecting him. It made him feel more dissected than being carved open had.
“Lack of reaction to stimuli,” one of them said. Not to him, of course, but he could hear it.
“The muscles seem to be reacting fine,” he said, playing at lightheartedness.
They did not dignify him with a response. He got the distinct feeling that would continue on for however long he was here.
He wondered why they bothered to allow him to speak on occasion when they never seemed to care enough to listen.
“Nothing you want to ask?” one of them prompted him.
It was like they could read his mind, intentionally proving him wrong.
“Nothing you’d be willing to answer.”
It probably wasn’t advisable, behaving like this. He should information gather, should try and trick them with some tricky, circular questions. He was just so tired.
The lights went back out. He was wheeled back to the irritating girl.
He didn’t try and spark up much conversation this time. The silence drew on.
The footsteps came back too soon. Or maybe not. His sense of time was fleeing him rapidly.
He braced himself as the rhythmic patter approached, muscles tensing under unforgiving bindings with little else he could do to brace.
But they didn’t come for him. He waited for his chair to tip back, for the sinking feeling in his stomach, but it never came. Instead, he heard the creak coming from somewhere in front of him, no lurch in his stomach, no sensation of falling, and then heard the rolling of someone else.
It was the girl. No noises came from her except those of the chair being moved. There were no protests, no noises at all. Even her breathing seemed level.
He wondered once more if her mouth was sealed shut too or if this was a silence she had been trained into.
And then he was well and truly alone for the first time since he’d arrived here.
Part of him was relieved that it wasn’t him being experimented on this time. From a practical standpoint it wasn’t a good thing. He was far more likely to be able to escape in transit that he was parked here, securely locked away. But still, there was some animal part of him that was relieved to not be in danger.
There was some dread too. What if they didn’t bring her back and he was stuck here, alone? She hadn’t been particularly helpful but he was not conceited enough to think he could remain sane in the lonely darkness. He didn’t think anyone could, not if they were stuck there long enough.
Maybe that was why they’d taken him. Maybe their other lab rat was nearing her end and they needed someone fresher.
Or maybe not. He supposed there was no point in speculating.
So instead, he sat and he waited. He had no other choice in the matter.
cw: medical horror, suicidal ideation, dissociation, depersonalization, memeory loss, amnesia, forced nudity, ivs, restraints, memory loss, gunshot wounds, loss of sight, whump
Work count: 3k
Masterlist
Ao3
There was a creature in her room. It had been placed there, the noises echoing through the dark, and then nothing. Still, motionless, but a creature nonetheless. She could hear it breathing, breaths labored and slow. It sounded painful. It often was, here.
She just listened.
For a while, all she could hear was a horrible shuffling, moments of struggle against the bonds and quick inhales of pain. It was reactive, an animal thing, no thought or restraint, just action and reaction.
She wondered what they’d trapped in here with her. She wondered if she’d ever get to see it. She wondered if it was with them. Or maybe it was like her. It wasn’t like that made it any less dangerous.
Could she be dangerous? She wasn’t sure, could hardly remember.
She focused on the creature, the new variable she had to figure out. She wasn’t sure why they would put it with her, they knew she had long since grown unable to process new things. They’d told her as much. Or, not told her, she supposed. Said it nearby to one another, people worth talking to.
It struggled and relaxed, struggled and relaxed, like a bound animal testing its range of motion, stuck between instincts to flee and to play dead.
Occasional wounded noises escaped it, quiet and sad, echoing off the too close walls, pressing in invisibly on them both.
She couldn’t be silent forever. Would it be mad that she had hidden herself like this, secure in the dark and the quiet in a way it had not yet learned to be?
So she called out, voice soft. Nonthreatening, or so she hoped. “Hello?”
The breathing stuttered. She hoped she hadn’t frightened the thing. It was already cornered, locked in here with her. The last thing she needed was to frighten it.
“Is someone here?”
It was a man, voice low and gravely. It sounded like speaking might hurt it, voice sore from lack of use. She felt much the same, her words coming up rough.
At least it was a question she knew how to answer. She’d been stumbling over questions more and more lately, unable to tell if they’d been getting harder or if her mind had begun to deteriorate in the dark.
“Yes.” She willed more strength behind the words this time but it didn’t come.
It was hard to know how to behave. She was accustomed to more constrained interactions than this, ones where her role and the expectations were made clear. It had been a long time since she’d had control like this, since she’d interacted with anyone willing to so much as pretend to be on her level.
Was that what this was? Pretending? Another test, maybe. Tests she knew. She wasn’t good at them, particularly; they’d made that more than clear. But at least knowing was something to grab onto, to try and orient herself from.
It would be a test, she decided. Until she was given something else to know it by, that was what it would be.
If it was a test, and she was now inclined to think of it as such, the next step was harder. Easier to know but harder to do. A different battle.
It would come in one of two ways, questions or action. Those too were different battles. When the tests were those of action, of things being done to her, it was easy to comply, to fall into whatever they wanted of her. It was difficult, still, to pass these tests, but rarely was it for noncompliance.
Questions were harder. She used to prefer them, used to hope for days where all they would do was ask her endless questions. Now she dreaded them, dreaded the loss of passivity, the need to try and do. She dreaded the way she always seemed to get them wrong now, the way words would swim through her head. She’d heard one of them say it had been expected, that this was no worse than they’d predicted she would be doing. That stung worse of all somehow, their expectations and the memories of when she used to be able to think.
“Who are you?” he asked, and she fought back a scowl, even in the dark, keeping the skin between her eyes as smoothed out as she could manage. They hated when she made faces, they responded to it. Passivity was easier, it was always easier.
It was as she feared. A question she didn’t know how to answer, a question that asked too much, one she couldn’t round up an answer to from disjointed thoughts. “I don’t know,” she managed, the words’ sharpness sanded down by a dry mouth.
“You don’t know who you are?” He sounded… displeased. Something else. Incredulous. He did not believe her. No, he believed her, she heard belief, he didn’t want to believe her. She heard incredulity but not doubt.
“I… It’s been a long time,” she tried, feeling the words out in her mouth as she spoke them, uttered through cracked lips.
“A long time since what?”
“Since I was someone.” Another answer she knew. That was good.
“Right.” It didn’t sound like it liked that one. He. He didn’t like that one. “Where are we?”
It was a complicated question. She had a few answers. None of them felt correct. Right in a technical way, certainly, but not what he was looking for. “The labs,” she tried hesitantly, hoping it was what he wanted from her. “We’re with the doctors.”
“And do the doctors usually put people in full body restraints?”
He struggled performatively, as if she did not know he was restrained, and cried out once more. This time the cry was more restrained, not nearly so vulnerable. Now he knew he was being observed. He would become accustomed to that.
She’d stopped noticing the restraints in any real way, too long a part of her life to be notable any longer. She knew better than to struggle, knew better than to play dead. All there was was to stay. Anything beyond that was delusion.
“It’s better not to do that,” she said tentatively in lieu of an answer to his question. She didn’t think he’d meant the question anyway.
“Better not to what? Fight?”
That too did not seem a genuine question. “I suppose. If you hurt yourself more, they’ll be cross with you.”
“I don’t think I care that they’ll be cross with me. What else are they going to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“I already feel like I’m halfway dead, what more can they do to me? Tie me up more?”
Did they do something to him? Maybe they did. Maybe he’d undergone testing already, the invasive, passive kind that left you aching for days. Or maybe he just had no idea. She could remember before, in a distant sort of way. It had seemed like a lot, in the beginning, before she understood how bad things could become.
If that was the case, she wasn't sure how to handle it. They never let her interact with anyone, let alone someone new, someone who didn’t know the rules. What would be better? To warn them or to let them live in hope and delusion for as long as they could?
He didn’t sound hopeful though, not really. As much as he was playing at anger, he just seemed tired.
“You can rest,” she informed him, the words coming slowly, like she wasn’t quite sure she was allowed to say them.
“Trust me, I wish I could.”
“You can.”
He paused for a moment, and something in the back of her head tried to read into the silence, trying to understand it as meaningful instead of the groaning, whirring curtains of sound she’d become accustomed to .
“Are you in pain?” he finally asked, and there was a lightness to the words, behind the rough grit of it. It seemed put on, a performance of nonchalance. She wasn’t really sure who it was for.
And then, like it was an afterthought, he added, “Are we dead?”
That gave her pause. It was an odd question, she wasn’t far gone enough to not be able to recognize that much. But why would he be asking it? There had to be a reason. There was a reason behind everything.
“Are you asking to see what my answer is or because you want to know?” she asked tentatively, hoping she wasn’t veering into a trap that had been laid for her, one intended to test her complicity.
More shifting, more hisses of pain. He had to know by now that the bindings would not give. She’d given up on the idea quickly, when she’d first come, the metal of them unyielding and smothering.
At least he could speak. In her first months here she’d lived with a bit in her mouth, there to ensure she didn’t bite off her own tongue. Not that they’d told her that. They never told her anything. But they talked about her enough while standing nearby, like she was an animal that couldn’t understand their words, not even worth stepping out of the room to evade.
It was beginning to feel more and more true lately.
“What’s it to you? Can’t you just answer the damn question?”
He was rather rude. Or maybe she’d just drifted too far into docility, she wasn’t sure how to tell the difference.
“No.” There was almost emotion behind that, almost… what had they said? Impertinence.
“No you won’t answer it or no we’re not dead?”
“I’m not in pain,” she said, knowing, this time, it was not the answer he wanted. But then, she was becoming more and more certain that he was something like her so she imagined it wouldn’t matter. It never mattered how anyone spoke to her, after all. No one ever bothered to answer her questions either. She’d learned to stop asking.
She supposed, considering that, she should probably appreciate them more, while they were here, before they were trained out of this man.
“You’re not?” He sounded surprised, she guessed. She was fairly sure she was right.
It was almost a lie. Her not being in pain. There was always some pain, now, in this place, but it felt hard to recognize somehow. Like it might be happening to someone else. Besides, everything was comparative, in the end, and they had been ignoring her for a while. She’d been able to rest and settle and had avoided any tests for the longest stretch since she’d gotten here so the answer at least resembled the truth.
Maybe he was why they’d left her alone, she realized. Focused on a shiny new toy while she was left behind in the cupboard.
If that was the case, maybe it would last. Was that a bad thing to hope for? She supposed it probably was.
“Not really.” The answer was imprecise. It should have gotten her into trouble, but this man didn’t seem to know any better.
“Are you bound?”
“Yes.”
“Like me?”
“I can’t see you,” she reminded him. Maybe when you were new to the darkness, you forgot it sometimes. She couldn’t remember.
He groaned, likely from pain or irritation. “Best guess?”
“Probably. It is the best way to properly secure a subject.”
“A subject?”
“Yes. Is that…” The words died on her tongue. She wasn’t supposed to ask questions, certainly not questions like that. She’d gotten away with the other because of the… whatever he was. But this felt a bridge too far.
“Is what?”
It was prompted now. But he didn’t know the rules, that was becoming increasingly clear to her. “Nothing.”
“Whatever. How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know.”
He huffed. “Of course you don’t. Is it always like this here?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” Exasperation. It often seemed to tinge this things words. “Dark and awful. Like this.”
“Oh. Yes. They prefer not to let us see. It encourages passivity and focus. They said it was like…” she trailed off, the thought slipping away no matter how much she grasped for it.
“Like what?”
She’d had it. She was certain she’d known it moments before. “I don’t know.”
He scoffed. “Is there anything you do know?”
“Not for long.”
“Is there something wrong with you?”
Another not real question. She was getting good at recognizing them. “I’m not supposed to know that. That’s what the tests are for.”
“I don’t need any tests to determine it. I can tell and I can’t even see you.”
“Why did you ask it then?” That was another question. It was odd to hear them coming from her.
“I don’t know, figure it out yourself.” The words were sharp. There was something behind them, some intent she couldn’t decipher. She wished she wasn’t so out of practice at this, talking instead of simply responding.
She tried. She really did. A question he didn’t want the answer to, words laced with something. That seemed to matter more here, what words were undercut with. Less words, more tone. Harsh, sharp, intending to cut not to learn to anything. Questions as punishment. That she could understand.
The man moved on entirely on his own as she untangled his words. “Do you remember the layout of this place?”
Layout. That was physical. Landscape, geometry. The building. “Where stuff is?”
“That is what it means.”
“I don’t…” She felt dizzy but she couldn’t move. It didn't matter if she couldn’t move. There was no falling anymore. “I’m not supposed to know that.”
“I don’t give a damn what you’re supposed to know, do you know it or not?”
“I don’t,” she said, words tentative and unsure. “I did?”
“There really is something wrong with you. Just my luck I’d get stuck with a-” The words were punctuated by more pained noises, struggling against the binds turning to writhing agony.
“Horse blinders,” she interrupted.
“What?”
“The dark. They said it was to encourage focus. Like horse blinders on race horses. From before.”
“Right.” Doubt. He thought she was unstable, that’s why he’d been asking before when he knew his answer. This was a tone she was more familiar with, pairing the questions with the doubt slotted it neatly into place. It was fine. If he was here to be like her, he would see soon, would settle into the same loss of mind she’d been pushed into.
She wished she’d met someone else at the start, like this. Not for the benefit of the old her. There was no use mourning things like that here, no use looking back. But at least it would provide a window, a glimpse into what he saw in her. Metaphorically, she supposed.
“Focus on what?” As his words cut through her thoughts, they melted away before she could get a firm grip on them, lost to her in seconds.
“Hmm?” Inquisitive. It was odd, she thought. That noises could be questions. That she could ask questions.
“Why would you need horse blinders? What do they want you to focus on?”
“I don’t… On being undone.”
A groan that sounded less pained than the others. “I don’t know what that means. Focus on being undone.”
“It helps me to focus on… to not focus. It helps me to not focus. That’s what I meant.”
“How would it be like blinders then? Why would they say that?”
Did someone say that? Horse blinders. That sounded familiar, like something she was trying to remember. “The dark. It’s like horse blinders.”
A familiar whir and clank and then noises she recognized, familiar steps. Not a creature, not this time. The doctors entered the room and she fell silent, prepared for whatever they wanted with her.
But they didn’t want anything with her, it seemed. Instead, they went to the creature. The man. He was harder to wrangle, did not go easily. She could hear his breathing, harsh and strained from the effort of resisting, could hear his pain, could hear it not making any difference. He couldn’t move, there was no point, but it seemed an animal instinct. It died quickly.
Spike didn’t die when he fought the Syndicate. Someone saved him, pulled him back into the land of the living against his will. He woke up, bound and cold in some sort of lab, no idea where he was or what these people wanted from him. All he knew was one thing, they’d take their dues for saving his life. More than that, he wasn’t alone. It seemed he wasn’t the first person they’d done this to.
Spike hadn’t died when he fought the Syndicate. Maybe it would have been better if he had.
cw: medical horror, suicidal ideation, dissociation, depersonalization, memeory loss, amnesia, forced nudity, ivs, restraints, memory loss, gunshot wounds, loss of sight, whump
Work count: 3k
Masterlist
Ao3
There was a creature in her room. It had been placed there, the noises echoing through the dark, and then nothing. Still, motionless, but a creature nonetheless. She could hear it breathing, breaths labored and slow. It sounded painful. It often was, here.
She just listened.
For a while, all she could hear was a horrible shuffling, moments of struggle against the bonds and quick inhales of pain. It was reactive, an animal thing, no thought or restraint, just action and reaction.
She wondered what they’d trapped in here with her. She wondered if she’d ever get to see it. She wondered if it was with them. Or maybe it was like her. It wasn’t like that made it any less dangerous.
Could she be dangerous? She wasn’t sure, could hardly remember.
She focused on the creature, the new variable she had to figure out. She wasn’t sure why they would put it with her, they knew she had long since grown unable to process new things. They’d told her as much. Or, not told her, she supposed. Said it nearby to one another, people worth talking to.
It struggled and relaxed, struggled and relaxed, like a bound animal testing its range of motion, stuck between instincts to flee and to play dead.
Occasional wounded noises escaped it, quiet and sad, echoing off the too close walls, pressing in invisibly on them both.
She couldn’t be silent forever. Would it be mad that she had hidden herself like this, secure in the dark and the quiet in a way it had not yet learned to be?
So she called out, voice soft. Nonthreatening, or so she hoped. “Hello?”
The breathing stuttered. She hoped she hadn’t frightened the thing. It was already cornered, locked in here with her. The last thing she needed was to frighten it.
“Is someone here?”
It was a man, voice low and gravely. It sounded like speaking might hurt it, voice sore from lack of use. She felt much the same, her words coming up rough.
At least it was a question she knew how to answer. She’d been stumbling over questions more and more lately, unable to tell if they’d been getting harder or if her mind had begun to deteriorate in the dark.
“Yes.” She willed more strength behind the words this time but it didn’t come.
It was hard to know how to behave. She was accustomed to more constrained interactions than this, ones where her role and the expectations were made clear. It had been a long time since she’d had control like this, since she’d interacted with anyone willing to so much as pretend to be on her level.
Was that what this was? Pretending? Another test, maybe. Tests she knew. She wasn’t good at them, particularly; they’d made that more than clear. But at least knowing was something to grab onto, to try and orient herself from.
It would be a test, she decided. Until she was given something else to know it by, that was what it would be.
If it was a test, and she was now inclined to think of it as such, the next step was harder. Easier to know but harder to do. A different battle.
It would come in one of two ways, questions or action. Those too were different battles. When the tests were those of action, of things being done to her, it was easy to comply, to fall into whatever they wanted of her. It was difficult, still, to pass these tests, but rarely was it for noncompliance.
Questions were harder. She used to prefer them, used to hope for days where all they would do was ask her endless questions. Now she dreaded them, dreaded the loss of passivity, the need to try and do. She dreaded the way she always seemed to get them wrong now, the way words would swim through her head. She’d heard one of them say it had been expected, that this was no worse than they’d predicted she would be doing. That stung worse of all somehow, their expectations and the memories of when she used to be able to think.
“Who are you?” he asked, and she fought back a scowl, even in the dark, keeping the skin between her eyes as smoothed out as she could manage. They hated when she made faces, they responded to it. Passivity was easier, it was always easier.
It was as she feared. A question she didn’t know how to answer, a question that asked too much, one she couldn’t round up an answer to from disjointed thoughts. “I don’t know,” she managed, the words’ sharpness sanded down by a dry mouth.
“You don’t know who you are?” He sounded… displeased. Something else. Incredulous. He did not believe her. No, he believed her, she heard belief, he didn’t want to believe her. She heard incredulity but not doubt.
“I… It’s been a long time,” she tried, feeling the words out in her mouth as she spoke them, uttered through cracked lips.
“A long time since what?”
“Since I was someone.” Another answer she knew. That was good.
“Right.” It didn’t sound like it liked that one. He. He didn’t like that one. “Where are we?”
It was a complicated question. She had a few answers. None of them felt correct. Right in a technical way, certainly, but not what he was looking for. “The labs,” she tried hesitantly, hoping it was what he wanted from her. “We’re with the doctors.”
“And do the doctors usually put people in full body restraints?”
He struggled performatively, as if she did not know he was restrained, and cried out once more. This time the cry was more restrained, not nearly so vulnerable. Now he knew he was being observed. He would become accustomed to that.
She’d stopped noticing the restraints in any real way, too long a part of her life to be notable any longer. She knew better than to struggle, knew better than to play dead. All there was was to stay. Anything beyond that was delusion.
“It’s better not to do that,” she said tentatively in lieu of an answer to his question. She didn’t think he’d meant the question anyway.
“Better not to what? Fight?”
That too did not seem a genuine question. “I suppose. If you hurt yourself more, they’ll be cross with you.”
“I don’t think I care that they’ll be cross with me. What else are they going to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“I already feel like I’m halfway dead, what more can they do to me? Tie me up more?”
Did they do something to him? Maybe they did. Maybe he’d undergone testing already, the invasive, passive kind that left you aching for days. Or maybe he just had no idea. She could remember before, in a distant sort of way. It had seemed like a lot, in the beginning, before she understood how bad things could become.
If that was the case, she wasn't sure how to handle it. They never let her interact with anyone, let alone someone new, someone who didn’t know the rules. What would be better? To warn them or to let them live in hope and delusion for as long as they could?
He didn’t sound hopeful though, not really. As much as he was playing at anger, he just seemed tired.
“You can rest,” she informed him, the words coming slowly, like she wasn’t quite sure she was allowed to say them.
“Trust me, I wish I could.”
“You can.”
He paused for a moment, and something in the back of her head tried to read into the silence, trying to understand it as meaningful instead of the groaning, whirring curtains of sound she’d become accustomed to .
“Are you in pain?” he finally asked, and there was a lightness to the words, behind the rough grit of it. It seemed put on, a performance of nonchalance. She wasn’t really sure who it was for.
And then, like it was an afterthought, he added, “Are we dead?”
That gave her pause. It was an odd question, she wasn’t far gone enough to not be able to recognize that much. But why would he be asking it? There had to be a reason. There was a reason behind everything.
“Are you asking to see what my answer is or because you want to know?” she asked tentatively, hoping she wasn’t veering into a trap that had been laid for her, one intended to test her complicity.
More shifting, more hisses of pain. He had to know by now that the bindings would not give. She’d given up on the idea quickly, when she’d first come, the metal of them unyielding and smothering.
At least he could speak. In her first months here she’d lived with a bit in her mouth, there to ensure she didn’t bite off her own tongue. Not that they’d told her that. They never told her anything. But they talked about her enough while standing nearby, like she was an animal that couldn’t understand their words, not even worth stepping out of the room to evade.
It was beginning to feel more and more true lately.
“What’s it to you? Can’t you just answer the damn question?”
He was rather rude. Or maybe she’d just drifted too far into docility, she wasn’t sure how to tell the difference.
“No.” There was almost emotion behind that, almost… what had they said? Impertinence.
“No you won’t answer it or no we’re not dead?”
“I’m not in pain,” she said, knowing, this time, it was not the answer he wanted. But then, she was becoming more and more certain that he was something like her so she imagined it wouldn’t matter. It never mattered how anyone spoke to her, after all. No one ever bothered to answer her questions either. She’d learned to stop asking.
She supposed, considering that, she should probably appreciate them more, while they were here, before they were trained out of this man.
“You’re not?” He sounded surprised, she guessed. She was fairly sure she was right.
It was almost a lie. Her not being in pain. There was always some pain, now, in this place, but it felt hard to recognize somehow. Like it might be happening to someone else. Besides, everything was comparative, in the end, and they had been ignoring her for a while. She’d been able to rest and settle and had avoided any tests for the longest stretch since she’d gotten here so the answer at least resembled the truth.
Maybe he was why they’d left her alone, she realized. Focused on a shiny new toy while she was left behind in the cupboard.
If that was the case, maybe it would last. Was that a bad thing to hope for? She supposed it probably was.
“Not really.” The answer was imprecise. It should have gotten her into trouble, but this man didn’t seem to know any better.
“Are you bound?”
“Yes.”
“Like me?”
“I can’t see you,” she reminded him. Maybe when you were new to the darkness, you forgot it sometimes. She couldn’t remember.
He groaned, likely from pain or irritation. “Best guess?”
“Probably. It is the best way to properly secure a subject.”
“A subject?”
“Yes. Is that…” The words died on her tongue. She wasn’t supposed to ask questions, certainly not questions like that. She’d gotten away with the other because of the… whatever he was. But this felt a bridge too far.
“Is what?”
It was prompted now. But he didn’t know the rules, that was becoming increasingly clear to her. “Nothing.”
“Whatever. How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know.”
He huffed. “Of course you don’t. Is it always like this here?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” Exasperation. It often seemed to tinge this things words. “Dark and awful. Like this.”
“Oh. Yes. They prefer not to let us see. It encourages passivity and focus. They said it was like…” she trailed off, the thought slipping away no matter how much she grasped for it.
“Like what?”
She’d had it. She was certain she’d known it moments before. “I don’t know.”
He scoffed. “Is there anything you do know?”
“Not for long.”
“Is there something wrong with you?”
Another not real question. She was getting good at recognizing them. “I’m not supposed to know that. That’s what the tests are for.”
“I don’t need any tests to determine it. I can tell and I can’t even see you.”
“Why did you ask it then?” That was another question. It was odd to hear them coming from her.
“I don’t know, figure it out yourself.” The words were sharp. There was something behind them, some intent she couldn’t decipher. She wished she wasn’t so out of practice at this, talking instead of simply responding.
She tried. She really did. A question he didn’t want the answer to, words laced with something. That seemed to matter more here, what words were undercut with. Less words, more tone. Harsh, sharp, intending to cut not to learn to anything. Questions as punishment. That she could understand.
The man moved on entirely on his own as she untangled his words. “Do you remember the layout of this place?”
Layout. That was physical. Landscape, geometry. The building. “Where stuff is?”
“That is what it means.”
“I don’t…” She felt dizzy but she couldn’t move. It didn't matter if she couldn’t move. There was no falling anymore. “I’m not supposed to know that.”
“I don’t give a damn what you’re supposed to know, do you know it or not?”
“I don’t,” she said, words tentative and unsure. “I did?”
“There really is something wrong with you. Just my luck I’d get stuck with a-” The words were punctuated by more pained noises, struggling against the binds turning to writhing agony.
“Horse blinders,” she interrupted.
“What?”
“The dark. They said it was to encourage focus. Like horse blinders on race horses. From before.”
“Right.” Doubt. He thought she was unstable, that’s why he’d been asking before when he knew his answer. This was a tone she was more familiar with, pairing the questions with the doubt slotted it neatly into place. It was fine. If he was here to be like her, he would see soon, would settle into the same loss of mind she’d been pushed into.
She wished she’d met someone else at the start, like this. Not for the benefit of the old her. There was no use mourning things like that here, no use looking back. But at least it would provide a window, a glimpse into what he saw in her. Metaphorically, she supposed.
“Focus on what?” As his words cut through her thoughts, they melted away before she could get a firm grip on them, lost to her in seconds.
“Hmm?” Inquisitive. It was odd, she thought. That noises could be questions. That she could ask questions.
“Why would you need horse blinders? What do they want you to focus on?”
“I don’t… On being undone.”
A groan that sounded less pained than the others. “I don’t know what that means. Focus on being undone.”
“It helps me to focus on… to not focus. It helps me to not focus. That’s what I meant.”
“How would it be like blinders then? Why would they say that?”
Did someone say that? Horse blinders. That sounded familiar, like something she was trying to remember. “The dark. It’s like horse blinders.”
A familiar whir and clank and then noises she recognized, familiar steps. Not a creature, not this time. The doctors entered the room and she fell silent, prepared for whatever they wanted with her.
But they didn’t want anything with her, it seemed. Instead, they went to the creature. The man. He was harder to wrangle, did not go easily. She could hear his breathing, harsh and strained from the effort of resisting, could hear his pain, could hear it not making any difference. He couldn’t move, there was no point, but it seemed an animal instinct. It died quickly.
cw: medical horror, suicidal ideation, forced nudity, ivs, restraints, memory loss, gunshot wounds, loss of sight, whump
Work count: 3k
Masterlist
Ao3
When Spike opened his eyes, all he could see was black.
The idea that there was nothing after death, just cold emptiness, wasn’t exactly shocking. It had seemed a definite possibility, though he made no claims towards knowing with any certainty what was waiting for you after you bit the bullet.
Or, at least he hadn’t. Now, he supposed he knew. Everyone found out, in the end.
The one thing that he hadn’t anticipated was being conscious for it. It was cold and dark and everything hurt. How could you still hurt after you died? It didn’t quite seem fair. Not that fairness had ever really mattered.
The pain was everywhere, running through every bit of flesh it could find, worming its way under his skin. He couldn’t tell if it came from an injury or if this is just what he was now, made of meat and bone and sinew and pain.
He closed his eyes; not that it mattered. The world looked the same either way now.
He breathed in as deeply as he could, the pain impossibly worsening, beyond anything he’d ever felt before, beyond what he could stand. A horrible, strangled cry escaped him. It sounded pleading to his ears, a useless instinct. He could not see nor understand what was happening to him, but somehow he knew he was alone. He knew no one could help him here.
He focused on the sensation as best he could, trying to find a source, to see if it radiated from anywhere. It was impossible to tell, the feeling imbued into his very being. He worried that if it was, somehow, a physical pain caused by real injury, that his body’s sensors were overloaded. That he could not tell where it hurt the worst because everything was already so far beyond what he could take that his body was just reporting back that everything was wrong.
But he did remember. He was shot, back then, when he was alive. Before this nightmare had begun. He shifted to touch his stomach, to reach the searing pain there where he’d seen the wounds begin to bloom with blood, but he couldn’t move, arms trapped by his sides.
That too seemed unfair, having enough of a body to hurt but not enough to move. Unnecessarily cruel. But he supposed that was about par for the course. Life rarely sought to be anything else, he was unsure why he’d thought death would be any different.
He tried, foolishly, to cling to normalcy. To take stock of his surroundings, to figure himself a plan. They were instincts years honed, not so easily tamped down, not even now. He knew, of course, that there would be no getting out of this. Even if he could move, could see, could feel anything but all encompassing, overloaded misery, no one escaped death. Certainly not once they sat where he sat now.
And still, knowing this, barely lucid enough to properly think it without panic, hurt, run taking over his animal brain, he took stock of what was around him. He listened for echoes, for breathing, for whirs of machinery. Those he found easily. He wasn’t sure how he hadn't noticed them sooner, they weren’t exactly quiet. Machines sounded around him, clicking and whirring in something so constant it had turned itself into a loud sort of silence. But still, he heard it. He wondered if there were real machines here, wherever he’d been exiled to, or if it was just the noise, trying to drown him in it, to worm its way inside his head while all he could hear was silence.
Feeling was still hard. He knew he must be sitting on something, he wasn’t just hovering like this. Or maybe he was, he supposed he was not accustomed to the rules of this place. If he was sitting on something, he could make no real guess at the material of it, his body telling him that it hurt whenever he tried to ask for information. He couldn’t find the energy to blame it.
There was little else to take in. He could smell something, almost metallic and sterile, but could hardly make sense of that either. It almost smelled like blood; but that happened sometimes, he supposed. When you were really hurt, even if you weren’t bleeding. Your brain’s way of telling you something was wrong, even if you couldn’t quite see it.
It had happened to him before. Once when he’d banged his head coming out of an unfamiliar ship, one with door frames slightly lower that what he was accustomed to, his muscle memory dooming him to a nasty bump on his head. Another time he’d experienced it for weeks, convinced Jett or Faye had been hiding some sort of injury or otherwise hiding a stash of blood until he realized it had inexplicably come entirely from him, caused by some problem with one of his teeth. He’d never told them that, especially not after accusing Faye of stealing some from a nearby hospital. It was better that they hadn’t known. It had saved him some dignity, at least. And besides, it did seem like something she would do. He couldn’t be blamed for it.
Or maybe it was a memory, one he was stuck with. He had been bleeding out, on those steps. Maybe that was it forever now, a scent stuck in his nose. The darkness fell in line with that, his eyes closed leaving a horrible darkness as his final sensory memory. But then, he was fairly certain he had not found himself restrained in his final moment.
He tried not to think about it too hard. There were things you weren’t meant to understand. He respected that, saw it as the necessary thing it was. Besides, the sort of things you weren’t meant to understand were rarely things he wanted to understand anyway. It wasn’t a great loss.
He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to understand this, where he was now, what was happening to him. Every new revelation he made cast a new horrible light on the entire situation. He wasn’t sure how many horrific things he could learn. Maybe ignorance would be best.
The thought did not stop his instincts, as much as he might’ve tried. Always, his senses searched, tried to find anything to grab onto, anything that would make the situation or the setting solidify into some understandable hellscape, something he could comprehend, even if he couldn’t properly bear it.
He kept noticing the mechanical droning. It was easy to forget, to let it become that faux silence once more. Every time he did, it would occur to him again, his mind deciding it was a revelation, a discovery he needed to become aware of anew.
“Hello?” The droning that was attempting to mimic silence shattered. The deafening roar akin to silence sounded much quieter when cut through by a voice, the illusion of how all encompassing it was being completely shattered in one fell swoop.
He practically jumped out of his skin, something in his abdomen sloshing as pain shot through him. He had no way of determining the source of it, able to tell nothing except that something was wrong. He was barely able to move, his hands still locked to his sides, his head refusing to turn to face the voice; not that it would do any good in this light. The contraction of his muscles alone seemed to be enough to shoot a new, pronounced wave of white hot pain through him.
He couldn’t even double over on himself, something keeping him upright, pressing him back against what he now recognized as a hard surface.
In fact, the more he tried to move, the more struggle the pain drew out of him, the more he felt himself pushing against hard surfaces. His wrists, unable to move, were enclosed by something, cold and firm, all encompassing. Something wrapped around his chest, drawing fits of agony with every breath as he pushed against the bounds of it. The pain, just as strong as ever, was becoming easier to understand. Like the noise of the machines, it was becoming monotonous in its loudness. He pushed past it to try and feel, finding that his head was wrapped in what felt like metal, holding him back into the hard surface behind him. It was hard to tell the material properly in the cold like this, where everything felt frigid and nothing had any give to it, but at least it was an attempt at sensation yielding some results. He wasn’t sure how he’d survive in a touchless world. But then, he wasn’t sure if his survival was something that even mattered.
He opened his mouth experimentally, relieved when it wasn’t wired shut and stuck in the same binds the rest of him was. He shifted his jaw to the side, relishing in the movement of it. He heard a crack as he shifted it back to center, something lodging either out of or back into place. He couldn’t tell, the pain was too all encompassing to determine if the movement had hurt or not.
At the very least, it meant he could speak. But to who? Someone had spoken, if he could still lay claim to his sanity. Someone was there. If his hearing was right, it was a girl, voice hoarse and scratchy, like she was lost in the throes of some sickness.
But that couldn’t be true.
He’d felt the bullet rip through him, felt his life fading. He knew there was no one coming. He had been in enemy territory. Even if he hadn’t died quickly, there was no one there who would help him. He’d expected a few kicks in the side as he bled out at most. Most likely, they’d just left him there, maybe hadn’t even stayed to watch him bleed out. Regardless, there was no salvation for him, not there. He’d known that as soon as he felt the first bullet enter him. If he was honest, he’d known long before that.
But someone was talking to him. Unless he’d gone crazy. He wasn’t sure if you could be dead and crazy.
Maybe she was dead like him, stuck with him in this hellscape. He wondered what she might’ve done to get put here with him. Maybe it was nothing. He wasn’t sure if this was something one could deserve. He was even less sure if whatever had stuck him here cared about things like deserve. It seemed unlikely, from where he was sitting.
She could be alive. They could both be alive. Even as he thought it, it didn’t seem like it could be possible. He was dead. He knew that as resolutely as he knew anything now, as surely as he knew that he was in pain and he was cold and he was bound.
What else even was there? Some demon or angel, here for him? He couldn’t bring himself to believe in that either. In demons and angels maybe. Unlikely, but what did he know? But even if by some universal joke they did, one caring about him seemed just as impossible.
Nothing seemed possible. His first theory of post-mortem madness seemed the most practical, though none of it was anything he could really understand.
Once again, he found that none of that trumped years of habit, and so he opened his mouth and began gathering information.
“Is someone there?” he asked, his voice cracking a little over the words. His mouth was dry, the words sticking as they came out, refusing to leave him with anything resembling the ease he was accustomed to.
Her hoarseness made more sense to him now. Maybe there was no water here, in whatever hell he’d ended up in. He supposed there were worse things.
“Yes.”
She sounded as alive as anyone he’d ever met. He wasn’t sure if he still did, to his own ears, his voice foreign and distant, but he knew she sounded alive.
He couldn’t glean much from her voice. The word was short, like she could barely squeeze the sound out of her. She didn’t sound scared or confused. She didn’t sound much like anything. Honestly, she just sounded tired, the words creaking out of her like this alone was too much effort.
He didn’t have it in him to feel sympathy for her. Everything hurt too much and he had too many questions. Sympathy was for people without problems of their own to worry about.
He blinked hard in the total darkness, willing his eyes to adjust, to be able to get something resembling answers on his own. The longer this went on, the more he worried there was nothing he could adjust to, that there was not one particle of light that had snuck into this room that he could even hope to see with.
The restraints, and he was becoming more and more aware of them as he shifted and pushed, were all encompassing. Even still, it was hard to tell properly where they ended. With every accidental flex of the muscles in his stomach, he felt them pushing up against something firm, like even they had been impossibly restrained.
He realized far too late that he was dripping sweat, the state he was being forced to exist in right now causing strain even as he sat motionless. He hadn’t picked up the moisture before, his senses too overloaded with input to understand it properly. It seemed unfair, that his body should decide he could spare the water for this but his mouth was still so dry.
A drop of sweat fell in his eye and he could do nothing but blink and try to clear away that new bit of irritation. He couldn't even call it pain. Not now, not when the rest of him felt like this.
He gave up after a few dozen blinks and shut his eye. The inability to fix it stung more than the physical sensation of it.
As sweat dripped across burning skin, he realized that it had no clothes to sink into, the moisture tacky against his flesh. He hadn’t noticed that before either, too caught up in the hurt to notice the way the air brushed up against him, uninterrupted. Maybe that was why he felt so cold.
He found, fleetingly, that he was grateful for the darkness. At least this way, he was spared that bit of hell, being so exposed like this. The darkness offered him some layer of modesty, of comfort. He wasn’t particularly shy, mind you, but being seen like this felt insurmountable, something from which he could not recover.
The cold began to sink bone deep. Or maybe it had already been there and he simply hadn’t bothered to notice it yet, everything else already all encompassing enough. The shivering caused new shots of pain through strained muscles, pulling at wounds new and old.
He needed to ask questions, needed to externalize. At least it would give him something to focus on.
“Who are you?” he tried. It wasn’t the best question, certainly not the one that would give him the most complete information, but it was something. The sound of his own voice, mangled and battered as it was, felt almost grounding, like a reassurance that at least one of his senses could still function properly.
cw: medical horror, suicidal ideation, forced nudity, ivs, restraints, memory loss, gunshot wounds, loss of sight, whump
Work count: 3k
Masterlist
Ao3
When Spike opened his eyes, all he could see was black.
The idea that there was nothing after death, just cold emptiness, wasn’t exactly shocking. It had seemed a definite possibility, though he made no claims towards knowing with any certainty what was waiting for you after you bit the bullet.
Or, at least he hadn’t. Now, he supposed he knew. Everyone found out, in the end.
The one thing that he hadn’t anticipated was being conscious for it. It was cold and dark and everything hurt. How could you still hurt after you died? It didn’t quite seem fair. Not that fairness had ever really mattered.
The pain was everywhere, running through every bit of flesh it could find, worming its way under his skin. He couldn’t tell if it came from an injury or if this is just what he was now, made of meat and bone and sinew and pain.
He closed his eyes; not that it mattered. The world looked the same either way now.
He breathed in as deeply as he could, the pain impossibly worsening, beyond anything he’d ever felt before, beyond what he could stand. A horrible, strangled cry escaped him. It sounded pleading to his ears, a useless instinct. He could not see nor understand what was happening to him, but somehow he knew he was alone. He knew no one could help him here.
He focused on the sensation as best he could, trying to find a source, to see if it radiated from anywhere. It was impossible to tell, the feeling imbued into his very being. He worried that if it was, somehow, a physical pain caused by real injury, that his body’s sensors were overloaded. That he could not tell where it hurt the worst because everything was already so far beyond what he could take that his body was just reporting back that everything was wrong.
But he did remember. He was shot, back then, when he was alive. Before this nightmare had begun. He shifted to touch his stomach, to reach the searing pain there where he’d seen the wounds begin to bloom with blood, but he couldn’t move, arms trapped by his sides.
That too seemed unfair, having enough of a body to hurt but not enough to move. Unnecessarily cruel. But he supposed that was about par for the course. Life rarely sought to be anything else, he was unsure why he’d thought death would be any different.
He tried, foolishly, to cling to normalcy. To take stock of his surroundings, to figure himself a plan. They were instincts years honed, not so easily tamped down, not even now. He knew, of course, that there would be no getting out of this. Even if he could move, could see, could feel anything but all encompassing, overloaded misery, no one escaped death. Certainly not once they sat where he sat now.
And still, knowing this, barely lucid enough to properly think it without panic, hurt, run taking over his animal brain, he took stock of what was around him. He listened for echoes, for breathing, for whirs of machinery. Those he found easily. He wasn’t sure how he hadn't noticed them sooner, they weren’t exactly quiet. Machines sounded around him, clicking and whirring in something so constant it had turned itself into a loud sort of silence. But still, he heard it. He wondered if there were real machines here, wherever he’d been exiled to, or if it was just the noise, trying to drown him in it, to worm its way inside his head while all he could hear was silence.
Feeling was still hard. He knew he must be sitting on something, he wasn’t just hovering like this. Or maybe he was, he supposed he was not accustomed to the rules of this place. If he was sitting on something, he could make no real guess at the material of it, his body telling him that it hurt whenever he tried to ask for information. He couldn’t find the energy to blame it.
There was little else to take in. He could smell something, almost metallic and sterile, but could hardly make sense of that either. It almost smelled like blood; but that happened sometimes, he supposed. When you were really hurt, even if you weren’t bleeding. Your brain’s way of telling you something was wrong, even if you couldn’t quite see it.
It had happened to him before. Once when he’d banged his head coming out of an unfamiliar ship, one with door frames slightly lower that what he was accustomed to, his muscle memory dooming him to a nasty bump on his head. Another time he’d experienced it for weeks, convinced Jett or Faye had been hiding some sort of injury or otherwise hiding a stash of blood until he realized it had inexplicably come entirely from him, caused by some problem with one of his teeth. He’d never told them that, especially not after accusing Faye of stealing some from a nearby hospital. It was better that they hadn’t known. It had saved him some dignity, at least. And besides, it did seem like something she would do. He couldn’t be blamed for it.
Or maybe it was a memory, one he was stuck with. He had been bleeding out, on those steps. Maybe that was it forever now, a scent stuck in his nose. The darkness fell in line with that, his eyes closed leaving a horrible darkness as his final sensory memory. But then, he was fairly certain he had not found himself restrained in his final moment.
He tried not to think about it too hard. There were things you weren’t meant to understand. He respected that, saw it as the necessary thing it was. Besides, the sort of things you weren’t meant to understand were rarely things he wanted to understand anyway. It wasn’t a great loss.
He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to understand this, where he was now, what was happening to him. Every new revelation he made cast a new horrible light on the entire situation. He wasn’t sure how many horrific things he could learn. Maybe ignorance would be best.
The thought did not stop his instincts, as much as he might’ve tried. Always, his senses searched, tried to find anything to grab onto, anything that would make the situation or the setting solidify into some understandable hellscape, something he could comprehend, even if he couldn’t properly bear it.
He kept noticing the mechanical droning. It was easy to forget, to let it become that faux silence once more. Every time he did, it would occur to him again, his mind deciding it was a revelation, a discovery he needed to become aware of anew.
“Hello?” The droning that was attempting to mimic silence shattered. The deafening roar akin to silence sounded much quieter when cut through by a voice, the illusion of how all encompassing it was being completely shattered in one fell swoop.
He practically jumped out of his skin, something in his abdomen sloshing as pain shot through him. He had no way of determining the source of it, able to tell nothing except that something was wrong. He was barely able to move, his hands still locked to his sides, his head refusing to turn to face the voice; not that it would do any good in this light. The contraction of his muscles alone seemed to be enough to shoot a new, pronounced wave of white hot pain through him.
He couldn’t even double over on himself, something keeping him upright, pressing him back against what he now recognized as a hard surface.
In fact, the more he tried to move, the more struggle the pain drew out of him, the more he felt himself pushing against hard surfaces. His wrists, unable to move, were enclosed by something, cold and firm, all encompassing. Something wrapped around his chest, drawing fits of agony with every breath as he pushed against the bounds of it. The pain, just as strong as ever, was becoming easier to understand. Like the noise of the machines, it was becoming monotonous in its loudness. He pushed past it to try and feel, finding that his head was wrapped in what felt like metal, holding him back into the hard surface behind him. It was hard to tell the material properly in the cold like this, where everything felt frigid and nothing had any give to it, but at least it was an attempt at sensation yielding some results. He wasn’t sure how he’d survive in a touchless world. But then, he wasn’t sure if his survival was something that even mattered.
He opened his mouth experimentally, relieved when it wasn’t wired shut and stuck in the same binds the rest of him was. He shifted his jaw to the side, relishing in the movement of it. He heard a crack as he shifted it back to center, something lodging either out of or back into place. He couldn’t tell, the pain was too all encompassing to determine if the movement had hurt or not.
At the very least, it meant he could speak. But to who? Someone had spoken, if he could still lay claim to his sanity. Someone was there. If his hearing was right, it was a girl, voice hoarse and scratchy, like she was lost in the throes of some sickness.
But that couldn’t be true.
He’d felt the bullet rip through him, felt his life fading. He knew there was no one coming. He had been in enemy territory. Even if he hadn’t died quickly, there was no one there who would help him. He’d expected a few kicks in the side as he bled out at most. Most likely, they’d just left him there, maybe hadn’t even stayed to watch him bleed out. Regardless, there was no salvation for him, not there. He’d known that as soon as he felt the first bullet enter him. If he was honest, he’d known long before that.
But someone was talking to him. Unless he’d gone crazy. He wasn’t sure if you could be dead and crazy.
Maybe she was dead like him, stuck with him in this hellscape. He wondered what she might’ve done to get put here with him. Maybe it was nothing. He wasn’t sure if this was something one could deserve. He was even less sure if whatever had stuck him here cared about things like deserve. It seemed unlikely, from where he was sitting.
She could be alive. They could both be alive. Even as he thought it, it didn’t seem like it could be possible. He was dead. He knew that as resolutely as he knew anything now, as surely as he knew that he was in pain and he was cold and he was bound.
What else even was there? Some demon or angel, here for him? He couldn’t bring himself to believe in that either. In demons and angels maybe. Unlikely, but what did he know? But even if by some universal joke they did, one caring about him seemed just as impossible.
Nothing seemed possible. His first theory of post-mortem madness seemed the most practical, though none of it was anything he could really understand.
Once again, he found that none of that trumped years of habit, and so he opened his mouth and began gathering information.
“Is someone there?” he asked, his voice cracking a little over the words. His mouth was dry, the words sticking as they came out, refusing to leave him with anything resembling the ease he was accustomed to.
Her hoarseness made more sense to him now. Maybe there was no water here, in whatever hell he’d ended up in. He supposed there were worse things.
“Yes.”
She sounded as alive as anyone he’d ever met. He wasn’t sure if he still did, to his own ears, his voice foreign and distant, but he knew she sounded alive.
He couldn’t glean much from her voice. The word was short, like she could barely squeeze the sound out of her. She didn’t sound scared or confused. She didn’t sound much like anything. Honestly, she just sounded tired, the words creaking out of her like this alone was too much effort.
He didn’t have it in him to feel sympathy for her. Everything hurt too much and he had too many questions. Sympathy was for people without problems of their own to worry about.
He blinked hard in the total darkness, willing his eyes to adjust, to be able to get something resembling answers on his own. The longer this went on, the more he worried there was nothing he could adjust to, that there was not one particle of light that had snuck into this room that he could even hope to see with.
The restraints, and he was becoming more and more aware of them as he shifted and pushed, were all encompassing. Even still, it was hard to tell properly where they ended. With every accidental flex of the muscles in his stomach, he felt them pushing up against something firm, like even they had been impossibly restrained.
He realized far too late that he was dripping sweat, the state he was being forced to exist in right now causing strain even as he sat motionless. He hadn’t picked up the moisture before, his senses too overloaded with input to understand it properly. It seemed unfair, that his body should decide he could spare the water for this but his mouth was still so dry.
A drop of sweat fell in his eye and he could do nothing but blink and try to clear away that new bit of irritation. He couldn't even call it pain. Not now, not when the rest of him felt like this.
He gave up after a few dozen blinks and shut his eye. The inability to fix it stung more than the physical sensation of it.
As sweat dripped across burning skin, he realized that it had no clothes to sink into, the moisture tacky against his flesh. He hadn’t noticed that before either, too caught up in the hurt to notice the way the air brushed up against him, uninterrupted. Maybe that was why he felt so cold.
He found, fleetingly, that he was grateful for the darkness. At least this way, he was spared that bit of hell, being so exposed like this. The darkness offered him some layer of modesty, of comfort. He wasn’t particularly shy, mind you, but being seen like this felt insurmountable, something from which he could not recover.
The cold began to sink bone deep. Or maybe it had already been there and he simply hadn’t bothered to notice it yet, everything else already all encompassing enough. The shivering caused new shots of pain through strained muscles, pulling at wounds new and old.
He needed to ask questions, needed to externalize. At least it would give him something to focus on.
“Who are you?” he tried. It wasn’t the best question, certainly not the one that would give him the most complete information, but it was something. The sound of his own voice, mangled and battered as it was, felt almost grounding, like a reassurance that at least one of his senses could still function properly.
Spike didn’t die when he fought the Syndicate. Someone saved him, pulled him back into the land of the living against his will. He woke up, bound and cold in some sort of lab, no idea where he was or what these people wanted from him. All he knew was one thing, they’d take their dues for saving his life. More than that, he wasn’t alone. It seemed he wasn’t the first person they’d done this to.
Spike hadn’t died when he fought the Syndicate. Maybe it would have been better if he had.
one of my favorite arthurian moments of all time is when gawain accidentally murders a lady and camelot just hands this problem over to guinevere who’s like ok you have to promise to be a feminist now for the rest of your life. and gawain says okay <3 and everything is fine afterwards
i know i say this often but i cannot say it loud enough: people who comment on fics, people who reblog posts and engage with fanworks are the people who generate community and without them fandom would be nowhere, so truly thank you for your presence, you make the world go 'round <3
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