True North: Point of Separation
Samir is alone with the insurgents. (Iago & Samir)
cw: fictional warfare, offscreen child death, guilt, exhaustion, whipping, violence, beatings, dehydration, guns, blood, bound hands/feet, hoods, auction/slavery mention, kidnapping for ransom, captivity whump, platonic touch, missing persons cases, implied murder or manslaughter, negative self talk, hurt/comfort, both Stockholm and Lima vibes with these two.
Charlie being ushered into a silver Jeep wrangler was the last thing Samir saw before the black canvas bag was pulled over his head. His hands were tied behind him, pulling the socket of his healing shoulder. His nose bled over his lips and into his mouth, wetting the rough cloth over his face, making it harder to breathe.
He kicked blindly, making contact with a soldier’s leg. They grunted in pain and annoyance, but before Samir could relish the little victory two men pushed him to the ground, one holding each leg so they could bind them together at the knees, all the way down to his ankles. He thrashed and fought like a wild thing, until one of his captors punched him in the face again.
The pain in his nose was so sharp that his eyes streamed with tears. He went still in shock, trying not to groan as waves of agony radiated up his nose, down into his teeth. They hoisted him onto the back of a truck and slammed the tailgate shut.
He’d never fought them like that. Not even when they’d first been captured. But they had taken Charlie away. They'd separated them. They’d given him to another group, like trading flour and clementines. Achille had done it casually, with the wave of a hand and a nod. Charlie had looked frightened for a moment, but steeled himself when he saw Samir, telling him it would be alright, not to panic, to do what Achille tells him.
“I’ll see you soon, Samir,” he’d said over his shoulder as they led him away. Comforting him, even as his own fate opened up like a black pit in front of him.
“Is this little pussy going to cry the whole way now?” Bones had complained, massaging the handle of his bullwhip. “We shoulda tossed him in as a bonus. A journalist and uh... a useless not-doctor. Two for one.”
“I thought you wanted to pick your teeth with this one,” another had said, nodding toward Samir. “Thought you just had to have him.”
He’d broken away from the soldiers and chased after Charlie, or tried to. Bones and two others stopped him before he got three yards, dogpiled him into the dirt. The men who took Charlie wore white camouflage, not solid green jackets like Achille and his men. They looked at him strangely as he made a scene, and later Samir realized it was because of he was wearing one of their green jackets, given to him when his own got wet and gave him a case of racking chills.
They thought he was one of them.
The truck started with a throaty diesel growl, a reverberation he felt in every bone in his body as he lay in its bed. Several men climbed onto the edges of the truck bed, and one clapped the body of it to let the driver know they were good to take off.
“Iago?” Samir tried, blind behind the black hood.
“Quiet,” Iago warned icily. This confirmed he was one of the several in the truck bed with him, but he was being tough in front of his fellow soldiers, like always.
“Lie the fuck down and be quiet.”
Samir wanted to scream. He wanted to kick and headbutt until something happened, until he had some power back in the world. He knew the odds of never seeing Charlie again had just skyrocketed. He was reminded of how dire both their situations really were, with the likelihood of some amicable ransom dwindling every day that his government did not pony up the cash and a rendezvous point.
He had no choice but to swallow the blood that ran down the back of his throat.
At least they’d finally taken the hood off his head.
The truck ride had been punshing, bruising and endless. His nose hurt and the blood in the hood dried so that it stuck to his face and smelled of sweat and metal. After they ditched the truck to walk, someone had jabbed the business end of their kalashnikov into his ribs over and over as they marched through the shelled streets of a ctiy, which he could not see but identified by smells, by things he tripped over.
Sometimes, a soldier would catch him by the arm and right him before he went down. Other times they let him fall, and by the time they stopped in an evacuated hotel, his hands and knees were torn up from hours of misstepping and catching himself on torn-up asphalt.
Iago steered him to a corner of what was once an elegant lobby. He had to bind Samir’s wrists for the night, as well as his ankles, but he did so farily loosely, and picked out tiny pieces of gravel from Samir’s bloodied palms before he did.
It was difficult to manage a drink of water now that his hands were bound, so when his thirst grew unbearable he had to ask. To his credit, Iago stopped messing with a broken cell phone to help him as soon as he asked, but it felt less and less like kindness and more like control at the most basic level. Funnily enough, Iago didn’t seem to think anything of it.
“Tell me about your home some more,” he said as he dried a dribble of water from Samir’s chin with his sleeve. “The mountain that gobbles people up.”
“I’ve already told you,” Samir answered, exhausted. They had ridden all day, and marched half the night through an evacuated, shelled city. He felt on the verge of tears, which would only further humiliate him and amuse the men near them. “Please, Iago,” he whispered, hoping his other captors were not listening closely. “Please, just let me sleep. I’m so tired.”
Iago spread out his green jacket like a bedroll, lay down beside Samir with his pack under his head. He shined his flashlight on the vast, cracked ceiling, twisted his hand above the light so it cast the shadow of an angry dog, ears at attention, lower jaw rolling in a snarl. He clicked the flashlight off, then on again, making his shadowpuppet dis and reappear. “Tell me,” he insisted. “About the forest.”
Samir was close to regretting all the delirious, sloppy conversations where he’d spilled his guts to Iago right about now. His eyes stung and burned, wanting to close. His legs throbbed, and his hands stung. His shoulder hurt. His throat was always dry, but he didn’t want to bother Iago again for another drink of water. He’d just need help to get up and relieve himself that much sooner.
“To the north of my city is a big woods,” he started, hoping his voice did not betray his fragility. “There’s mountains, and streams, and hot springs... elk and mule deer.”
Iago grunted. The wild game interested him.
“But sometimes,” Samir licked his dry lips. “People go missing up in the woods. Campers… hikers. Even experienced hunters, with lots of guns and gear. They go missing right off the beaten path, in the middle of the afternoon. Sometimes they were right near other people when it happened. Their friends turned around and they were just gone.”
“And people look for them?”
“Helicopters… search parties. Dogs. They comb the woods in these big sections tied off with rope so they know what they’ve already searched.”
“But they never find them?”
“Sometimes they do, sure.”
“But they never found your friend? The one who disappeared?”
“Never,” Samir said, giving Iago the same bullshit narrative everyone back home believed was Jeremy’s fate.
Jeremy had even been included in an episode of a popular podcast about missing persons in the area who likewise had disappeared from those woods without a trace. Samir had listened in horror, feeling ill the entire time.
It reminded him of the summer before seventh grade, when the TV was a twenty-four hour nightmare, always covering the search and rescue attempt for Jeremy Huffman. Around day five, helicopter searches gave up on finding a boy and began looking for a body. Eleven days, it lasted, until the formal search was called off forever.
A decent person would at least send in an anonymous tip, so Jeremy’s parents could bury their son.
...But you are not a decent person.
He didn’t deserve any compassion from his captors, or any human decency. It felt cosmically revolting that he might live through this ordeal, that he ended up under the wing of Iago or even Achille, who were less cruel than one would expect from the insurgents’ reputations alone.
“Do people say it was aliens that took him? A UFO?” Iago asked, now leaning toward the conspiratorial, the supernatural and otherworldly, as so many of his own friends and even some of the adults around him had at the end of that awful summer.
“That’s your state, right? You have uhh, Roswell? Area 53?” He could hear Iago’s grin in the dark, and he did not bother to correct him on account of Area 51. “Here we have...how to say it… portals? Someone is walking through the forest and whoopsie daisy, never seen again. It spits them out in the same place, but in the wrong dimension. Nobody ever finds them. Sometimes we hear them crying for help, but when you go toward them, nobody is there. You think your friend walked into a portal?”
Quiet tears ran from the corners of Samir’s eyes. He was too tired. His mind was unable to keep up the defenses that kept him sane. It was just a fishbowl in there now, all the terrible things he feared swimming around with the lucid, compact lies that kept it all together.
Iago lowered his voice even more so the others would not hear. “Hey. There’s no portals. It’s a bad story. Don’t cry.”
Samir went cold and still, unsure how Iago could even see that in the dark. Could he hear it in his breathing? He flinched at Iago’s touch, but it was just a friendly hand in his hair, petting the top of his head.
“It’s alright, little soldier.”
Samir closed his eyes. He hated himself for it, but he wanted Iago’s hand in his hair a little longer. Maybe until he fell asleep.
Iago clicked off the flashlight a final time. He reached over in the dark and pulled Samir closer. Samir didn’t breathe. He stiffened, still skittish from the blows he’d received the day before. But Iago held him fast with his forearm over his chest. He was not hurting him. Samir's body took another minute to catch up with his brain, but soon he could breathe again, and the fear in his chest quieted.
The temperature always dropped at night, and he could not remember the last time he was truly warm as he slept. As tough and wild as Iago was, surely he felt the cold, too? Perhaps that was why Iago was holding onto him the way he was...using the captive for body warmth. He lay back against him, unsure of the intimacy but glad for the heat, and the feeling of being protected.
When Iago spoke next, his voice wasn’t cruel, but musing. “You lose lots of friends, don’t you?”
He’s talking about Charlie, Samir realized.
“Will those people hurt him?” Samir whispered, his head tucked into Iago’s shoulder. “Who are they?”
“That’s two questions. I’ll answer one.”
“Who are they? The men Achille gave Charlie to?”
“Whitecoats,” Iago shrugged. “Mercenaries.”
“Will they hurt him? Will they kill him?”
Samir knew that was a second question. Iago did too, but he answered anyway. “They’ll take him to auction. But…” he was careful to whisper the rest. “But we know something they don’t know, those Snowycoats.”
“What do we know?” Samir breathed. "Tell me."
“Hmm. No. Can’t tell little American soldiers things like that. Even if we like them. Achille would skin me. Alive.”
His voice nearly broke out of a whisper in his desperation. “Fucking please, Iago.”
“Mm, I like my skin where it is, I think. You begged me to let you sleep just a minute ago. So sleep.”
He had not really expected one of his captors to divulge intel to him. As much as he looked like one of them to outsiders, he was not. And he was still on the chopping block.
He scooted an inch closer to Iago anyway, and turned his head into the soldier’s arm.
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