m!bailey / f!pc - the snake leaves no remains
chapter 5 - this town, your grave
TITLE: the snake leaves no remains
SHIP: M!Bailey x F!MC (Defiant, Late Game)
WORDS: 4000 words
Contains: Self-Harm, Self-Destruction - All exposition because I decided to split my writing in half. I promise you the next chapter will have explicit BaileyPC!
DESC: How two snakes in the same shithole learned to stop devouring each other only to twist together into an inseparable knot.
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Your visit to the private clinic comes to you in pieces as you drift in and out of consciousness.
You remember Bailey hauling you into the building before depositing you on the examination table with the same care a dock worker might give cargo late into his shift.
You don't recognize the clinic, nor do you recognize the doctor. But even in your concussed state, it's obvious to you that this is one of Bailey's private contacts. Someone completely separate from the public hospital and Harper. Someone who treats what he's told to treat, asks nothing about the provenance of the wounds he handles, and invoices quietly in a way that leaves no paper trail behind.
"You've never brought one of your wards here before," the doctor remarks blankly while shining a penlight into your eye that makes everything behind your face throb with pain. He checks your pupils, asks you to follow his finger, presses along the ridge of your skull until you hiss through your teeth. He does all this with an emotionless efficiency that you know Bailey appreciates.
Your caretaker says nothing from where he leans against the wall, arms crossed. His expression is flat, but his eyes remain fixed on your body and your face, cataloguing your injuries. You aren't exactly avoiding his gaze, but it's hard for you to stay focused, eyes drifting from the doctor to his tools to the bright light above and the darkness behind your eyelids that begged you to sleep.
"Moderately concussed. Mildly intoxicated." The doctor diagnoses you. His cold, gloved hand tilts your face upwards so he can inspect the gash on your head. "This is going to need stitches." He glances at Bailey. "You know, she's not supposed to drink when she has a concussion."
The doctor doesn't notice the way Bailey exhales exasperatedly before he replies, snide and direct, "You try stopping her."
The doctor does not pry. He takes a step away from inspecting your head to type something into a tablet. "Can you undress for me?"
Your fingers find the halves of your ruined camisole. You pull at it. The motion is sluggish and uncoordinated, your motor control lagging behind your intentions like a signal traveling through water. It's too slow for Bailey. He watches for maybe five seconds before he pushes off the wall, steps forward, and bats your hands away.
His fingers hook into the torn fabric of your camisole and pull it down your arms in two efficient motions. He unhooks your bra with a practiced snap with one hand and slides the straps down your shoulders. Your breasts fall free, the cold air tightening your skin, the soft flesh surrounding your nipples marked with fading finger-shaped bruises. His eyes linger a beat too long before he continues undressing you.
One hand moves to the button of your shorts, the other braces against your shoulder to keep you upright. You make a vague noise of protest, reaching for the waistband yourself, but he's already unzipping them, already hooking his thumbs into the sides of your shorts and your underwear and pulling them down your hips, past your thighs, over your ankles.
He straightens up, holding your clothes in one fist, and steps back to let the doctor work.
You sit on the crinkly paper on your bare ass, shivering. The fluorescent light above makes your head hurt and illuminates every bruise and scar that spans your disastrous body in merciless detail.
The doctor looks up from his tablet and pauses briefly before he steps forward. He inspects and logs each wound down into his tablet, clinical and detached in a way that Bailey doesn't get to be. Each and every mark, old or new, is a transaction with Bailey's signature on the receipt. You received every one of your scars from someone he sold you to, or from someone you endured in order to pay his rent and survive his system.
He watches the doctor's hands roam across the topography of damage Bailey himself sculpted.
... The first sale. Pudding. ...
Faded nicks on your arms and legs. Old dog bites.
You missed rent the first time and Bailey sold you to rich bastards who ate dessert off your body and tossed you to the dogs afterwards still covered in remnants. Despite your struggle and strife, he considers these clients easy and will sell to them again. They know the terms and they would never dare to cross them, borrowing his property for a few, simple hours before letting them go free. Degradation without the risk of destruction. A warning to errant wards of what's to come if they decide to make a habit out of missing rent.
You scrambled home naked and humiliated and bleeding and took on Robin's debt the next morning on top of your own, stuttering with each word, avoiding Bailey's stare like he might sell you again for insolence alone. Stupid, Bailey thought back then. You couldn't handle your own rent, and your solution was to double it. Only an idiot would pick up someone else's financial burdens when they couldn't even afford to pay their own.
"You want to take on that worthless waif's debt? Why? ...Don't answer. I don't care. People pay more for your ass anyway."
You were always more resourceful and capable than that good-for-nothing brat anyway. Fast enough of a learner to realize that you should sell that valuable body yourself instead of waiting for Bailey to sell it for you. You couldn't quite make twice your rent trying to balance shifts at the cafe and the docks with your classes, so you started to work Briar's brothel. You even managed to retain your virginity all those months only for you to auction it away. The brutal tape of your deflowering circulated all the way into Quinn's permanent collection.
Legendary as it may be in the underground, selling your virginity only bought you and Robin two weeks before you failed to pay up again.
... The second sale. Eden. ...
The faint scar that circles your neck in the shape of a collar.
Most people would mistake it for a crease in your skin, but the doctor sees it. Bailey knows exactly what it is and where it came from. He traded you to Eden for esoteric artifacts from the forest that Bailey could have acquired himself if he wanted to. A simple business deal between old friends. Eden was lonely; Bailey sells company.
He brought the hunter his portfolio of orphans, expecting the man to flip through and step away with the realization the cure for loneliness isn't a handful of miserable, orphan ass. He remembered the way Eden's eyes lit up when he saw your photo, the way his hand tightened around the glossy paper.
"Her. Give her to me. I'll protect her."
The same man who'd left civilization behind to escape the depravity it bred had become indistinguishable from the men he despised, capable of enforcing his will on a helpless orphan because he thought he knew best. Bailey didn't point out the hypocrisy, having long become a man who straddled contradictions to survive.
The next time you failed to pay, he simply left you tied up in the woods for Eden to find.
He figured this would end one of two ways: either Eden would bore of you within the agreed timeframe or he would run over time, necessitating your retrieval. What he got instead was you stumbling back to the orphanage all on your own, covered in mud and cum and blood, collar still fastened tight around your neck.
You didn't bother stopping by Bailey's office, though he had seen your return from his office window. You didn't stutter when you interrogated the other orphans, demanding to know where Bailey sold Robin in your absence. Pretty ones like you get sold to be pudding when you missed rent the first time. The not-so-pretty ones get sold to the docks to be taught a hard lesson. You promptly made your way there, organized some kind of ridiculous rally with the dockworkers you'd befriended working there, and retrieved Robin within hours of your return.
Bailey showed up in his car, having caught wind of your shenanigans.
"You got away sooner than I expected," Bailey said to Robin while you glared the 'caretaker' down. He looked at you then, and it was perhaps the first time Bailey looked at you twice. "I'll take him from here." Your glare intensified. "Or would you rather he walk through town like that?"
Bailey gestured callously towards Robin's body. You looked your best friend over, beaten and bruised, tearful and traumatized, and you reluctantly handed him over. Bailey shoved the boy into the backseat of his car and turned away from you.
"You can walk."
He glimpsed your sneer in the rearview mirror as he pulled away. You flipped your middle finger towards the car, a futile attempt to bank your rage that Bailey chose not to react to.
He would have done the same twenty years ago.
You find out later that Bailey didn't even take Robin to the hospital afterwards. You took Robin there yourself, holding his hand while his blank eyes stared at the wall next to your head. He was never the same after, traumatized and shaken by the beatings he endured. You failed him.
You would never fail him again —
... The third sale. Remy's Underground Farm. ...
The brand that marked you and your ass as CATTLE.
You did the math. You saw you were falling behind. Instead of risking a situation where both you and Robin were sold, you made a decision. You saved up several weeks of rent for Robin, left it in your desk drawer, and you let Bailey sell you. Bailey became aware of this calculus only when Robin showed up the next week with rent in hand and tears in his eyes.
He sold you off to Remy's underground farm. He predicted two outcomes. Either Remy's machine would grind you down into a docile, contented cow producing milk with glassy eyes and slack mouth, ending your spiral of self-destruction for good, or you would be resilient enough to claw your way out of something that had domesticated every orphan he'd ever sent there.
You came back weeks later, branded and transformed. You rode off the farm on one of Remy's prized mares. You even knocked over some of Remy's aphrodisiac supplies on your way out. One of Remy's goons accosted you for your sabotage and you lied without hesitation, telling him Bailey sent you. A bold attempt to sic two bastards you hated against each other. It got the goon off your back, at least.
The cow features faded over the following weeks. The breast milk stopped. The brands stayed. The anger stayed. The meek girl who stuttered and stammered had turned into a defiant brat who gave Bailey constant shit and grief.
And Bailey learned the precise dimensions of what you could endure and come back from. That's the one constant to the impossible variable that is you. You always come back.
Back to the orphanage. Back to Robin. Back to him.
... The fourth sale. The Underground Brothel. ...
You were paying rent on time. Consistently, impressively, absurdly — juggling the cafe, the docks, the brothel, the parlor, the antiques. Whatever you had your grubby hands in that week, flooding Bailey with cash on time like clockwork. You paid you and Robin's debt. You paid for town infrastructure. You paid for the orphanage pond and greenhouse.
Then, you deleted Bailey's spreadsheet, which logged every missing orphan, sorted into columns that spanned years of careful organization: retrieved, sold, released, escaped, other. You cleared the history, recycling bin, cache, restore points. Everything. Mickey prepared you well.
Bailey's eye twitched as he looked at his computer, then up at you. You braced yourself for the violence that was sure to come, visibly filled with glee at the damage you caused him. He stood hunched over his desk, staring at you for a long time. So long that it you had a hard time maintaining eye contact, unsettled by the fact he wasn't bending you over the knee right then and there.
"I see," he said. His face was perfectly still when he finally straightened up and adjusted his sleeves. He nodded at the door. "You can go."
You never expected him to send four men to beat your ass on Harvest Street. Bailey must have known you were in cahoots with Landry. You worried for a long time afterwards that you had compromised Mickey, but if you did, Bailey still hasn't gone after them yet.
The men beat you, tied you up, and loaded you into the trunk of a car. The sight that greeted you when the trunk opened was Bailey's sneer as he procured the usual hood and ropes he sold you with.
"It's not quite payment day yet, but I don't care. After what you put me through, I'm not accepting anything less than this."
He sold you to the Underground Brothel.
It was a death sentence disguised as a transaction. The brothel was the meat grinder at the bottom of the barrel. It's one of the worst places Bailey sells his wards to, reserved usually for the ones who have become too broken and useless to sell elsewhere. A holding pen for human debris. Better a whore than a corpse. Better to generate some revenue than to feed the rats.
You walked back into the orphanage less than twenty-four hours later.
Bailey did a double take from his office when he saw you shuffling up to the orphanage, looking no worse than he left you. He exited his office and leaned against the wall, waiting for you, musing at you. You stopped in your tracks when you noticed him staring at you. You braced yourself.
"You're a slippery little shit, aren't you?" He'd said to you, truly baffled by how you managed to pull this off. He didn't sound sarcastic and mocking, for once. "I'm glad you're alright."
He pinched your cheek, hard and painful, before he turned back into his office. You rubbed the pain out of your cheek on your way to check on Robin, surprised by the lack of punishment. He had never touched you like that before. There was something absurd and unforgettable about the fact that the man who beat you was capable of pinching your cheek like an old grandma when you impressed him.
The fifth sale. Avery.
Thin, crisscrossing lines from whips and flogs, layered over older marks that spans six months. Avery's work.
Each sale before this one had a logic to it, ugly as the logic always is. Rent unpaid, debt owed, punishment dealt, property redirected to extract value through a different channel. Clean equations with dirty variables. All the other sales were temporary extractions of value that had terms — days, weeks, some window after which retrieval was expected and executed.
In the eighteen years he's run the orphanage, Bailey has never let any of his orphans be adopted. He has turned down doctors, lawyers, businessmen, couples with spotless records and earnest faces and more money than sense. He has dissuaded them with price hikes, with intimidation, with quiet threats delivered over tea in his office. The orphanage is his. Its wards are his. The system runs because he controls the product absolutely, and adoption is a crack in that control he refuses to allow.
Avery stood across from Bailey's desk smiling, that civil veneer barely concealing the rot underneath.
"I know why you're here," Bailey said, running a hand through his hair, visible disdain on his face. "You want custody of this one."
"Correct," Avery said, smiling like he already knew the outcome. His hand tightened around your arm. "I'm suitable. A member of the community in good standing."
"It takes more than that to adopt one of mine."
"Of course. I'm sure there are background checks. But that's not the only reason I'm here. I'd also like to make a donation. To support the good work you do."
Avery slid a piece of paper across Bailey's desk.
Whatever it was on the other side of the paper that Avery offered for you was enough to give Bailey pause. He stared at it, silent, calculating. The sound of the clock hanging overhead ticking filled the room. You could hear the muffled sound of orphans leaning against the office door, snooping as you would do.
You held your breath with them, waiting for Bailey to tell Avery no.
But whatever it was on that damned sheet, it was enough. He allowed Avery to adopt you, despite you being good on rent, despite the man being scum incapable of following the rules Bailey set, despite his lifelong refusal to let his wards somewhere out of his control.
He remembers the shake of Avery's hand and the way Avery's fingers closed around your arm and pulled you after him into the hallway. He remembers wiping his hands on his handkerchief after. He remembers you looking back at him one last time before Avery guided you into his car. You looked at him with hatred. Anger. Despair. Loathing. Like a child who just watched her own father sell her off because he didn't give a damn about anything other than the math.
He spent the next six months performing the delicate act of not thinking about you. He emptied Robin's room within hours of him being sent to the docks, but he left yours untouched for six months. He attended Avery's social functions only when he knew you would be there, making his rounds, shaking hands, smiling his best smile. He told himself it's him checking on his property, making necessary social appearances. He told himself it was better this way. You were safe. You were elevated. You were out of the mud.
He spent the party forcing himself to look anywhere but you. It was only once you came up to him that he allowed himself the sight. You looked healthy enough, dressed in whatever Avery chose, hair cut and styled to Avery's preference, your smile carrying the particular blankness you wear when you are surviving rather than living. Avery clearly sent you to mock your former keeper for his decisions, to intrigue him long enough to stay so he could flaunt the construction site of his tower.
The same tower that Avery spent months pouring money into. The same tower Avery attempted to sacrifice you in. The same tower you sabotaged and kicked Avery to death from.
You came back to Bailey. You came back covered in soot and blood and victory, dragging your sins behind you like a wedding train. You laid the pieces of Avery's empire and of what remained of yourself down before Bailey and waited for the punishment you learned to associate with the simple act of surviving.
Despite everything, you chose to come home.
...
The Hopeless Cycle of Hatred. ...
There are more marks.
Faded cigarette burns, bite marks, scratches, and hickeys all across your body. The effect of Bailey's weekly extortion. The debt that never shrinks, the rent that doubles, the system that converts your body into currency at an exchange rate few can keep up with. They're all overhead. The cost of business.
There's also the fresh damage from tonight. The boot-shaped bruise darkening across your ribs, the split lip already swelling, the gash on your temple that would need stitches, the various bruises and cuts acquired for no good reason other than because you needed to be hurt.
He sees you clearly, now.
The serpent swallows its tail. The cycle that feeds on itself and narrows with every revolution until there's nothing left but the teeth and the swallow. He sells you. You come back. He strikes you. You come back. You seek destruction in every dark corner of this town. He drags you out. The cycle consumes you both in increments so small they look like business as usual — rent collected, discipline administered, property maintained — until someone's chewing off cocks in alleyways because it's the only way they can gain any semblance of control.
He knows what you were doing in that alleyway tonight. You were using his strategy. His playbook. Endure. Absorb. Let them think they've won. Then, when their guard drops, take the piece that hurts most.
Bailey knows this architecture because he lives inside it too. The inability to stop. The conversion of suffering into fuel. The self-annihilation dressed up as resilience. The need for violence that runs so deep it has become indistinguishable from breathing.
Tonight you walked into a warehouse and offered your body to animals because you needed the violence, needed to be reminded of what you were for, needed the noise in your skull beaten quiet — and the orphan strapped to the table was the excuse, never the reason. You went looking for punishment the way a drunk reaches for a bottle, and Bailey knows this because he reached for the same thing at your age, in the same streets, with different scars and the same hunger.
The only difference between the two of you is Bailey learned to stand behind the fist, not in front of it.
"Done." The doctor's voice seems to cut through to both of you at once. Bailey straightens his posture ever so slightly, relaxing the too-tight fist he had clutched around your clothes. Your eyes snap open before they settle into the half-lidded sleepiness that you've been fighting off for hours now. The doctor sets aside his tablet and reaches for the suture kit. "You can put your clothes on."
Your hands move toward the heap of fabric still crushed in Bailey's fist — what remains of your camisole, shorts, underwear. They barely constituted at clothes at this point. Bailey steps back, pulling the rags out of reach. He looks down at them with the expression one might give a dead rat.
He tosses the clothes into the trash right in front of you. He shrugs off his coat and drops it over your shoulders in a single, casual motion. Your naked form disappears into his coat. You blink down at it with confusion and no small amount of gratitude. It smells of him — cologne and smoke — and it's warm from his body. You slide you arms into the sleeves without thought, grateful to no longer be naked and cold. The sleeves swallow your arms past the wrist. The hem grazes your thighs.
Without the coat, Bailey stands in his suit, smeared with rust-brown at the shoulder and chest where your bloodied body pressed against him. The gun sits in his shoulder holster. You've registered the subtle bulge beneath his coat a hundred times. You've never seen the holster itself until now.
The doctor's hand finds your chin and his needle touches your temple.
Four stitches. You wince with each one, jaw tight, swallowing the sounds before they reach your teeth.
The fatigue outpaces the pain. Your eyelids droop. Your chin drops forward. Bailey's hand catches your shoulder, straightening you, holding you upright for the doctor to finish. His palm flattens against your collarbone, fingers curling over the ridge of muscle and bone, steady and warm. You lean into the contact without thinking, too tired to think twice about reaching out for simple comfort.
The last thing you register before the dark swallows you whole is the pressure of Bailey's arms beneath your knees and shoulders, the steady sound of his breathing, the way the hallway tilts as he hauls you up a flight of stairs, the glint of the lotus doorknob under the streetlight.
