“Like crying out in empty rooms; with no-one there except the moon.”
Day No: 3
Prompt: Solitary Confidement
Fandom: Murdoch Mysteries
Medium: Fic
Trigger Warnings:
SFW
The loneliness started getting to him within two weeks.
Llewellyn couldn’t hear or see anyone else being held in the cells around him. The only interactions he had were with guards that dragged him out for his torture and the people committing it. There was a random doctor, but they merely treated his wounds.
Talking that didn’t give them the answers they wanted, the information they were listening for, was ignored. When that continued, when he talked back, he was hit. At first it was a simple hit to the face. Slaps, punches. He knew that he had double black eyes at one point. He remembered getting them from other Builders in Ethea, and from teens that did not like him. Cuts from rings on the man’s hands, or from the nails from the woman. They sometimes stung when tears flowed down his face after a particularly bad day.
It was after the second whipping, another poor attempt at sabotage, that he started rambling to an empty room. “I shouldn’t have taken the Expedition,” he mumbled, his back chilled between the wounds ripped open on his back. “Jackson was right. He was always right on this stuff.”
The faintest of noises outside had him bolting up. A part of him was terrified over what would happen. The door was opened and a guard stood to the side while the doctor.<i> “Don’t talk unless you need to, Watts.”</i> He jumped at the unexpected voice. The doctor thought it was his presence, but he kept up his examination of his back. He felt the liquid before wincing at the burn that came from cleaning the wounds. That’s all the man did before walking back out the door and leaving him back in silence with nothing.
“J-Jackson?” he mumbled, fearful of what he heard. Instead of another ghostly instruction, it was quiet. He didn’t know if that was worse, or better.
The next time he was dragged back from the workshop, a newly broken leg strapped to a splint to ensure its correct heal, he swore he saw Jackson standing in a corner. One of the guards ‘accidentally’ hit his bad leg, which earned a cry and attempted movement to get away from them. Laughter followed them on the way out.
It hurt to sit up, but he needed to in order to get along the wall. <i>“Could have told you that pissing off the man in charge would have led to worse consequences, Watts. You’re an idiot.”</i> Llewellyn glared at the figure in the corner. Jackson wasn’t mean like this figure was. He didn’t say things that tore him down. He made him reconsider himself, forced him to eat healthy and not tire himself out. Distracted him, showed him parts of Ethea and the other cities they went to. Walnut Grove was so welcoming, even after Jackson left with something for the night. The artists there accepted him after Jackson’s introduction.
Llewellyn, well, Llewellyn internalized everything ever thrown at him. His sister didn’t want him, told him straight to his face when he found her again while traveling for commissions and work. Miss Marks couldn’t take him in, not with the two boys and restrictions on people in homes. The Ethean Builders spat at him when they weren’t stealing from him, were beating him up. He tried his best to fight back, but it never worked. The Commissioner loomed over him every time he tried to report the incidents, chuckled and ridiculed him. Tore up the paperwork for official misconduct. Lied when Free City representatives came to investigate.
His mind, his awful, hurtful mind was making a mirrored version of his friend. One that embodied his negative responses to fire back when he didn’t toe the line of subservience outside of helping build Duvos an actual weapon.
And he knew, after the second time the hallucination showed up, that it was himself. He was lonely enough to envision his friend hurling insults at him because it was better than not being able to hear even the guards outside his door. He had managed to look at one point and realized there was no one around. The place echoed as a cavern so when he couldn’t even hear bootsteps, he realized they left him somewhere without any clear help.
Right now, his leg could break again and it would take hours for someone to get there. And then they would fracture it for fun to set it back up. There wasn’t any food, he was denied it today. The only drink he received was before the torture he endured.
His body dried sobbed twice. He had no one to talk to, no one to comfort him. The Duvosian guards would likely laugh like the Ethean Builders at his plight and even that would be better than thinking that he could pass out one day and wouldn’t be discovered for two or three before they tried torturing him again.
He had no one. He was no one. And no one cared...
James was the one to figure out his issues with being alone. His high fever had him gripping and holding onto anyone that got too close to him. Murdoch, as Julia pronounced, was a saint when Llewellyn kept seeking him out and curling up next to him as close as bodily possible. His lavender tincture was the reason for that, a reminder of his mother when he was lucid enough to explain.
There were two pictures that James managed to get, one that he likely won’t let William know about. One was from Julia, who took it when she found them on the couch. Llewellyn was on his shoulder, wrapped around his arm and keeping his fingers on his wrists to ensure that the man he was sleeping on was alive and real. William was reading. The other one was a miracle James managed to capture. William was asleep, curled on his side and unconsciously wrapped around Llewellyn. Who had, in his fever induced state, seeked out lavender and climbed into bed with the older man to cuddle with him. He was reminded of a picture his mother showed him of a very young him curled up on his father while the man was working on blueprints.
No, he didn’t show Julia that one. His parents would coo over them all if they ever found out about that.
Instead, he always made sure that Llewellyn was around one of them, or that he knew there was an invitation to join him in a room, even if it was just sitting in the corner reading one of the Builder reports or a novel stolen from William’s shelf.
