theo at first.
contents: slavery / human trafficking, dehumanization (being manhandled, inspected, sold), referenced past violence / war / implied future abuse.
hi i first wrote this story like four years ago, wrote one chapter then bailed. but i have been thinking about it since then and i have been inspired. anyway here is a new reworked chapter one of ARTHUR'S HOUSE which is a story about art and conducting intricate rituals to touch the skin of other men and what it's like to live in a haunted house. enjoy!
The auction house was clean, which was way, way worse than if it hadn't been.
For the better part of three years now, Theo McCarthy had been in dirty places. Filthy places. A field hospital that turned into a surrender point that turned into a processing camp that turned into the transport ship, the one that took him away forever, the one with its stacked cots and recycled air. The processing facility afterwards had felt unclean, too, even under all that 10% bleach and it's fluorescent, white-washed corridors and the paper gowns and staff who called him property. Dirty places, all of them, but the dirt had made sense. Dark and disgusting things were happening there, and he found a small comfort in the fact you could look at a concrete floor with a drain in it and know exactly what you were standing in.
But the auction house had marble floors. It had soft lighting and there was beautiful music playing from somewhere, something with strings, something classical, like this was a museum exhibit or a public event of some kind. Like the sixty-some people standing on numbered platforms in the main hall were not for sale.
Theo was number forty-one. He knew because the number was printed on a card and the card was clipped to his shirt, the same way you'd tag inventory at a warehouse. The shirt was new to him, they'd given him clean clothes this morning, made him shower, checked his teeth. A woman had rubbed something into his skin to make it look healthier and then stood back and assessed him the way his anatomy professors used to assess cadavers very clinical and consciously unconscious of the person this thing used to be.
He was twenty years old today. He'd counted. There was a calendar at the facility, a paper grid pinned to the common room wall, and he'd tracked every day since intake, which had given him a lot of numbers to work with in his head. There had been the seven hundred and six days since the sky above him filled with smoke and other things that blocked out the sky, there was the eighteen months in the facility, and the twenty years of life before that which had been, prior to the first date, pretty good. But those twenty years had led him here.
The others on the platforms near him were still and compliant and were doing exactly what Theo has been supposed to be mastering the last eighteen months. They all had their eyes forward or down, they were breathing even, hands at their sides. This was basic stuff. This was Stage One. This was present yourself as calm, available, and undamaged. Do not speak unless addressed. Do not flinch when touched.
Theo had failed that module. He'd failed it seven times, actually, before the facility's lead assessor had signed off on a provisional pass with a note in his file that read: Manageable under controlled conditions. Residual startle response present.
Residual startle response. That was what they called it when you still flinched because the same person who had hit you twelve times in the past half-hour was raising their fist to do it again. Theo just couldn't shake it.
He was trying. He was standing still, with his eyes forward and his breathing even. He was trying so hard his jaw ached from clenching. Around him, the auction hall buzzed with buyers. They were well-dressed people, relaxed people, people with drinks in hand. It looked kind of like a farmer's market, everyone browsing the seller's wares. Some of them barely looked. Others stopped, consulted assistants or some documents on their phones, discussed among themselves. A few reached out and touched, placing a hand on a shoulder, fingers tilting a chin up, and the people on the platforms always always let them, because that was the training, that was what the facility had spent months installing: you are an object being assessed, and objects do not have opinions about being handled.
Theo watched a man three platforms down lift another person's arm, rotate it, press his thumb into the muscle of the forearm. The person didn't react, didn't flinch. They stood there with their arm held out like a mannequin and their face perfectly, terrifyingly blank.
Theo's stomach turned.
(A lifetime and eighteen months ago he had been a medic. Well, almost a medic. He'd been more than a year into his apprenticeship when the war started, and then the clinics emptied and the field hospitals filled and suddenly it did not matter if he had passed certain tests or knew certain medication names. Now he set bones in a tent while artillery hit the ridge above them. He'd learned what human beings look like dying, the color under the nails, the tension in the jaw, the way someone held their weight when something important was going away.
He couldn't turn it off. He'd never been able to turn it off and everyone around him was dying, all the time. Everyone looked like they were dying).
The person being handled three platforms down had yellowing at the edges of a bruise on their collarbone, three days old minimum. They distributed weight away from their left hip, probably from another injury, since they had the shallow breathing of someone managing pain they'd learned not to show. There were no doctors here to fix any of it. Theo stared at them, looking and not looking.
And then he saw the man who was about to buy him.
Arthur Carole moved through the auction hall like he owned it, which, Theo would learn later, he basically did. The Carole family had funded the building's renovation eight years ago. There was a plaque by the entrance.
He was tall, well-built, and younger than most of the buyers — late twenties, maybe, with dark hair above expensive clothes that were deliberately understated in the way only very rich people managed. Right now, he was against the wall, almost slumping, but even before he knew anything about him Theo could tell that this was not the type of man who slumped. He leaned. Quite possibly, he lounged. He looked very comfortable in the great mass of sweaty humanity that surrounded him, even though he couldn't look more different.
Behind him, half a step back and to the left, was another man. Taller, weirdly tall, the tallest person Theo had seen in the hall. He was similarly dark-haired, similarly mid-twenties, but visibly, unmistakably miserable.
This one wasn't a buyer. Theo clocked that immediately. The posture was wrong; he wasn't browsing, he wasn't shopping, he held the contained stillness of someone enduring something. His eyes were fixed on a middle distance that didn't exist. His shoulders were pulled in slightly, making himself smaller despite his height, and every few seconds his gaze would drift toward the exit and then snap back, like it was a reflex he was trying to suppress.
Owned, Theo thought, and then felt sick for how quickly the assessment had come.
The one who presumably did the owning was moving on. He began to look at a man six platforms down from Theo, a man standing in the trained stillness. He was studied for a moment, the other man's head, and then he reached out and took his face in both hands.
He rotated the face in his hands in this clear, proprietary way, his thumbs pressing into his cheekbones as he turned him left, right, tilted him back. He was examining the architecture of the man's face the way Theo had seen sculptors examine clay, looking for planes, angles, how the light would fall, how it would crack. His fingers pressed down on the skin beneath the man's jaw and he watched the color change under pressure, watched it flood back when he released.
"What do you think?" he said over his shoulder, not looking away from the man's face, which seemed to be working very hard not to look the man handling it in the eye. "The bone structure's good. Jaw's a little heavy."
The tall man behind him said nothing for a moment. Then, flatly: "I don't know, Arthur."
"Come on. You have an eye. Lighter bone structure photographs better, but there's something interesting about the heaviness. It's structural. Like a building." He was still holding his face, kneading his thumbs along his jawline. "Open your mouth."
The man opened his mouth. The other one—the one that had been called Arthur—looked inside the way you'd check a horse's teeth. The action sort of made Theo unable to breathe. It was one of the strangest fucking things he had ever seen. His planet (his dead, far away, lost forever planet) had been one of the few in the near universe without any real concept of slavery besides the knowledge that it happened somewhere else, and even after eighteen months of becoming oh-so-acquainted with the concept, there were still new ways to make his stomach turn. The way this man was kneading the people he examined, like he was trying to discover the plasticity of their skin, the way he released the man's face and moved on without buying, only to step to the next platform and run his hand down the arm of the boy next to him. He saw the man's hand grip suddenly, pressing hard into the bend of the boy's elbow, the skin blanching under his fingertip. The man was watching his capillaries refill. Theo couldn't possibly think of a reason for why.
The man moved on again. The one behind him followed like a shadow that didn't want to be attached to its source.
He was getting closer to him. Two platforms away now. Then one.
Arthur stopped at the person directly beside Theo. It was a boy, younger than Theo, eighteen maybe, thin and fragile looking, like he had been constructed out of toothpicks that could sway with the littlest breeze. He was not calm, but he was frozen. He reminded Theo of a of a rabbit that had spotted something with teeth, wide eyed and so so still.
He took the boy's chin and tilted his head then pressed his thumb into the hollow of the boy's throat. It couldn't have been hard enough to choke, but it must have been hard enough, because Theo could see the boy's pulse jump. Theo watched the man watch the pulse with interest. His other hand went to the boy's waist, tugged at the fabric of his shirt, pulling it taut so he could see the shape underneath.
"He's too thin, Reuben." Arthur murmured. "See the clavicles? Not even thin in an interesting way. Just thin." He let go and turned the boy around with a hand on his shoulder, studying his back. Now he sounded miserable. "There's nothing here."
He released the boy and turned toward Theo's platform.
And stopped.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Now it was Theo's turn to have a rabbit heart. For a moment, he felt outside his body, though it was hard to imagine what he could have possibly looked like, what feeling his face could have been showing. He knew what it felt like from the inside, holding fury so bright it felt like nausea, revulsion so complete it was physical, every lesson he had learned in the last stupid, cruel eighteen months screaming at him to go blank, go still, do nothing nothing nothing and yet he could feel it, he could feel his face refusing, doing what faces were supposed to do when they watched a human being get handled like clay.
Arthur stared at him. Theo stared back.
For a long moment, neither of them moved. Arthur's hand was still half-raised from releasing the boy beside Theo, like he had seen something so shocking and unexpected that it forced him into a completely frozen state. Then it broke.
"Oh," Arthur said softly. Then he smiled.
He stepped up to Theo's platform. This close, Theo could see his eyes — light things, warm amber-brown, and utterly focused. He could feel the full weight of the man's attention like a physical thing, like he already had a hand pressing down on Theo's chest.
"You're looking at me," Arthur said, "like you want to kill me."
Theo said nothing. His throat had closed.
"You are not doing a good job at hiding it. So obviously staring at me and you're just..." Arthur gestured at Theo's face. "Right here. All of it. Right on the surface. What's that about?" He sounded dreamy, and genuinely curious. He reached for Theo's face. Theo flinched.
It was not a small flinch. It was not the residual startle response the facility had documented and tried really really hard to beat out of him. Theo did a full-body recoil, his head jerking back, his shoulders coming up, his weight shifting to his back foot, every single instinct in him saying don't let this man touch you with a clarity that obliterated anything he learned in the last eighteen months in a single second.
Arthur's hands stopped in midair, he rose them up as if in surrender. His eyes widened slightly. And then his expression did something Theo couldn't parse. He went soft with a kind of wonder, like he was seeing something rare. Something he'd been looking for without knowing he was looking for it.
"When were you processed?" Arthur asked.
"Eighteen months ago," Theo managed. His voice sounded wrecked.
"Eighteen months?" Arthur's eyebrows rose. "And you still—" He gestured at Theo's posture, the visible tension, the flinch he hadn't been able to suppress. "How interesting."
He reached for Theo's face again, slowly this time, and Theo was once again thinking about horses, and he tried to only think of horses, trained horses, good horses. But he couldn't, he couldn't, and so his body moved before his brain could override it, pulling back, and Arthur's fingers caught his jaw and held. The grip was firm. Not painful, but immovable. He turned Theo's head the way he'd turned the others, the same exact pattern left, right, tilted back. He pressed his thumb into the skin below Theo's ear and Theo felt his own pulse hammering against the pressure. He could feel his skin contract under the man's hand, then bounce back sore.
"You're shaking," Arthur observed. He wasn't like. Making fun of him, or anything. He seemed fascinated. Interested, Theo guessed was the word he used. Interesting.
His other hand came up and pressed hard against Theo's cheekbone, and he felt the small bones of his face shift under the force of it. Theo tried not to buckle or whimper underneath him. It felt like even if he went completely limp in his grip, Arthur was not going to let go of his face.
"Reuben," he said, not turning around. "Come look at this."
The tall shadow stepped forward. He kept his hands stayed perfectly still at his sides and looked at Theo and then looked away quickly, like making eye contact was something he'd trained himself out of or had never properly learned in the first place. Then, he trained himself completely, totally towards Arthur. Something about that made Theo shudder too.
"Look at his eyes," Arthur said, still holding Theo's face. "That color. And do you see the expression quite present, given. Everything."
Reuben looked. And Theo saw something move behind what had previously been a very blank canvas, a flash of recognition, or pity, or memory, there and gone so fast he almost missed it. But he didn't. He saw it. He thinks he saw it.
"He's scared," Reuben said quietly and only to Arthur.
"Of course he's scared. Everyone in here is scared. But everyone else is pretending a lot better than he is. I find that charming." Arthur's thumb traced along Theo's jaw. "What planet are you from?"
"Adura," Theo said through his teeth.
"Adura." Arthur's grip softened slightly, not releasing but easing. "I read an article about that last year. I heard they took captives from the free people. This all must be very new for you, then."
"Yes. Everyone was free there." He wanted to flinch at his own words. He was a stupid idiot. He needed to stop talking.
"Yes." Arthur repeats, in the similar clipped tone Theo had choked out. He flattened his hand against Theo's face, just feeling. "So what were you? Before."
Theo almost didn't answer. But Arthur's hand was on his face and Arthur's eyes were on his and the question had an easy answer and withholding it felt stupid when there were larger battles coming.
"I, uh. Medicine," Theo said. "I was a medical apprentice."
Something shifted in Arthur's expression. A new layer of interest, as if Theo had just become three-dimensional.
"A doctor."
"Almost."
"How almost?"
"Um. Uh, I did eighteen months of apprenticeship. Plus field work during the war. I was—I was like. A field medic when we were taken."
Finally, finally Arthur released Theo's face and stepped back. Then Arthur laughed. Not cruelly, which would have been better, which would have made more sense, if he was making fun of Reuben, but with genuine, startled delight, like Theo had just done something wonderful.
"Oh," Arthur said. "Oh, you're perfect."
He grabbed one of the attendants of the auction house and told them that he wanted to purchase Theo. He didn't ask the price, didn't negotiate, didn't hesitate. Somewhere, a door was closing. A lock was clicking. This felt like the sort of thing Theo should stop. This was not the kind of thing Theo could stop.
"Reuben," Arthur said, already walking away after a seemingly large amount of money changed hands. "We're done. I found what I came for."
Reuben looked at Theo again, and again Theo saw the flash of something raw and quickly suppressed. Then he turned into a shadow again, turned and followed Arthur, and Theo stood on his numbered platform with the tag clipped to his new clean shirt and his hands shaking at his sides and knew, he knew he knew he knew.
I just made it worse. I just made everything worse.