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ashintheairlikesnow · 5 years

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Daniel Michaelson: Beaten/Numb

(for @whumptober2019 - combining yesterday and today’s themes of Beaten and Numb - plus @pinkcupboardwitch’s excellent suggestion of psychological whump/mind games. TW: Serious injury/violence and physical abuse, noncon touching, noncon kissing, implied/referenced torture, implied/referenced noncon, I really cannot emphasize enough that Abraham Denner is a bad bad man)

“Red!”

Abraham’s voice echoes across the small clearing and Daniel’s head jerks up instantly where he kneels in the dirt, a bit of red hair flopping over one eye, wincing as the sudden motion aggravates the new bruises around his neck from last night.

“Come here, boy!”

I’m not your fucking dog, you piece of shit. I am twenty… something years old - how old am I? I don’t remember anymore, why don’t I remember how old I am…

No. Stop it. Those aren’t the right thoughts. Be good, Red. It doesn’t matter that you can’t remember things. All that matters is that he wants you now.

You have to be good.

You want to be good.

He’s been carefully looking over the last few carrots from the spring planting, trying to decide just by looking at the thin green tops if they’re ready to pull for tonight. Abraham has a venison roast out of the freezer thawing in the sink - he likes roasts if you put onions, carrots, and potatoes in and cook it forever, until all the vegetables have gone soft and taste like the meat and the venison is as soft as beef.

Daniel knows how to cook everything just the way he likes. He can’t remember if he likes roasts or not - there’s never enough food, and he takes what Abraham will give him and he’s grateful for it.

Thank you for letting me eat, Abraham.

He lets his fingers trail across some carrot leaves, frowning at the lack of sensation he feels. After living here and being forced to use harsh cleaning chemicals and bury his hands in boiling water - after Abraham’s knives and the barbed wire and worse - Daniel can’t really feel much with his hands at all.

It doesn’t matter. His hands work well enough for gardening and cleaning and cooking and worse - and sometimes the lack of feeling is a relief. None of it matters, nothing matters, just that Abraham is calling, and he needs to stand up, but he doesn’t want to.

He doesn’t want to go.

Because he’s not a fucking dog.

Part of him still wants to refuse, even knowing what happens when he does, even knowing there are worse things than a little bit of cutting that can be done to him.

His heart is speeding up with his anger, pounding into his chest, and that’s not good; Abraham wants him to want to be his good boy, to be happy to be called, not pissed off.

He practices breathing in: inhale - I’m not a person, just the puppy - hold for five, exhale - no one wants me but Abraham now - inhale - My family thinks I’m dead and no one is looking for me - hold for five, exhale - I love Abraham and I want to be good - and feels his heart start to slow, a little, the dangerous anger starts to fade out, replaced by the way Abraham wants him to think.

Part of his brain wails that none of it is true, the thoughts Abraham feeds into his mind with the breathing exercises, at the end of a knife, licking the blood from his throat. Part of his brain wants to scream that there has to be some way out of this hell, but he tries not to listen, because there isn’t, and telling himself there is might make him less numb.

His body isn’t his own. His life doesn’t belong to him. If he starts trying to fight that knowledge again, he’ll scream and scream and never stop.

Be good. Be Red.

Red is numb.

Red is a good boy.

“Oh, little Reeeeeed… come here, boy…” Abraham’s voice is a singsong, but he doesn’t like to call twice. If he has to call three times, that’s breaking a rule.

Always answer when Abraham calls.

“Coming, Abraham! I’ll, um, I’ll be right there!” He glances over at Nate, who is wearing waterproof boots, real pants meant for the outdoors, a heavy shirt to protect against the hint of chill in the spring air, and gardening gloves, digging up some potatoes and tossing them into a basket next to him.

Nate moves slower than he does, thanks to the one busted hand. He has to dig with the little shovel, lay it to the side, pick out the potato, and then pick the shovel up and do it again, since the other can’t quite close enough to grip.

The two of them meet eyes, warm blue on mossy, faded green, uncertainty and more than a little worry written across both of their faces. “Wh-what do you think he wants?” Daniel asks, in a low voice he knows won’t carry far.

With Nate, he’s still a person, just for a few seconds at a time - in stolen kisses and touches while checking traps together, in furtive moments when Abraham sleeps and Nate comes to lay with him on the living room floor, in the old movies they watch sometimes and laugh along with.

On the best days - when Abraham leaves them alone while he goes on supply runs (Danny still securely chained to the living room wall, he’s not going anywhere, and Nate won’t ever leave again, they all know that now) and Nate teaches Danny how to waltz, to tango, to do all kinds of dancing with his chain scraping the floor.

Sometimes they talk about Nate’s career as a professor and how Danny wanted to be an anthropologist. They break the rules and think about a life other than this.

Then, and only then, does Daniel let himself stop being good and really just let himself be Daniel, the person that used to live in his body, when he didn’t have to be good, when he didn’t want to be.

When he lets the careful numbness crack and tries to find happiness, because he’s going to be here until he dies and if he can’t sometimes be happy he’ll lose his fucking mind.

But then Abraham always comes back, and his voice is back in Danny’s head and his hands are on his body, the body that doesn’t belong to him, it belongs to Abrahm Denner because Daniel Michaelson doesn’t exist any longer, just Red - and Red only exists for Abraham, to be hurt whatever way he wants, forever.

Nate only looks away from him, back to the potatoes. There’s a moment where his jaw becomes a hard line and the green eyes go flinty and angry. Then he slumps forward and goes back to work, slowly shaking his head. “D-d-doesn’t matter. You h-have to a-a-answer.”

“I don’t want to,” Daniel whispers, because he can say disobedient things to Nate and know that he’ll never tell Abraham he said them, thought the wrong way, didn’t want to be good. “I don’t ever want to, Nate. I don’t… I don’t want to try harder.” He drops his voice to a whisper, says the words he’s never, ever allowed to say. “I fucking hate him.”

“I kn-know, Danny-” Nate catches himself with a wince, even though there’s no way they were overheard. “R-R-Red. Sorry. I’m w-w-w-working on it, oh-okay? I’m t-trying to f-f-figure it out I, I h-h-have an idea, but… Go on b-before he g-g-gets mad.”

Working on what? What are you figuring out? He doesn’t dare ask. Nate might be having disobedient thoughts, too, fighting the same anger deep within himself that Daniel fights each and every day, the person he used to be screaming to get back out.

Daniel shoves that person even further away, buries him under the puppy. The puppy doesn’t think the wrong things, the puppy wants to be good. Abraham will know if he’s not being the puppy, he’ll know, and then the memory of last night’s fingers squeezing the air from his throat will be the least of his problems.

He hops up to his feet, turning and half-jogging across the yard, trying to be visible to Abraham as soon as possible, to prove that he really is answering the order immediately, just the way he wants. His throat aches as he takes in deeper breaths but he ignores it. He’s good at ignoring it by now, at letting all the different places he feels pain run together into a comforting nothing-feeling.

He’s good at it, but the person-thoughts trickle back in.

I used to be a person. I used to be more than this. There used to be more to living than trying to figure out the next way he’s going to hurt me. I have a little brother, he’s still out there somewhere looking for me.

Stop it. Never think of any life before or after this one. This is all there is. No one is looking. Noe one cares. Everyone thinks you’re dead. You know the rules, Red, remember the rules.

Never think of any home but this.

There used to be a home other than this.

God damn it, no, there isn’t any home other than this, not for me, not ever again.

“I’m, I’m right here, I’m coming right away, Abraham, I’m coming!”

Abraham laughs, the braying sound bouncing off the trees, and Daniel winces but doesn’t slow down as it settles into his bones, crawls under his skin, until he can feel the echo in his fingernails and down to his half-frozen numb toes in the wet grass.

Abraham can turn even obedience into something to laugh at - make out of his willingness to do as he was told a joke about the phrasing of his words, and he feels the grime that lives eternally on his skin all over again.

Dirty and empty and hollow but that’s okay, it doesn’t matter, what matters is that Abraham wants him right now and he needs to be good.

The metal cuff on his ankle shifts as he moves, a flash of old pain as the metal rubs against the skin that’s been some version of raw or open or scarred since he came here, and he can feel the slightest chill in the air right through the threadbare T-shirt and pants he always wears. He’s barefoot - it’s warm enough not to waste boots on the puppy, Abraham said this morning, and even though his feet and his toes are so cold they’ve gone numb, he doesn’t dare disagree.

If he’s good, he can get his feet close to the fireplace and warm them up later, maybe. Or at least take a bath, but Daniel doesn’t like baths, because Abraham always watches him. Makes comments. Sometimes pushes his head under the water in the giant old clawfoot tub. Sometimes does worse than that.

He’s not really supposed to not like it, because he’s supposed to want whatever Abraham wants, even though he hates it - hates his eyes and his hands and his fucking mouth - and…

Daniel stops himself from thinking, slowing to a trot, trying to breathe.

He has to force himself to focus, to think of the ache in his left side, the bruising around his throat. Focus on it, use it to settle his heart, to push away the anger that might otherwise boil out of him and end with being in trouble again. If he can’t calm down, there would be more ways he could be hurt, there would be worse than what’s already been done.

He can be made worse than broken.

There are so many things worse than dead, and Abraham knows them all.

Inhale.

I will never leave here.

Hold for five counts.

Exhale.

I want to be good.

Abraham is standing over along the side of the cabin, near the cellar, and Daniel skids to a stop twenty feet away, his face carefully set into his usual eager-to-please nervousness, trying to hide the disobedient, roiling thoughts underneath the surface.

The cellar doors are open.

No.

I don’t like the cellar. The cellar is dark. I don’t like the dark.

“Wh-why, um, why is the cellar, the-…” He trails off, voice cracking. “Abraham, I-… why are you, I don’t like to see those doors open, I don’t want-”

all alone in the dark, all alone all alone all alone

“No one gives a fuck what you like or want, puppy. Why did you stop so far away?” Abraham has his head tilted slightly to bask in the weakly warm sunlight of spring. The yellow sunshine make his skin seem even whiter, less human than it normally does - brings out the suggestion of deep shadows underneath the high cheekbones, turns his light eyes into glittering opaque glass Daniel cannot read, like the sheen of ice on a lake.

There are things underneath the ice in Abraham Denner’s eyes. Dark things that drag Danny under into the cold water, to keep him there forever.

“I, um, I stopped because I saw the cellar-”

“Why would that bother you, puppy?” Abraham smiles, a bright smile that shows his teeth, only a shade whiter than his skin. It’s never a good sign when he smiles like that. It’s never a good sign when he doesn’t, either.

“It, um, I don’t… I don’t like the cellar-… when you put me in the, the cellar, you, um, you leave me there.”

“Only when you’re bad, little Red. Are you going to be bad today?”

“No! No, I won’t!” Danny swallows back revulsion at the nervous fearful whine in his own voice, twisting his fingers into the fabric of his T-shirt in a helpless, childlike way he can’t seem to stop. “I won’t. I’ll be good. I want to be good for you, Abraham, you know, you know I want to be good now. J-just like Lyken says, in the show, I want to be good.”

Please please please not the cellar, please

“Hmmm… you’re so good at saying what I want to hear, aren’t you? But you’re still too far away. I said come here, Red.” Abraham holds out one hand, white fingers curled slightly, a clear command, invitation, and thread all in one.

Don’t hesitate, never hesitate, never reject a touch.

Daniel’s body jerks into automatic motion before his brain can catch up and remind him that he hates this - this place, this man, the breathing exercises, every single fucking thing about his life but Nate - and instead he keeps his eyes on the open cellar, on the yawning gaping black hole in the ground, the first few rickety steps visible, maybe a patch of the dirt floor beneath if he stood close enough.

He doesn’t want to stand close enough.

alone in the dark

Never hesitate when Abraham wants you, his brain shrieks the reminder, alarm bells ringing. He made him call twice already, he stopped too far away, he’s courting disaster if he hesitates now. He steps forward and ducks his head, leaning his face into Abraham’s touch.

A cold palm rests against his cheek, Abraham’s thumb pressing just a little into the scar that curves over his cheekbone, long fingers just brushing his earlobe. He swallows against the surge of nausea, forces it back before it can make him go any paler than he already is.

Puppies don’t get sick at their owner’s touch.

“Good boy,” Abraham says in a low, pleased rumble, and Daniel tries to feel reassured by it and not dirty and ashamed. For a second, there’s only silence and the vaguest hint of breeze moving his hair, the chill that seems to slip right through the thin cotton of his clothing, raising goosebumps on his arms and making him shiver. “That’s my very good boy. I want to ask you something, little Red - and it’s very, very important that you be honest with me.” Daniel tries to breathe.

I love Abraham and I want to be good.

No one will ever find me here.

“Wh-what do you want to ask?” Abraham’s hand slips down from his face and drops slowly to his throat, curling around, fingers placing themselves perfectly over the bruises, following the map laid out of exactly where Abraham had cut off his air last night.

The barest bit of pressure against the mottled bruising makes a fresh new wave of fear run through him as he gasps, and he’s not choking - he’s drowning. It’s not the lack of air - it’s the overwhelming frozen touch, the look in those odd nearly-colorless eyes, that pulls him under the water for the dark things to devour and holds him there.

“Pl-please don’t-… don’t do that again,” Daniel whispers. “D-Don’t take my air, please, Abraham, I, I need the air…” He’s taking in what breath he can, hands clenching into fists to keep himself from trying to grab at Abraham and pull himself free.

It won’t work, and he’ll just get in trouble for breaking the rules.

“I don’t have to, if you answer my question. Little Red, would you like to go in the cellar today? Just for four hours or so?”

every time he puts me down there, they go, they’re gone for weeks and it’s harder and I get so weak, I get so hungry, I ran out of water last time, I don’t want to be alone, I don’t, I can’t, please no, please not the dark

“No!” It’s more an exhalation than a sound, whistling air around the grip on his throat, the aching of the bruises. He’s taller than Abraham, but staring into his eyes always makes Danny feel so fucking small. “I don’t, I don’t want to go down there, please, Abraham, please don’t make me.”

“No? Only for four hours and you say no?” The hand leaves his throat, sliding along the edge of his shirt’s neckline, trailing along his shoulder. Daniel shivers and holds himself still, dropping his eyes down to the ground, hands still at his sides.

“I, but-…” But what if you’re lying and you leave again. He can’t say the words, because suggesting Abraham is lying is disobedient, but sometimes he does lie. Lies and puts Nate in the car and leaves Danny in the cellar with his hands tied for a month until he runs out of food and begs and begs and begs and somehow Abraham always seems to know when Danny is about to lose his mind from the isolation and hunger and thirst and reappears to take him back up the stairs, dirty and frightened and full of the need, the deep deep need, to be so good it never happens again. “But I, I can’t go down there, I hate it-”

“Poor thing, you’re so scared of the cellar, aren’t you?” Abraham’s voice is sweet, and loving, and Daniel hates this voice most of all - it’s a lie, Abraham hates him, only loves hurting him, because there are things like Danny in the world that only exist to be hurt. “What kind of grown-ass man is scared of the dark, little Red?”

He knows what Abraham wants him to say. He knows, and he hates it, and the person part of his brain tells him to spit in his face, punch him, give him another black eye and take his punishment afterward. But the person-voice is getting very, very small and weak compared to the, to the…

“I’m not a grown-ass man,” Daniel mumbles down at his feet. “I’m just the puppy.”

There’s a silence, and he glances up from behind a curtain of wavy red hair to see Abraham smiling at him, a wide and beaming, proud smile. Danny had, after all, just done a perfect trick. Like putting up his paws to beg for a treat. Roll over, sit, stay, that’s what’s left of Daniel Michaelson.

Daniel’s face burns with humiliation.

“That’s my good boy,” Abraham breathes, and Daniel shudders at the joy in his voice, the way the touch of his fingers changes, becomes more intense somehow, more purposeful.

Daniel turns his head to the side when Abraham’s hand slides up into the back of his hair. He never pushes him away. He never fights back. He closes his eyes, slowly, trying to focus on the way his eyes feel when closed, how his eyelashes are long enough that he can almost feel them brush his skin - he tries to deaden his skin to Abraham’s touch, to not even notice any longer.

Be numb. Be good. Go away in his head and come back when it’s over, when whatever it is Abraham intends to do is over.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Abraham murmurs. “I know what you’re up to, and you know I don’t like that. No escape for you.” The fingers tighten suddenly in his hair, he’s gripped on until Daniel can feel a flash of pain in his scalp and the velcro-like rip of a bunch of hair being pulled out of his skin, yanking his head backwards hard until his back is arched and his eyes fly open to stare up into the blue sky above.

Breathe. See the sky? The sky is still there, no matter what happens to him. No matter how small or inhuman or broken he gets, the sky is still there.

Let him do whatever he wants. Be good.

No one is coming to save you.

“I was thinking I would give you a choice,” Abraham spoke mildly, as though he wasn’t tearing Daniel’s hair out with the strength of his grip, slowly forcing his head further and further back until Danny finally realized what he wanted and buckled his knees, dropping like a stone to kneel in the dirt.

Cold damp from the wet grass began immediately to soak into the knees of his pajama pants, along the front of the shins. He kept his hands carefully at his sides, and now, staring up from the ground, he wasn’t looking at the sky. He was looking right into Abraham’s face as the man leaned over him.

“I’m bored and I want to play a game. You don’t get choices very often, do you?”

Danny tried to shake his head but it only pulled on the grip on his hair and he hissed in pain and went still again, swallowing, his throat aching as if to remind him that his hair wasn’t the only injured place right now.

There was never just one injured place, really.

“N-No Abraham, puppies don’t get choices. They, they like when their owners choose. I b-b-belong to you, so you, um-… You choose because you, you own me, my body, um… I’m just the puppy.“ He recites the words automatically, rewarded with a loosening of Abraham’s fingers, breathing a sigh of relief as sharp pain went back to a dull ache. “What, um, what kind of choice are you going to give me? What’s the game?”

He didn’t want to make a choice. If he didn’t have to make a choice, he felt safer, none of it was his fault or his responsibility. It was all being done to him, and Daniel had learned how to handle that, to go away in his head and let it happen to someone else.

Making a choice made him part of it.

“You’ll like this, puppy. You can choose to go in the cellar for four hours…”

Daniel whines in the back of his throat, a helpless unconscious sound of fear, shifting where he kneels in the dirt. The yawning darkness along the side of the cabin has a physical weight in the back of his mind, a constant drumbeat of panic and the dark things and the pressure he knows will settle over him down there, the buzzing static nothing, the dwindling apples and water day by day by day until it’s gone and still he’s all alone…

“Not your favorite option? Well, maybe you’ll need to think that over. You can go in the cellar for four hours, unharmed, just put your handcuffs on… or… We can learn about something else.”

“Wh-what?” Daniel will do anything, anything to stay out of the cellar, anything at all, and he looks up with a desperate plea in his eyes. “I, whatever it is, Abraham, if you, if you’ll let me choose, I-”

“Ever had your shoulder dislocated?”

Daniel blinks, and the fingers finally leave his hair entirely and brush down the back of his neck, along the line of his shoulder, then back down to his shoulder blades, rubbing at it through the fabric of his shirt. “Uh, um, I… n-no, no I haven’t.”

“Oh, let’s find out, shall we? Last night when I put my hands around your neck you pulled away from me. You’ll know better than to pull away from me next time, won’t you?”

Daniel takes in a deep breath - or tries, but he can’t manage more than a gasp. “I, um. You’re going to- to pull out my shoulder?”

“Dislocate it. Then I’m going to hang you by your arms in the smokehouse until the sun goes down. It’s only nine-thirty, Red. That’s a lot of hours to hang by a dislocated shoulder. Or… four hours in the cellar. That’s not so long, is it, to live in the dark?” Abraham’s hand wraps around the ball of his shoulder and Danny starts to shake, unable to stop himself, to hold still like he’s supposed to.

“That’s your choice,” Abraham says, in a voice that’s nearly a purr. “Do you want to go in the cellar, or do you want to dislocate your shoulder and hang out in the smokehouse for a few hours? You choose, Red. All on you.”

If I choose the cellar he’ll leave for days again, he and Nate, and I’ll be alone in the dark.

“N-No, I don’t, I don’t want to, I don’t want to choose-”

“Sssshhhhhh. No one gives a fuck what you want.” Abraham leans down as close as he can get, licks along the shell of Daniel’s ear with his cold, cold tongue. Daniel groans unwillingly - it’s an awful feeling, the wet and the cold - but Abraham mistakes it for something else and laughs at him, breaths of cool air against his dampened skin. “Oh, you like that, huh? We can learn more about that little response later. First, make your choice. I’ll count to ten. If you don’t choose by then, I’ll come up with something even worse.”

There is always something worse that Abraham can do to him.

Daniel tries to breathe, to practice his breathing exercises, but nothing comes. Instead he only gasps, half-chokes on his own fear, staring at the blackness of the cellar, then up into Abraham’s delighted, dancing eyes.

“I, I don’t want to, I can’t choose, Abraham, please, please you choose, please don’t make me-”

“One… two… three… four…”

I love Abraham and I want to be good. Making a choice is good. Making a choice is what he wants.

I don’t want to go into the cellar, I don’t want to be alone in the dark.

Please no, please no, I don’t want to hang by my shoulder, I don’t want to do that either.

“Five… six… seven… running out of time, little Red…”

Not the dark, not alone in the dark, please God don’t leave me alone in the dark again

My shoulder’s going to hurt so much, so much

If I don’t choose he’ll do something even worse, so much worse, he can always do something worse

“Eight… nine…”

“M-my shoulder!” Danny bursts out, nearly a shout, reaching up without thinking to grab onto Abraham’s arms in supplication, staring up at him with wide, panicked blue eyes glittering with tears. “Pl-please, Abraham, I can be good, I’ll be so good for you, please just don’t make me go down in the cellar again. Please, my shoulder, we’ll do my shoulder!”

“Good choice.” Abraham presses a kiss to the top of his head, then to the side of his temples, against his cheek where the line of the scar is, licks at the notch in his jaw, down to the pulse beating wildly in his neck. “That’s my very good boy. You try very hard for me, don’t you, Red?”

“I-I do, I can try harder, I’ll try harder-”

“Good. Good, good boy. Now.” Abraham disentangles himself from Danny’s grip, steps back and puts one hand on his shoulder, the other gripping his upper arm in an implacable frozen steel clamping. “Count to five out loud. On the count of five, I’m going to make you so fucking sorry you pulled away from me last night. And you keep your eyes open and on me the whole fucking time.”

Danny nods, slowly, raising his eyes to meet Abraham’s again, trying to practice his breathing, desperately trying to cling on to some calm, some sanity, as his mind screams at him to disobey, to be a person, to fucking run.

But he can’t run. He can’t fight. He can’t do anything, except what Abraham wants.

Inhale. No tears, no tears, no tears. Stay calm.

“One… t-two…”

Hold.

“Three…”

He can feel the tears in his throat, knows they’ll come out in his voice. Abraham’s grip tightens.

Exhale - shaky air, but Abraham doesn’t seem to mind. He doesn’t say anything, anyway, only stares right into Daniel’s terrified eyes.

Danny can feel the cellar pulling at him, wishing it had been his choice, all alone in the dark might have been better, only four hours…

But it’s never only four hours, it would be days, and he can’t be alone in the dark again.

Be good be good be good.

I don’t want to be in the dark.

“F-Four… oh god, Abraham, I can’t, I can’t, please-”

“One more, Red.” Abraham’s voice is gentle, loving, soft with affection, soothing his jangled frightened nerves. “Be my good boy and just one more number… if you take this well I won’t even leave you all day, that’s how good I am to you.“

“F-f-f-five, please, I’m so sorry I pulled away, I won’t do it again, I can try harder to be good please don’t-”

There’s a sudden horrifying pressure on his arm and shoulder, cracking and grinding somewhere deep within him, then a pop as Abraham pulls his arm apart with inhuman strength and a smile as wide as the sky. There’s a moment where Danny’s arm feels strange and loose, a half-second of horrified anticipation, and then - and then the pain hits and his brain bursts into an agonized explosion.

Danny tries to twist away from it, but that only pulls his shoulder more in Abraham’s steady iron grip, and he hears the sound of a horrible wailing scream tearing apart the air before he realizes the sound is coming from him.

The things that live behind Abraham’s eyes are pulling him down, pulling him under, and they’ll feed and feed and feed on his pain.

He is screaming so loud he cannot hear the lust in Abraham’s voice as he pets into his hair, murmuring, “That’s my good fucking boy, little Red, I wonder what else makes you scream like that…” His fingers card through the wavy red hair as Danny curls around himself, gasping - he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, the ends of his fingers on that side are tingling and half-numbed and the pain throbs and throbs into his lungs, he can’t breathe.

“Pl-please, God, please, I’m so sorry, Abraham, I’m so fucking sorry, I don’t, I won’t ever pull away again, please make it go back in, please, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I’ll be good, I’ll be good-… oh god, oh god it fucking hurts, I’m so sorry-”

“I love you so fucking much, puppy,” Abraham speaks in a thick, throaty voice, pulling Danny to his feet as he screams again, pulling him close, nuzzling through the tears tracks and against the scars, pressing kisses as Danny cries in heaving sobs, but he doesn’t pull away.

He’s too lost in the pain and the strange way his whole arm feels loose, like it could just fall off of him at any moment, the way he can’t take a deep breath, the way every nerve-ending in his body is somehow connected to his shoulder.

“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” Danny whispers with Abraham’s lips on his scars, cold tongue licking up his tears. “I’m so sorry I’ll never, I’ll never, I’ll be good I want to be good, please, I want to be good…”

When Abraham kisses him, Danny’s mouth is open as he tries to gasp in breath to beg some more, and Abraham’s mouth on his is so fucking cold and steals all of what little air he can find.

But he doesn’t - he can’t - pull away.

Abraham finally pulls back, smiling at him, touching the side of his face with an expression like a proud father. “You’re so gorgeous,” He says softly, the words buzzing and dancing and bursting around and through the white noise in Danny’s head. “You’re so fucking beautiful when you’re hurting for me, my sweet little Red. Just two hours in the smokehouse, I think, that’s my good boy. Then I’ll help you…” Abraham presses a kiss to his forehead, laughing at the wide blue eyes that barely see him, the audible whistling gasps for breath around the ache. “And you, my darling, my sweet boy, my good puppy, can help me. You don’t need a working arm for that.”

Then he drags him by his dislocated arm towards the smokehouse across the yard, laughing every time Danny stumbles and cries out at the new flash of agony.

Nate, still working in the garden, hears the scream and jerks his head up, jaw hardening into that straight line again, teeth ground together so hard they hurt. He can only stare, hearing Danny’s pleading and begging and continued pained shrieking, Abraham’s wild, joyful laughter, braying and echoing around and bouncing off the trees.

Then he looks back down at his work, digging the next potato out of the earth with furious zeal, digging and digging and digging until his fingernails are caked with dirt and the basket is nearly full and still, still Danny is screaming.

The screams eventually coalesce into slurred words, occasional shrieks.

Nate knows what"s happening in there. Daniel, after all, isn’t the first man Abraham’s played a game like that with. Bram rigs the game, he always wins. Anyone stuck playing is always, always beaten.

Last time it was Nate - and his choice was a broken knee (I love you so much… you’ll never fucking run again, will you, baby?) or Ashley choosing what part of him to bury her knife in… and Ashley’s eyes had been staring far too long at Nate’s pelvis.

Nate swallows hard as he listens to Danny’s throaty wail, begging Abraham’s forgiveness for what he’s done wrong, promising to do better, try harder, be good, if only he’ll let him out and make it stop.

His knee begins to throb, a very old pain, in time with Danny’s pleading.

The sound of the smokehouse door slamming shut - and Bram’s joyful laughter as he heads back into the house - muffles Danny’s wailing until it sounds like nothing more than wind, until it quiets down to hopeless, hoarse sobbing.

The sun goes on shining and the sky is a beautiful, bright, clear blue.

It’s going to be a gorgeous spring, and Nate is running out of time.

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ashintheairlikesnow · 5 years

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Daniel Michaelson: Trembling

(for @whumptober2019, Day 20: Trembling TW: serious violence/torture, SW: creepy whumper thoughts, Abraham Denner is a bad bad man)

“Am, am I doing okay so far?” The man’s blue eyes are wide, moving from one lawyer to another, a constant dance of seeking approval and reassurance from anyone he can see.

Of course, no one in the courtroom can see the lawyers he is looking at, only him - he is the center of the frame, wavy red hair falling nearly to his eyes, scarred hands flat on the table but visibly shaking even through the digital image projected on the screen.

“You’re doing great, Mr. Michaelson. We just need to keep going, okay? Do you think you’ll be fine to continue?”

The man slowly nods. “I, I can try to keep going.” The warm blue eyes are rimmed in red by now - his testimony includes several edits and jump-cuts, and the jury doesn’t see the tears but they do see the way his face has changed, over time, from nervous but resolute to sniffing and uncertain and finally to frightened and eager to smooth over whatever offense he thinks he might have caused by not being perfect enough.

He doesn’t give up, he never stops trying.

He’s trying so hard to be brave, and it’s so fucking beautiful.

He’s being such a good boy, and Abraham wishes he were right here in the courtroom so he could tell him so right to his face.

Abraham Denner can nearly feel those tear tracks that shimmer only a little in the soulless fluorescent lights, the way they would give the slightest damp warmth if he ran his thumb down pretty red scar dug deep into his cheekbone, down the softer skin below it, all the way to his jaw.

He could picture how Red would hold himself so still, trembling under Abraham’s touch, but he would never flinch or pull away.

If Abraham wanted information from him, of course, it would all fall out of his mouth like a waterfall of words, whatever he wanted to hear, to know, all his for the taking. Red was all his for the taking, but these lawyers - they did not know how to take him correctly.

Instead, they question and dance around and try to coax without really coaxing. It’s annoying, but it draws everything out, so he tries to sit back and enjoy it. Honestly, who knows when he’ll see his Red all tear-stained and gorgeously tempting like this again?

Little less bleeding than he likes to see, granted, but he can just imagine that part.

His memories provide so many images of Red bleeding.

“Okay, Daniel. Let’s keep going.”

“What is your name? Who do you belong to?” He holds Red by the chin, tilting it up to meet his eyes where the man kneels on the floor, his wrists tied with barbed wire Abraham found in the body’s workshop out back and held out in front of him at chest level, holding himself perfectly still so none of the barbs will cut him.

He’s been kneeling like that for an hour in the smokehouse, in the dark with the scent of old fires and curing meat all around them. Abraham set a timer on his phone and sat back to take some photos, then simply waited, watching him, until the timer beeped.

It’s hot, and Red is pouring sweat in rivulets and rivers, but he doesn’t try to get up, and he doesn’t try to move his wrists even as his arms begin to tremble with the effort of holding themselves up like this.

“Red, m-my name is Red.” The voice shakes, it shivers for him. Red is always shivering for him, one way or another, when he bleeds. “My name is Red and I belong to y-you, Abraham, to you.”

“Good boy. Put your hands on the ground.” He watches Red do as he is told, smiling as some of the barbs finally prick into his skin and Red winces, laying his palms flat on the ground. “Now are we going to try any of that nonsense again? You going to try picking the lock on your chain again?”

“N-No. I’m sorry, Abraham, I won’t. I’m sorry.”

“Good.” Abraham lets one boot come out and press against Red’s wrists, forcing the barbed wire to dig into the skin, and listens to the sound of Red hissing through his teeth at the pain, digging his fingernails into the earthen ground, with perfect contentment.

Those blue eyes stay open, and they never look away from his, even as they well with tears.

Abraham leans down, reaches out, and gently wipes one tear away as it slides down that perfectly scarred cheek. “I adore you, Red,” He says softly. “You’re going to be our perfect puppy forever.”

Red licks his lips, breathing in shallow pants to avoid making any noise as Abraham puts even more weight over the wire wrapped around his wrists, and nods quickly. “Yes,” He says in a gasp. “Yes, I will, I will, please stop, I’m sorry, I’ll try harder to be good-”

“Yes,” Abraham says thoughtfully, and pulls his foot back, listening to Red’s relieved half-sob in response. “Yes, you will try harder. And you will be good.”

“Th-thank you, Abraham,” Red manages in a voice just above a whimper. “Thank you for listening to my apology, thank you for only hurting me a little, thank you.”

The way the lawyers question him is irritating. What Red really needs, of course, is someone in that room to give him some orders, using his true name, the name Abraham had gifted to him, a way to understand his place, to become what he was meant to be.

If they would only tell his good boy what to do or say, of course, Red would understand what they want from him. He would feel safer, more secure, hemmed in the way he deserves to be. Red feels safer in a life full of cages, now, defined bars made up of commands and orders and expectations.

Red likes the rules. He understands his name.

All those lawyers in fancy suits do, though, is ask questions, they give him choices. It confuses Red, makes him struggle to figure out the right thing to say.

No one bothers to get Abraham’s advice about any of it, of course. He’s the bad guy, he’s the villain, just for simply doing what came naturally to him and turning Red into what he had been meant to be all along.

In a world where the monsters all wear nametags and point at someone higher-up when called to accept responsibility, Abraham is a monster all on his own, one they cannot tame, and so they want to lock him away.

They call him a lot of things, in the newspapers that report on the trial - he gets four newspapers every day in jail - but mostly he’s picked up the nickname The Carver in the Cabin, and he kind of likes that one. It’s better than he thought he’d get, anyway, and his guards are quick to let him know that the Carver is the nickname that seems to be sticking.

He likes the guards. They’re his best friends now.

Granted, everyone he talks to is his best friend if you give him long enough - that’s always been true.

Abraham and Ashley have been caught so many times, but until Nate burned the cabin down none of those moments ever seemed to stick.

Abraham Denner could charm the pants off anyone - and often did, shortly before killing them.

Ashley could never seem to charm anyone - something about her was too cold, the violence in her coiled too close to the surface and too visible to anyone who looked right at her. Abraham could bury his.

To him, though, Ashley was always his warm and loving twin sister. To him, she had been arms around him from birth, arms he could still sometimes feel even though she had been dead for more than four years.

Nate’s fault - but he couldn’t feel angry… he couldn’t feel anything but pride at his black-haired prince for being strong enough to pull it off, to leave. No, he’s not mad at Nate.

He’s mad at Ashley for leaving Nate the opening to kill her. She should have known better.

In the video, Red rubs compulsively at the scars around his face, and Abraham feels his mouth go a little dry just watching him, pouring himself a glass of water (next to him, his defense lawyer flinches, just the slightest bit, and Abraham feels good about that). He sips slowly, savoring the cool clear nothing-taste of it while imagining Red’s tears were just for him, just for him and Nate, the way it should be.

Red, a tall and lanky man with heavily muscled shoulders, is hunched over like a child waiting for punishment with fear in his eyes, and it’s all because of Abraham Denner. He’s so perfect, so genuinely and perfectly beautiful.

Nate was his true love, of course - and Abraham fully intended to find some way to see his sweet man again, either a prison visit or, hell, never write off an escape, he’d done more unbelievable things in his life… but he would never walk away from his Red, either.

“All right, Mr. Michaelson,” The prosecutor on the video is saying. “We need to move on to speaking about what happened in this photo. Would you be able to look at this photo for us, Daniel?”

The soft scrape of a bit of paper being moved across the table, and Red reaches out as if to touch it. His eyes glance down, too quickly to do more than take in the basics, and then he looks back up, looking more confused than frightened, pulling his hands back. “We, we have to talk about, um, about that?”

“Yes. We need to understand what was happening in this photo. Would you be able to talk about that now? Obviously if you need a break-”

“No,” Red says quickly, leaning forward, pulling the paper towards himself, shaking his head so his hair falls back over his eyes. “No, I’m fine, I can do it, I’m sorry, I’ll just try harder, I can, I can be good and do this for you-”

That’s my good good boy, Abraham thinks with a grin. He knows the jury watches him. He can feel their revulsion when he smiles at Red’s tears.

He doesn’t care.

Nothing about this trial was ever going to end in anything but a prison sentence, and Abraham isn’t the type to delude himself. He’s not here to try and find acquittal. He’s just here to have some fun before he gets locked away.

“I will show the photo using the secondary screen,” The prosecutor sitting at the other table speaks out loud. The judge gives his approval, and when the prosecutor clicks the remote to pull up a large-scale version of the photo the man is holding in the testimony, everyone in the courtroom sees a photo of Red sitting on the ground, his face turned away and eyes shut but his mouth open wide in a scream, his hands wrapped tightly around himself.

Nathaniel Vandrum is crouched just behind him, one arm around him, one hand buried in his hair to pull Red against his chest. Nate’s chin rests on top of Red’s head and he’s glaring right at the camera - right at Abraham - with pure, loveless fury.

Closed around Red’s left leg is a bear trap. The smears of bright red showing through his torn jeans seem too brilliant to be real in the courtroom’s yellow light.

Abraham takes a deep breath, seeing it blown up so large, larger than life really, and has to take another drink of water before he’s totally bowled over by the incredibly knife-sharp surge of pure joy that rocks through him head to toe.

Joy, and something much darker.

“I stepped in a bear trap,” Red says in the video testimony, staring down at the photo. “He took a photo before he let Nate get me out of it.”

“Why were you in a bear trap, Mr. Michaelson?”

“I was bad and I did not apologize,” Red says, head tilted down at the photo, tracing his fingers along it. “When you do something wrong, you apologize, and you get hurt so that you do not do it again.”

Someone in the jury coughs hard.

Red’s eyes are glittering again, and Abraham can see him trembling, even though this isn’t really happening right now.

He shivers so well, little Red.

He knows just how to shake the way Abraham likes best.

“Are you saying that Mr. Denner forced you into the trap? We need you to be absolutely clear, for the record, Daniel. Can you be clear about this for us?”

Red takes a deep breath, licking his lips, and slowly nods. He looks around the ring of lawyers offscreen again, looking for their approval, and then lets his eyes drop back down to the photo. Abraham looks over to the jury to see some of them glaring right at him with hatred, most of them looking at the photo still, and one old woman dabbing at the corner of her eyes with a tissue.

“Yes,” Red says finally, and his voice is shaking as hard as he is. “He told me to step in the trap as hard as I could or he would, um, he would… he would…” His voice trails off and he hunches over, mumbling too low to be heard.

“Please, Daniel, please try to speak clearly for us, just to finish this last little bit. Then we’ll take another break. Describe what happened.”

“He told me I had to step in the bear trap to punish myself or he would hurt Nate again.” Red looks up, pleading with them to understand with his wide eyes. “He, he said he would really hurt him this time - he’d break his leg or worse, if I didn’t go in the trap, so I had to. The last time I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t take my punishment like a g-… like he wanted me to, he beat Nate so badly, so.. so I had to go in the trap. I had to step in it, I had been, I had been bad I had tried to say no again, and I don’t get to say no. Puppies don’t get angry, pets don’t… I had to, I, I had to be good, I had to…”

They cut the video short again, but Abraham isn’t done with this memory, not at all. He’s going to be thinking about the bear trap for days, running over and over in his mind the moment Red had agreed to do exactly what he said to spare Nate.

The way Nate had glared at him over Red’s head, holding onto him, the way the guilt had shredded Nate for days and days, that Red had been so willing to take a punishment to save him.

“I’m sorry, Abraham, please, I’ll do it. Don’t hurt him, please!”

“I won’t, if you step right in. Not just a little step, either. These things are made for much larger animals than my skinny little puppy. You stomp your foot right into it and take your punishment, or Nate takes it for you.”

Red’s hair is sweat-soaked and stuck to his forehead, even out here in the chill air. He nods quickly, hugging himself around his middle as though it would ever make it any better. “I will, I’ll do it, Abraham, just, just give me a second, I just need…”

“Take a moment. Deep breaths, Red. In and out, in and out. That’s my good boy.” Red’s whole body shakes, but he nods, breathing slow and deep, just the way Abraham tells him to. Nate steps over to him, hands on either side of his face.

“You don’t h-h-have to d-do this,” Nate says softly, gently, and Abraham missed the love in his words, because he was so busy searching for it when Nate looked at -him-. “I c-can take it. I’ve t-t-taken it before, Red. I can t-take it. Don’t d-d-do this just because of m-me.”

Red looks up at him, tears in his eyes, and shakes his head. “I’ll do it. You were so hurt last time, I can do it, Nate. Okay? Okay, Nate?”

Nate just pulls him close for a hug, holds him tightly, and finally steps back. “I’ll b-be right h-h-here to hold you after,” He says, gently, reassuring, leaning in to kiss Red’s forehead, each side of his face, the tip of his nose. “I’ll h-hold your hand.”

Abraham’s not jealous, not yet. He had taken Red to give Nate a friend, after all, and in Abraham’s world there was no such thing as a platonic friend. The puppy’s not a person, and taking is what puppies like Red are made for.

Red nods, stepping back, taking breaths as deeply and slowly as he can.

He turns back to the bear trap, one hand gripped white-knuckled onto Nate’s, as he moves towards it, staring down with abject dread. He shivers, he shakes, and Abraham all but purrs watching it.

Red’s left foot is trembling as he slowly lifts it up above the open trap.

He looks back at Abraham - maybe hoping for some sort of last-minute mercy - but Abraham just smiles and waits, shaking his head. “Will you be good for me, Red?”

“I’ll be good,” Red whispers. “I’m going to try harder. I can be good, just… just don’t hurt Nate.” Then he jams his left foot down into the trap, onto the little metal plate in the center, as hard as he can.

The trap snaps shut around his left leg and Red collapses long before the pain reaches him. He gives out and falls backwards, Nate grabbing onto him tightly around the chest and waist, holding onto him and murmuring soothing nonsense sounds.

Red goes suddenly still, his eyes wide and white-ringed, and he begins to scream. The sound shatters the woods around them, sends a flock of birds flying up into the sky in a burst of wings, bounces around the trees and crisp air, goes on and on and on.

Red screams, and screams, and screams.

The video testimony cuts to after the break, his little Red looking shaken but still resolute, still resolved to see this through. Abraham glances over to the prosecution’s side and sees Red’s little brother, that Ryan kid, ashen under his darker skin (adopted brothers, and still the brother comes here every day but the parents don’t… interesting, that) and staring at nothing now, twisting a little bit of paper into shreds with his hands.

He sees Nate, looking straight at the screen still, his jaw locked tightly and his green eyes totally focused. He doesn’t look to Abraham. He doesn’t see what his reaction was.

But Abraham settles back. He doesn’t care about this next bit of testimony.

No, he closes his eyes and relives, one more time, the moment his beautiful Red put his foot down in the trap.

#whumptober2019 #no.20 #trembling #whump #intimate whumper #broken whumpee #Daniel Michaelson's story #creepy whumper #tw: torture #tw: blood #tw: violence #barbed wire #restrained #bear trap #prior whumpee #secondary whumpee #Nathaniel vandrum #Abraham denner #whumper's POV

142 notes · View notes

ashintheairlikesnow · 5 years

Text

Daniel Michaelson: Laced Drink

(another @whumptober2019 prompt for Day 20: Laced Drink. I went with kind of a different take on it, I hope you guys like it!. TW: for nonconsensual touching (nothing NSFW or anything), being forced to drink something against their will)

Nate blinks awake to the sound of a mumbling voice, just a little too muffled to understand. He shifts around in the bed, pushing himself up on his elbows where he lays on his stomach under the heavy soft blankets that Abraham layers one atop the other until Nate feels weighed down by them, by their warmth.

“Bram? Is th-that you?”

“Fuck off, baby,” Bram says without opening his eyes, his voice affectionate but still sleep-slurred, nuzzling into Nate’s neck.

He’s still asleep enough that Nate feels safe pulling away from him, shivering only half in disgust, half in something worse.

The voice definitely isn’t Bram - the mumbling is still going, pauses in-between like he’s listening to half of a conversation someone’s having on the phone. Nate groans, trying to stretch and pull himself all the way awake, feeling skin pull over scratches and bruised spots, wincing a little.

Bram’s arm slides off of him when he moves and the other man - the man he hates and fears and somehow, somehow, feels a helpless despairing love for - rolls onto his other side, back to him, and Nate breathes a sigh of relief.

He still can’t quite stop himself from leaning in to kiss one cold bare shoulder, even though he doesn’t want to, even though he hates Bram so, so much.

He can’t help the little thrill of sick happiness when Bram mumbles, “God, I love you so much, baby,” and then relaxes fully back into sleep.

He hates himself - but he can’t help it.

It’s like a spell - a spell he was under for years and somehow broke and escaped and now he’s under it again, hypnotized, charmed, held captive by his mind as much as by any of the injuries he’s had inflicted on him - and there are so, so many ways to be injured he’d never known before he met Ashley and Abraham.

Before they followed him home.

Before they murdered his best friend.

Before they took him away.

They dragged him out of his own home drugged and beaten and worse days after murdering Ross, kept him locked up and bleeding, and still - still he loves Bram, and hates himself for being so broken as to feel love he didn’t ever want for a man who is a goddamn monster who has hurt him in so many ways and hurts Danny in so many more.

In his sleep, Bram seems utterly normal. Relaxed and breathing deeply, all the power and charisma locked away behind closed eyes. He could be anyone other than who - what - he is.

Nate sometimes lays just like this, watching him sleep, idly fantasizing about smothering him with a pillow or sneaking out of bed to get a knife to stab him with, dumping arsenic in his drink at dinner, just anything - any murder at all would be wonderful.

He won’t, though.

He can’t - and he and Bram both know it. They both know Nate will never do anything more than dream, now.

He escaped once, and then only because Ashley Denner hadn’t given a shit whether or not he loved her - so he didn’t, and he’d been able to kill her while Bram was out hunting for new people to slaughter to sate himself.

He couldn’t turn on Bram.

He wouldn’t dare, not for his own sake.

Although lately he’s started to think that maybe, just maybe, he could if it would help Danny.

Danny had just been some younger guy that he kept sort of thinking about, but here in the cabin, trapped, Nate thought about him all the time.

Danny had been funny, sarcastic and cynical and cursing every other breath - and he’d thought Nate’s quiet dry wit was hilarious. When that part of Danny came back - and it did, when they watched old movies or Bram brought back one of those weird kids’ make-your-own-suncatcher kits and they spent half the night painting them (and eventually each other, laughing in whispered gasps to keep from waking Bram up) - Nate thought he might be falling in love with Danny, too.

Maybe it was just because they were captives together.

Maybe he would have fallen for him anyway.

Nate doesn’t ask - you never ask why, that’s a rule, and Nate follows the rules even for his own feelings, because he’s nothing if not a master at simply burying his emotions in a kind of quiet empty cry for help inside his head that he never, ever lets out.

Maybe he can do something to escape, if he could know for sure it would work, that it would let him get Danny out alive. But every time he thinks about it, he thinks about how Bram will really kill Danny if they get caught trying to escape together… and he can’t do it.

He has to get him out of here - but he just… can’t.

He’s not sure how long he has before there isn’t much Danny left to rescue. He goes away a little more each day, no longer answers to his name, only to the stupid dog-name Bram gave him. He sleeps curled up out there on the thin plastic mat in the early spring chill and he deserves so much more than life as a captive Bram keeps just to see how broken he can make someone.

And Danny is so, so broken. Something of him was still in there, though - Nate could see it in the fury that sometimes still lit the blue eyes, an anger he didn’t dare show. He saw it when Danny remembered, every once in awhile, that he could laugh.

Like the suncatchers thing - when Danny had nearly passed out from trying to hold the laughter back, blue streaks painted in his red hair, a swipe of green across one cheek, and the red nose Nate had given him and called him Rudolph for three days afterward whenever Bram wasn’t close enough to hear it.

Danny had leaned over and painted him right back, a spiral in purple on one cheek and a happy face in green on the other, and finally a streak of blue that started at the line of his black hair and went down the center of his face, the cool paint and slightly scratchy bristled moving in a slow, solid line down over his nose, his mouth, chin, and finally straight down his neck over the scars from every time Ashley carved the collar, until they had reached the neckline of his shirt-

And Danny had stopped, looking up at his eyes, and smiled at him. I wish we were anywhere other than here doing this, Danny had said softly, and then grinned at him, only the barest hint of the darkness in his eyes. Because then I would get you drunk enough to pass out and paint dicks all over you.

Then he’d collapsed back into giggles, and the moment of tense waiting for something, something neither of them could really give in this place, was gone, and Nate laughed with him.

Then there was the Blair Witch day.

Danny had tied a bunch of sticks with twine into Blair Witch effigies and hung them around the clearing near the cabin, twelve or thirteen altogether. It’d taken him all afternoon and when he was done, he’d laughed at his own stupid joke until he fell over, hand pressed to the side where his old broken rib still hurt sometimes, pulling Nate down with him until the two of them were covered in dust and dirt, still laughing.

Bram had paused in his work scraping hides to look up and smile at his two good boys getting along so well.

The laughter died in them both when Bram smiled.

If he is ever going to do anything, it has to be before Danny stops being able to laugh, and there seem to be fewer and fewer times when he laughs now.

Nate tries to shake the thoughts of escape, making himself lay back down with the image of Danny laughing behind his eyes, but the mumbling doesn’t stop. After a moment his sleepy brain wakes the rest of the way up and he realizes it’s not Danny maybe watching TV out there - the mumbling is Danny himself.

Nate’s eyes blink back open and he’s immediately fully awake. He slides carefully out of the bed, disturbing it as little as possible, and Bram doesn’t even move. He usually doesn’t, once he’s asleep, trusting in Danny’s chain and Nate’s broken spirit to keep him safe.

Nate hates that his trust is not misplaced.

The floor is freezing cold under his bare feet as he tiptoes out to the living room, closing the bedroom door slowly behind him. The room is dark but there’s a full moon tonight and moonlight shines through the windows over by the door, lighting the whole room in a kind of eerie blue-white, everything perfectly visible but off-color, like watching a black-and-white movie that someone just barely colorized.

He expects to see Danny curled up on his mat like always, in the defensive sleeping position that’s become second nature to him - hands over his head or stomach to ward off the blow, knees to his chest, head tucked in so as little is exposed as possible, wrapped in every single one of the threadbare blankets he is given and usually still shivering from cold, almost always in just a thin T-shirt and old cotton pajama pants unless Bram deems him good enough to earn a sweater or flannels.

Instead, Danny is sitting up on his mat, his back to Nate, talking to himself.

Nate pauses, swallows hard, and just listens.

“Have to look in the woods,” Danny mumbles, words slurred like he’s drunk, shoulders hunched in on themselves. His head hangs forwards, just a little, hair falling over his eyes. “You have to look, to look in the woods, Ryan.”

Ryan.

That’s his brother’s name - he’d told Nate he had a younger brother, they talked about it a lot in the early days, the biological child of the people who adopted him and who then largely forgot they had two sons and cared only about the younger.

There’s a pause, and then Danny says softly, “He says you aren’t looking anymore, Ryan. Are you-… are you still looking?”

Nate moves slowly forward, giving Danny sort of a wide berth, trying to get a look at his face. When he comes all the way around to where he can see him, Danny jumps a little and turns, looking over at Nate.

Even in the dark, his eyes are glassy and fogged-over, and Nate can see the stripes of color high in his cheeks, the shimmer of clammy sweat on his forehead and the tip of his nose, the place Nate had once painted red because he’d wanted so badly to kiss it but didn’t dare.

“Danny-” Nate catches himself and glances over his shoulder, but the bedroom door is still closed, and he can hear Bram snoring, just faintly, through the door. He turns back. “R-Red, are you okay?”

“Ryan’s here,” Danny says, and his voice is still slurred. He can’t quite seem to lift his head all of the way up, and his hands are rubbing compulsively at his thighs, the way you rub at your aching knee on a rainy day. “He doesn’t know where to look, Nate. I told him, I told him you have to, um, to look in the woods. Bram always says no one’s looking anymore, no one misses me, but Ryan does. He’s still looking, Nate, he promises he’s still looking.”

“I d-d-don’t d-doubt it, Red, b-but…” Nate moves slowly closer, cautiously, watching Danny’s face as he does. The foggy blue eyes slide away from him, back to the spot he was looking at before, but Danny doesn’t tense up or try to pull away when he reaches out one hand.

Danny’s forehead is sweat-soaked and slick and burns so hot Nate pulls his hand back with a hiss.

“This is Nate,” Danny says out loud, without looking back at him. “He’s in the woods, too. Can you, can you tell the cops to look for him, too? Nathaniel Vandrum. That’s his whole name, Ryan. Can you, can you tell them? Please, Ryan, are you still looking?” Danny leans forward, pleadingly, lifting his hands to show them to the phantom brother only he can see.

Nate swallows against the guilt at the lines of red, inflamed scars that travel up his hands, cut just over the tops of the visible veins, cut over and over and over again until the marks were deep and permanent.

Each scar is a rule Danny has broken, each cut carved into him until he swears he won’t break it again.

Nate knows exactly how that feels - his own hands bear the same scars, just a few years older.

“Ryan, don’t give up,” Danny whispers, and his eyes are starting to fill with tears. “Please don’t stop looking for me. Please, you’re the only one who will, please don’t stop looking, I’m in the woods-”

“I c-c-c-can’t fu, fucking l-listen to th-this,” Nate mutters, backing away from him, trying to think. He leaves Danny mumbling to go into the kitchen, pulling the tea Danny had made earlier out in its giant pitcher, pouring a small cup of it. It’s hawthorn berry tea, something Danny had found a recipe for in one of the survivalist books the body had had out here before Bram decided he wanted this cabin. It’s sweetened with plenty of honey Danny had stirred in while it was still hot, and it should cover the taste of the medicine well enough.

He can hear Danny still talking to his brother as he moves over to the bathroom, pulling down the cold medicine, pouring a dose of the syrup into the tea and then stirring to dissolve it as best he can.

After a moment’s hesitation, he grabs the thermometer, too.

They say sometimes to let a fever run its course, but if that meant listening to Danny beg his brother to find him - when Nate knew very well no one ever would, no one ever found Bram unless he wanted to be found - he couldn’t do it.

Nate stared at his own reflection in the mirror - he was older by years than Danny but he’d lost so much of his life to Bram by now that he didn’t really feel it. The face that looked back at him seemed hardly recognizable - he’d been smiling in the last photo anyone ever took of him before there was this, a professor in a suit and tie, in his second year of teaching adjunct and deeply in love with the life he was building.

All the photos of him now had shadows around the eyes, buried deep within the mossy green there, shaggy half-chopped black hair with a curl at the nape of his neck where it always ended up just a little too long. All the photos of him now had the scar in his lip, still healing from the last time he’d really angered Bram by trying to stand up for Danny. All the photos of him now showed the rings of scars around his neck from Ashley’s collar.

He’d worn a lot of turtlenecks and high-necked sweaters when he was out, for those few months, before Bram had tracked him back down.

“You can’t let him turn into you,” Nate says to his reflection, but all he gets back is an empty mouthing echo of his own words.

Danny will turn into something worse, in the end, because Bram doesn’t love him. There’s nothing to stop him from going too far, nothing but the fact that he still find Danny amusing. If Nate can’t figure out where all his courage is hiding and do something, Danny will eventually be too injured to recover.

And if Danny dies, Nate will have absolutely no reason left to remember himself.

Out in the living room, he hears Danny’s muttering change into something fearful, the sound of the chain scraping along the ground, and then he hears the younger man start to cry, the sniffling sound of him trying to hold it back but failing.

He can’t listen to Danny’s tears, not for the days it might take the fever to break on its own. He’s barely hanging on by swinging from each time Danny remembers how to laugh to the next.

Each swing on the vine takes longer, forces him to go further, and Nate isn’t sure he can keep himself together much longer if Danny stops entirely.

When he comes back out of the bathroom, he freezes at the sight of Bram sitting on the couch with the side table lamp lit, Danny settled between his legs with his back to him, Bram’s fingers running through Danny’s hair, petting him gently, oh so gently, with one hand while the other rubs at the back of his neck.

Nate can see how badly Danny is shaking from all the way across the room the careful way he is holding himself very still, the blank blue eyes staring directly ahead of himself, tear tracks a visible shimmer along the scarring on his face.

“H-he’s sick, B-Bram,” Nate says, hesitantly. “I w-w-went to g-get a thermom.. thermo… thermometer.”

“Oh, I know, baby,” Bram replies cheerfully, without even pausing in his movements. “I heard you get up, decided to come out and see for myself what my good boys were up to.” He looks over at Nate, raising an eyebrow at the glass in one hand. “What’s that?”

“M-medicine. R-Red hates t-t-t-taking medicine, so I f-figured put some in t-t-tea so he can’t taste it…” He shrugs, trying to keep his voice casual, trying not to let on how much it bothers him to watch Danny’s absolute terror wash through him, again and again, adrenaline not fighting the fever but fueling its rise.

He moves around, setting the glass on the side table (Bram shoots him an irritated look before picking up a coaster and loudly moving it underneath the cup) and crouches in front of Danny, looking him over. He’s even redder, if that’s possible, and the sweat is gone, replaced by a blistering dry heat underneath his skin that Nate can only stand for a moment.

He’s like a furnace, isn’t he?” Bram says in a low, delighted voice. “I could use him for a space heater in bed like this.”

“O-open your m-m-mouth please, D-… Red,” Nate says softly, flinching as he nearly uses the wrong name. Bram only shakes his head, and Nate shoots him a mute look of apology as Danny obediently opens his mouth, letting Nate slide the thermometer under his tongue and turn it on with a tiny, barely-audible ‘beep’.

“Eye-an ish thalk-ing oo ee,” Danny slurs around the thermometer. His eyes keep glancing off of Nate’s and then bouncing around the room and back again.

Ssshhh, Red, g-g-give me j-just a seh… a second,” Nate says softly, gently pushing his jaw up so his mouth closes all the way. Bram’s hands never stop their gentle petting and massaging at his head and neck, and Danny trembles the whole time under the touch he can’t stand but knows better than to reject.

When the thermometer beeps again, Nate pulls it out of Danny’s mouth, holding the little screen at an angle where he can see the digital numbers in black against the light green. He squints, then looks up at Danny’s pale, red-cheeked face again. “106.8. H-holy sh-sh-shit. No f-f-fucking w-wonder he’s s-seeing th-things, Bram.”

“What are you seeing, little Red?” Bram asks in a tone of syrupy sweetness, and Nate is suddenly deeply sorry he even mentioned hallucinations at all. Bram leans down, the hand in Danny’s hair dropping to his right shoulder, sliding down over the upper arms that are becoming muscled from nearly two years of the heavy lifting and chores he’s responsible for, the other leaving his neck to curve around his left arm and hold that, too. “Hm?”

“M-my brother,” Danny answers, his voice shaking, blue eyes searching the room where he was looking before. “Ryan is, he’s still looking, Abraham, he’s still looking for me, I just have to tell him-”

“He’s not looking for you, you fucking whore,” Bram murmurs without the slightest change in tone. “No one is. What’s even left of you now, hm?”

“N-no,” Danny whimpers, and Nate shatters a little more.

But a little of his unwilling, unwanted love for Bram shatters, too.

“No, Ryan’s looking, he says he’s looking-… you have to look in the woods, Ryan, we’re in the woods-” Bram’s hands tighten around his arms and Danny cuts himself off, but his eyes stay on that corner of the room, staring and staring and staring at the brother he can see there, someone Nate has only seen in a couple of cell phone photos Danny showed him before the night they were taken away. “Please don’t stop looking for me,” Danny begs the empty corner, straining against Bram’s grip. “Please, please don’t stop looking, Ryan, please, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry-”

“No one is ever going to find you here,” Bram says softly. “No one is looking any longer, Red. We’re all you have now - Nate and me. We’re the only ones who could want something as fucked up as you.” His eyes lift to Nate’s, and the cold inhuman amusement in them shifts, warms, becomes the love and affection he always shows his true love.

Nate could kill him right now.

Only he… only he still can’t. He’s never hated Bram more than this, but he can’t do it, he can’t lift a finger, and Bram knows it.

“Give him his medicine, baby,” Bram purrs, smooth a silk, and Danny begins to struggle in his grip. He’s too sick to do more than pull weakly against the hands that hold him, and Bram leans forward in a sudden violent lunge, throwing an arm around his chest to pull him up tight against him, the other moving to his jaw - thumb on one side, fingers on the other.

Danny freezes, eyes wide in fear, as though only now realizing that he’s been struggling, when you never pull away from Abraham Denner.

Never reject a touch.

“I’m sorry,” Danny says in a sudden rush, struggling to get the words out from around Bram holding his jaw. “I’m s-s-sorry, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean-… I just… it’s just, Ryan’s here, I can see him-”

“Don’t give a fuck,” Bram says softly. “Nate says you need medicine. My baby gets what he wants.”

Nate hasn’t moved, only staring at them, breathing hard.

I hate you, I hate you so fucking much, I love you, I love him, how can you do this to him, how can you make me be part of what you do to him, why can’t I kill you, I love you so much I hate you I love you I hate you

I love him

“I said, give him his medicine,” Bram says, and his voice drops into something low and laced with threat and ice, and Nate nods quickly, grabbing the cup off the side table. A dose of medicine for the fever, stirred into a few inches of honey-laced tea.

He takes a deep breath, looks into Danny’s teary eyes, and says softly, “I’m s-s-sorry, Red. I h-have to, you can’t h-h-have a fever this high. Y-your leg’s probably inf-infected or something, I’ll clean it o-out once the fever’s d-d-d-down-”

“Please,” Danny begs him, begs him, and Nate has never felt more like slime. His voice is a high, ragged plea that bounces off the beams in the ceiling and back down. “Please don’t take Ryan away. Please, please, don’t take Ryan away from me, Nate, please! Please let me keep my brother!”

“F-f-fuck, I’m so sorry, I’m s-s-so s-s-s-s-” He can’t get the words out, his own eyes are hot with tears, but he lifts the glass and Bram uses his thumb and fingers to force Danny’s mouth open as he tries to hold it closed.

Danny shakes his head as much as he can, violently, but Bram’s grip is strong and inexorable and eventually Danny’s mouth is forced open far enough for Nate to pour some of the tea in.

Bram snaps it shut, holding Danny’s mouth closed with about a third of the tea in there. He looks at Nate, glacial eyes cold and delighted. “Pinch his nose.”

“Wh-what? Bram, I, I c-c-can’t-”

“Do it.”

Nate closes his eyes for a second against a wash of shame so strong it nearly knocks him over, and then reaches out and pinches Danny’s nose closed with his own thumb and finger.

Danny, eyes wide, struggles again, fights as hard as he can - but he’s sick and weak and he was tired and hungry before that, and eventually he has to swallow if he wants to breathe. As soon as he does, Nate yanks his hand back and Danny breathes as hard as he can through his nose.

Then Bram forces his jaw open again, to Danny’s low pained wordless whine. “Again,” He orders Nate, and this time Nate doesn’t hesitate.

He all but throws his hand forward to pour more of the medicine into Danny’s mouth, and again they force his mouth and nose shut until he swallows.

A third time, and Danny’s taken all of the medicine and Bram shoves him forward and away from himself as hard as he can.

Danny smacks hard into the floor on his stomach, crying hoarsely, whispering, “No, no, you have to keep looking, you can’t stop trying to find me,” and Nate leans over to rub his back. It’s the only thing he can think of to do.

“I’m going back to bed,” Bram says, looking down at the two of them. He pauses, then leans down to run his fingers through Nate’s black hair and down over his neck. “You can stay out here with him, if you want, baby.”

“Thank you, B-Bram,” Nate says, and he really means it; it’s a sick, awful gratitude he feels, but still he’s grateful, even just for this much mercy. He lets Bram rest a hand on top of his head for another moment before he turns and walks away, back into the bedroom, and closes the door.

It wasn’t much, but it was still mercy, and Bram has so little to give.

Be grateful for every gift you are given.

He manages to get Danny back onto his mat, sitting next to him on the wood floor and rubbing his back as he curls back into his ball. He shakes for a while and cries, but eventually the medicine kicks in and Nate watches Danny’s breath slow, his eyes flutter back closed, a cold sweat breaking out all across him as the fever drops.

“I h-hate this,” He says in a thick heavy voice, slurred now with sleep rather than sickness.

Nate nods, leaning over to press a kiss to his forehead, in that little spot between his eyes where there’s a furrow that never seems to leave. “M-me too,” Nate whispers. “I’m s-s-sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too, Nate.” Danny’s limbs have gone loose and Nate pulls the blankets around him as tightly as he can, kisses him one more time, on the top of his head. “I’m so sorry,” Danny murmurs. “I wish…”

“I w-w-w-wish too, Danny,” Nate whispers, low enough he knows Bram won’t hear it. “I wish, t-too.”

I love you.

I hate him.

I love him.

I love you.

Once he’s totally sure Danny is asleep, Nate unfolds himself and lays down on the couch, staring up at the ceiling, wide awake. Guilt is an ever-present beat in him, right alongside his heart.

All he can hear is the sound of Danny begging him not to take his brother away.

#whumptober2019 #no.21 #prompt: laced drink #whump #comforting caretaker #caretaker forced to be whumper #intimate whumper #violent whumper #broken whumpee #prior whumpee #Daniel Michaelson's story #Nathaniel vandrum #Abraham denner #tw: nonconsensual touching #tw: forced ingestion of drink #sickfic #conditioning #dehumanization #caretaker

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ashintheairlikesnow · 5 years

Note

❓ A random fact or short drabble! Or make up your own question to ask the OC!

(Ooooh, a drabble! Okay, have a Danny drabble - with inspiration courtesy of @iaminamoodymoodtoday‘s moodboard for Danny Michaelson and with bonus @bleeding-demon-teeth’s Lyken mention because seriously, Abraham cannot stop being a giant nerdy fan. TW: noncon touching, collaring, nothing explicit or anything, just Abraham doin’ a creepy)

“Do you know why I’ve never asked you to wear one of these before?”

You’ve never asked anything. You give orders, you asshole.

No, stop it.

Wrong thoughts.

Danny, curled up on the dirt floor, only shakes his head and pulls his knees even tighter to his chest. He’s not handcuffed, or tied, or anything else. He could push Abraham to the side, maybe, and run back up the steps out into the hot open air of summer.

He doesn’t have to be down here with the dark and the things that move when the cellar doors close, but Abraham told him to come down here, and he wants to be good.

Even when being good is terrifying, even when being good means he walks down each and every step all by himself and sits on the floor, watching the way the sunset steals every scrap of light piece by piece.

The last dregs of the day only make it to the fourth step from the bottom, lighting Abraham from behind in a kind of silhouette, making it difficult to see his features.

Those ice-blue eyes, though, glow in the dark. The white hair is lit with a reddish-gold halo, like he’s a demon on fire, like Abraham walked out of hell.

Danny wonders, sometimes, if maybe he committed a sin or something - something he doesn’t even know about, something bad enough that hell found him while he was still alive

He’s never believed in anything religious, really, but the longer he’s here, the more he thinks he must have done something spectacularly wrong to deserve this.

“You won’t even guess?”

Danny just shakes his head again. His heart pounds inside his chest, beating against his breastbone as though trying to escape. Like maybe his heart, at least, could free itself of the rest of this broken body and run through the woods and find people again.

Set this fucking place on fire, burn it to the ground, shoot this motherfucker with his own goddamn bow and arrow-

No.

Be good.

Think good boy thoughts.

Have to be good.

“Fair enough. I haven’t had you wear one before because I didn’t think you needed it. We’re out here in the woods - who needs to see it to know? You already know who you belong to, right?”

Danny nods, carefully. He can see the flash of white hair, the red of the halo around it. He can feel the cold that grows with each passing moment he is this near to Abraham.

It’s summer - he thinks midsummer, he’s not allowed to know the month or the day but there’s only so much you can hide when Danny has to chop wood and tend the garden and help set the traps. Down here in the cellar, it’s cool and comfortable; with Abraham, though, it’s cold, and he shivers.

There’s a shift, and Abraham moves to crouch in front of him, with a flashlight dangling from one hand - he’s hit Danny with it before, it’s the cause of at least one of the concussions - and something entirely different in the other.

I fucking hate you get the fuck away from me

No.

Don’t be Danny.

Be Red.

Red is safe here, Red is the safe one, Red is the puppy and Red is safe. Danny gets hurt. Be Red.

When he crouches, the halo leaves his hair and he’s just a man again, just a regular living breathing man except for the eyes that glow in the dark, the things that move beneath them, the dark things that Danny is terrified of.

The things that find him when the cellar doors close and he is alone.

“We had a dog growing up,” Abraham says thoughtfully. He drops the flashlight with a small thumb, and looks down at the thing he holds in his hands. “We lived in the woods then, too, but back in America. Just us and our mother. We had a bunch of dogs, really, they kept running into bad luck. But they never wore these. Why would they? Great way to get caught on a tree branch, you know? Or a bush.”

Danny nods, just to show he’s listening, just to prove he’s being so good. He slowly unfolds himself, and Abraham goes quiet as he watches Danny shift from sitting to kneeling, the way his shoulders hunch forwards and his hands lay flat in the dirt.

Abraham reaches out to brush the backs of his knuckles down the side of Danny’s face, over the line of his scar, and he shivers but holds himself still.

He is Red.

He is not Danny.

He is Red, and he is good.

Never reject a touch.

“So, you know, these sorts of things don’t really occur to me much. Not for long-term use. But I saw this on my last supply run, and I just.. couldn’t resist. The King says symbols are important - and he’s right, you know? About symbols. This is a symbol, and a gift.”

“Does he tell, um, does he tell you to give gifts?” Danny asks, slowly lifting his head to really look Abraham in the face.

There’s a silence, and then Abraham laughs, and Danny nearly flinches back from the bright, high-pitched bark of it, but he catches himself.

Never flinch or pull away from Abraham.

“No, little Red. No. The King doesn’t give a shit about that sort of thing, I don’t think. But listen, Red, listen to me. Gifts are my love language. They’re how I show that I care.”

“Do you care about me?” Danny asks, and the words come out nearly numb.

“Of course I do, puppy. I care so much about you.” A hand cards through his hair and Daniel closes his eyes, not quite leaning into it. It’s something better than hurt. He’s been good this week, and all he has are bruises right now, the cuts and the bits that bleed are very nearly healed up.

“This is your gift,” Abraham says softly. “Lift your chin.”

Danny raises his chin, closing his eyes and waiting, feeling shame and revulsion through him but unable to even get together the will to argue, let alone fight back. It doesn’t matter, it won’t work, he’ll end up back in the smokehouse or left down here alone.

Abraham always wins.

I fucking hate you

Puppies don’t hate their owners

Be Red.

The leather that slides around his neck is still stiff from lack of use, scratchy at the edges, not really made for a person with bare skin but for an animal with fur. Danny feels his face flush red and grits his teeth, setting his jaw against the humiliation.

The leather doesn’t quite go all the way around - on the back of his neck, he feels a cold chain gradually warming to his skin.

Abraham’s cold fingers skim the skin of his neck as he circles it around, adjusts a little to make it tight enough to cut just slightly in to Danny’s skin, to be something he feels every time he swallows or tries to take a deep breath. This thing will scratch him raw by morning.

That’s okay.

He’s being very good, and he’s had worse around his neck than this.

There’s a soft jingling as Abraham hooks a little padlock onto the buckle, locking the collar on.

“I think I like them better on people dogs than real ones,” Abraham says thoughtfully, then smiles at him. “Good, good boy. I made you come down here because I thought you might fight, but look at you, being so good for me. Trying so hard.”

“I always, um, try hard to be good,” Danny whispers. He can feel the leather move, the rough edge of it, when he speaks. “I’m good, Abraham, I’m being good.”

I fucking hate myself

I want to be good

I hate this

I hate you

BE GOOD

“Yes, you are. Well.” Abraham pauses, leans forward and kisses his forehead. Danny closes his eyes, holds himself still as his stomach flips in disgust and rage, but it’s all so faded now. He can barely even find the feelings. Instead, he pushes his head a little harder into the hand that pats him, tries to take the moment of something that isn’t pain for what it is.

Abraham offers his hand and Danny takes it, standing up, fighting the urge to raise his hands and touch the thing around his neck. He can feel something dangling off the front and he knows what it is without having to look.

A metal tag that reads Red.

If you find me, I belong to…

“Happy birthday,” Abraham says softly.

“What?” Danny’s head jerks up from his thoughts, surprised out of them. “It’s my birthday?”

Did Ryan remember my birthday? Is there a gravestone somewhere he visits?

“Yes.” Abraham grins. “I never forget an important day, you know. Plus, I wanted to get you a gift.” He leans forward, flicking the little metal tag so it clinks, and Danny bites his lower lip to keep himself from flinching. “Do you like it?”

Danny swallows hard, feels the leather shift against his throat “Yes,” He whispers. He’s a terrible liar. “Thank you for my present, Abraham, for my gift.”

I hate you

I hate you so much

I fucking hate you so fucking much

I am not the-

I am the puppy

I am Red

I want to be good

“Not good enough.”

Danny feels fear flash through him, deep terror that he’ll be left down here for not being grateful enough.

“I-I-I mean, um, thank you for my, for um, for my… for my c-cuh…” He clenches is eyes shut, taking deep panting breaths, but every breath he takes makes the thing dig into his throat, he has to work a little harder to breathe around it.

Abraham moves forward, sliding his arms around him. The arms are cold and terrible, they have hands that hurt him, but Danny collapses into them anyway, trying to force himself to breathe.

“Take a moment,” Abraham murmurs affectionately, petting his hair, along his neck, down his back. “Breathe, puppy. Breathe for me, little Red. Be my good boy.”

Think.

In through your nose, I am the puppy, hold for five, exhale, my name is Red and I belong to Abraham…

I hate this

I hate what I am now

I am the puppy

I’m not the puppy I used to be a person

don’t think about life before this, there wasn’t one

I’m not the puppy

I am the puppy

I’m not Red

My name is Red

I don’t belong to-

I belong to Abraham.

My name is Red and I want to be good.

It takes a few tries, but slowly he starts to calm.

“Th-thank you for my collar,” He manages, in a weak, small voice. “Thank you, Abraham.”

Be grateful for every gift you are given.

“Good boy. Let’s go back upstairs, shall we? Nate baked you a cake, and I’ve been hiding the candles to go on top for a month.” Abraham pulls him towards the stairs and he goes with pathetic gratitude, feeling like he can hear the angry whispers of the dark things that he will leave behind down there.

When they make it back up into the last minutes of sunset, Danny takes Abraham’s shirt in his hand hesitantly. “Abraham? May I ask a question?”

Ask permission for everything a person would do, because you aren’t one, and you have to earn it.

My name is Red

I am a good boy

“Go ahead,” Abraham says, slinging an arm over his shoulders like they are old friends. Danny hunches himself over to be smaller, but that just makes the leather dig in at the front. When he stands up straight, though, the chain pulled tight across the back seems to dig in, too.

“H-How old am I today?”

“Oh. You don’t remember?”

Danny slowly shakes his head.

He’s lost some things - he forgets things now. He tries not to think about it much.

“You’re twenty-five years old today.”

Abraham nuzzles into the side of his face, and Danny counts in his head, realizing that means he’s been here for nearly three years.

He’s never going home.

No one is looking.

No one is looking for me

I belong to Abraham Denner

When they make it back into the cabin, Nate has set out the birthday cake, put the candles on top, and lit them.

Danny leans over, the collar digging in hard into his Adam’s apple, with Abraham’s cold hand in the middle of his back, moving in slow circles, a promise for later that Danny would give anything not to understand.

I will be so good

There are only five candles on the cake, and Danny blows all of them out at once with his eyes closed.

I used to be a person

There used to be something better than this

Don’t think about it, there was never anything else, there is only Abraham

“M-m-make a w-wish,” Nate says softly, something sweet and sad in his green eyes.

Danny nods, as Abraham’s hand slides up over the back of his neck, cold as ice, pressing the chain of the leather collar hard into his skin. He feels frozen in time, in place, in the memories of everyone he’d left behind.

Make a wish.

I wish there was something better than this.

#Daniel Michaelson's story #whump #broken whumpee #creepy whumper #intimate whumper #pet whump #dehumanization #conditioning #collar #collaring #this might be the saddest thing I've ever written #poor buddy #at least we all know he escapes in the end?#Abraham Denner #misery vampire

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ashintheairlikesnow · 5 years

Text

Daniel Michaelson: Embrace

(final prompt for @whumptober2019: Embrace! Since yesterday’s was such a sweet, genuine bit of brotherly loyalty and love and comfort, today is... well, it’s the exact opposite of that. TW: there’s some pretty much outright torture here. Blood, knives, stress positions, dehumanization, it’s all here, folks. Abraham Denner is very, very good at what he does - and what he does is terrible)

“Did you think you were my first?”

Abraham sits back in the folding chair, looking down at the slim, sharp knife he holds in one hand, chosen expressly for today's purpose. The end of it is still red, and he tilts the knife down, watching a single drop coalesce at the tip, swell and grow fat, shimmer in the dim light, and finally drop to the ground.

There is a tiny spot that briefly darkens where it lands and then is indistinguishable from all the other blood soaked into the earth here - insignificant, like the puppy’s life.

A life he has broken and remade in his own image.

Red is kneeling, in the dim light and cured-meat smell of the smokehouse. Kneeling and bent totally at the waist, folded in half with his arms out in front of him, forced straight until they pull, a little, at his shoulders by the ropes cutting hair into his wrists that tie him to the hooks in the wall near the ground.

Bram reaches down to pull his fingers against one of those ropes, then lets it go, and smiles at the twang and the groan from the back of Red's throat, forced unwillingly from behind the muzzle.

"Oh, right, your shoulder isn't quite healed yet, is it? Silly me. Well, I suppose we should keep talking, hm? Or I should. You can't really hold up your end of the conversation today, can you?"

Red doesn't even try to look up, and Bram smiles at the sheen of sweat on those muscled shoulders, along the line of his arms, the trickles of sweat that run over the clear shadows along his ribcage.

It's hot in here, today.

Abraham feels it as a gentle, comforting warmth, but the sweat on Red is a giveaway that he feels the heat very intensely.

Funny. Bram never feels warm unless he’s in direct sunlight.

Red’s hair is a riot of mess everywhere that it isn't plastered to his forehead and neck with the sweat or the leather isn't pushing it in. Abraham’s are caught, for a moment, by the metallic glint of the little padlock laying against the back of his head.

He smiles at the curve of the grid he can see along Red's cheek and jaw, the way it's red there, too, smeared around from Bram's thumbs.

But that doesn't hold a candle to his back.

His back is a beautiful mess. Abraham's been working on it for the better part of two hours now, carving into the skin with a steady hand and a practiced eye for anatomy. Never too deep, never even grazing anything he can’t live without.

You can't see the design through all the blood, but you will, soon enough - and when it scars Bram will get to feel the twisting patterns he’s made himself, run his fingertips over them and watch Red hold himself so carefully, perfectly, obediently still.

For now, kneeling and prostrated and bloody, he looks like a flagellant. As though he’s a pilgrim out of time, a penitent being bloodied in purification, bleeding out the weight of his sins before God.

Bram Denner is not God, of course.

The puppy that used to be Daniel Michaelson prays to him now at night, though, and that's close enough.

“Did you think I was born with this knife in my hand? That I sprang fully formed from my father's forehead like some slightly less muscular and significantly prettier Athena?"

Red doesn't answer - but then he can't, with his voice locked away. The only sound from him is the harsh breathing through his nose and low, ragged sounds coming from the back of his throat as the position he's in stretches his shoulders just a little too much and aggravates the still-aching too-recently dislocated joint.

Bram only left it like that for a few hours, but these things take time to heal, and Bram has never been a fan of letting old wounds heal before creating new.

The sweat runs into the cuts all over his back and makes them sting, no doubt. Maybe Red can't even feel it any longer, though.

Doesn't matter.

"No, this is the kind of thing you discover in yourself and then cultivate, puppy. You understand, right? You sure showed me some hidden talents that we got to cultivate together, hm?"

He kicks out his legs, landing a glancing blow into the puppy's shoulder, and Red coughs behind his teeth, whining a little at the ache and the pain as he inadvertently tries to force his jaw open and fails.

"You paying attention, puppy?"

Red doesn't even try to look up, nodding with jerky, dazed movements. Honestly, he's probably lost enough blood by now to be feeling pretty out of it - and he has that trick where he leaves his head when the muzzle is on, too. Abraham hates that trick. But the only thing that seems to prevent it is the headphones, and he wants little Red to really hear his voice today, in whatever part of him can still hear.

“Good boy. I know what you’re thinking. Why is this happening? What possible mistake did you make to earn this punishment, what lesson must you learn? What rule did you break?” Bram laughed, the deep, low little rumble of sound that he used to charm the bodies out there in the world, all of them collections of organ and bone waiting to be made better, to be fixed.

But Bram was only one man, and even his prodigious skills could only be utilized on so many people at once. Besides… he’d hate to be distracted away from the puppy.

Bram was very devoted to the puppy.

“Let me reassure you, little Red, you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong this time.”

Red made a sound like a sob that came from somewhere deep within his chest, giving a single full-body shake, and fuck, he was so beautiful like this. Bram leaned over and tilted his head, looking carefully for a clean spot of skin. It was hard to find but eventually he located what he was looking for and smiled.

“This isn’t about punishment, little Red. This is about honing a craft. I had to learn these skills that make good boys like you over… years… You know, we all have something we’re good at, but you have to really practice to turn a basic talent into a real skill. You’ve been so good lately, but I can’t just… waste these talents just because you’re getting so good at keeping me all kinds of happy, you know?”

Bram leans down, thoughtfully, and slides his hand along the metal muzzle that locks Red's voice up, smiling at the pinpricks (not pain, not really - Bram never feels much pain at all) as his thumb finds the spots he turned into little jagged edges that pop up from the wires to cut and poke and tear. When he lifts Red's chin, he finds empty blue eyes staring up at him from above the muzzle, hair hanging over them that goes unnoticed.

Bram hums appreciatively at the sight. “You’re so fucking beautiful,” he breathes, just taking it in.

Wide, nearly sightless blue eyes under sweat-soaked red hair. The slight unconscious nearly inaudible whines, vibrations Bram can feel against his fingers when he presses them to Red's throat. The red smears where his skin is retorn every time the muzzle goes on or off.

Nate never appreciates it - he’ll be angry once Bram finally lets the puppy back in the house, he’s usually angry these days anyway. He’s been pulling away from Bram’s kisses, acting differently. It takes longer - and takes more incentive - to make Nate be his black-haired prince, his true love, like he used to be. It’s confusing and troubling to Bram, but he tries not to think about it, too much. It had taken him months to hunt Nate down when he ran - and he can’t run, not here in the middle of the woods with his bad leg. There’s nowhere to go.

He’ll come around, Bram is sure of it - it just might take a while. But as long as Red is here, Nate will never, ever try to leave… that, at least, he’s sure of.

Nate just doesn’t understand, is all, because he’s not really a Denner yet. Those things take time, but he’ll get there, he has to. He doesn’t grasp how all of this builds, layer on layer, into a perfect portrait of exactly what something like Red was born to be.

The dim light that comes through the cracks in the wood slats makes Red’s blood too vibrant, nearly surreal. It looks like paint, like his puppy is a Renaissance painting with those bright blue eyes and that wavy red hair. He’s pure unadulterated beauty in every line, scar, and bruise.

Red had cried when they started in here, but he was far past tears now. Now he was blank, and empty, locked inside his head just a little further than Abraham Denner could follow. He would be back, later, and the pain would still be there for him, to shape him.

He didn’t need to be here to learn his lessons.

All Bram needed for those was his body.

“I have made you,” Bram murmured. “I have made you from the dust of your life and you are my creation, little Red, and I call you good.”

Maybe he was a little bit of a god, after all.

He slid his hand over Red’s hair, feeling the damp softness of it in between his fingers, before forcing his head back down until Red’s chin was pushing into his collarbone, baring the back of his neck to Abraham’s eyes.

A bit of clear, unbloodied skin. A blank canvas, ready to be painted. A piece of creation, like the dark and formless sea before it split to make the heavens.

“You belong to me,” He says softly, marveling at it, at the miracle of coincidences it took to bring little Red into his orbit at just the right time, the right place, when he needed something to help him hold onto Nate, when he had gone too long without someone to remake. “All of you, forever, belongs to me. You’re all mine.”

He moves his chair closer, watching Red shift around, trying in vain to find a way to take some of the pressure of the position he was trapped in off his knees and thighs.

“Poor thing, your feet went numb ages ago, am I right? And your legs must ache. Don’t worry, I’m almost done. Just one more thing, puppy, and then we’ll go inside and get you all washed up and bandaged, okay?”

If Red even hears him now, he doesn’t react, only continues breathing harshly and quietly towards the floor. If he could talk, Bram thinks cheerfully, he would probably tell Bram he was busy being someone else.

It’s a neat little trick, but it never lasts long after the muzzle comes off - and when Red comes back, he feels all that pain he worked so hard to escape.

Bram moves the knife, with its thin, razor-sharp blade, to the back of his puppy’s neck. The clear skin splits apart like darkness and light - like the land and the sea - opening and welling up with the same brilliant red blood. Bram carves two careful straight lines at diagonal angles that meet at the top, connects them with a shorter line through the center.

Red groans again, but it’s fainter, now - more distant and hazy. He’s begun to shake helplessly, and Bram frees his hand from Red’s hair to rub soothingly at his shoulder while he lowers the knife to carve again. “Good, you’re doing so very well, my sweet boy. Just a little more.”

Another straight line, vertical this time. Then a half-circle curved to meet the line at either end. He continues to soothe Red with one hand while cutting him with the other, and feels the man’s shaking grow more and more noticeable under his hand.

He’s pushed him nearly too far, right up to the line of what his body will take before it simply drops him into unconsciousness in a desperate attempt to escape. That’s all right; Bram knows how to walk the line very carefully. He learned that skill a very, very long time ago.

Finally, below the first two letters, he carves the final one. One straight line up, one diagonal line to the side and down, then another straight line up. The blood is smeared and running down the sides of his neck now. Bram leans down to lick it up, feeling Red shudder but try to hold himself still.

He doesn’t try to pull away, even like this.

“Good. Very good, sweet boy. We’re all done now.”

Bram looks over his handiwork with a satisfied eye, then moves to the ropes that hold Red’s arms out, taking his sharp little knife and slicing right through them until the wrists are freed, wrapped in deep red welts that will bruise, in time.

Red bruises so very, very easily. Something about pale redheads, Bram thinks. Makes him irresistible when you can see all those pretty marks.

Red falls forward without the tension to hold him, collapsing onto the ground with little choked-off cries of pain as he tries to pull his arms back and his shoulders - stretched for hours - protest any attempt to bring them back to his sides. He can’t unfold his legs, and just rolls onto his side to take the pressure off, trying to sob without opening his mouth even as his eyes are still glazed, fogged-over, and empty.

Bram lets the knife drop to the side and kneels down himself, bundling the bloodied redhead into his arms, heedless of the blood he smears, enjoying the little hisses of further pain as he presses his palms against the new cuts along his back.

Red doesn’t fight him, and that’s perfect - just curls up against him, head under his chin, clutching weakly at Bram’s shirt with shaking fingers, whining and pleading behind his teeth. Bram knows the different sounds so well by now, has beautiful dreams about them.

“Don’t worry, you’ve been so good,” He soothes. “No more for today. No more. I’ll take you inside and get you all clean. We’ll bandage you right up, you can take a little nap on your mat, then you’ll get some dinner made for Nate and I tonight, hm? You were so good, helping me keep my skills up. So very, very good, little puppy. Do you know you’re my very good boy?”

There’s a movement of the soft sweaty red hair as Red nods against him, fingers finally able to get a good grip in his shirt, twisting into the fabric the way a child might hold onto their mother. Red’s eyes are closed and he breathes, in and out, in stutters and stops.

He's very nearly unconscious, and it makes him weak and pliable in a way that sends sparks of joy through Bram's mind.

Bram smiles, sitting back into the dirt, keeping the other man sitting right in his lap, letting himself be soaked in the blood. He lets his fingers run over the new letters carved on Red’s neck - A, D, N - and licks the blood off them enjoying the sparks of life on his tongue, the taste of pain and misery and I give up that has been forced into Red’s veins.

"Oh, you sweet thing.” Bram presses a kiss into his hair, feels Red boneless against him, maybe even pushing himself a little more against the cool skin in the baking hot smokehouse, taking the comfort Bram chooses to give with gratitude, because this is better than the pain, and it’s all the choice he gets.

He takes Red by the muzzle that runs along his jaw and tilts his head back, leaning in to kiss the sweat-soaked forehead, feels the flutter of Red’s eyelashes against his cheek when he nuzzles into the side of his face.

One of Red’s hands moves up to touch Bram’s neck, to curl around it, to pull him back to kiss his forehead again, wordlessly, whining low in his throat, desperate for any sense that the pain is really over, that Bram can be kind if only for a second.

He’s praying for mercy, Bram thinks with a laugh bubbling in his throat. I think you’ll find I can be a merciful god. The joke would be wasted now; he'll have to tell Red later, when he comes back to himself.

Red won't laugh - but he'll give that tremulous, trembling little smile that never reaches his frightened eyes, and that's even better.

Bram smiles, and kisses each closed eyelid. Red slowly starts to truly relax, to trust that for this moment, at least, it’s over.

“You're not my first,” Bram breathes into his ear. “Not by a long shot.”

He tucks a little bit of red hair behind one ear, feels Red's pounding heart start to slow. Those empty blue eyes look right into his, and he wonders what little Red can even see.

“You’re not my first, and you won’t be my last, little Red, but I think you might be my best."

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