#argh. augh. hrrgh. this fic is gonna fuckin kill me

[damienthepious]

ahhh dunk here we go again, ,,,,, poor lizard hours,,,, payyy attention to the tags/notes for cws

The Beast In On His Chain (chapter 2)

[ch 1] [ao3] [ch 3] [???]

Fandom: The Penumbra Podcast

Relationship: Lord Arum/Sir Damien, Sir Damien/Rilla, Lord Arum/Sir Damien/Rilla

Characters: Sir Damien, Lord Arum, Rilla, Sir Absolon

Additional Tags: Second Citadel, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, prisoner/guard dynamic, Dehumanization, (which feels like a weird word to use for a nonhuman person bUT. it’s what i got.), Despair, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, (EVENTUALLY!!!! it’ll take a while), Captivity, Suicidal Thoughts, (that will be a theme throughout. inescapable in this particular fic. alas.), Eventual Romance, (Yes the dynamics in this one are fucked. honestly i’m kinda Stretching my limits these days.), (having fun with it. fucking around. it’s fine.), Recovery, (eventually), Self-Reclamation

Chapter Summary: Damien learns more about one of the trophies he is assigned to guard.

Chapter Notes: mmmm continuing warnings for captivity, dehumanization, basically kinda torture, malnutrition, isolation, nightmares, inaccurate pronoun use unrelated to gender, canon-typical and canon-extrapolated monster treatment. let me know if i missed anything PLEASE. I'm awful at suspense so i'll say up front (if the angst-w/happy-ending tag didn't give it away) that this will become a recovery story, eventually, and i am pretty goddamn eager to get there. Also, side note, Damien's inaccurate-pronoun-use should NOT be read in any way as my own position on folks using it/its pronouns. Y'all kick ass. Damien himself just doesn't have a context for it/its besides the inanimate and the inhuman, unfortunately. He hasn't met the Keep yet, lol

~

The boredom is an issue, about as soon as Sir Damien expects.

Marching in the same exact circle, surrounded by the same exact trophies, hours and hours in the gloom by torchlight...

Damien thinks of Sir Angelo riding off north, valiant and grinning and promising gleefully to break their tie while he travels, laughing off Damien's somewhat blustering protests to the contrary.

The twin-faced head by the swamp lord's plinth whispers if it cannot prove itself, what is it even good for? and Damien pretends not to flinch.

The swamp lord himself seems to be sleeping again. Sleeping most of the time, in fact, so far as Damien can tell. He would wonder if the creature is simply nocturnal (Damien has not yet been assigned any overnight shifts), but- how would the thing even tell when it was night, down here? Not a flicker of sunlight pierces this deep. There aren't any timepieces, either. Damien himself loses track- the next shift arriving at their posts is the only way Damien knows that enough time has passed to end his own shift.

"Who feeds that creature?" Damien asks the knights at the entryway, curiosity taking command of his tongue. "The swamp lord, I mean."

The pair of them meet eyes, and then one of them shrugs. "No one does."

At the obvious confusion on Damien's face, the other wrinkles his nose. "It's a familiar, Sir Damien," he explains. "The familiar of the swamp. It's made of magic. It could eat, it can, but it doesn't need food or drink to survive. Not really."

So. Why would they bother? It makes... enough sense, an efficiency that Damien acknowledges, though the idea of it- it is difficult not to think it as starving a prisoner, even if that isn't the case in truth.

The question floats through his mind, later that night as he rolls over on his cot in the barracks, and Damien stares hard at the stone wall beside his bed for at least a quarter hour as he tries to make the question go away.

How, exactly, the did lizard's captors first discover what he did and did not need, to survive?

~

He brings his poetry drafts with him for his next few shifts. His notes are bound only loosely, easy to rearrange when he makes connections between two pieces, or when he needs to add more sheets as one of his ideas expands, or if he wishes to look at two budding poems side-by-side.

Obviously he can't walk around his patrol effectively with his notes and a quill and an inkwell - for a moment he envies the swamp lord's extra limbs - so he borrows one of Rilla's clever, narrow, wrapped charcoals. They're better for sketching than for script, but Damien has gotten used to the way they write by now and he doesn't particularly mind the thickness of the lines. Rilla even seems pleased that he isn't complaining quite so much about the inertia of the assignment, so long as he can stretch his mind with other tasks.

He finds himself speaking aloud as he composes, after a little while. It is an old habit, and besides- the creaky, chittery noises of the room are somewhat distracting, and he finds that if he keeps his focus more firmly on the poetry, the twin-faced head in particular is far less likely to try to get under his skin.

At times the poetry shifts, dissolves somewhat, and Damien realizes belatedly that he has fallen into prayer rather than poetics. The line between the two is rather thin, on occasion. A decent number of his poems come in the form of entreaties to his saint, anyway.

Perhaps he requires the prayers, here. This place seems to unsettle his Tranquility. It turns his stomach, if he thinks about his surroundings too deeply. He almost wishes that he requested the dungeons, instead. Speaking to Saint Damien helps, as it always does, although-

The feeling, the sensation of his saint within his chest, that slow pulsing wave of cool affection and protection- it feels strange here, as well. Less certain. Damien suspects that it is the melange of fragmented magic that surrounds him, causing the disruption, but he is unsure. He prays all the more fervently in response.

He does not notice the attention of one of the trophies upon him as he speaks, not until he hears the creature growling in its corner again on the fourth day after he began bringing his drafts along.

Damien blinks as the words die on his tongue, his gaze fixing on the incongruous vivid purple glaring out from the storm-gray monster crouching on his little platform.

His first instinct, oddly, is to feel embarrassed. Which is foolish in the extreme. He clutches his papers close against his stomach, careful not to drag the charcoal over the page as he does, and the monster growls all the louder as Damien meets its eyes.

The creature bares its teeth, when it sees that it has his attention, and then it rolls itself slowly to stand, taller than Damien expected even with his horns shorn down, the entire weight of its body pressed against the chain at its neck and the ones on its wrists. It uses its own weight to help keep it upright, Damien realizes, hanging forward against the chains pulling it back.

And then it- it opens its mouth, and coughs harshly, and then-

He speaks.

"Do you," the monster grates, face screwed up with effort, a hand curling against his collar, "ever... shut... up?"

Damien- Damien stares, lifting one hand to cover his mouth and watching the creature glare at him, panting with a vicious sort of effort.

"You..." Damien swallows. "You can speak," he says, the emptiness of his tone turning the question into a statement, and the monster bares his teeth again, snapping them together and growling as he turns his head away. "This whole time? You could speak this whole time, you could understand me, and-"

"Is this the newest torture your queen has devised?" he snarls, and then he whines, closing his eyes and digging his claws into the collar again, tugging uselessly at the metal as if trying to pull it away from the scales of his neck. "Deprived- deprived even of- of silence, deprived of my own thoughts, tormented by your- your relentless chattering for days on end-"

The creature's voice gives out, his throat moving for another moment as he cringes, stuttering into a painful sounding round of coughs.

"Oh Saints," Damien hears himself say, faintly. Too startled for any proper response, yes, but also-

Deprived of-

Silence, freedom. Food. Water. Deprived, apparently, of his own voice. Deprived of words, and Damien can tell from the coughing and the choking, forced tone in his voice. He can tell, from the way Damien can feel a pulse of strange energy from the monster's heavy collar with every word, and from the way the monster seems to respond to that energy with visible pain.

"I have endured much," the monster spits, his body swinging fractionally forward as his expression twists in fury, the collar at the taut end of its chains pressing deeper indentations into the scales of the monster's throat. "I will endure- endure more, certainly. But if you c-cannot find a way to hold your tongue, then I will find a way to pluck it from your head."

Damien only stares, too stunned to truly comprehend what is being said to him for a long moment, and then-

The absurdity of this creature, cowed and collared, attempting to threaten him- it strikes him as strangely humorous, suddenly and perhaps somewhat grimly. He feels his face twitch, a half-breath of almost-laughter slipping from his lips, and the monster only contorts the expression on his snouted face even further, looking more alive than he has for the entirety of Damien's post here.

"I... will... kill you, little knight," the monster says, visibly struggling to force out the words, his vivid violet eyes locked on Damien's with obvious hatred. "Someday the cage will crack, someday the guard will be sloppy, someday I will again curl my tongue around a shred of magic and then-"

The monster spasms, the collar apparently paying him back for speaking so long against it, and the creature collapses back onto his little plinth with a pained exhale, and Damien-

Damien holds his breath for a moment, shocked by the sharp, strings-cut drop of the creature. He can't help the way his eyes widen in alarm, uncertain whether or not the monster has just injured himself on Damien's watch or- or worse, perhaps, but- no. No, he seems to be- he's still breathing, at least, and there doesn't seem to be any blood around the collar, at least, so.

Not that Damien is- concerned, exactly, but- he is meant to guard these... trophies. That certainly includes keeping them from harm- from damage, at the very least.

(and he knows, of course, that this beast in particular must not be allowed to die)

"You'll forgive me," Damien says slowly, eventually, his tone blank and oddly dry, "if I am not quite terrified of such threats from a creature in your position."

The monster sort of... curls in on himself, two arms around his head and two clutching at his stomach, his tail wrapping up into an almost catlike circle, hissing ineffectually through his teeth, but he does not try to speak again.

"Though..." Damien pauses, paces a few steps, and watches the poison-bright gleam of one of the monster's eyes follow him as he goes, glaring out from between his arms. "I certainly will know to mind my tongue a bit better, here, in the future. For my own sake, you understand, and not yours. Of course, I should not care if you find my prattling an annoyance. You are a prisoner, after all."

The creature glares at him, and even with his face still mostly hidden behind his arms, there is enough venom in his eyes that Damien has to force himself not to take a step back in response. He still remains silent, though. Aside from the pained panting.

No reason whatsoever to feel threatened, Damien muses. Despite the overt threats.

Damien opens his mouth, as if to say-

He does not know.

It seems pointless at best to mock the creature, needlessly cruel at worst. What good would it do? He presses his lips closed after a moment, then reshuffles the pages of his drafts in his hands. He pulls his gaze away from the monster, and he continues his patrol.

~

In silence, this time.Damien dreams the weight of cold iron around his own throat. Dreams a prayer trapped in his lungs, begging for deliverance, begging for voice and sky and any gentle touch. Cold fire curls beneath his jaw, scorching away his words before they can bloom from his lips, the pain sharp enough to pull tears from his eyes, streaming hot down his cheeks.

Across the room, lazing on an identical plinth, the monster watches him wail soundlessly, his violet eyes the only points of color in their grey prison, his own chains slack with hopelessness.

Another knight shoves Damien awake to stop him screaming. Damien can hardly hear the rest of the grumbling complaints from the other cots over the furious thudding of his heart. His throat hurts, ragged as if he were swallowing thorns.

His pillow is wet with tears as he tries to find sleep again. When he closes his eyes, he sees the monster staring back.