Touch
a/n; touch starved human weapon who’s never known kindness gets a hug :’) & a bunch of other times he’s touched, mostly in a horrible fashion
for the anon that wanted silas to get a hug & the anon that wanted more of the unit !! two bingo squares crossover episode best of both worlds babeyyyy
tw/cw: grievous bodily harm, mutilation, guns, traumatic brain injuries, implied rape/noncon, references to graphic violence, medical torture
living weapon whumpee
The first touch Silas ever knows is that of the cold, gloved hands reaching into the opened cavity of his chest.
Their touch is not gentle. Their touch introduces Silas to pain. It’s a pain that he will very quickly become familiar with.
They open him from throat to groin. They peel skin away from meat, and meat away from muscle. They pry apart his ribcage and crush his ribs into splinters of bone. They pull out chunks of organ tissue and they hold him down, against the cold steel of the operating table, as they take the colder steel of a surgical scalpel of his hairline.
Silas’ very first memory is waking up to those cold, gloved hands fishing his small intestine from his opened gut.
The very first touch Silas ever knows is that of those hands.
Silas doesn’t like to be touched.
He learns this very quickly.
It’s an empty cell, carved from stone, not quite tall enough for Silas to stand in but that doesn’t matter because Silas can’t stand. He’s shackled to the floor by the iron closed around his throat, and he’s left there for days in the dark.
He’s alone. He’s alone a lot in the beginning.
The first person that he ever sees, outside of that operating room, is a soldier. Silas doesn’t recognize him but he spits, “I’ve been waiting a long time for this, you ugly fuck,” and swings his fist into Silas’ face with as much force as a human being can manage.
His name is Point, Silas learns later, and his touch breaks his right eye socket into splinters of skull.
They manage to save his eye. Much later, however, Point puts three bullets in it, and Silas loses his right eye for good.
Silas learns very quickly that touch is something vile. It’s something to be shied away from, something that hurts. Touch is inhumane.
When Silas is touched, it hurts him.
When Silas touches, he hurts.
They chain his hands in front of him, and they shackle him at the ankles. He has to wear a bite bar because they don’t trust his teeth.
They’re right not to.
Because they remove the bite bar, the chains, the shackles, and there’s carnage.
When Silas touches, he hurts. When Silas touches, there’s carnage.
Silas usually does his field tests alone, but not always. They are a team, technically, him and the unit, and the district needs to be sure they work well together, or some shit equivalent.
Silas had spent a lot of time making a careful point not to let the unit see him the way the soldiers see him, as the horrible thing he really is, and introducing them into the field tests had made him edgy, and it had made him feel kind of sick.
It turned out to be a waste of emotion.
Even now, the soldier’s gun aimed into Hal’s face, Silas makes quick work of pulling his throat out through the back of his neck. He uses his teeth, and still, as Hal stands, he wipes blood from his eyes with his sleeve and looks up at Silas with a grin that’s nothing but relieved.
“Good looking out, man,” he says, and holds his fist out to Silas. Silas doesn’t know what to do with that, so he doesn’t do anything. Hal kinda gestures with his fist and says, “don’t leave me hanging, big guy. Bump me.”
Silas raises his eyebrows and Hal reacts like he hit him.
“You’ve never had a fist bump?” And he says it like it’s something heinous, like it’s even the most heinous thing Silas has done in the last three minutes. “Oh, man,” he says, but his grin is bordering on obnoxious. “I’m so glad I get to take your fist bump-ginity.”
“No,” Silas deadpans, because he doesn’t know what that is and he also doesn’t want to.
But Hal says, “yeah. Come on,” which isn’t all that convincing on its own, but he adds, “Wren will think you’re really cool if he finds out you do fist bumps,” and Silas squints. Hal grins again, wide and innocent, and holds his fist back out to Silas. “It’s easy. Just bump my fist with your fist. Fist bump.”
“Why?” Silas says.
“I don’t know,” Hal says. “Who cares? Just do it.”
Silas looks at Hal’s hand for a long time and decides the pros — Wren might be impressed he’s learned something — outweigh the cons — he just doesn’t want to. He relents and knocks his fist against Hal’s.
Hal, who throws both his arms up and his head back as he cheers.
June, after she left the service, was a hairdresser for a while.
Silas knows this, because she tells him, “after I left the service, I was a hairdresser for a while.”
Silas says, “okay.”
“So you can trust me,” she adds.
“No,” he says.
June tips her head back, dramatic, as she groans. She’s been wielding the hairbrush like a weapon. “Silas. Come on, dude. Stop being a bitch about it. Let me brush your hair.”
“No,” he repeats.
“Silas,” she repeats.
“No,” he says.
“Wren’ll like it,” she tries, and Silas narrows his eyes. She grins, and she has a very predatory grin. “You wanna look good for Wren, don’t you, big guy?”
He’s starting to suspect these people might be using Wren to manipulate him, and it’s unfortunate that it’s working. Silas sits on the floor, and June, with the added boost of the back of the couch, pulls a brush through his hair like she’s trying to rip all of it out.
He complains the whole time, mostly for the sake of complaining. “Ow,” he says again, and June groans at him.
“You’re too big to be this much of a pussy.”
“You’re hurting me,” he says. She isn’t.
“I don’t care,” June replies. “Stop moving.”
“I’m not moving,” he says.
“You’re flinching,” she says.
“You’re hurting me,” he reminds her.
“You should’ve started brushing your hair six months ago,” she bites back.
“How was I supposed to know?” Silas asks, and he’s won, because she quiets behind him, and her hands tug a little less violently at his hair.
“Sorry,” she says finally, and Silas tries not to smile but it tugs on his mouth at one side. He doesn’t think she’s looking at him, so he doesn’t try all that hard to hide it and so it makes him jump when he turns and she’s leaning over his shoulder to look him in the face. “Hey,” she accuses. “That’s not funny. I thought I hurt your feelings.”
He cracks a smile, despite his best attempts. “You couldn’t hurt my feelings.”
June grins widely, raising her eyebrows. “I’d love to try.”
Silas snorts, and she laughs as she pulls back over his shoulder to tug the brush through his hair again. She ties it up for him; a half knot, because, “I thought it would suit you. I was right.”
He tracks Wren down, just in case.
He has a pencil tucked behind his ear and Silas is strangely entranced by it. “Silas,” he says, and he says it with a smile. “You look so handsome.”
Silas doesn’t know what it means, but he’s flattered, anyway.
He’s on his back on the concrete, looking down the barrel of a gun.
It’s shaking. Point’s hand is trembling. “You stupid, disobedient fuck,” he spits, and Silas barely sees the bottom of his boot closing in on him before it’s cracking his cheekbone. “Bad. Dog.”
Both of Silas’ arms had been nearly amputated at different points, but he can still lift his left hand. Just barely, and it trembles with blood loss and severed tendons, but he manages to lift it from the wet concrete and fold almost all of his fingers down, save for the middle.
Point roars in frustration.
Silas knows the cold kiss of gunmetal, for only a second, and then an eruption of heat that’s white hot and electricity charged and Point empties his gun into Silas’ face.
Silas is reintroduced to the touch of surgeons, but this is nothing new.
He loses his eye.
They take Wren.
Silas couldn’t give less of a fuck about his eye. He’s got another one, he’ll be fine. What’s another disfiguring injury? But he gets back to the unit, and Robin finds him in Wren’s absence.
They’d taken Wren. Robin doesn’t know where.
His touch is a firm handshake that makes Silas’ skin crawl. But he accepts it, even if he didn’t need Robin to ask. Even if he would’ve raised hell, anyway.
He’d been really careful around Wren. He’d been so careful.
Wren’s different. He isn’t like any of the rest of them. He’s gentle in a way Silas thinks super soldiers just aren’t capable of. His skin is still soft. He’s still so human, and he looks at Silas, and he sees something in him that’s human, too.
But he’s wrong. Silas has known for a long time that he’s wrong, and whatever it is that Wren thinks he sees in him, it isn’t human.
He’d wanted so badly for it to be true, though. He’d wanted to believe Wren. He wanted there to be something human in him because he never wanted Wren to stop looking at him like that. He’d done his best not to let Wren see anything less, to not let him see him as any less human than a couple of fatal injuries.
He’d never let him see anything else. He’d been so careful.
But then he finds Wren, and he finds him with a group of soldiers.
Their touch is not kind.
He’s shackled to a bunk by an ankle to the bedpost, and Silas doesn’t even know what they’re doing to him but he knows it’s vile. The sounds make his skin crawl. Wren is begging for it to stop.
He’s crying, and it’s crying like nothing else Silas has ever heard. Wailing. He isn’t in complete control of himself after that.
The soldiers all react to him with flailing, frantic cowardice, shouting and clambering for guns, for knives, for weapons, and it’s embarrassing. Silas is embarrassed for them. Cowards, all of them — loud, cruel cowards. All so scared of Silas, every one of them, and they fuckin’ created him. What a fuckin’ joke.
He lets them scramble, looking at Wren through the blur of them. His mouth is swollen, face shiny with tears, and when he sobs, he sobs, “Silas.”
“Don’t look,” Silas says.
He doesn’t recognize any of the soldiers because their faces all blur.
Every one of them dies in that bunk, and they do not die gently. They die screaming and they die in pain.
Partway through suffocating a soldier with another’s small intestine, Silas lifts his head, and Wren is still there.
He reaches out and splinters the bedpost with one hand. He can’t look at Wren for too long — he doesn’t really wanna see the look on his face. “Run,” he says, and peels the jaw off a nearing soldier with one hand, without even looking at him.
Wren runs.
Silas is punished greatly for his disobedience.
Still, he isn’t looking forward to being back in the unit. The long walk back has his heart beating higher in his chest than he thinks it should. He only ever wants to be in the unit because he wants to be where Wren is — if Wren doesn’t want him there anymore, Silas will have to find a way to stay away, whatever he has to do.
He gets back to the unit and he’s expecting Wren to look at him in disgust if he looks at him at all. He isn’t expecting the way Wren pushes himself into Silas’ chest, arms so tight around his waist that Silas is surprised by the strength of him.
It doesn’t hurt, though, a very pleasant sort of vice, warm and Wren. “What are you doing?” He asks softly.
“A hug,” Wren says, face pressed into the spot just beneath Silas’ sternum and the pressure of him is nice.
“Why?” Silas asks, and Wren makes a sound that Silas can’t decipher as laughter or crying. It might be both.
“You didn’t have to do that for me,” he whispers into Silas’ crewneck.
It’s probably the stupidest thing Silas has ever heard him say. “I’d do anything for you,” he says, flat.
And it’s true. There isn’t anything in the world Silas wouldn’t do for him. Wren doesn’t even need to ask. Clinging a little tighter to Silas’ sweatshirt, he sobs.
Silas cradles the back of his head with one hand and lets himself be hugged.
The concrete of the common room floor is a cool touch against his cheek.
It’s the last thing Silas knows before his skull is crushed.
When Silas gets back to the unit, he has tremors in his hands and he doesn’t remember how to read.
When Silas gets back to the unit, it’s been months. He doesn’t know how many.
When Silas gets back to the unit, he’s surprised to immediately find his arms full of Hal.
“What?” Silas says, and then June is jumping onto his back, clinging to his neck, and Wren is at his side, small hands finding Silas’ skin beneath his sweatshirt and his touch is warm, impossibly soft. Silas cradles the back of his head with one hand. “What are you doing?”
Hal laughs from somewhere around his armpit as June laughs loudly into his shoulder. “We missed you, big guy!” She crows.
“We missed you!” Hal cries.
Wren laughs into his side and it’s a little wet. “We were so worried about you.”
Robin is lingering nearby and Silas points at him with his other hand. “Don’t come anywhere fuckin’ near me.”
His face doesn’t change, militant as he is, but his gaze flickers to Wren and back before he says, in the low, rumbling version of Wren’s accent, “welcome back.”
Silas lifts his chin, sort of a nod. He looks back down, at his shaky armfuls of the rest of them, and he can’t help the smile that tugs at his mouth on one side.
They laugh and they cling to him and the touch of the pressure and the weight of them hurts, it makes his recently reconstructed bones groan in protest, and he’d be lying if he said it didn’t but he’d also be full of shit if he said it bothered him at all.
Silas would consider himself pretty well versed in pain; this has to be his favourite.
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