FIC: Bait
He becomes aware of his blindness first and notes the sound of breathing, quick and unsteady, next. Beyond that, there is emptiness. He isn’t granted the comfort of power conduits thrumming softly in an almost imperceptible frequency behind metal paneling, that familiar low thrum which lulls him to sleep, the life source of the metal womb he lives in. He turns his head a little to the right, trying to see anything at all through the blindfold, to sense something, anything.
Even a black-dyed cloth can’t obscure everything, not one this thin - it’s slick, cold and taut across his eyelids, damp over his temples and the stretch of skin folded upon high cheekbones. He’s alone and it’s dark in here. Pitch black. His anxiety bubbles up slowly like something rising from dead still waters, rushes through him till his arms and legs are buzzing, bloodless, numb.
‘Hello… is anybody here?’ He says quietly and swallows when his voice breaks on the last word. Sweat bleeds from his pores and seeps into the ragged ropes around his neck, wrists, knees and ankles. He tilts his head back as much as the strip of cloth burning into the base of his collar will allow and sucks in a deep gulp of air, ‘Hello!’
His cry echoes around the room. From the deep vibrations, the volume and shortness of his echo, the room is small, with little furniture. Air thickens and begins to cement.
The sound of a door swishing open and instinctive warmth across his face makes him sit up. Underneath the blindfold his eyes strains within his dark prison frantically, searching for light. He peers past his nose and across his cheeks, aware of the thin layer of sweat shimmering across his upper lip. The tip of his tongue dips out and flicks across chapped broken lips, trying to soothe. His tongue is dry and rough. The small gap between the blindfold and the flat of his cheeks is confusing. He thinks he can see his upper thighs in dim watery light, tense under a short thin robe he is draped in, but he can’t be certain. He feels naked.
He takes a sharp breath as a shadow falls across what little he can see, and the door closes gently with a click, taking away the light. His visitor walks around him. To the left, in a swinging circle, pause, back three steps, clockwise full revolution, closer, closer… the back of his neck aches sweetly from the strange thrill that charges through damp skin of a hand so closer and yet so far away. He turns to confront his silent tormentor.
‘Who’s there? What, what do you want?’ He says with a controlled tremor in his voice. But even as the words leave his mouth, something becomes unstuck from his insides and travels up his wind pipe, lodging at the base of his throat. He wants to throw up, cut something out, exhale.
The sound of something heavy dragging along the smooth hard surface of the floor makes him start, his skin jumping. He tenses and squeezes his eyes shut behind the blindfold; he expects pain, he expects a hit, a touch, something. The soft breaths along the curve of his left ear titillate until his flesh pimples, aching for certainty.
‘I’m not alone,’ He says, ‘You can’t keep me here. They’ll look for me!’
The touch across his forearms is so soft he thinks it’s just air but then it hardens to something solid, weighty, hot dry palms and searching fingers, flexing across his skin in their own circular brushes. The sensation makes him squirm. It’s not painful but he can’t see anything, he doesn’t know what’s coming next. Will there be a strike to the face? Will it be an open handed swat, or a tense hard tap? A mix of dread, like the sting of bitter vinegar, collects along the line of his jaw.
‘What’s your name?’ The whisper is cool against his left cheek and blooms painfully like a bruise.
He snaps to face his inquisitor and strains forwards, ‘Let me go!’ He yells, almost howling.
The reaction is immediate. His entire body shudders in terror as he feels the world turn jarringly to his left. In his temporary confusion and panic, he almost misses the horrible screech of the chair’s legs against the floor. When it’s over he’s left there, sweating into the thin material of his robe, breathless, skin aching with dread. He can’t see but he tilts his head up, certain at something is there, someone looming over him.
The touch against the curve of his right ear elicits a hard flinch, ‘What is your name?’ The whisper is gentler and softer than before. He can almost believe he knows them, that this is not unusual, that they are allowed to speak to each other in intimate whispers.
His fingers tremble, releasing their sweaty grip on the chair legs his wrists are twined to, before clutching harder than before. Vinegar burns his skin, worse than any physical blow - it’s the waiting that kills him. ‘P-Pavel, Pavel Chekov…’
The stroke along his ear is smooth, cool, and snakes under the lobe, down the invisible path of his carotid artery, along his sharply defined collar bone, a curious finger hooking into the hollow there. The touch is light but possessive. ‘What is your name?’
Pavel tensed, ‘I just told you.’
No, please no, be reasonable, his mind silently begs. The finger at the hollow of his throat is joined by several more. They drag down slight, rasping against the sweaty skin taunt over his chest plate. His wrists strain against the hold of the rope securing them so tightly to the back legs of his chair. If he could pull them free, it would be so easy to just reach out and…
There is a shift of something in the air, a crack of bones and tendon and sinew. They’re sitting down, more likely squatting down. His eyes snap open though there's nothing to see. He can’t even sense anything beyond his own knees. The touch there is electric. He involuntarily shudders and curses silently, because now they know, they can touch him, affect him. His toes dig into the cold hard floor.
He expects more questions but there is none. There is heaviness in the air, unsaid words. What are they looking at? It feels like an appraisal, non-threatening, curious.
‘How do I know you’re not lying?’
He wants to weep. It’s just his name! He’s not going to lie about something like that! ‘I’m not.’ He snaps, riding on the high of his sudden anger to distract him from the overwhelming sensation of falling, ‘But if you think that I am lying, then okay! My name is Pavel Chekov, Nikola Tesla, Yuri Gagarin! Pick one!’
The thick silence that answers him does nothing but edges him on till he is straining against the ropes, furious at his tormentor. He takes a deep breath when suddenly the pressure, rough against his skin, lightens - his appraiser is pacing now, walking around him. The sharpness of anticipation creeps along his limbs, piercing into his nerves - his breaths quicken.
Nothing happens.
Fucking mind games - he knows this, but he can’t do anything except recognize it. He is unskilled, unprotected, untried. His instincts respond and override everything, they’re the only thing that still function here in the darkness, with the silence, the absence of everything. They went easy on him and now - he feels tears prick the edge of his eyes - he is useless. It had been their moral dilemma - how to teach someone to resist interrogation and torture through practice when the prospective student cannot legally give their informed consent- and so they stood back and let him pass. He has no plan, no facts to rely on, nothing to anchor him.
The sound of something hard dragging along the floor makes him jerk and almost cry out but he silences himself just in time with a hard bite. The burst of iron, rich and sharp across his tongue, clarifies his mind for a moment. It’s a chair - the sound is chair-legs grating across the hard floor. His questioner sits, shifts forward and around to get comfortable. Pavel tenses, recoiling back against the chair he is tied to.
‘You’re not even a challenge.’
The regret that wracks him burns like something bitter. Should haves wrench through his guts, heavy and cold; he should have overwritten their concerns, should have begged them to teach him all those things that other officer candidates were given a right to know - the craft of mental warfare, to hate, to curse, to lock his soul up where no one could touch him or hurt him. His defenses are poor, he is all sensation and emotion and affliction; his strongest point, his mind, was shaped for something else entirely - to think, to create, to consider, to calculation, to imagine - and is overwhelmed, ill-equipped. He is drowning. Without grace, without dignity, without resolve, he’s just fucking drowning.
No he is not a challenge. And he doesn’t know how to be. He just -
His breath hitches and an unbidden whimper slithers up from his throat as a hand rested, intent, heavy, warm, dry against the cooling damp flesh of his inner left knee. Every roll of those finger pads, digging into the soft flesh behind that knee cap churns his stomach. His knees struggle to close but that just makes the ropes burn more, makes his thighs burn.
‘Please,’ He says, struggling to breathe through the dampness, the heaviness, the pressure flushed against his skin, his nose and mouth, his chest. ‘What do you want from me? I have nothing, I am nothing.’
Not a commanding officer with codes, not a medical officer with the power to save and kill with impunity, not a communications officer with information, not even a tactical officer with plans - all he has is the beauty of numbers, the hardness and mystery of space, gravity, time, and stardust, in his fingernails, in his eyes, in him.
The hand moves higher, all pressure and promise. There is no pretense of caress, no attempt to discomfort him further but he feels himself grow hot and red, to bursting. His knees are squirming, jittery, wobbling, moving left and right. The ropes are starting to feel dry and scratchy. His toes push at the cold hard floor, searching for purchase to push away from the dry clinical hand gripping his mid-thigh from the inside, sure fingers burrowing underneath.
‘You smell good.’ The words are soft, warm and human against his left shoulder, the displacement of air teasing at a crease on his sweaty neck.
Pavel tenses and fights against the instinct to inch away, fight, squirm, twist, pull, strain - in his frantic desperate grabs for memory, words come back at him: show them fear and they have you, so shut up and close your eyes and think of something else, anything else. He tries, he desperately conjures up images of home, laying flowers as a boy at the foot of that statue of Yuri Gargarin in the middle of the campus on Cosmonaut Day, the cool pale grey-blue of the sky in winter, his friends and all the beauty and wonder of everything he’s done, achieved, in such a -
The hand on his leg softens and strokes, wet skin dragging and creasing and sliding. It feels almost good, grating against all his nerves so poised for pain. He shudders and feels his legs jerk. His mind descends into chaos, more violent, more desperate, more unstructured than before. The rope around his neck tightens against his flare of his collar, across the curve sweeping down from the sides of his neck into his shoulder. He wants to curl up, wrap his arms around his knees, and yell: don’t touch me, don’t touch me.
The hand abruptly leaves and he hears the sound of something coming closer, dragging, screeching against the floor. His tormentor returns, closer, close enough to hear his breathing, feel the static of his skin, the gravity of his form. His entire left side freezes and begins to ache - everything with mass attracts one another, in varying degrees.
‘Ask me a question.’ He blurts out, because that is the endgame isn’t it? Information? Knowledge is power?
There is a pause but then the hand is back, making him recoil in disgust, sliding smoothly under the little cover he has. The muscles in his leg scream, and he hears a creak in the mix of plastic and metal that makes up the chair. He is strong, he has a healthy body, he can run, his legs are capable of flight, endurance. The flesh strangled by ropes securing his knees apart, each one locked to a chair leg, surges with electricity and heat, the numbness disappearing in a rush of fear - there is redness under the buzz of pins and needles, the exacting pain of abraded skin.
‘Why would I do that?’
Pavel stops breathing. Isn’t that the point of all of this?? Did he have it all wrong to begin with?
‘Ask me a question!’ He says in a rush, and feels doubt poison him, make him want to heave.
There is no sound, no light, no touch but he feels it, brushing gently across his cheeks, blooming like something hot and unpleasant: amusement, gentle, mocking amusement. Suddenly he feels stupid, small, and utterly humiliated. He is useless - he doesn’t know anything pertinent, important, anything that can’t be learned, studied, observed through good well-planned experimentation, a provoking hypothesis. The hand slides further up his leg till the back of a bare knuckle is hot against his right inner thigh. His limbs writhe in protest. Just a slip of skin against skin, and yet it feels like someone just rubbed coarse sand into his skin.
‘It’s not just about what you can tell me.’
That's not what he wants to hear. Doubt floods his guts till they are heavy, sodden with cold. The touch, light and fleeting against his chin is fond, almost affectionate. He rears up to bite it because that hand disgusts him and he wants to hurt this man back, for not viciously toying with him, for not treating him as an enemy, aloof, less sentient, something to be investigated, a resource to be used and then discarded.
The hand moves up till it’s at the crease between his hip and thigh. He shudders violently, jerks, grits his teeth and feels angry sweat pore off him like tears. The hand slides back away.
‘You smell good.’ It’s just a lie, he is laughing at him. It’s said to discomfort him, to irritate him, torment him, scatter his already confused mind to lines of thought and images that will cause him pain, make this worse. He’s being fucked with.
‘Shut up.’ He says, low and almost crying. He smells like sweat and fear and anger and despair and standard Starfleet antiseptic soap, slightly spicy, like the Andorian root plant - a major component, useful for killing skin-surface bacteria and fungi. He doesn’t “smell nice” - he smells like a boy, all human, mortal and frail.
The grip tightens on his flesh, squeezing it till it’s almost sexual and he has to gasp, has to tremble, because despite all that terror eating through him like acid, he is young and healthy and blood flushes in his lower abdomen. His heart thunders and cracks within the confines of his ribcage, vigorously swelling and squeezing, pushing and filling, blood, blood, blood. The flesh over his face, even his broken lips, throbs with each fresh wave of blood, his heart working desperately to feed his dying, strangled flesh. Pavel feels his feet lose all sensation, even the tickles of discomfort, that disturbing lack of blood.
The hand slides upward, soft and almost ticklish as it reaches the juncture between his hip and thigh. Fingers probe at the stretch of skin there. He can’t help the jolt he gives, or the shuddering, but he clamps down on his mouth and bears it. His mind careens off into a chaotic swirl of night terrors and things that can happen, do happen, slam into graphic color in front of his blind dilated irises, one after another until he’s sick, sick to the pit of his stomach.
When the hand leaves, he almost sags. Everything in his body burns, everything aches, and he breaths, long and deep, drinking down the damp hot air around him. ‘I don’t have anything to tell you. You must know by now, that my name is Pavel Chekov. I am an ensign. I know nothing.’
His voice sounds off. Distance, an echo and strangely calm - he is useless strategically, and he can’t imagine that they could do anything to him except humiliate him, kill him, make an example of him.
‘Do you know your Captain?’
Pavel feels scorn rise within him, ‘Of course. He is my Captain!’
‘Do you know your Captain?’ The tormentor repeats, somehow having gotten closer to him in those brief seconds. He swallows and resists the urge to lean back, to show his aversion.
‘Yes,’ He says harshly. He does, just a little - he looks over his work sometimes, lets him sound out his ideas with him when the Chief Engineer or Commander is too busy, in the middle of something, unavailable. Not with comfortable familiarity as Doctor McCoy does, not with such witty barbed words as Uhura or Hikaru, not with such deep precision as Commander Spock, not with such genuine affection as Mr. Scott. He knows the Captain - they work together every day, he saved the Captain’s life, more than once, and the Captain saves him, all of them, every other day.
‘Yes! I know the Captain! Of course I do! I work on the bridge!’
There is a cold pause and he swallows, feels his temporary frustrated bravado drain away into nothing.
‘Do you know your Commander?’
Commander Spock terrifies him in a cerebral manner. He considers the half-Vulcan to be his mental superior. He trusts in the man’s integrity, his earnest desire to be objective, to be fair, to act to the best of his abilities, in everyone’s interest. ‘Yes.’
‘Do you know your Second Officer? What is his or her name? His or her post?’
These questions are almost mundane, stupid, an insult. ‘Montgomery Scott, Chief Engineer.’ He says tersely, and then asks, ‘Why do you ask me these questions? This everyone knows.’
The questions continue and he feels the time drag by. The questions are all the same - do you know this key member of the crew? What is his or her name? Do you personally know them? There is no talk of state secrets, no military plans to divulge, no security codes to reveal.
‘Would you consider yourself to be well-known among your crewmembers?’
Yes, of course. He is friends with them, all of them, some more than others, deeply more.
‘Why are you asking these questions?’ He whispers in a rush, feeling the weariness set in. Why do any of these stupid things matter, he thinks but doesn’t say. He is here, a prisoner; he has no information of any practical use, and everything he has said so far is all common knowledge, easier retrievable from any current news database, from the open portal on the Starfleet network.
‘Like you said, they’ll come for you.’
It is not an explanation but Pavel feels it settle inside of him, a soothing balm and a vicious tear through his gut. He is useless to them politically, intellectually, but he has a use. He is bait.
‘I won’t let you.’ He whispers. ‘I won’t let you, I’ll find a way to - argh!’
The world spins and tilts alarmingly as hard hands grip his shoulders and push. His stomach dips as his chair tips backwards dangerously and every muscle tenses, his neck bent forwards like a reed on instinct to protect his head. A soft firmness whacks into the back of his skull, and his terrified squirming body bounces lightly on the mattress before going still.
Pavel swallows dryly and trembles as he feels something cold and hard slide down the flat of his shin. There’s a soft rip as the cloth tears, releasing one ankle, and then another. His calves flop uselessly. Something nicks against his left knee and then his right and then his ass is being dragged off the rough seat of the chair. As soon as a hand is lose, he lashes out, grabbing whatever flesh he can and ignoring the choking sensation of that noose around his neck, tightening each time he moved and his other wrist, still captured, bleeding as he twists it hard to reach his tormentor.
But his body quickly becomes numb again, his muscles going into painful spasms as blood rushed there. The arms around him and the thighs pressing down on his are familiar and strong but he fights, he kicks and writhes and screams and yells and hits. He doesn’t even know what he’s saying or screaming, if it’s in Standard or English or Russian but he’s angry. He feels so dirty, so out of control, so powerless, so fucking used.
‘Pavel! Pav! Calm down, hey! Hey! Shhh! It’s okay!’
Pavel sags at the sound of that voice. The blindfold slips off with barely a brush of careful fingers across the bridge of his nose. He blinks up in the darkness and feels relief, feels joy. He hugs back and allows himself to shake out all those fears, to let go of the poison festering inside of him. He takes a deep breath and surges up, wrapping his arms and legs around Hikaru because it hurts, it hurts so fucking much and he doesn’t even know why.
‘Ow, ow, ow,’ Hikaru chuckles against his ear, ‘Pavel you’re strangling me.’
He loosens his grip but does not let go. ‘I’m terrible. I… if… I can’t be trusted…’ He settles on, unable to put to word what he means, the disappointment he feels, the regret and utter humiliation. If this had been real, he would have given them everything, he would have betrayed everyone, he would have betrayed himself. Exhaustion hits him, making everything seem inconsequential, far away, everything except the gnawing inside his chest.
‘There, there,’ The whisper against his ear is full of understanding, sad with him, hurting with him, full of quiet affection. ‘It’s not easy, not for anyone - you did well.’ The caress against the crown of his head, through his messy hair, settles into him like something warm - the knot in his heart softens. ‘Next time, you’ll do better, you’ll improve, I believe in you.’ The kiss is soft and warm, a whisper of heat and wetness against his painful broken lips, ‘I believe in you.’
and exhale...
OKAY that was interesting - I could dig that kink :D