Fic: Live and Die This Way 4/13
Title: Live and Die This Way [4/13]
Author: wanderingjasper
Rating: FRT
Characters: Morgan/Reid, ensemble
Word Count: 1515
Themes: AU, action, angst, romance.
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters, but I do take liberties with them for no financial gain.
Notes: Warning and rating deal with the chapter content. The story as a whole deals with the concept of sexual slavery and other adult themes.
Warning: Violence, adult concepts, mild gore.
Summary: They're being tracked, and they can't get away until they've dealt with that.
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“We have to switch cars,” Morgan said as they drove on. “And soon. They shouldn’t have known my route, we were in the ass-end of nowhere. I checked the car, took out the GPS, but there could be a secondary device.”
“It’s in me,” Reid said in a resigned voice.
“What?”
“It’s in me.”
“A GPS?”
“I’m property, remember? I’m micro-chipped with a GPS tracking device.” Reid rubbed at his bandaged wrists, turning his head blindly towards the window.
“Were,” Morgan corrected.
“Were what?”
“You were property. You don’t belong to anyone anymore.”
“Maybe so,” Reid continued, a small smile on his lips, “but I still have a tracking device in me. I’m never going to disappear with it in.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“The back of my leg. I can feel it if I press down on the spot.”
“How big is it?”
“It’s about the size of a tic-tac.”
“Do you think we could get it out?”
“You’d have to cut it out, I can’t reach,” Reid reasoned. “From what I heard from another slave I met once, a woman, it’s a lot like having a contraceptive implant. That only takes a little cut. The tracking device is a bit bigger, but not much.”
“We need to do that.”
“We need to do it now.” Reid seemed resigned to the idea, no nervousness showing in his voice. There was something about that which set Morgan on edge.
Ten minutes later they’d pulled up, and the front seats of the car were down, allowing Reid to lay down at an angle on his front, sweatpants removed, the leg without the chip in pulled up crooked. Morgan supposed he shouldn’t be surprised at Reid’s ease with exposing himself after he’d spent years as someone’s sexual plaything, but he still was. The skin of the back of his thighs, above his knees and thankfully below where he said the chip was, was bruised with deep welts, yellowing as they reached the end stages of healing.
“I don’t have any gloves,” Morgan said as he rubbed his hands with the antibacterial hand gel from the medical kit.
“I don’t have any blood borne diseases,” Reid said, with his blindfolded head resting on his folded arms. “The man who owned me tested me every month.”
“Okay.” Morgan found himself wincing every time Reid used language like ‘slave’ and ‘owned’, even though he said it because it was true, without any hint of suggestion that he thought that arrangement had been okay. He eyed the scalpel lying in the lid of the medical kit as he pressed his fingers to the top of Reid’s right thigh, just below the swell of his backside. He pressed down, and with a little motion he felt the small hard lump under his fingers.
“That’s it,” Reid encouraged.
Morgan felt it, and tried to move it a little. “Okay. I’m gonna make a small cut and try and squeeze it out.”
“Another scar,” Reid hummed.
“Sorry. You know what they say;” he murmured, “‘I don’t want to die without any scars’...”
He lifted the small torch he’d set aside and turned it on, then put it in his mouth so he could angle the light to illuminate what he was doing.
He spread his hand out, framing the area where the chip was, and picked up the scalpel. He located the small device again with his finger, and with a breath to steel himself, pressed the tip of the scalpel to Reid’s pale skin and pushed down, breaking through several layers of skin and dragging it a few minimetres across. Reid hissed and flexed his legs, but didn’t move too much. Immediately blood blossomed to the surface and Morgan dabbed at it with a cloth as he framed the chip with his fingers and applied gradual pressure. After a few seconds he could see the silicone tip of the device poking out of the straining wound, but even with more pressure it didn’t want to pop free.
“Hold on,” Morgan said around the torch, reaching for a pair of tweezers. Carefully he framed the metal, having to push the tips of the tweezers into the wound a little, which made Reid hiss again. Careful not to exert too much pressure, keeping it firm, Morgan pulled back and pulled the tracking chip free from Reid’s leg. “Got it.”
He put the chip and the tweezers down on the lid of the medical kit, and pressed the cloth to the small cut. As he held it there, his other hand absently brushed over the bruised skin of the man’s thigh, and reid let out a small sound of discomfort.
“Sorry,” Morgan murmured, moving his hand away and picking up the kit to pack it up.
“It’s okay. We should crush the tracking chip.”
“You wanna do the honours?” Morgan said, picking it up between his fingers and placing it into Reid’s outstretched expectant hand. He turned it between his fingers, and then pressed his nail into the silicone skin and broke it, and proceeded to tear the tiny device apart and then threw the remains out into the dark.
“We still need to change the car,” Morgan said as he got back into the vehicle, watching Reid shift with discomfort as he settled in the seats pulled upright again. “You okay?”
“Yeah. How are we going to find a car without it getting reported stolen? If we get arrested, you’re going to jail, and my buyer will bail me out.”
Morgan sensed the nervousness, and reached across to squeeze the man’s shoulder as they drove. “I promise you, Reid, nobody is ever going to lay their hands on you when you don’t want them to ever again.”
Reid smiled softly, leaning his head against the dark window as they drove through the night. Morgan wasn’t sure if he was going to sleep, but was too curious about him to leave him be.
“What did you do before you got caught up in all this?”
Reid turned his unseeing face towards Morgan. “I’d just got my second degree.”
“Second?”
“I went to college at thirteen.”
“What?” Morgan chuckled. “You some kind of genius?”
“I have an IQ of 187 and can read twenty thousand words a minute.”
“I’ll take that as a yes, then.”
“Intelligence measurement is biased.”
“Sure. Sounds like you don’t have street smarts if you got mixed up with drugs, though.”
“My mom died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She was sick. She had schizophrenia. I’d looked after her my whole life, after my dad walked out on us. I didn’t cope well when she died. Without having to pay her medical bills, I suddenly found myself with more money. I shot it all into myself. A guy picked me up in a crack den and got me clean, and then he sold me. Hankel, who bought me wasn’t the worst owner I could have ended up with.”
“Those marks on you say different,” Morgan murmured.
“I’m not saying he was nice, or good, or even that he had a shred of humanity, because he still bought another human being. But it didn’t get rough unless his father took a turn. Or until he started sharing me.”
“Sharing you?” Morgan felt a flash of anger. “How can you say it like what happened to you was a good thing?”
“Because I saw worse.” Reid’s voice was quiet, and he folded his arms over his chest nervously.
He didn’t elaborate, and Morgan didn’t push him. It was bad enough to imagine what the man might have been through, without knowing the reality. Instead, he changed he topic.
“So what did you want to do when you finished college?”
“I was looking into going into the FBI.”
“Really?” Morgan asked, interest piqued.
“I’d already spoken to recruiters. They were interested in me. I would have been the youngest FBI agent on record. It’s never going to happen now.”
“It could,” Morgan said, even if he didn’t believe it.
“No. They’d find me. I know too much.”
“You’ll have to start a whole new life,” Morgan said.
“Where?”
“Wherever you want,” Morgan said. “As long as it’s not North America. We’ve gotta leave the country. I’ve got a retirement plan, I can set you up on your way.”
“Why?” Reid asked softly.
“What do you mean ‘why’?”
“Why are you offering to help me? Why aren’t you just dumping me at the first opportunity?”
Morgan’s shoulders bounced with the huff of a laugh. “Because I wanna be able to sleep at night.”
“You haven’t transported people before, then?” Reid sounded sceptical.
“I probably have. None of them ever banged around in my trunk, though. I never had to know for sure. Blissful ignorance. I’ve done a lot I'm not proud of, and there’s gotta be a line somewhere. You’re the line.”
Reid turned his head back to the window, settling his body down in the seat. “Thanks,” he said softly into the silence.
“Don’t thank me yet, kid,” Morgan muttered, “we’ve got a long way to go.”