Transitional States II, Ch33
Author's Note: Rated M for language, sexual situations, violence, and the occasional flying monkey man.
Tony
It was an effort to remain conscious.
Tony slumped down in the chair he was shackled to, barely able to focus on anything but the agonizing pain that lanced through his body, beating time with his heart. He had long ago stopped trying to keep his head up and his shoulder straight in a defiant gesture - if it wasn’t for the chains securing him in place, he’d fall off the chair and onto the stone floor. As it was, the handcuffs weren’t the only thing keeping him on the chair - every few minutes, one of the guards outside the door would leave his post to walk across the small room and shove Tony back into place.
And there wasn’t a thing Tony could do to take advantage of the man’s casual approach.
Drantyev had been merciless during the interrogations, but displayed a surgical precision in his application of pain that almost seemed at odds with the brutality. To prevent Tony from trying to escape on foot, both of DiNozzo’s legs had been broken. His arms had followed soon after and, just to be safe, Drantyev had taken a further step and dislocated both of Tony’s shoulders, resulting in a perpetual state of agony, especially when DiNozzo tried to move his arms. His face hadn’t escaped injury, though. Both eyes were so swollen that he couldn’t see farther than a few feet, and, if the raspy sound when he inhaled was any indication, his nose was broken. The constant pain was excruciating, despite (or perhaps because of) with the various drugs they’d injected into him to lower his inhibitions and encourage truth. Even worse - or just as bad; Tony wasn’t entirely sure which - was the ominous rattle he felt deep in his lungs whenever he breathed. There was a persistent tickle inside his chest that he recognized all too well; since his bout with the plague, he’d never quite had the lung capacity he used to and when winter set in, he had to take extra precautions to avoid bronchitis since, for him, it could be lethal.
Not like you’re getting out of this one, the cynical part of his psyche murmured. He tried to grunt in agreement - God, that hurt - and just hoped there weren’t any gutters around these parts so he wouldn’t prove his father right after all.
He focused on his pain in a desperate but ultimately vain attempt to block out the images of what these bastards had done to Ziva when he wouldn’t talk. A sob built deep within his throat and Tony could feel hot tears begin trickling out of his eyes. It was all his fault. He should have known she would end up being hurt. Every woman he dared to come close to suffered somehow. His mother, Kate, Dana, Paula, now Ziva. Every one. He may deserve this hell but she … they didn’t.
“I see you are awake.” Drantyev’s cool voice caused Tony to flinch. He barely bit back a scream when his useless arms shifted, though his tormentor chuckled at the whimper that escaped Tony’s lips. “If you cooperate, Agent DiNozzo,” the Russian man said, “this will go much easier.”
“Liar,” Tony mumbled through swollen lips. He wanted to spit in this man’s face, to show that he hadn’t been beaten … but the fear of what would happen to him, to Ziva if he resisted again paralyzed him. The pain was just too much and a growing part of him knew he would do whatever he had to in order to make it stop. Already, he had spilled secrets he’d never wanted to reveal just to get the man to stop hurting him.
“Did you enjoy Dmitri’s … attentions so much, Agent DiNozzo?” Drantyev’s question caused Tony to recoil and scramble to push the terrible memories away. He fought to find something - anything - to focus on but that. “I thought not,” Drantyev said with another sinister chuckle. “Answer my questions and we shall not need to rely on such crude measures, shall we?” Tony gave him a noncommittal grunt in response which the Russian apparently took as agreement as he pulled a capped syringe from inside his jacket. “Let us get started,” Drantyev said before injecting the drugs into a vein on Tony’s left arm.
The next few hours were a haze of pain and questions that did not stop. His blood felt like it was on fire and words tumbled from his lips before he could even think to prevent them, sometimes before he even realized what he’d been asked. Whenever Drantyev was dissatisfied with the answers he was receiving (which was pretty often), he resorted to physical assaults, punching or kicking or swinging a thick board of wood to emphasize his point. Tony stopped being able to tell where the agony began or ended, and he lost track of how many times he passed out.
Eventually, through the fog of agony, he pieced together the purpose of this line of questioning: they were still trying to find Michael and were afraid he was coming for them. Smidt was dead and they were terrified that they were next. Hope flared instantly, but died just as quickly when Drantyev redoubled his efforts to find out something that Tony didn’t know. It became torture for torture’s sake, and Tony slipped into unconsciousness more and more frequently.
“He doesn’t know where his back-up is.” The statement greeted him an indeterminate amount of time later as he clung to his last shreds of awareness, and Tony’s abused brain labored to translate the Russian into something he understood. Blood was dripping down his naked chest and he had been pulled back in the chair so he was staring at the wooden ceiling.
“Are you sure?” The new speaker was a woman, and Tony tried to roll his head around to see what she looked like. His vision swam in and out of focus, but he was finally able to make out three people. Drantyev was one of them, but the other two were both female and couldn’t have been more different if they tried. The shorter of the two was blond, with hard features and eyes so cold that they could have frozen fire. He couldn’t tell how old she was - anywhere from mid forties to early sixties - but the deferential way that Drantyev stood around her let Tony know that this was the boss, the Russian Ghost that he and Michael had been chasing almost two years now.
The other woman was taller than the Ghost, with raven black hair that fell to her mid-back and a complexion slightly darker than Ziva’s. Even though he was barely conscious, DiNozzo noted that she was a beauty, mixing sensuality and lethality into a deceptively hot package. Just like Ziva. Something niggled at Tony’s brain when he looked at the woman, though he wasn’t sure why. Sure, she looked a little like that Iranian spy who had tried to frame Ziva, but clearly wasn’t that woman, so why did he feel like he’d seen her before?
“I am sure,” Drantyev said. “He could not lie if he tried.”
“Then he is no longer of any use to you,” the dark-haired beauty said in curiously accented Russian. “Let me kill the Mossad whore,” she continued, almost eagerly.
“She has ceased to be useful,” Drantyev remarked. Tony tried to speak, tried to force his unresponsive body to obey his commands, but could only groan. The trio glanced once in his direction but ignored him as they continued their conversation. “David has killed or badly injured the last five men who tried to sample her charms,” Drantyev said, shaking his head ruefully. “Now none of them dare to even enter her cell, so I can no longer use her as leverage against him.”
“Keep her alive for now,” the Ghost ordered. “She may still be of some use to us.”
“This is a mistake,” the dark-haired woman said tightly. “You should kill her now.”
Salima Farhan Smith. The name came to him suddenly, flooding Tony’s awareness with sense memories of chasing after her husband aboard the Enterprise so long ago. She had killed her son … although the kid probably wasn’t hers, even if she’d been a mother to him for years. Michael had been positive she was either Palestinian or Syrian, although their best efforts at identifying her came up empty. She had simply vanished like she never existed.
He was so distracted by the direction of his thoughts and the pounding agony thundering through his body that Tony lost track of the conversation for long moments. A familiar word - Shepard - caused him to claw his way out of the drug-induced flashback. Salima - or whatever her real name was - was gone, leaving only the Ghost and Drantyev.
“You have confirmed this?” the Ghost asked. There was a tremble in her voice, as if she wasn’t sure whether to be happy or frightened.
“It is,” Drantyev said. “She will be attending Decker’s funeral.”
“Then arrange for a flight,” the Ghost ordered. “We are going to Los Angeles where I will finally have the revenge I’ve been seeking for ten years.” Without another word, she turned and walked out of the small room, leaving Drantyev and one other guard alone with Tony.
“Throw him into David’s cell,” Drantyev instructed, “but keep an eye on them so they don’t do something stupid.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And, Ivan? I expect them both to be alive when we return from America.” There was a dangerous edge to Drantyev’s voice, and the guard - Ivan, Tony noted - visibly quailed before nodding. “While you are at it, keep an eye on Haneyeh,” Drantyev added with a frown. “I don’t trust her not to try and kill David.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tony passed out while Ivan was unshackling him from the chair and woke up to find himself slung over the large Russian’s shoulder. A small knife was secured to the man’s belt mere inches away from DiNozzo’s right hand. He grimaced and pushed through the agony coursing through his arm as he tried to wrap his fingers around the weapon.
“Stop it,” Ivan snapped, grabbing the knife before Tony could pull it free. At the same time, the hefty man intentionally jostled DiNozzo’s already broken limbs. This time, Tony wasn’t able to keep the sharp cry of pain from escaping his lips. His vision darkened as unconsciousness once more beckoned but he fought to stay awake.
A few agonizing moments later, they reached their destination and Tony heard the grind of an abused metal door being pulled open. He was airborne a heartbeat later and smashed into the unyielding floor with a bone-jarring thump and a scream of agony when his broken limbs impacted against the hard surface. The door squealed once more before clanging shut with a hollow boom.
“Tony?” Ziva’s soft voice pulled him out of the painful haze that had shrouded his mind and DiNozzo tried to push himself up so he could find her. Once again, white hot agony coursed through his body and he fell back against the floor with a whimper. He heard movement and, a moment later, a warm arm pulled him upright into a sitting position. Without a word, Ziva took a seat behind him, her good arm cradling his equally nude body to hers. Hot tears gushed from his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“Shh.” Her voice sounded odd and, as he craned his head around to look at her face, he realized her jaw was swollen. She began to rock him slowly, her arm anchoring him to her.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. It was the only thing he could think of to say even though he knew it wasn’t enough. He had done this to her. He had dragged down the brightest part of his shitty life and ruined her. This mess was his fault. Saying that he was sorry once just wasn’t enough.
So he kept saying it until darkness once more swallowed him.
Tony
It was an effort to remain conscious.
Tony slumped down in the chair he was shackled to, barely able to focus on anything but the agonizing pain that lanced through his body, beating time with his heart. He had long ago stopped trying to keep his head up and his shoulder straight in a defiant gesture - if it wasn’t for the chains securing him in place, he’d fall off the chair and onto the stone floor. As it was, the handcuffs weren’t the only thing keeping him on the chair - every few minutes, one of the guards outside the door would leave his post to walk across the small room and shove Tony back into place.
And there wasn’t a thing Tony could do to take advantage of the man’s casual approach.
Drantyev had been merciless during the interrogations, but displayed a surgical precision in his application of pain that almost seemed at odds with the brutality. To prevent Tony from trying to escape on foot, both of DiNozzo’s legs had been broken. His arms had followed soon after and, just to be safe, Drantyev had taken a further step and dislocated both of Tony’s shoulders, resulting in a perpetual state of agony, especially when DiNozzo tried to move his arms. His face hadn’t escaped injury, though. Both eyes were so swollen that he couldn’t see farther than a few feet, and, if the raspy sound when he inhaled was any indication, his nose was broken. The constant pain was excruciating, despite (or perhaps because of) with the various drugs they’d injected into him to lower his inhibitions and encourage truth. Even worse - or just as bad; Tony wasn’t entirely sure which - was the ominous rattle he felt deep in his lungs whenever he breathed. There was a persistent tickle inside his chest that he recognized all too well; since his bout with the plague, he’d never quite had the lung capacity he used to and when winter set in, he had to take extra precautions to avoid bronchitis since, for him, it could be lethal.
Not like you’re getting out of this one, the cynical part of his psyche murmured. He tried to grunt in agreement - God, that hurt - and just hoped there weren’t any gutters around these parts so he wouldn’t prove his father right after all.
He focused on his pain in a desperate but ultimately vain attempt to block out the images of what these bastards had done to Ziva when he wouldn’t talk. A sob built deep within his throat and Tony could feel hot tears begin trickling out of his eyes. It was all his fault. He should have known she would end up being hurt. Every woman he dared to come close to suffered somehow. His mother, Kate, Dana, Paula, now Ziva. Every one. He may deserve this hell but she … they didn’t.
“I see you are awake.” Drantyev’s cool voice caused Tony to flinch. He barely bit back a scream when his useless arms shifted, though his tormentor chuckled at the whimper that escaped Tony’s lips. “If you cooperate, Agent DiNozzo,” the Russian man said, “this will go much easier.”
“Liar,” Tony mumbled through swollen lips. He wanted to spit in this man’s face, to show that he hadn’t been beaten … but the fear of what would happen to him, to Ziva if he resisted again paralyzed him. The pain was just too much and a growing part of him knew he would do whatever he had to in order to make it stop. Already, he had spilled secrets he’d never wanted to reveal just to get the man to stop hurting him.
“Did you enjoy Dmitri’s … attentions so much, Agent DiNozzo?” Drantyev’s question caused Tony to recoil and scramble to push the terrible memories away. He fought to find something - anything - to focus on but that. “I thought not,” Drantyev said with another sinister chuckle. “Answer my questions and we shall not need to rely on such crude measures, shall we?” Tony gave him a noncommittal grunt in response which the Russian apparently took as agreement as he pulled a capped syringe from inside his jacket. “Let us get started,” Drantyev said before injecting the drugs into a vein on Tony’s left arm.
The next few hours were a haze of pain and questions that did not stop. His blood felt like it was on fire and words tumbled from his lips before he could even think to prevent them, sometimes before he even realized what he’d been asked. Whenever Drantyev was dissatisfied with the answers he was receiving (which was pretty often), he resorted to physical assaults, punching or kicking or swinging a thick board of wood to emphasize his point. Tony stopped being able to tell where the agony began or ended, and he lost track of how many times he passed out.
Eventually, through the fog of agony, he pieced together the purpose of this line of questioning: they were still trying to find Michael and were afraid he was coming for them. Smidt was dead and they were terrified that they were next. Hope flared instantly, but died just as quickly when Drantyev redoubled his efforts to find out something that Tony didn’t know. It became torture for torture’s sake, and Tony slipped into unconsciousness more and more frequently.
“He doesn’t know where his back-up is.” The statement greeted him an indeterminate amount of time later as he clung to his last shreds of awareness, and Tony’s abused brain labored to translate the Russian into something he understood. Blood was dripping down his naked chest and he had been pulled back in the chair so he was staring at the wooden ceiling.
“Are you sure?” The new speaker was a woman, and Tony tried to roll his head around to see what she looked like. His vision swam in and out of focus, but he was finally able to make out three people. Drantyev was one of them, but the other two were both female and couldn’t have been more different if they tried. The shorter of the two was blond, with hard features and eyes so cold that they could have frozen fire. He couldn’t tell how old she was - anywhere from mid forties to early sixties - but the deferential way that Drantyev stood around her let Tony know that this was the boss, the Russian Ghost that he and Michael had been chasing almost two years now.
The other woman was taller than the Ghost, with raven black hair that fell to her mid-back and a complexion slightly darker than Ziva’s. Even though he was barely conscious, DiNozzo noted that she was a beauty, mixing sensuality and lethality into a deceptively hot package. Just like Ziva. Something niggled at Tony’s brain when he looked at the woman, though he wasn’t sure why. Sure, she looked a little like that Iranian spy who had tried to frame Ziva, but clearly wasn’t that woman, so why did he feel like he’d seen her before?
“I am sure,” Drantyev said. “He could not lie if he tried.”
“Then he is no longer of any use to you,” the dark-haired beauty said in curiously accented Russian. “Let me kill the Mossad whore,” she continued, almost eagerly.
“She has ceased to be useful,” Drantyev remarked. Tony tried to speak, tried to force his unresponsive body to obey his commands, but could only groan. The trio glanced once in his direction but ignored him as they continued their conversation. “David has killed or badly injured the last five men who tried to sample her charms,” Drantyev said, shaking his head ruefully. “Now none of them dare to even enter her cell, so I can no longer use her as leverage against him.”
“Keep her alive for now,” the Ghost ordered. “She may still be of some use to us.”
“This is a mistake,” the dark-haired woman said tightly. “You should kill her now.”
Salima Farhan Smith. The name came to him suddenly, flooding Tony’s awareness with sense memories of chasing after her husband aboard the Enterprise so long ago. She had killed her son … although the kid probably wasn’t hers, even if she’d been a mother to him for years. Michael had been positive she was either Palestinian or Syrian, although their best efforts at identifying her came up empty. She had simply vanished like she never existed.
He was so distracted by the direction of his thoughts and the pounding agony thundering through his body that Tony lost track of the conversation for long moments. A familiar word - Shepard - caused him to claw his way out of the drug-induced flashback. Salima - or whatever her real name was - was gone, leaving only the Ghost and Drantyev.
“You have confirmed this?” the Ghost asked. There was a tremble in her voice, as if she wasn’t sure whether to be happy or frightened.
“It is,” Drantyev said. “She will be attending Decker’s funeral.”
“Then arrange for a flight,” the Ghost ordered. “We are going to Los Angeles where I will finally have the revenge I’ve been seeking for ten years.” Without another word, she turned and walked out of the small room, leaving Drantyev and one other guard alone with Tony.
“Throw him into David’s cell,” Drantyev instructed, “but keep an eye on them so they don’t do something stupid.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And, Ivan? I expect them both to be alive when we return from America.” There was a dangerous edge to Drantyev’s voice, and the guard - Ivan, Tony noted - visibly quailed before nodding. “While you are at it, keep an eye on Haneyeh,” Drantyev added with a frown. “I don’t trust her not to try and kill David.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tony passed out while Ivan was unshackling him from the chair and woke up to find himself slung over the large Russian’s shoulder. A small knife was secured to the man’s belt mere inches away from DiNozzo’s right hand. He grimaced and pushed through the agony coursing through his arm as he tried to wrap his fingers around the weapon.
“Stop it,” Ivan snapped, grabbing the knife before Tony could pull it free. At the same time, the hefty man intentionally jostled DiNozzo’s already broken limbs. This time, Tony wasn’t able to keep the sharp cry of pain from escaping his lips. His vision darkened as unconsciousness once more beckoned but he fought to stay awake.
A few agonizing moments later, they reached their destination and Tony heard the grind of an abused metal door being pulled open. He was airborne a heartbeat later and smashed into the unyielding floor with a bone-jarring thump and a scream of agony when his broken limbs impacted against the hard surface. The door squealed once more before clanging shut with a hollow boom.
“Tony?” Ziva’s soft voice pulled him out of the painful haze that had shrouded his mind and DiNozzo tried to push himself up so he could find her. Once again, white hot agony coursed through his body and he fell back against the floor with a whimper. He heard movement and, a moment later, a warm arm pulled him upright into a sitting position. Without a word, Ziva took a seat behind him, her good arm cradling his equally nude body to hers. Hot tears gushed from his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“Shh.” Her voice sounded odd and, as he craned his head around to look at her face, he realized her jaw was swollen. She began to rock him slowly, her arm anchoring him to her.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. It was the only thing he could think of to say even though he knew it wasn’t enough. He had done this to her. He had dragged down the brightest part of his shitty life and ruined her. This mess was his fault. Saying that he was sorry once just wasn’t enough.
So he kept saying it until darkness once more swallowed him.