LFN Story Bits <3
Note: Am posting this here for clueless_02, who was interested. About a year ago, when I first dipped my toes into LFN fandom, I had this really random I'm!New!to!Fandom!and!Want!to!Torture!the!Characters!'Cause!It'll!Be!Epic plot idea. These are the bits and pieces that were written before I realized the entire idea was crap. It had a very damsel-in-distress feel to it, and that's... not Madeline.
Okay, basic premise: Whoever helps break Madeline out of Section One betrayed her, and she found herself held captive by a terrorist group, who then later joined up with the Collective, who happened to have captured Paul when he "died". Yeah, really bad plot. I was new; don't hate me. When I wrote this, Madeline ended up being drugged and crazy because my rationale went something like 'if she were being tortured, she'd just stop her own heart and die rather than put up with it, unless she couldn't focus enough to stop her own heart...' and this is what happened. I hadn't realized that I'd written so many pieces to this. They're very random, only loosely connected, and some of them border on stream of consciousness. I've listed them all below, separated by tiny dividers.
Also, apparently being drugged makes Madeline more sentimental than I normally write her, or something. But you do get the ending, tacked on the end there... so. Yeah. I apologize now for subjecting whoever reads this to my weird half-written story. Lol.
LFN STORY BITS
She's shivering cold, thirsty and sick, but mostly she's just furious. Furious, and trapped.
'No one knows I'm alive,' she thinks as the room dips and weaves and spins around her. 'If he knew, he'd come get me, but I'm dead. He thinks I'm dead.' She fights to remember who he is, and finally comes up with a name, whispering it to herself as she slips back into unconsciousness. “Paul.”
~
The lights are too big, too far away. This is the first thing she notices as she opens her eyes, and she stares, watching as the caged, protected bulbs dance across the ceiling. “Cage,” she whispers, and she tugs experimentally against the chain clinging painfully to her ankle and wonders if she can tear through her own foot. Her mind swims with visions of blood, so much blood, and it's red and beautiful and terrifying in its intensity, the color of too-bright lipstick and the tips of Paul's ears when he's angry.
“Paul,” she says, and she thinks she's said that name many times before because it rolls off of her parched tongue so easily, in a nondescript accent that she perfected years ago because Madeline is no one from nowhere, no origins, a god in her own element, and she giggles but then stops because she doesn't giggle. No home, no family, no last name. No accent. “That's a lie,” she thinks because an accent slips out when she's angry or upset, her 'sorry' and her 'don't' betraying her, and sometimes Paul notices it, sees her past when he looks at her, but she doesn't care because no one else would dare to notice, dare to speculate.
Nikita dares. Nikita asks. Nikita betrays, too-not in a tone, not in a telltale 'O', but in lies and secrets, and once Madeline trusted her enough to tell her about a little girl who couldn't fly and crashed to the ground, and to ask her help to catch a bird that always flew too far and too fast and couldn't be allowed to slip away again. She remembers, but the images don't make sense now, and a red bird wearing a black mask circles the room, but it's not a vulture so that's okay-she's still alive.
The door opens, and the sound is full of dread, shrieking mice in the hinges. She knows if she looks, she'll see them and they'll eat through her legs, but she doesn't scream when the guards drag her to her feet because the ribbons of blood will make tie-dyed pants of red, brown when it dries, and white feels like a lie on her skin.
The mice are afraid of the guards, Madeline thinks, because they're hiding by the time she touches the floor. She's half-pushed, half-pulled, half-led out the door, but that's too many halves, and her eyes dart around trying to figure out where she's going, where she's been. “I've been to Paris,” she tells them, and the guards ignore her, forcing her into another room and pointing to a chair in the middle.
The chair is silver-black-shiny, and it speaks to her. “Sit down, Madeline,” it says, and she steps back, colliding with the guard. Movement across the room catches her eyes, and she watches a bald man approach warily, but can't back up anymore because the guard is pushing her forward. “I asked you to sit down,” he says in the voice of the chair, and she knows they're the same, that his arms are fake, the real ones are in the chair and they'll grab her and trap her, and she shakes her head, the room spinning as her eyes pass over tile and metal and evil again and again with the movement.
Hands wrap around her arms, dragging her forward, and she can see the mouth of the chair waiting, opening to consume her. She fights wildly as they push her down among razor-sharp teeth and pin her there with harsh, icy metal that pinches and aches at her wrists and ankles. The teeth avoid her skin for now, and she stares up at the chair-man, filling with dread, but then he meets her eyes and she looks away.
“Tell me about Section One,” the chair-man says, and her mind fills with a cacophony of words, her own voice in surround sound, a dozen languages all at once. They tell her of missions and informants, torture and people, so many people, faces she doesn't recognize, numbers that mean nothing, places she doesn't think she's ever been, all whispers and echoes and chants and shouts, but the loudest one is screaming, “No!” at her so loudly that it makes her head ache, and this is what she whispers aloud.
“Why not?” the man asks gently, touching her hand, and she pulls away so quickly that the metal restraints cut into her skin, blood running over her fingers.
She laughs then, laughs until tears run down her face and her chest hurts, and she thinks she may never stop, but a sudden flare of pain erupts across her face as the chair-man hits her, and she falls silent. He waits expectantly, and on his face she sees purples and blues, shifting and changing, and it doesn't look right, isn't normal. Leaning forward conspiratorially, she tells him, amusement in her tone, “It's a secret.”
A guard steps forward with a needle, and the needle brings pain, so much pain it feels like her skin is being torn away, and she screams. The room spins and flashes colors, and closing her eyes doesn't work because everything is dangerous there, shrouded in darkness.
The chair grumbles from behind her, “Tell me about Paul. Who is he?” As if on cue, a picture flashes behind her eyes, graying hair and ice-blue eyes that see right through her. “Is he at Section One, Madeline?” the voice presses, and the picture changes, changes so many times she can't keep track. Paul is young, Paul is growing older, Paul is touching her hair. He's shouting at her, dancing with her, shooting her, kissing her, worrying about her, watching her, fucking her, smiling at her, and she can't tell if she loves him or she hates him, but she does know that she wants to protect him from these men with their talking chair and their needles.
“I don't know anyone named Paul.”
After that there are more needles, more pain, and the minutes and hours blur together as they talk and she screams without allowing herself to form the sounds into words. Sometime later the chair-man tells the guards to return her to her room, and as they pull her from the chair, she grins and tells them, “I won.”
She can't make her legs support her, they refuse, and so the guard carries her slung over his shoulder like a rag doll, dumping her painfully onto the uncomfortable bed and clamping the chain back into place around her ankle. Everything hurts, she's dizzy, and the walls are laughing at her because she hasn't won anything at all and everyone knows it. She has to go to the bathroom, but she can't walk without falling over and there is an army of mice waiting for her feet to come into view, so she presses herself against the wall, knees pulled to her chest, and waits. For what, she doesn't know.
~
On her more lucid days, Madeline wishes she had some way to track the passing time. She tries not to think about it too much because it will serve no purpose other than to make her crazy, but some days are harder than others. Her hair has grown a couple inches, and she measures her time by that, but it's imprecise and ridiculous. Two months, maybe three. Maybe six, considering all of the drugs, the physical effects they could be having on her. She loses days drifting in and out of consciousness, and lying awake in her cell makes each minute seem eternal.
Her mind plays games to keep busy. Count to sixty-another minute survived. Count to ten, over and over, when she can't focus enough through the pain and the drugs to make it to sixty. Count to three when she can't make it to ten. Try to remember the lyrics to every song she's ever heard. Write those lyrics, letter by letter, on the roof of her mouth with her tongue. Write them on the wall with the motion of her eyes, blinking in space of periods and commas. Try to remember the faces of everyone she's ever worked with, worked for, tortured, slept with, hated. Remember them in such great detail that she could draw them. Try not to think about the few people she's loved because it will consume her. Make lists of countries, capitals, flowers, cars, breeds of dog, names of informants, titles of movies and plays and symphonies she always wanted to go to but never seemed to find the time to see. Start over, do it again. And again. Repeat it in Russian, in French, Hungarian. Now Japanese, and then German. Imagine backgrounds, lives outside of work for the violent guards. Imagine their mothers and wives and children. Imagine killing them all.
Sometimes she can't think-count-write-draw-spell-remember, in English or any other language, but those days are almost easier, when she's unaware of her surroundings, concentrating solely on not saying the wrong thing. Her throat is raw from screams torn out of her against her will, but she won't tell them any of the things they want to know. She tells herself this over and over, when she's too tired or in too much pain to think about anything else: I won't, I won't, I won't.
She's always hungry, always cold, always dirty. Food comes sometimes, random occurrences, and she imagines she's eating a feast because she can almost trick her stomach into feeling full for a few minutes. She's spent her life comfortable in harsh realities, but she's had enough reality to last her quite a while, and it's easier to let the edges blur a little now.
~
The door opens and a guard steps in. He cuffs her hands in front of her, releases the chain on her ankle, and half-leads, half-shoves her into the hall. Business as usual, she thinks, and she likes the way her barely-suppressed laugh makes the guards uncomfortable. A moment later she's shackled into the chair in the interrogation room and left alone. The walk has made her head spin, and she sees reds and blues and greens when she looks toward the lights.
The bald man, her interrogator, walks in, but for the first time he has someone else with him, someone besides the guards. A short man, dark hair. The new man regards her with something akin to admiration in his eyes.
“She doesn't say much these days,” the interrogator says, almost apologetically. “Too much pain and it's like flipping a switch-she just shuts down. The drugs make her talk, but after the first week or so she stopped saying anything useful. It has to be some sort of psychological conditioning, a programmed response.” Madeline listens to the words, and they wash over her as she tries to cling to their meanings. “The only constant we've gotten from her is that she knows someone named Paul, and she's determined to make sure we never find him. We're pretty sure she's talking about the head of Section One-our intel suggests his name is Paul.”
The new man grips her chin in his hand, forcing her to look up into his eyes, and she stares back at him, her gaze full of contempt. She can see two of him, this close, and she hopes she's glaring at the real one.
“Yes,” the man says simply. “Paul Wolfe.” Madeline blinks up at him, surprised. She doesn't know why they're talking about Paul, doesn't know who this man is, and she drops his gaze, her resolve to stay silent renewed. “Is she drugged now?”
“Yes. We don't have much choice; she's killed two of my men and keeps stopping her own heart.” If the short man is surprised by this information, he doesn't show it. “Look, this alliance is important to us, and if you really want her, you can have her,” he continues, “but keeping her alive is basically a waste of a cell at this point. She won't tell you anything.”
“I don't really need her to talk,” the man answers, stroking her bruised cheek with his thumb, and even though his words drift away from her before she can make sense of them, the grin that spreads across his face makes Madeline's blood run cold.
~
“Welcome to your new home,” the guard says sarcastically as he pushes her into a cell. She stumbles, nearly falls, and he grabs her and drags her to the far wall. Nothing has really changed; more lights that are too bright, another bit of foam on a raised platform that passes for a bed. This one has a real toilet, and that's an improvement, at least, but the room smells of sweat and there's sticky, still-drying blood splattered across the floor. As the guard tightens yet another heavy cuff around her ankle-even that hasn't really changed-she wonders who inhabited this cell previously. If they've been killed or just moved.
The guard leaves, and she allows herself to collapse down onto the bed. The drugs are different, she thinks, and the new ones have made her tired, but no one seems to have a problem with her sleeping-she can't recall just now why they ever did, but can't focus on the thought for long anyway before her concentration slips away again.
Sometime later she wakes up, curled in a ball in the corner of the bed, trying to keep warm. A noise has woken her, and as the door swings open, she realizes it was the sound of a key in the lock. She begins to sit up, but the guard that enters points a gun at her head and tells her to stay where she is and face the wall, and she's still so tired that she can't bring herself to try to disobey.
The sound of more footsteps headed in her direction float into the room, accompanied by the clinking of chains. Another prisoner, maybe. The noise stops when it reaches the doorway.
“So I get a roommate now? How-” a voice says before abruptly falling silent, and then she hears, “Madeline?” spoken so softly that it's almost a whisper. Her heart begins to race-she knows that voice. Without thinking, she starts to turn her head, and then her world seems to explode with pain as something-she thinks, disconnectedly, that it was the guard's gun-hits her across the face hard enough to make lights flash behind her eyes.
“I said face the wall,” the guard growls, and she looks down at the space between the foam mattress and the rough concrete, trying to keep the blood that's dripping down her forehead from running into her eyes. Her mind is reeling, and she's almost shaking from the sudden rush of adrenaline she feels-whether from the pain or from the voice, she's not sure.
The other prisoner is brought in, and she can hear the locking and unlocking of cuffs and chains, and the whole thing seems to take longer than an entire day of staring at the ceiling. Finally the guards seem to finish, and they leave the room without a word. She sits up and turns around to find herself staring at Paul's bruised, bloody, utterly shocked face.
He stares at her, uncertainty written plainly across his features. She doesn't want to believe it's him-if she believes it and then is wrong, she thinks it might destroy her. Finally, after a moment that lasts forever, he says, “You're bleeding.”
Madeline almost unconsciously reaches up and prods gently at the cut on her head. When she lowers her hand it's covered in blood, and the bright red shine draws her eyes with it for a moment before they find their way back to Paul. She's still drugged, still dazed, and she's not sure any of this is real.
Without another moment of hesitation, Paul comes closer, sitting beside her. With pained, slow movements, he tears a strip of cloth from bottom of his pants leg, then cautiously touches her shoulder as if he still doesn't believe she's really there. “Lie down,” he says, part order and part love and part worry, and the tone is so familiar to her that it aches. Still dizzy, head throbbing, she allows him to pull her down to the bed, her head resting on his thigh. There's silence for a minute as he presses the torn fabric against her head, and she doubts it's really doing any good, but his other hand gently caresses her cheek, and for the first time in months, she doesn't dread being touched by another person.
“You died,” he says, his hand pausing in its movements but never leaving her skin, his voice full of pain. She thinks she might drown in his voice.
“A few times now, actually,” she answers lightly, and it works-a small smirk graces his lips, and he idly brushes her hair away from her face with touches like feathers.
“I'd order you to stop doing that,” he says, almost amused, “but it might be your best option at this point.”
The truth of his words makes Madeline laugh, and it doesn't sound like hers, raspy from disuse and too much screaming. She tries to remember a time when contemplating her own death wasn't a joke, when it bothered her, but can't, so she asks instead, “How long have you been here?”
He considers this for a second, then shrugs. “I have no idea. You?”
“A day or two, I think. I was held by someone else since the day I left Section, though.” A flash of sadness appears in his eyes before he looks away, and she reaches up to place her hand over his. “I was going to contact you. I just never got the chance.” She doesn't worry that the guards will see, that they'll hear. They already know, or they wouldn't be here together at all.
She blinks up at Paul, her thoughts drifting, fighting to stay awake. There's a hazy edge to everything she sees, but she can't bring herself to care, and she forces herself to sit up, one hand reaching up to hold the makeshift bandage to her head. The movement makes her stomach churn dangerously, and she stares at the floor until the feeling subsides, then turns her gaze back to Paul. “You look like hell,” she says bluntly, and he grins, almost proud.
“You look beautiful,” he says, and she thinks he means it, even if she's bloody and bruised and dirty.
“I can assume you've been drugged as well, then?”
He laughs again. She's always loved his laugh.
~
They've been driving for nearly fifteen hours, only stopping for gas four times and to change cars twice. Madeline's tired, Paul can see it in her eyes and in the way she leans her head against the window, but she doesn't say a word. The radio station fades out again, and she reaches out one hand and hits Scan without looking. She leaves it on the first station she finds that's broadcasting more music than static. It's some awful song in what he's pretty sure is Italian, and the lead singer sounds like someone is raking a cheese grater across her vocal chords. He grimaces, and Madeline just continues staring out the window.
“We should get some sleep,” he says over the radio. A long moment passes before she nods in agreement, and in the next town they park behind a small, rundown hotel. She gets out and disappears around the corner, and comes back a few minutes later carrying keys.
The room has two beds, and when Paul sets his only bag down on the first and she quickly steps around him to place her own bag on the second, he suspects that she planned it this way. He can't quite bring himself to make mention of it, but his disappointment is evident in his expression. She sees it, he knows she does, but she doesn't offer anything other than a guarded half-smile, not meeting his eyes.
“I'm hungry,” she says abruptly, and he drags his gaze away from her, nodding and heading for the door. After the first day, they avoided being seen in public together as much as possible-her bruises drew too much attention, and the anger that never really seems to leave his eyes led everyone to believe that he gave them to her. They can't afford to be noticed, to be remembered by the people that see them.
When he returns, Madeline's already taken a shower, and the smell of soap and damp air fills the small room. She's sitting at the head of the bed, leaning against the wall where a headboard should be but isn't, her knees tucked against her chest. There isn't a table and there aren't any chairs, and so he hands her a small box containing her dinner and then sits on his own bed. She finishes her food first, but not by much-they both eat too quickly now, he thinks, and he makes himself finish the last few bites of his meal a bit more slowly.
“We could work as assassins,” she says with a shrug, setting down the wax-coated cardboard container on the bed, as if eleven hours haven't passed since they first started this conversation.
He shakes his head. “I haven't spent the better part of my life fighting to stop people like that just to become them.” The 'and neither have you' that is implied in his tone makes Madeline incline her head in agreement. They both know it wasn't a real suggestion anyway, just something to say because this room doesn't have a television or a radio. They give in to idle words more easily now, too, because they've had enough silence.
Reaching for the now-empty box in his hand, she gathers the trash around them and sets it half in, half on top of the too-small can near the door. She's already dressed for bed in loose-fitting pants and an over-sized shirt-that's different too, Paul thinks, but it's also another thing he won't mention. She climbs into bed, pulling the covers tightly around her, and he turns out the light.
Stripping down to his underwear, he gets under his own blankets, staring at the ceiling. “Let's become yak farmers,” he tells her, and he can hear her turn over in bed, see the silhouette of her body in the dim glow of the streetlight that shines in around the edges of the thick curtain as she leans up on one elbow.
“Have you lost your mind?”
“I thought we’d established that already?” he answers. “Just picture it. We'll buy land on some random hill in Tibet, get a couple yaks. One male, one female, just to start. I'll clean up after them if you'll figure out how to milk them.”
A small chuckle rings through the room, and he grins-it's the first time he's heard her do that in such a long time.
“They're big, hairy, ugly things, but far more useful than, say, a dog, and you've always said I was the sort that needed a pet,” Paul goes on. “We can name them Michael and Nikita, and zap them with cattle prods when they misbehave.”
And that does it-she collapses back onto the bed and laughs. He laughs too, feeling just a little proud of himself. After a moment she quiets, and one of her pillows flies across the room, hitting him in the face.
“You're an idiot,” she says, almost affectionately, and he tucks her pillow under his head. It's damp from her hair and smells like shampoo. “Go to sleep.”
Listening to her resettle herself among the blankets, he smiles. “Good night, Madeline.”