flavour of the day and grapefruit with malt and fresh peaches and pineapple
Story: Timeless { backstory | index }
Title: Grave Error
Rating: PG-13 (discussion of gory torture methods)
Challenge: FOTD: equivocate, Grapefruit #30: rock bottom
Toppings/Extras: malt, fresh peaches, fresh pineapple
Wordcount: 957
Summary: Cooper Braun refuses to co-operate.
Notes: If Timeless were a film, the very end of this would be in the trailer. It’s Adele at her most scary! Intimidation and fear are her methods, not actual full-blown physical torture. Cooper, of course, doesn’t know this. Soon after, and referring to, A Class In Bad Timing. Equivocate: To be deliberately ambiguous or unclear in order to mislead or avoid committing oneself to anything definite. Grapefruit PFAH: Cooper : the more I see the less I know the more I like to let it go. Peaches: With the Moon squaring Mercury tonight, there could be too much talk and no understanding […] keep working until you work it out. Pineapple: All the dirt you’ve been throwin’ my way/ It ain’t so hard to take, that’s right.-“Loser Like Me”, Glee Cast.
“We really are going all the way with this old-fashioned nonsense,” Miss Merritt drawled from the other side of the room, lounging back against the wall next to a roaring furnace. A poker lay with its very tip encased within the brightly glowing embers, building up a glow of its own.
Cooper didn’t take his eyes off of it.
“In the seventeenth century, adulterers were branded with a letter A,” she said. “That’s where this lot are from, isn’t it?” Of course, Cooper didn’t reply: he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. “And vagabonds and gypsies had the letter V. That’s closer to your ticket, eh? Presumably there was one for thieves, too. My guess would be a T.”
“Torturers are an imaginative lot, aren’t they?” Cooper muttered.
“I’d say Chinese water torture was very innovative,” Miss Merritt replied, pulling the poker out of the fire and turning it around in front of her eyes, watching the vivid tip of it. She thrust it back into the fire and rested it back along its stand. “But I really can’t be bothered with the set-up, most of the time. And it takes far too long.” She brightened. “And the Glasgow smile! That really is something.”
“What’s the Glasgow smile?” Cooper asked even though the increasing dread in his stomach told him he really shouldn’t have asked.
“The torturer would cut from the corners of the mouth to the ears,” Miss Merritt said, taking a few slow steps towards him. She still had her pristine blazer on, though she’d rolled it up to the elbows. “Not quite all the way through. Then they’d beat the victim and when they screamed they would rip their own face open.”
“That’s disgusting!”
“Yes. I’ve heard it’s very messy,” Miss Merritt said idly. “Still. Someone thought of it.”
“Someone with a sick mind!”
“Well, yes. That’s torture for you.” Miss Merritt sighed and picked up the poker again. “Anyway, I’m not going to go that far. You are not that special and I am not that cruel.”
Yeah, right, Cooper thought. He flicked some of his bronze hair from his face with a toss of his head and scowled at her.
“It doesn’t help that you’re not co-operating,” she added.
“I’m not answering any of your questions,” Cooper snapped. His heart was at his chest like a battering ram, possibly trying to escape from his body in order to get as far away from this madwoman as it could. His wrists ached from being bound and his bare feet were both up in front of him, shackled to the top of a box.
“But they are such simple questions,” Miss Merritt said. Her nightmarish stormy-sky eyes flicked downwards momentarily, covered entirely by her thickly painted black lashes. “You simply can’t survive without land contact. So which docks are letting you in?”
“None of your business.”
“It’s every bit business, and business is what I do best.”
“Aside from torture?”
Miss Merritt smirked a little.
“Aside from torture,” she confirmed. She stood up suddenly and walked over to the furnace. “Speaking of torture…”
Cooper sighed loudly, trying to seem exasperated instead of terrified.
“Feet are funny. An unexpected weak spot.” She whirled the poker through the air as she brought it out of the furnace, smiling at him chillingly, walking towards his shackled feet. “It makes people nervous when they can’t control what’s happening with their feet, or can’t see them. Because it’s so far from the head, I suppose.”
“Oh?” Cooper asked weakly.
“Where did your fleet go, Mr Braun?”
“They’re not my fleet.”
“That’s not important. Where did they go?”
“Sydney? Dubai? Grimsby?” Cooper forced out a laugh, ignoring the fact that this was most probably the worst situation he had ever been in. “I don’t know!”
“Unfortunately, we all know that you do,” Miss Merritt said, arching an eyebrow. “God knows we’ve seen enough videos of you cavorting around on Nutriware vessels, swinging from ropes and showing off your skills as a thief. It’s rather lucky that we caught you, really.”
“That’s exactly it. Luck.”
Miss Merritt looked at him for a long moment and then touched the very tip of the poker briefly to the tip of the second largest toe on his right foot. The contact was less than a second but it was enough to make Cooper jump as far as his restraints would allow and let out a shout of pain, a jolt of seething fire racing like a lightning-bolt up through his leg and splitting into his head.
“Fuck!”
“You’re going to have to toughen up a bit. Really,” Miss Merritt said.
“Go fuck yourself!” Cooper cursed, the sudden, unexpected pain having caused an unpleasant shot of buzzing adrenaline to puncture every cell, leaving his chest shivering. He steadied himself and glared at her as the pain in his toe continued to burn and fizzle, twinges rising and falling in irregular fluctuations. For some reason, something Captain Graham had said to him earlier bubbled to the surface of his mind. “It’s not like you have a boyfriend to do it for you any more…”
He said it quietly in nothing more than a mutinous mutter but the reaction was instantaneous. The sharply-dressed woman was suddenly behind him, moving snake-fast, and the hot poker whirled through the air-Cooper could have sworn it sang as it did so, a deadly ring of dark red metal-to hover just in front of his throat, Miss Merritt’s mouth by his ear. He could feel the heat emanating from it and the tickle of an escaped strand of her sleek hair.
“I think what you just made is traditionally known as a grave error,” she said darkly.