Person
“Do you know what this is? Hmm? Ohh baby, don’t tell me you fell asleep again.”
A soft hand feathered down your cheek. Another hand wrapped around the left side of your waist. Warm.
You were naked. You had the sense that you’d been naked for a very long time. It wasn’t uncomfortable.
“Hmm? Stephen?” You slurred. The sharp tang of iron filled your mouth as you came to—blood. Your nose scrunched at the taste before a sharp inhale of disgust followed by a screaming ache that bloomed into your cheekbones. Why didn’t you remember taking a crack to the face?
“Guess again, angel,” he said. The hand on your cheek moved to cup your chin. Soft lips nipped at your jawline. Chills rippled down your neck. “Open your eyes…”
You tried to stretch, wanting to reach up and touch his wrist, but found your arms were too hefty to even lift. Every joint was sore, like waking up with the flu. Your eyes tried to flutter open, but the lids felt like they were being pulled back down by bungee cords. Through what little light broke through, all you could see was a blur. Though your body felt heavy, your mind felt light, as if in a dream.
“Where am I?” You didn’t recognize that groggy, hoarse voice, though it must have been yours.
“Shhh…It’s okay. Stop fighting, Peach. Just open your eyes. Do you know what this is?”
Two thin metal fingers poked at your right side. The cold touch made you jolt, eyes flashing wide open. His voice darkened.
“Tell me what this is before I use it on you,” Darren said. He jabbed it against your ribs.
“Shit,” you gasped, gritting your teeth as you breathed through the pain.
“Good guess, but no. It’s a cattle prod. Damn, that muscle relaxer really did a number on you, didn’t it?”
You nodded the affirmative. If by ‘muscle relaxer’ he meant ‘the sleeper hold,’ then yes, it had done a number on you.
“Back to the old grind, then. I’m sure you know the drill by now,” Darren said, smiling lightly as if you were out on a lunch date.
“You’ll have to remind me,” you grunted, your typical snark lost behind your tired voice.
“Oh sure…The game is simple, give me the passwords to that flash drive. If you win, I won’t use this cattle prod on you. If you lose, zap zap. I might waterboard you for a little ‘dessert’ if you make things too difficult. I’ve been missing that cute little face you make when you think you’re drowning.” He chuckled before mocking you, making a faint wheezing sound and puckering his lips into an O. It reminded you of that scream painting by Edvard Munch. You’d always hated that painting. “Shouldn’t be too hard. Easiest game you’ll ever play.”
You might have been close to complying before, but your talk with Stephen Strange before your last sleep had rejuvenated your will. After the first week, you’d lost hope that they were looking for you and by the second…You may have only chosen to live out of pure spite. Now you knew you’d be on Stark’s radar until you were good and dead, and as long as Stephen could contact you, your boys were on the hunt.
“Get bent,” you croaked. Darren activated the cow prod, which promptly delivered an electric shock over your stomach. It didn’t hurt as bad as you’d imagined. It was intense, sure, but the bite was localized to the small area where the tongs of the prod touched. The sting was certainly not worse than some of the torture you’d already been subject to. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, beatings, choking… Numerous phone calls from men pretending to be Stephen, Tony, and Loki. Those had nearly tricked you until the inevitable question came: Can you just tell him the codes so he will let you go? After enough rounds of that, it was only rational that you first assumed Stephen’s manifestation in your mind was another trick.
They’d also spent a few sleeps subjecting you to solitary confinement, your food slipped through a crack in the door at mealtimes. No bathroom breaks were given, leaving you to piss in the corner of the shed they’d locked you in. After they’d let you out, Darren sat you down in his office and showed you the only thing on his desk: a picture of your family. The one from your office, frame and all. He spent the next few hours very calmly detailing how he’d torture and kill each of them in unless you gave him the passwords. Mom would be gutted, dad beaten to death a la Inglourious Basterds, and your brother would be skinned alive. Now that he knew your address, all it would take is a little gas and a can-do attitude to kidnap and lay waste to your loved ones.
That conversation did more damage than any physical torture they’d bothered with yet. By your next sleep, you’d held your head high knowing you hadn’t begged for them. Cried, yes, but never begged. That would have given him too much power over you, and if he’d heard your pleas, you didn’t doubt that he would go through with his threats.
“Lets try again,” Darren said, his tone clearly irked.
“I said get—”
Zzzt went the cow prod, higher this time, against your ribs. The lack of meat over that area made the shock worse. Your head knocked back as your body jerked in protest.
“Nngh…Okay, let’s play this game, how do you know you haven’t whooped the memory out of me, hmm? Maybe I actually don’t know the passwords anymore.”
“How does the wind know when to stop blowing?” Darren retorted. He lifted the prod even higher, pressing it against the lower half of your right breast. Though the metal electrodes had warmed after touching your skin for a while, you caved your chest in to pull away. It didn’t work, only causing Darren to push even harder.
You gasped and bared your teeth this time when the shock hit, your chin hitting your chest. The skin was so much more sensitive there. Darren’s contented sigh told you he’d noticed your pain. There was a look of accomplishment in his eyes. His mouth did not quirk, his gaze did not falter, and his hand did not twitch as he raised the fingers of the cow prod to your right nipple.
“Hey, hey, no. No no no no no no no, Darren. H-hey, hey, Darren please? Please no, don’t, man, come on. Come on, man, I’m a person. I’m a person, Darren, look at me, please. Please don’t do that, dude, please. Don’t. Listen to me. Don’t.” Your voice was cracking. You shook your head vigorously, that cool façade vanishing as tears stung your eyes.
His head tilted to the side, wondering if you might finally break.
“Don’t?” He questioned, blinking slowly.
“Darren, don’t do that to me, please. Please. I’m a person. You’re a person. We’re just people, just two people, it doesn’t have to be like th—”
The high-pitched screech you let out when he shocked your nipple made your ears ring.
Darren spent the next…however long it took, shocking your body one inch, one jolt at a time until he ran out of things to electrocute. By the end, you were sweating, disoriented, and felt as if your teeth were vibrating. He’d left your nether regions alone, but only with the promise that if you didn’t start talking soon, that would change.
He slipped out of the room stretching, arms high in the air as he twisted the tension out of his back, looking as if he were waking up from a nice, long nap. He left the door wide open.
“She’s all yours, boys,” he called out, and the two men who watched over you shuffled in. They weren’t comically hulking, but they were big enough in stature that you would not want to take either in a fight, let alone both. You hadn’t learned their names, so you assigned names after you realized they might be the last people you’d ever get to meet. The shorter one with a tattoo of a pigeon on his wrist was ‘Stoki’ (combining ‘Stephen’ and ‘Loki’) and the blond with a bit of a limp was ‘Tony’. Half the time they wore ski masks, as if to convince you that there was a rotation of guards, but you could identify their silhouettes instantly by now, even with the lights out. If you had to pick between the two, you liked Stoki better.
Stoki wrapped a blind over your eyes, knowing it was secure by the way you sucked in a breath when the knot pulled your hair. As Tony threw you over his shoulder, you heard Darren turn back and give them a status update. Something about ‘plan b’ and ‘low on time’. You’d need to remember that, make sure to pass it on to Stephen for the next time. Maybe he could decipher the meaning. Speaking of Stephen, you were starting to wonder what was taking him so long to contact you again. How much sleep did he think they’d let you get?
No matter how slight, Tony’s limp made you even more dizzy than you would have already been hanging upside down as he lugged you down the hall. The floor sounded solid beneath his feet, not like at your parents’ trailer, where you could hear the hollow space between floor and ground from heavy footsteps. He turned down a few halls and then you heard, behind a door, the sound of bathwater running. It had been a while since you’d been given a bath, and the prospect had you both anxious and excited. You had stopped feeling some of the dried blood and dirt that was crusted over your body, but you knew it was there.
Stoki turned the water off as Tony lowered you in the tub. The luscious heat gave you chills, instantly taking your memory back to the day that Loki gave you a bath. Though you were still blindfolded, your vision was taken over by the memory of flaring veins in Loki’s neck as he lowered you into the tub that day. Your skin remembered the absurd gentleness he’d washed you with. Bliss.
“Aw, look how perky,” Stoki chuckled as a lone finger flicked against one of your nipples. Your memory faded to black, the sensation of Loki’s hands disintegrating as you dropped back into reality.
“Oh, look at her, she’s still shaking,” Tony cooed. A hand grabbed your chin but you yanked it away, drawing your knees towards your chest.
“Hm, maybe not the best idea while she’s this feisty,” one of them said, beginning to soap and drop each of your weak limbs in the tub, scrubbing you down in a stiff, medical fashion. The other man took to washing your hair. Your mind struggled to distinguish which of them was talking. “Have to wait that out.”
“Yeah. Soon,” the other said wistfully. A cup of water poured over your head, suds running down your cheeks. The blindfold was sopping wet.
Despite the scalding bathwater, you felt very cold.