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The door has just closed, the squeak of iron that hasn’t been oiled for years echoing through the room.
The room itself contains the following: Blood spattered on the floor, rusted chains on the far side of the wall, a wooden table on which various tools of torture are laid out, a wooden chair, and a man sitting on the chair, shackled at his wrists and ankles.
This man is barely conscious, his thoughts flowing like a tide in his mind: In, out, in out.
There’s blood dribbling from the side of his mouth, a slow red trail that irritates his skin. He can’t even reach up to wipe it away.
Instead, his fingers grip the wooden armrests tighter than they did during the torture session that has just ended.
They had tried to get the information out of him. They’d been trying for the entire week, and each time the methods of torture got more painful.
Mevolent’s men had burned him, branded him with red hot pokers, whipped him, the whole ‘prisoner-of-war’ package. And when still he refused to betray his brothers, they’d gotten Sensitives for emotional and mental torture.
All his memories, torn apart carelessly by those too sadistic or scared to care, they were all spilled for all to see. His mother’s voice, the smell of burning meat, the sensation of cold shadows creeping up his arms, they knew it.
But he had never let them know where the Dead Men where, what they were doing.
He’d sooner die than ever give up on the only family he likes to think he has.
His throat aches from the screaming, the crying, and his eyes can barely focus on his dimly-lit surroundings.
The man doesn’t know how much longer he can take before they overdo the torture and kill him.
He hopes his brothers will come soon. They must. No man gets left behind, that’s the rules he lives by. He knows –trusts- them to do the same.
He can feel the blood drying on his skin, the painful deep gashes on his back against the wood of the chair, the pounding in his head.
His captors were talking about scooping out his ‘pretty, golden’ eyes. He hopes that isn’t true.
If there’s one thing he needs to see again, it is the sunlight, the clear blue sky. He will not have those simple pleasures taken away from him.
Takes a deep, shuddering breath, and glances down at his body.
They’ve only given him his undergarments to wear, preferring to display their wounds they’ve inflicted for all those to see.
There’s a nasty burn on his stomach, a brand on his side, bruises across his chest. His body is a canvas of red and purple and tan.
Wryly, he thinks that at least now he looks like a proper, battle-scarred warrior instead of some fresh-faced greenboy.
He still has hope, when the first week passes. He knows that the Dead Men are looking for him, will come to aid him and take him home.
One, two, three days pass, and in the middle of the second week in Hell, he begins to crack.
Gone are his half-jokes and little jibes that he directs to his captors in his head. Vanished are the smirks and small chuckles when they leave him be, unable to get him to confess his knowledge.
All that’s left is fear and paranoia and the growing sense that he will die in this shithole, spend his last moments still in pain.
He screams each time the door opens, squirming in his chair until one day he wrenches too hard and feels the bones in his right arm shatter.
His throat is inflamed, his voice hoarse, but he can’t help but to scream and weep and call out for his mother, his brothers, his sister, anyone, to save him, please, he can’t do this, please.
When they leave him to his misery, he rocks the chair back and forth, hoping that his shackles with burst.
The chair topples backwards on day and he slams his head repeatedly on the floor, until blood runs into his eyes and he can’t see a damn thing.
He grows thinner, his beautiful eyes lose their cheery glimmer, his hair begins to fall in clumps.
He wishes he will die, screams at them to fucking kill him already, why won’t they end him, please, just fucking do it.
But despite that, he keeps his secrets stubbornly to himself.
At the end of the second week, he thinks he’s going mad when he hears the fighting beyond his door.
Heart soars, hope rises from the ashes in his heart.
It’s his brothers, he knows, oh, he knows!
The door opens, and he’s expecting to see Skulduggery there. He’s the leader, always in front, with a joke to lighten the mood.
But there are people in black and grey, people that he have only seen once or twice: The Children of the Spider. Already, he can see the little insects scuttling on the floor, and he doesn’t know if he’s dreaming or not.
They unshackle him, silently, and he can’t walk properly, one leg broken from the torture. Instead, he leans on one of their number, a man with dark eyes and no expression.
“Did the Dead Men send you?”
His voice is a whisper, unable to raise it any louder for the fear of losing it completely.
The man does not look at him as they follow the others to the exit of the Hell he spent two weeks in.
“No. They think you are dead. We, however, got wind of your aliveness.”
Just like that, the anger comes cascading down on him, a waterfall of red so harsh that for a moment he cannot see.
They left him for dead.
He has spilled blood for them, he has kept his mouth shut, he has suffered and been in agony until he has wanted to gouge his own eyes out.
And they had given up on him.
He spends a year with the Children of the Spider. They live in grim and squalor, and he slowly regains some semblance of sanity.
But his anger at the Dead Men grows brighter and bigger, even when he tries so hard to forgive them.
They are only human, after all, and this is a war.
When he finally rejoins them, they are surprised (pleasantly) to see that he isn’t dead.
Jokes are exchanged, traditional Dead Men hugs are given, and they do not mention his experience, nor the fact that they let him rot.
He acts like everything is normal. There’s a smile on his face, and despite the scars he now has, he seems pretty sane to them.
Surface image. A little trick he’s honed over the past year.
But every time they go on a mission, he hopes that one of them will be captured.
It’s cruel of him, he knows, but he prays that one of them will know how it feels to be helpless and alone.
Because then, Erskine Ravel will do the very same thing they did to him.
And they will fucking know how undone one becomes when all hope is lost.