Chapter Text
Ray woke in a gray room, tied to a chair, to his own screaming and to all-consuming pain from the sharp sting of an electric prod at his temple.
He felt small muscles in his face twitch. At first he couldn’t see anything but the flash of light and many small dark spots.
When his vision cleared, there were three of them—not only the Darhks, father Damien and daughter Nora, but also Kuasa, who’d tried to drown him all those months ago in 2042, when they’d met Zari.
They took turns with the torture, sometimes all three of them in the room, sometimes two or one.
Kuasa’s preferred method was strangely intimate, given that it involved holding him as he was bound in the chair and pulling his head back as she poured water into his nose and mouth.
Each time he felt a primal panic rise in him, and then she’d abruptly stop and step back. He’d choke out the water as best he could, an intolerable burning in his nose, his throat increasingly sore and stinging from coughing out the water, an acid taste remaining in the very back of his throat.
She’d wait until he could breathe again, allow a few deep breaths—and then she’d do it again.
Nora played with the electric prod. The way her face became curious and childlike as she tentatively tried out different settings and different parts of his body was heartbreakingly disturbing. He couldn’t help but remember her thirteen year old self that he and Zari had tried to help in the asylum and in that coffeeshop. Thankfully, she kept her attacks “proper,” never going below the belt, but the sting still left him involuntarily screaming each time. After a while he noticed the distinct smell of ionized air.
When he could speak, he begged her to stop, argued that the torture would do no good, but she seemed more fascinated by how the prod abruptly stopped his pleading, and in trying different ways to increase his screaming, and didn’t seem to be listening to him at all.
Damien Darhk smiled an indulgent smile as Ray gasped and cried out in pain. Nora glanced over at her father, and Ray could see her searching her father’s face for approval. She wanted, Ray realized, to make him proud of her.
Damien Darhk’s go to method was choking via his magic, though he also played with the electric prod, sometimes with Nora there, showing her settings and techniques. Sometimes, though, he moved his hand in the way he did when he was choking, someone with his magic, but Ray could still breathe just fine—but Ray felt deeply strange, panicked and as though a million ants were crawling inside of him. He never knew exactly what this was but he suspected the man was doing something to his blood, perhaps slowing down the flow of it.
They usually kept him tied to the chair, wrists bound in front of him. The room was plain but the time period they were in had to be 20th century or later—the off-white and darker grey cinderblock painted walls and the floating arm floor lamps plugged in to 3 pronged GFCI outlets told him that.
During the torture sessions, sunlight streamed in from windows behind him. When the light from those windows faded and the only light left was from fluorescent ceiling lights, they left him alone.
He was secured to the chair still and wasn’t going anywhere.
Still, he allowed himself a few minutes of out of control struggle. It did nothing to help him get free or to give him any sense of power or hope.
He stopped and breathed hard. He felt in his throat, in the pained buzzing in his head, in the aches of his muscles, the echoes of what they’d done to him that day. Memories of his crewmates came into his mind then--Sara’s mischievous laughter, Mick’s grumpy scowl, Zari’s wry grin--
A sensation welled up in him at these thoughts, not from the torture but from him, a pressure in his chest and behind his eyes, and his eyes were stinging. He was never going to see them again. The tears came convulsively then, washing through him. The certain knowledge of his irrevocable aloneness left him sobbing helplessly.
A part of him wanted to make the argument for hope--he’s always been good at that, and people had come to expect it of him, that almost impossible optimism. But there was no one to be optimistic for, and he was too overwhelmed to manage it. In the clinical harshness of the fluorescent ceiling lights, his face chilled from tears not yet dried, he felt a strange relief to let go of hope and to face squarely how grim his situation was.
Eventually, he was able to sleep for what might have been an hour or two, slumped in the chair, head hanging.