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Caduceus doesn’t take it particularly seriously, when they first grab him.
After all, it’s probably just a misunderstanding or something – he’s never been to this town before, is pretty sure the rest of his new friends haven’t either, and they’ve not been around long enough to have pissed anyone off yet. There’s really no reason for anyone to have any reason to knock him out, truss him up, and toss him in the back of a cart. Probably a case of mistaken identity, nothing serious.
He begins to take it a little more seriously when they manhandle him down into a cellar-network of tunnels, past doors and cells and various offshoots, and he starts getting the feeling that these guys might be organised. That there might be more of them. That this, perhaps, might not be a mistake.
“Hey,” he says, mildly, as they drag him into the middle of a large, dirty-damp room and shove him to the ground. He narrowly misses biting his tongue, and his teeth click together unpleasantly. “Hey, there’s no need for that, really. I dunno why you’ve brought me here, but I’m thinking that maybe you’ve got the wrong person? Or you’re kinda confused, really, ‘cos I’m just saying-”
“Shut the fuck up, cleric,” snaps one of them, and then there’s hands digging into the sides of his jaw, prying his teeth apart so another man can shove a length of sackcloth between them. The musty taste of it fills his mouth, rubs raw at the corners of his soft, sensitive lips as they tie it in a tight knot at the back of his skull. “None of that magic shit here, or we’ll make you wish you were never born.”
When Caduceus bites absently down on the fabric, though, intending to grind the fabric to rags between his broad molars, it’s not rough sackcloth he feels against his tongue and soft palate – instead, it’s the sharp bite of a hundred tiny points, digging their way into the tender flesh of his mouth and ripping. He cries out, belatedly, confused, as the taste of copper-salt fills his mouth. There must be strings of barbed wire laced through the middle of the fabric, he realises, even as he whimpers confusion and pain at the tearing in his tongue and lips and cheeks.
One of the thugs flips him over onto his front with a toe, grinds his face into the worn stone floor with a heavy boot on the back of his neck. “Yeah, that’s what I fuckin’ thought,” the guy mutters. “Not so goddamn big and scary without your friends and your spells, huh? You’re pretty fuckin’ skinny for a cow, actually. Probably didn’t even need the two of us, I coulda taken you down on my own.”
Caduceus groans, unable to articulate properly with a tongue full of wire and barbs ripping into the sensitive sides of his mouth. He wants to say hey man, what’s your problem and I think you’ve got the wrong person, I don’t know you, but instead he can feel the short, soft hairs of the fur around his lips clumping sticky and wet with bloodied saliva. His tongue is throbbing in time to his heartbeat, and every time he tries to swallow the coppery spit welling up in his mouth the barbs just get driven deeper, lodging more firmly into the soft, wet, vulnerable places of his mouth.
He’s distracted enough by the metal-and-salt of it that he hardly notices when the other man straddles his back, knees either side of his chest and a sudden weight on his shoulder blades. “Keep that foot on his neck,” the man warns, and Caduceus feels a hand grab at his ear, ragged nails biting into the thin, blood-hot skin of it. “He’s not gonna like this.”
It happens before he can react, before he can protest or buck or twist away from the weight on top of him. There’s a hand on his ear, cold metal against his ear, a click – and then pain, sharp and throbbing and wet, and he’s moaning low, unsteady, helpless as they thread more cold metal through the newly-punched circle in his body.
“That’s it,” says one of them – he’s unsure which, vision still hazy with the pain-shock of being tagged. A hand smooths over his hair, as if he were a wild animal in need of stilling. “Not so bad, huh? Only two more to go.”
No, he moans, but it comes out muffled through the cloth and slick with wire-blood, unintelligible. He can feel hands on his ear again, tugging at the aching-sharp skin, pulling it out so they can slot the punch over a fresh section of flesh-
He loses time for a while. Everything goes blanked, warped and wavy and unreal in a way that he can’t explain, in a way that terrifies him in the abstract but is blessed relief in the concrete present.
It doesn’t last forever.
“Wakey wakey,” sing-songs a voice from behind him, and reality is back – along with the hot throb of his ear, and the trickle of blood down the short fuzz-fur of his neck, and the unfamiliar weight of metal tags through his ear. The man flicks them, one at a time, and Caduceus flinches with each sharp stab of bright-hot pain. “Cleric-mage. Never been owned. Nice shiny tag for your new owner to engrave,” he lists off, tapping each of the metal circles in turn, making them clink together, the noise too loud so close to his delicate eardrums.
Why are you doing this, Caduceus moans against the gag, with the confusion of someone who understands death and the natural order of things but knows little of human cruelty. The words taste of blood, don’t make it past the sackcloth, and he chokes on them as the barbed wire bites into his flesh. Why. Why. Why.