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Elias moved slowly, making a meal of Jon's rising anxiety as he prepared whatever punishment he'd concocted for Jon's near-escape. Jon turned over the months he'd spent trapped here, trying to find any point where he might have made a better choice and regained or kept his freedom.
He should have sawed off his foot when it caught in Elias' trap instead of waiting for help to arrive. Jon should have guessed what Elias was like from the moment they met. What more did he need than Elias' serene smile at his pleas for help, and telling Jon he set the trap snapped around his ankle himself with exactly that intention? He counted himself lucky, some days, that Elias didn't complete the tableau by stringing Jon's injured foot around his neck for luck instead of his eye.
The next thing he did was tear Jon's left eye out and drag his limp body, insensate from the pain, back to his workshop and dump Jon in a tiny cage with a conjured muzzle muffling his cries. And his attempts to bite; he thought he remembered trying at least once. The pain and fear blurred those memories.
The muzzle didn't interfere with Elias stripping his clothes off and strapping him to a table to paint symbols on Jon's skin and complete the spell, once he was good and ready. It just quieted Jon's screams. Familiar. Jon's impression of the term was more a black cat than anything like his situation. The joke was on him; the cat would probably be treated better.
Elias clicked his tongue as he smoothed his hands over Jon's body, unable to fight back strapped to the very same table. "I wish you wouldn't hurt yourself like this, pet."
"I wish you would die." It was a stupid thing to say, and he regretted it immediately. It didn't even manage to sound as strong as he wished it was, choked by fear. It was juvenile.
Elias clicked his tongue again. "If you can't keep a civil tongue, I don't have to let you keep it at all."
Jon gulped. "Sorry, sir."
"Good boy." Elias patted his head. Jon burned with humiliation, and the eye left to him burned with tears he couldn't stop.
Jon's head was held tightly to the table by a strap over his forehead, but of course that didn't matter when magic was an option. It took a moment to realize what Elias had slipped under his neck and around.
Elias tapped a fingernail against the bell, making it jingle and leaving no doubt as to what the collar might be.
"Take it off." Jon squirmed, the first time he'd been roused to anything but grief and resignation. "Take it off!"
Elias' fingers pinched over his chin, taking away the tiny movement he could manage in spite of the strap. "You don't have an opinion, pet," he said silkily. "You're a tool. And if you're determined to act out, I see no reason to continue to offer you the luxury of pretending at personhood."
"I'm sorry," he whined not expecting mercy but unable to stem the words. "I won't do it again, sir, please."
Elias snapped his fingers, and magic closed over Jon's jaw.
-
Jon didn't want to leave the table anymore. He whined in his throat, one of the only noises he was capable of like this; Elias didn't bother muting him entirely. Instead of extracting a toll on Jon's body, as he expected, Elias just painted symbols on his skin and extracted an entirely normal about of blood, marrow, and lymph. He didn't want to know what punishment he faced, if it wasn't at the table. He knew what to expect, there.
Still, the moment his hands were free they went to his throat, clawing and tugging at the collar. It didn't have a buckle, unbroken leather all the way around. The bell made a hideous amount of noise.
Elias regarded him with detached interest, even gaze falling over Jon, unsteady beside the table and desperate for a way out. He didn't offer or magic on the smock he let Jon wear when the full expanse of his skin wasn't needed. He sighed.
"I wish you didn't make me do these things to you, pet."
Jon glared. Elias dug his fingers backwards through Jon's hair, almost the possessive strokes of his better moods, but then his fingers closed and he started tugging Jon forward by the hair. Jon moaned in protest.
Please stop. Please just stop.
Elias used his grip on Jon's hair to yank him forward blindly, tossing him ahead so Jon stumbled and reached out instinctively to catch himself. His hands hit wood and something started to glow.
Jon struggled, but his hands were affixed to the wood just as firmly as they were affixed to his wrists. Possibly more so. They only moved when the wood rippled with magic, pulling Jon along with it.
The struggle was brief, fierce, and a resounding victory for the inanimate object.
Jon glared from his position sunk into the wood deeply enough for most of his body to be submerged, eye nearly level with the surface and arms and legs spread. There were iron fitting buried in the wood, and he couldn't escape the fire of contact. His eye, as it so often did, fell to its twin hanging in its pendant around Elias' neck. Elias reached up to grasp it, setting it spinning lazily as he touched a finger to the design painted in the center of Jon's chest.
Everything burned, and when he stopped trying to scream through the gag, the designs ran continuously from the wood over his skin, like mesh holding him in place. Elias flicked his wrist, and Jon had just enough time to gasp in a breath in preparation for begging before wood oozed up over his mouth, as immovable as all the rest. A moment later, it closed down over his empty eye socket as well. He couldn't even struggle.
-
The round wooden panel Jon was trapped in was rolled into the dining hall and mounted on the wall, high enough to make the thought of falling bite with fear. He knew Elias could have levitated him all the way there, as he did to hang him; the long, queasy roll was part of the punishment, Jon assumed.
There was no gloating or taunting. For days, he hardly even saw Elias. Only when he had to pass through on his way elsewhere, taking his meals in the smaller dining hall. Every time he passed, he tapped a finger against the bell, the only acknowledgement he gave Jon. Jon spent hours straining his muscles against immovable wood, afraid the iron would burn straight through to the bone.
Jon knew something was coming when he started to feel himself being drained, some working significant enough to make Elias balk at relying only on his own strength, but still small enough that Jon's presence wasn't required. He often drew on Jon remotely like that to bespell the chores necessary for the house's upkeep into doing themselves, and indeed, brooms and feather dusters soon whisked into the room, cloths polishing the table to a shine in time with them.
When they left, Jon had plenty of time to try not to think about the implications and pray Elias would come for him. The dishes that, hours later, drifted in to set the table were terrible confirmations: Elias intended to entertain, apparently a group of significant size, and he meant to leave Jon hanging up for his guests to gawk at.
The food that eventually began to arrive took his mind off of that in the worst way. Jon hadn't eaten- hadn't needed to eat- since Elias stole his eye. The meal being set out beneath him smelled as it would to any human after a long period of privation. It smelled so good he wanted to cry.
Elias led his guests in soon after that, already laughing and chatting, making Jon feel acutely lonely. They were all plainly sorcerers, but if they had familiars of their own they'd left them at home. Elias wore enough medallions and trinkets around his neck that Jon's eye wouldn't stand out to him if it weren't his own. Elias' friends were of the same mold.
They all regarded Jon with frank amusement, and that was all the attention they cared to give. Once they started on the meal, Jon was utterly ignored.
-
Elias stood after a brutal number of courses, each making Jon wish for simple, human nourishment more than the last. The guests rose along with him, but rather than filing out for conversation elsewhere, they started jockeying for position, eyeing Jon. Elias smiled, and came up to him.
"I hope you gentlemen have decided on what you'd like to find. It's more than earned the punishment." They all laughed.
That was the only warning Jon got before Elias fitted his hand into one of the designs drawn onto his torso, warm in a way Jon was almost grateful for, and the same burning pain overtook him again.
It was a thousand times worse this time. It leached out over his skin, and then it was extinguished by all his focus being stolen by the splitting pain in his head. The wood over his mouth swallowed the sound of his reaction.
Distantly, through the pain, he became aware of something happening in- through?- the wood covering his missing eye. There were... images, of a sort. They were drawn past him too quickly to be grasped, but they were there. It felt strange to associate any kind of sight with that side again.
It kept up for a long time. Jon wasn't aware that it was over in the freezing, ringing emptiness left behind when Elias and his guests departed. The awareness came slowly, and he was just working around to the realization that he'd been used to find something, or maybe several somethings, and that as he didn't trust Elias' friends to be any less unsavory than Elias himself, there was another incalculable weight to add to his conscience. Elias returned as it was all sinking in.
He didn't say a word. He barely even looked at Jon; there was another bout of burning pain-- hardly notable, compared to the last-- and Jon fell heavily to the floor. Elias started dragging him away without letting him get his feet under him. Jon was so disoriented that they were nearly at their destination before he realized that, thankfully, he was once again clothed.
He fell where Elias dropped him. He didn't make any effort to move, to check for light through any crack in the door slammed behind him or rattle against its lock.
After all that, he still wasn't forgiven. There was no point raising his freed voice to plead or demand. Hardly anything, light, sound, smell, vibration, could get through the closet's door once it was locked. That was why it was one of Elias' favorite venues for punishment.
After the mortification of being hung like a portrait, the darkness of the closet was like an old friend. He tossed and turned, trying to find a position that wouldn't put weight on any of the deep iron burns. His fingers slipped under the choking leather around his neck, and the tinkling bell mocked his efforts to claw himself free.