Work Text:
Jon's shoulders tensed the moment he heard the lock, cringing away from the anticipation of light. In the dark, at least he didn't have to anticipate new species of cruelty being inflicted on his body and soul. He was blinded with the first beam; the door opened on his good side, but the only alternative was letting Elias lurk in his blind spot.
"Leave me alone." He intended it as a snarl, or maybe a plea, but it came out as more of a croak. His bones still ached, some of the iron burns rooted deep in his flesh from prolonged contact still hadn't healed, and days or weeks in the dark had given him plenty of time to imagine what awful deeds he might have aided at Elias' dinner party. It hardly mattered.
Elias clicked his tongue, managing despite Jon's best efforts to combine the light and his eye and reach over unseen, snagging his fingers under the collar's band and pulling Jon forward gagging. It hurt; Jon had very little unbroken skin under or around the collar, the boredom of solitude worrying away at his latest humiliation. "I thought you were ready to be civilized now, pet. If I was incorrect in that assumption, you can always go back into the closet when we've finished."
Elias held his arm stiff, ensuring that Jon was forced to choose between crawling or stumbling hunched over. He chose to walk, though his back would surely make him regret it later. It wasn't fair, to be denied the need for food or water, to be bent entirely to Elias' will, but to still suffer pains both magic and mundane. He might not need to bother caring about his back, depending on what Elias wanted to cast. There were plenty of workings that would leave him too sore to isolate that sort of specific ache. The jingle of the bell newly affixed to his neck tried to sing him back into the belief that resisting its addition so strenuously had been a worthy cause, even as it chafed and drew blood from crackling scabs.
Jon was clearly still out of favor, either from the sham escape or his request to be left alone, because Elias secured Jon's collar low to the floor. The collar was already inventing new physical miseries by the dozen. Before Jon could struggle into a more bearable posture, Elias flicked his wrist and constructs sprung into being, holding Jon in place where he wanted his familiar situated.
Jon was left on his knees, legs held together by liquid, swirling light at his sides, more light binding his wrists together behind his back. The only decision left to him was whether he would strain at the end of the chain or give up the fight for his dignity and bow his forehead to the floor, supplicating and submissive at Elias' feet.
He only fought for a moment. It hardly seemed worth it to protest for the microscopic tatters of dignity left to him when he knew that Elias was even more likely than usual to drain him until he couldn't maintain any posture but a lifeless heap. There was no way to catch sight of what Elias was doing like this no matter how he squirmed, and that warning was the only thing that made the risk of injuring himself when he collapsed worth it.
He thought he was suppressing the gasps and grunts of trying to discover by millimeters a way to keep his skin away from the iron burn of the chain, but apparently not. Before beginning the chant to accompany whatever diagrams he sketched while Jon was locked in the closet, Elias wrapped another swirl of light around Jon's face, entirely extinguishing his ability to make noise and forcing his lungs to strain and struggle for breath. Muzzled, again, like an animal. A more thorough working than Elias usually bothered with, like he expected to need very loud sounds stifled.
Behind the impenetrable barrier that guarded the sound from even his own ears, Jon allowed himself a whimper.
When light began to flicker in his periphery he tensed, even knowing that it would do nothing but intensify the pain and prolong the hangover afterward. He'd never been much for Latin, but his ears strained for snatches he might recognize, clues to what havoc Elias would siphon his soul to wreak.
He didn't need to use his eye to know what he'd see even if he were permitted to sit up, so he closed it. Jon tried to narrow his focus to his forehead against the cool floor, to block out the tearing in his bones and shredding in his spine, the awful hum that eventually drowned out everything else, the hollow ache of his empty eye socket. His mind played out in brilliant detail the aggregate memory of every time he'd ever watched Elias grow rapt and underlit, eyes alight with an entirely mundane cruelty, hand clenched tight around the necklace, cupped over the crystal in which Jon's stolen eye spun and rolled frantically with the currents of the magic.
The air fizzed and crested, and Jon tried to flinch, the pure magic he'd been forcibly transmuted into sizzling everywhere the iron chain touched.
He felt the spell fall into place in his molars, but when Elias vanished his bindings the only change was that his joints flopped into a more comfortable position and his quiet cries began to bounce and echo through the laboratory. His eyelids were too heavy to do anything but let tears bleed out. His cheek was crushed to burning iron.
Jon couldn't flinch when Elias tapped a foot against his side, but he wanted to. There was no way to know he was coming with the roar in his ears still receding, and no way to guess whether Elias' anger had faded with his eyelid as heavy as a cinder block. Jon braced, mentally, to be kicked and taunted, or dumped back into the closet for another eon deprived of light and sound.
Elias' hand skimmed over Jon's hair and his bones began to wither within his skin. He breathed a sigh of relief. It was agony, the first time Elias molded him into a shape not his own, but it paled in comparison to the coring torture of casting or the electric buzz of understimulation hammering the inside of his skull for days. It meant all the human injuries melting away. The ache of his soul never entirely faded, but the iron burns and bloody mess under the collar vanished entirely under fur.
Elias finally released his collar from the chain and scooped Jon into his arms, jostling his aching body into a more normal shape that his immovable sprawl. The jingle of his collar's bell was less humiliating like this. Jon always liked cats. He envied their composure, now. A cat was simple, could curl up and be consoled without worrying about disaster wrought on a human scale.
It was wonderful to curl up and let Elias stroke him, pretending all was right with the world and this was a bizarre glimpse into the life of one of the scraggly cats that lived in the alley near his home, before. The weighty horror of his missing eye was alleviated by becoming unremarkable beside notched ears and docked tails, another hard life like every other creature in the crowd, all free. Just accept that he was a pet. Accept that "pet," the only thing Elias had ever called him, was all he was. Just let Elias' hand over his coat soothe away some of the lingering pain of spellwork. Just give in, for a few hours. Only a few.