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The hallway is long. Cold concrete floor and walls interspersed with dim bulbs overhead cast a sterile white light ahead of her. The cart she’s pushing rattles beside her footsteps, echoing a tinny cacophony of noise down the stretch of floor behind her.
The single door ahead of her is huge, iron-clad, with a large and very heavy-looking padlock sitting on its latch. She pulls a silver key out of her pocket as she approaches. The lock clicks out of place and hangs idly.
Lesley hefts the door back. Light spills into the room and a wall of stale, humid air rushes out to meet her, prickling her skin. She can see his outline faintly against the backdrop of darkness ahead of her, and the white-green shimmer of his eyes reflecting light from the hallway–another augment he received that she didn’t.
The room is a concrete holding cell, one of dozens scattered across the compound, secluded far away from training grounds and the canteen and their sleeping quarters. Far away from the sound of voices, the noise of trainees enduring the newest drills, where no gunshots or wails of pain can penetrate. It’s small, unbearably small, especially for him. Maybe a dozen or so feet wide if she had to guess, with a low hanging ceiling far too short for him to stand up comfortably if he had to.
She shuffles in, pulling the cart through the threshold. Sliding her hand across the left wall, she finds the bulk of the light switch.
He flinches and hisses when it comes on, eyes stinging from however many hours sitting in the dark. The room is immediately swallowed by that same sterile white light that bounces off the steel of his bonds as he bows his head.
She can get a good look at him now, and her stomach drops at the state he’s in. He’s sitting upright on the chair, collared and straitjacketed, held in place by thick leather and chains around his waist and chest. The white fabric is dark in some spots, stained by sweat and dirt and his blood-drenched old clothes underneath seeping through.
No food or water for days, no contact with the outside, no light, no sound except for his own breathing. Tucked away like a weapon, like a gun, until they decide he’s useful again.
“I’m sorry, Raz,” she says quietly. She continues forward, bringing the cart to a stop a few feet away from him.
He tries to raise his head to look at her as she gets closer, but he’s squinting, eyes still adjusting to what’s likely the first light he’s seen in days.
“I can turn the light off if it hurts too much,” she says.
Razlo shakes his head, still not quite looking at her. “No,” he manages, voice muffled under fabric and metal. “I want to see you.”
“Let me get this thing off, at least,” Lesley says as she reaches for her pocket.
She pulls out the silver key. Razlo tries to stare at it in her hand, but his eyes are still too blurry and he can’t seem to keep them open for longer than a few moments. She knows he likely already recognises what it is, though. He’s seen it many times before.
She connects it to the lock at the back of his head, holding his mask in place firm against his flesh with thick straps of leather. It clicks, then her solid metal hands come to rest on either side of his face. He inhales as she pulls it away, and she imagines what kind of a relief it would be to finally breathe air no longer thick and sticky with the humidity of his own breath. It smells fucking foul in here.
Lesley sets the mask aside and watches him breathe. Considering the key still in her hand for a moment, she moves to insert it into the lock sitting on his chest where his arms are tucked under each other, thick fabric and leather encasing them tightly against his body.
“No,” he pulls back from her, shaking his head. “If they come down here and see I’m out…” he trails off. His voice is groggy as he speaks and she can see his eyes must have finally adjusted because he’s looking straight at her. “I don’t want you down here, too.”
Her shoulders drop at the realisation. She exhales, disappointed, and nods, placing the key back into her pocket.
There’s silence for a few moments while Lesley brushes several locks of long, white hair out of his face. It looks greasy and damp, even matted in some places, assumedly where the mask’s straps dug into his head. He leans into her touch, angling his head against her hand. Both of her hands come to sit at either side of his face then, a cradle of cool metal against warm, sticky skin. His eyes flutter shut as she traces her forefinger over indents the mask left on his cheeks, very quickly fading with each stroke.
“I wish I could’ve gotten down here sooner. I only found out where you were yesterday,” she says, her voice soft and apologetic. She notices his shoulders relax as she talks. “I had to beg Chapel to even let me come down here.”
She feels his head stiffen at that. His eyes are wide when she looks down.
“Don’t worry about that, though,” she says, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, hoping it’s of some reassurance. “I got what I wanted and I’m here now, right? And you must be fuckin’ starving.”
With that she turns to the cart, retrieving a large steel canteen from the second tier. She holds it to his mouth and stares as his throat works, several droplets running down his chin as he drinks eagerly, undoubtedly for the first time in days.
When the canteen’s empty, she tucks it away and removes the lid off the old serving tray and pulls the cart closer so he can see. The smell of cooked meat tickles her nose, and she can feel her mouth begin to water as she starts to carve flesh from bone.
He lurches forward suddenly when she raises a piece to his mouth, the restraints threatening to jerk him back into place. She hesitates for a moment, pulling back just barely to ensure his artificially-long canines miss her fingers–not that they would have hurt her. He barely chews at all before he swallows, mouth agape and eyes wide with anticipation. He eagerly takes another piece from her fingers and juice from the meat drips from his lips as he bites down before the whole thing’s in his mouth. Tiny rivulets of blood cascade down over the rolls of his chin, down his neck to collect where the leather of his collar is pulled taut against his flesh, making his skin glisten. He barely chews at all before her hand is readying more meat. He lets her place it in his mouth before he starts chewing.
Suddenly a memory resurfaces, one from when Lesley was a child, patiently watching her father cut up inedible refuse from a tomas butcher to throw to the dogs. She feels a smile pinch at her cheeks as the image of her father’s face beams into her mind, a thick red beard streaked with grey framing his smile, disappearing into a mop of equally thick red hair. She silently scolds herself for having likened Razlo to a dog–a hungry, starved dog, shoved down into this dark, dingy hole because he misbehaved. She feels anger claw up from her chest at the thought he has to spend another couple days down here alone and tries instead to focus on the task at hand.
“That’s all they gave me,” Lesley says a handful of minutes later, placing the knife aside on the now-empty tray, wiping her hand down with a washcloth.
He swallows the last mouthful, his hunger she knows from experience barely satiated, if at all. Lesley moves items on the cart around, a basin with water from the second tier now sits at the top. She submerges the cloth and wrings it out before bringing it to his face.
She gingerly wipes down his face, rinsing and wringing the cloth out between every section. Starting with his forehead, she removes layers of sweat and dust and remnants of sand from the folds of his skin, brushing his hair back out of his face as she goes.
He closes his eyes and tilts his head up into the feeling, the moisture cooling against his skin no doubt a relief trapped in the humidity of the room.
She removes a buildup of crust from around his eyes, wipes over skin soft with tears and sweat. She takes her time washing around his mouth, one hand rising to cradle his jaw again. His mouth parts open slightly at the touch, inviting her to thumb at his bottom lip. She imagines, through the hard metal alloy and wiring of her hand how soft his lip would feel, glistening under the light.
She thumbs at it one more time before moving her hand further up the side of his face.
There’s no hesitation on either part when she leans down to put her lips to his. He moves against his restraints, what little he can with chains across his chest and shoulders holding him back, and into her more. She feels suddenly alight with want, desperation at the touch of her own skin flush against his. Her other hand, still holding the washcloth, reaches around his neck past his collar to sit firmly against the back of his head as her other hand rests on his cheek.
They stay like that for several long moments, Razlo tugging fruitlessly at his restraints, pulling them taut as his body reaches forward. Her knees brush against his. He tastes like cooked blood.
Lesley breaks away momentarily, to catch her breath, to look at him; eyes eager and soft, tracing her own, mouth open slightly, chest rising and falling with the excitement. She goes to kiss him again, but hesitates. She pulls back as her expression suddenly sobers.
“They’ll be expecting me to return soon,” she says, voice low. “They watch like hawks every time I do this. Any longer and they’ll be sending someone down here.”
She reaches for the basin, wringing the cloth out. She finishes wiping over his chin, using her pinky finger to gently part the collar away from his skin as she wipes down his neck, retrieving the blood in between the folds of his skin.
She wrings the cloth one final time before reluctantly grabbing the mask–his muzzle–and wipes down the inside of it. He watches her as she does, head turning slowly with every one of her movements.
Finally, she holds it up, her lips pursed, brow furrowed. Razlo’s eyes are half-lidded as he raises his head, obediently, and lowers his shoulders. A posture she assumes is mechanical, like he’s done many times before. She takes her time lingering over every strap, making sure it all sits just that bit looser than it was before she took it off.
She retrieves the key from her pocket again. The one from Chapel’s personal quarters, one that was handmade specifically for the kind of locks that keep Razlo in place.
She slides it into the lock atop his head, and it clicks. All the straps around his head pull tighter, the mechanism winding them further into the mask.
Razlo sighs. Lesley holds his face again and he looks up at her.
“I’m sorry, Raz,” she starts, running her thumb over where she assumes his lips are. “Sorry about all this. It’s not fair. He thinks he’s got free reign to do whatever he wants. Fuck up someone else’s day–” her brow hardens, her jaw works. For a moment it seems like she’s looking through him, not at him. “Fuck up everything, and then–” her features soften up, the edge in her voice dissipating. “Then you end up back here. Always you.”
She lets out a scoff, rolling his head between her hands gently, playfully. Like it’ll help somehow.
“Livio would take some of this off your back, y’know that, right? You don’t have to do everything yourself.”
“No,” Razlo says, shaking his head, balking at her touch, just slightly. “Not his responsibility.” His voice is low and stern. Lesley recognises it from conversations she’s overheard, where Razlo doesn’t have the energy in the moment to fight. “Never his responsibility. He’s mine.”
“Livio wants to–”
“No,” Razlo jerks his head from her hands as the word punches out. He’s more forceful this time, his eyes peering over the edges of the mask to bore down on her. “I don’t care what he thinks he wants, I’m not letting them put him through this.”
“You’re always dealing with this shit by yourself,” Lesley says. “Day after day you clean up after his mess, and every time you end up back down here,” she tries to touch his face again, but he twitches away, pointedly avoiding looking at her. “Alone, again, while he’s up there, laughing at you. Laughing at what he knows he can do to you.”
Razlo’s silent. Lesley feels her stomach roil at the thought of Sidney; the wide-eyed, toothy grin, the dark curls glued to his face with sweat, the wild, delighted screams of laughter that bounce down concrete halls. The spray of blood and every disgusting, wet crunch of blade against bone, the promising new trainee one of the Masters had taken an interest in reduced to a writhing mass of viscera and screams to stop that Razlo was just a minute too late to answer, dutifully heeding Chapel’s call from across the dust and dirt of the training grounds where Livio was standing a handful of moments before.
No one else dared to try and pull him off, because no one else could. Because Sidney wouldn’t let anyone else try.
Lesley had watched it from afar. Sid tore the kid apart, targeted because he knew his augments were fresh. Slow. There wasn’t a whole lot left to salvage by the time Razlo got there and instantly grabbed Sid by his neck, yanking him to his feet, bodily throwing him into the ground like he weighed all of nothing.
Lesley was expecting Sid to jump right back up and drive that huge blade of his into Razlo’s shoulder, or spine, or neck, but he didn’t even move. He just lay on the ground, limbs splayed right where he landed, cackling through crooked blood-spattered teeth as Razlo tried to bundle up what remained of the kid and disappeared from the training grounds.
“He’s mine,” Razlo says, staring at the floor in thought. “He’s always been mine. He’ll always be mine.”
Before Lesley, for almost as long as Livio’s had him and he’s had Livio, Razlo’s had Sidney, too. A friend, a lover, a shadow–constantly at his heels, unavoidable, inseparable. Inescapable.
Lesley came to the Eye long after Razlo and Livio and Sidney had, desperate for a meal and shelter from the heat more than anything else, the sudden death of her father pushing her forward. She wasn’t there to witness what Razlo and Sidney used to be.
She always likened it to stumbling over a town just after a sandstorm had passed, when everything that wasn't tied down was upturned and in ruins, sand and dust choking the life out of what was left. Razlo had told her he wasn’t always like this, unrecognisable in everything but appearance from the person who would have done anything for Razlo if he’d just asked him to, who exists as it seems now only to pry and prod and torment Razlo however he sees fit. Razlo doesn’t really talk much about what they used to be–not anymore, anyway–but when he does, Lesley can always hear the longing in his voice. Forlorn and mournful, reminiscing over something he’s not certain he believes he can ever get back, despite how hard he tries to make things right. Tries hard to appease Sid’s endless desire for carnage, satiate his blood lust, the hunger for violence, for something to break, placating all his anger in whatever way Sid demands. Willing to heap whatever else he needs onto his already bruised and bloody back, while Sidney laughs at everything he’s wrought, everything he knows he can get away with, every little piece and shred of goodwill he uses to his advantage, because he knows he’s Razlo’s responsibility.
And if Razlo can’t do as he’s ordered, can’t keep Sid obedient and in check like he should be, Sid knows it won’t be himself in chains thrown deep down into the bowels of the complex, tucked away and out of sight.
He doesn’t hide it, either. The games he plays aren’t subtle or coy. He knows he can hurt Razlo as easily and fiercely as he can fracture the shin of some poor trainee with the heel of his boot.
Lesley scowls at the thought.
“If it were up to me…” she starts, pausing for a few moments, hesitating, like the words will hurt him. Like they could ever hurt him more than he’s already been hurt. “He’d be in the fucking ground.”
Razlo doesn’t move.
“You should go,” he says, finally. His voice is low and unaffected. “Don’t make them come down here.”
Lesley hesitates, a rebuttal already forming in her head, a fight she’s had before, but she knows he won’t let her argue.
Reluctantly, she finishes tidying the cart up and starts to turn towards the door.
“I’ll be back once it’s time to let you out,” she says after she shuffles the cart outside the door, turning back to look at him a final time. She can really see how tired he is now, like all the remaining energy he did have was sucked out of him at the mention of Sidney’s name. It’s probably not that far from the truth.
There’s a moment of silence before Razlo breaks it, shifting to speak.
“Stay away from him,” he says. “He might go looking for you, knowing I’m not out there. He’ll tear you apart. You don’t know what he’s capable of.”
“No, I do, Raz,” Lesley says. “I know exactly what he’s capable of. But I’m not the one he wants to hurt.”
Razlo doesn’t say anything.
She turns the light off, and the door creaks as it shuts. The lock clicks back into place.