Chapter Text
He exhales, lying quietly on the concrete floor. The coldness of the stone seeps through the hood covering his head and chills the back of his neck. A blindfold rests heavily over his eyes, causing sparkling patterns to appear in the darkness. He shifts. The cloth and leather of the straitjacket tightens around his chest and he quickly moves to relieve the pressure. He’s uncomfortable enough as it is. There’s a leather muzzle strapped to his face and the inside edges of the hood, keeping him from biting or speaking clearly. He has very unnatural teeth. Two sets, a smaller inside the larger, all ridged like shark’s teeth. Apparently very frightening for people.
He’s not entirely sure how long he’s been down here on his own. Normally someone comes to rough him up every few days or so. But they haven’t come in what he would guess is a couple of months. That means it’s been months since he last had water. Longer since he had food.
But he will live on. He doesn’t need food. He doesn’t need anything to stay alive. He ponders this, lying on his back like he’s stargazing. A man who cannot die, no matter the circumstances. The definition of immortality. He is immortal, as far as he’s aware. His captors know that, too. He doesn’t know why they bother to keep him here. He’s going to escape one day. Even if he has to wait until this prison crumbles to dust, he’ll get out eventually.
He slowly rolls onto his side and curls into the foetal position, attempting to drive away the cold as the freezing air of the cell wraps around his body. A body that’s dressed in bloodied rags.
They want to humiliate him. To break him. Collars, cages, torture. It’ll take a lot more than that to truly hurt him. He’s lived through pain that mortals couldn’t even begin to imagine.
He knows how to stay sane, even in conditions like this. The key is to continue remembering. To never forget a single thing. Because once he starts forgetting, he’ll begin to lose sight of the line between what’s real and what they want him to believe.
He repeats his name to himself. His name is one of the very few things in this world that belongs to him. Raven. It’s been a long time since he was called by his name. He likes his name. He thinks it suits him. Raven– a harbinger of death and destruction, a carrion creature that bridges the gap between life and death. Someone so deeply entwined in death that life itself has no grip on him.
Unfortunately, certain things do still have a grip on him. Namely, his captors. Eclipse Team. A wing of a little organisation called PAX. He’s been told it stands for Protection Agency International, but he’s not entirely sure what they’re protecting people from. Themselves, maybe. Because, after all, their little group includes those who the polite people call ‘Thauma’. Bullshit name, in his opinion. There’s nothing thaumaturgical about it. Just normal people with stolen quarks.
He’s no fan of PAX. They want to hurt him. After he was imprisoned, that’s all they would do. They hated him. Still hate him. They beat him and tortured him to try and get answers. When they realised he would not give them any answers, did they stop? No, of course not. He is different, and they are scared.
Then, after everything, they threw him down here to forget about him. Like a bad dream or a monster under the bed. But he is eternal and forever. His one job is to keep living. He is the only reason the world has survived this long. But they don’t know that, even though he tried to explain. They want answers, but they don’t seem to listen if he gives them.
He doesn’t like to think about how they captured him, but the thoughts creep in from time to time. After so many days alone, he tends to run out of things to occupy his mind. Once again, he runs over the sequence of events that day, trying to find where he went wrong.
All the days before he was captured, he never noticed anything amiss. Why should he have? He was invisible, quite literally. No one saw him. He spoke to no one, walking alone through the world like a living ghost.
But they must have been tracking him. Now, in hindsight, there were a few things that he should have noticed. Someone looking in his direction too long, the same car driving past multiple times. They probably had people following him for months. Probably thought they were so smart. They had their reasons, he supposes. Every Thauma has to be registered, but he was not. That’s what they were upset about, to start with. His response to that was his tests clearly weren’t returning with markers for Thauma. He just wanted to be left alone. If they had listened to him, they would have understood. But, as he’s well aware, they don’t tend to pay attention to what he tells them.
Then, of course, there was the fateful day. The day where his already miserable existence went from bad to worse. It’s painful, to be a walking shadow. But from there, being taken and thrust into the spotlight of the world– well. There’s a reason shadows never appear in bright light.
It was perhaps just past midnight when it happened. A city park in the north of Thailand. PAX’s Eclipse Team ambushed him. It didn’t strike him as very honourable. First, they tried to just take him down using a more peaceful method, relative to what happened later. Two tranquiliser darts to the back, each with enough sedative to take down an elephant. They had no effect.
Then, they must have turned to their snipers, as he found himself with a bullet through the head a few seconds later. That, again, had no effect. He just got up and started looking for a way out. But they escalated again, coming out from the trees and bringing their vehicles down the roads to form blockades. If he remembers correctly, there was at least one military division there as well.
That was when he realised he might have to fight. They had set up physical barriers to stop him escaping, and an odd kind of barrier that prevented him from simply leaving via teleportation.
Now, that was bad. He might be an incredibly powerful man, but he was not really what one would call a ‘fighter’. He knew how to fight hand to hand, but not in a war-like way. He was alone constantly. He never had to fight in this kind of combat. He carried nothing but an old, rusted weapon. His only assistance was his previous knowledge of martial arts, his non-lethal powers, and of course, his one deadly power. But, unfortunately, that power took far too long to wind up to be of any help in a fast paced fight for survival. His non-lethal powers were quicker and easier to use, but hardly enough to deal with the sheer numbers he was facing.
He had no chance of winning. But he fought anyway. He had been tied down before, and he never wanted it to happen again. His life was already terrible enough. He didn’t want it to get any worse.
But he was trapped. He had nowhere to go. His flesh and bones may have regenerated at an astounding rate, but he was being shot and thrown into trees and blown up repeatedly. He was able to dodge most attacks, but some were going to hit no matter how he tried. The toll that pain takes on a body, both physically and mentally, is immense.
Eventually he was too exhausted, too pained to continue. His mind failed him and he had one of what the PAX agents refer to as ‘seizures’. They’re not seizures, but he doesn’t care enough to pursue the matter.
He remembers the moment when he collapsed to the ground amidst the rubble of buildings they had destroyed in their rage. They blamed him for that destruction, of course. That was all he became. A scapegoat, some monstrous enemy they could pin their worldly troubles on. He remembers the humiliation as he came back to his mind, seeing them standing over him. They dragged him to his knees, tore his weapon away from him. The separation from it hurt him more than they could ever know.
He remembers the jubilant cheers of the spectators that had gathered. They already hated him, despite not knowing his supposed crimes. He found that was a trend that continued.
The side of his head is resting on the cold ground. He feels the lead collar around his neck rub more of his skin away. The mechanisms inside whir and hum as he moves. A thick black cord running from a hole in the wall is plugged into a charging port at the side, keeping it at full charge. A damping collar. Or, as the polite people say, a ‘risk reducing device’. He refuses to call it that.
Stupid thing. Taking away what’s rightfully his and reducing him to nothing more than a man who can’t die. A very personal kind of hell. Not dying may sound wonderful, but when one is being tortured day in and day out it gets a little tedious.
He’s broken the wire before in an attempt to escape, but the collar was still at full power. One of his captors would find out what he’d done and repair it before it had a chance to run out of power. Even if they didn’t notice within a day, the collar, at his guess, takes nearly a month to run out fully. He’d have to wait for so long, and even then it would be permanently locked around his neck.
The PAX agents, Eclipse Team, his captors, had this damping collar made specifically for him. He was far too powerful for the ones used on captured Thauma. He is more than just some Thauma, some person with stolen power. They weren’t born with those quarks. They were given them. They took them.
Those restraints for Thauma would never have held him. They just broke and fell away when his captors tried to use them on him. For nearly a year, they had him wearing everything they could think of. Damping collars and bands, locked around his neck and wrists and ankles. Even with all of these, the sheer extent of his power would short them out constantly. One would break, then the others in quick succession. So they experimented and stuck needles into him until they finally made the collar that would reduce him to what he is now.
Nearly two years now, he’s had this damping collar. For more than two years, he’s been in the hands of PAX. Two years. That’s a long time. Longer than it sounds. He’s been without his powers for so long that he’s beginning to forget the extent of them. That frightens him. He’s trying so hard to stay whole, but he’s slowly losing himself.
The day they made the collar that would fully contain his powers was a terrible one. The moment they knew he would bleed and keep bleeding, they attempted to execute him. That’s what they do to people they’re scared of. Not that they’d ever admit it, but the dozens of powerful Thauma he’s been on death row with say otherwise. He went through a lot of pain in those months. They all did. Now it’s just him.
After all their trying, they realised they would never kill him. They had hundreds of meetings with the United Nations in an attempt to decide what to do with him. No country wanted to be responsible for his imprisonment. They were smart enough to know that it would be far too much work to keep him caged for long periods of time. So they shunted him between countries like a game of pass the parcel. Except the prize was a ticking time bomb.
Finally, he ended up here. The United States of America, he believes. They never told him where he actually is, but by their accents and mannerisms, they were fairly easy to identify. He’s been in their hands for, at his guess, around a year. Half the length of his whole imprisonment. He hates them the most, the ‘US PAX Branch’. The USA Eclipse Team. They’re all sadistic liars. They say one thing and do another. They want him to lose his mind, to break under their fists, to beg them for death.
If only they knew who they were dealing with. That he wasn’t just some Thauma, some witch, some demon. If only they knew he wasn’t delusional like they claim. He tightens his fists, fingers rubbing against the thick fabric of the straitjacket.
He shifts again, new lights sparking in the darkness. He almost misses being tortured, because at least then his mind had some kind of stimulation. It’s boring, being alone by himself for so long. But he knows this is just a waiting game. He’s not going to break first. Patience is, as they say, a virtue.
Something brushes his leg. A rat. There’s a lot of rats down here. He was furious at first, the way he had been abandoned to a place where rats crawled all over him and ate away at his ears and nose. But he learnt to ignore them. It’s not worth worrying about trivial injuries.
Something moves over his face. He assumes it’s another rat until he hears a voice. He doesn’t move, doesn’t let the person know how relieved he is to feel their presence. He was so bored by himself.
The person slaps his face. They have gloves on, making the hit rather soft. They speak. A man. A man that he’s pretty sure he knows all too well. One of the liars. His voice is very recognisable, mainly due to how often he’s bothered Raven during his imprisonment. He has a slight accent, and makes seemingly involuntary clicking noises between some of his words. The man takes his shoulders, shaking him. “Come on, wake up. Please, you can’t be dead now…”
Raven slowly and rather painfully moves his head so he’s staring straight up again, revelling in sounds he hasn’t heard in so long. The man’s breathing, the movement of his clothes. The man mumbles, “Yes, come on. Wake up,” before shaking him again. “You have to come with me.”
He narrows his eyes under the blindfold, running his forked tongue over his double set of teeth. He’s not doing anything. If the man is going to leave him by himself for months, then he’s getting the silent treatment again.
The man grabs him by the shoulders and hauls him up into a sitting position. “Come on. I know you’re awake, don’t just ignore me. This is a matter of life and death.”
He doesn’t care about life and death. Obviously this man has forgotten who he is over the time that he’s left Raven alone. Not that he ever believed Raven to start with.
He sighs. He knows who this is. This is Gray Spring. Doctor Gray Spring. The psychologist assigned to Raven by PAX, which Raven imagines must be an awful job. But the pay must be good. It’s probably the only reason Gray stuck around.
Gray isn’t even a PAX agent– he’s just some poor idiot who signed up for this terrible job. Though, Raven suspects he’s not as mild-mannered as he seems. Raven managed to scare away all of the other doctors who were assigned to him. All except for Gray.
He doesn’t particularly want to talk to his doctor right now, but even just a few moments of interaction will make his solitude more bearable. Hopefully Gray will leave him alone again soon.
But it seems like he’ll have no such luck. Gray touches his face again, hands by the blindfold. “Can I take this off? Are you going to behave?”
Raven would like Gray to get his hands off of his face. So he slowly pulls away from him, leaning against the wall. He can’t even stand up, as his pants are of the same kind as his straitjacket, strapping his legs together so he can barely move. He hasn’t stood up for so long that he’s not even sure he can anymore. He clears his throat, voice raspy from lack of use. But he makes sure to keep it soft and quiet, the way he’s always spoken. “Yes, doctor. I’ll behave. For now, at least.” His voice is muffled through the leather.
Gray says, “No, Raven. There’s no ‘for now’. Are you going to behave, or are you not? I can leave again, if you like.” His tone is reprimanding and Raven scowls, looking away. Gray is the only one who calls him by his damn name. And unfortunately, it works on him. Stupid psychologists. They know how to get to him. At least, this one does.
Gray says, “I need an answer. Yes or no?”
He keeps his head angled away from Gray’s voice and mutters, “Yes.”
“Thank you.” Gray moves towards him and touches his face once more, removing the blindfold. Strangely, everything remains dark. Then there’s a slick sliding in his head and he can suddenly see again. His eyes must have rolled back into his head during his months of blindness.
He slowly looks up at Gray, adjusting to having sight again. The fluorescent lights overhead, unused for months, are letting off a burning scent. He squints, the light sending spikes of pain through his head. He hates the light.
He turns his attention to Gray. He hasn’t seen the man in over two months, but he looks exactly the same as the last time they spoke. He’s wearing neatly pressed muslin fabric robes, mostly in shades of green with hints of brown, pink, and yellow. They cover him from head to toe, not a single inch of skin showing. His face is covered by a wooden mask in the same colours as his robes. The eye holes are covered by sleek black glass, showing no trace of anything behind them. The only hint is a faint green light that shines through the right eye hole.
The mask is an odd thing. It’s carved with spirals and patterns, elaborately hand-painted. It looks like something that would have taken years to make. Gray has always been a little elusive about why he wears the mask, but from what he’s told Raven, he really doesn’t like people seeing his face. Raven knows the feeling.
On Gray’s back is a worn leather backpack, and a long wooden staff is harnessed beside it. The staff is lacquered hardwood and carved with flowers, budding about halfway up and blooming fully at the top. It is quite beautiful. Raven likes how it shines under the lights.
He looks away from it and back at Gray as the man says, “Why are you looking at me like that?”
He glares back. “What, with my eyes?” He knows what Gray is talking about. He’s referencing Raven’s lethal power. That little patch of skin above Raven’s eyes that conceals an organ like no other. The man has seen it in action once, a long time ago, when Raven had had enough of a certain PAX agent. The agent in question now no longer annoys Raven.
Gray says, “No. You know what I mean. Stop that, now.” He sounds rather annoyed, which Raven thinks is unfounded. He replies, “You know my powers are being suppressed, doctor. I am not doing anything. If you don’t like it, don’t look at me.” He sighs, shaking his head anyway so his hair falls over his forehead, obscuring most of his face and covering the pitted diamond of skin on his forehead. Though he is annoyed with Gray, he doesn’t want to frighten the man any further. His voice takes on a melancholy tone. “Two months apart, and the first thing you do is yell at me. Have you finally decided to convert to their way of thinking?”
Gray lets out a long sigh, lowering himself to the ground and crossing his legs. He rests his head in a hand. He’s quiet for a moment, then says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that to you in that tone. I know it’s not an excuse, but I’m quite stressed right now. I apologise. Can we start again?”
He slowly nods, leaning heavily back against the wall. He feels incredibly tired, though he’s not sure why. He’s spent the last two months sleeping, he should have done enough of that by now.
Gray nods too. He looks like he’s about to say something, then his shoulders slump. “I can’t do this. I can’t do the formalities.” He shakes his head. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
Raven tips his head. “What’s wrong, doctor?”
Gray sighs. His voice is quiet as he says, “I need help.”
Raven responds quietly, too. “Oh. Look at you. Eventually you had nowhere to go and you had to come crawling back to me, the monster under your bed.” He pauses, licking his dry lips. “What do you want?”
Gray twitches and looks down at the floor. He’s scared. “The others didn’t listen. I tried to tell them something was wrong, but they just wouldn’t believe me. They think that because you’re gone, everything’s fine. But it’s not.”
Raven watches him curiously. “And…?”
Gray sighs again. “Look, some of my friends went out on a mission a week ago. They haven’t come back. There must be something wrong. You need to help me.”
“Why do you think I can help? What makes you think I’m even going to help? May I remind you that you’ve been ignoring me for the past two months?”
Gray goes to respond, then stops. “I… I haven’t been ignoring you. They transferred me. Didn’t they tell you? They got rid of me, because they knew I wasn’t going to abandon you. I’ve been stuck in Australia for two months.”
Raven frowns. “What? They didn’t tell me that. How did you get back here?”
Gray looks around quickly, like someone might be listening. “It was my other friend. Basiliskos, the commander of operations. They told me what was happening, and I took the first plane back when my ‘companions’, read, my parole officers, weren’t looking. I’ve been hiding out at Kos’s house ever since then, trying to find my friends.” He lets out a long sigh. “No luck yet. But I know you’re going to help, because you’re unusually good at knowing where people are, even if there’s absolutely no way you should know. And because you go on a power trip every time someone has to ask you for something.”
Raven looks down his nose at the man, which is hard, as Gray is able to sit up taller than him due to not being extremely fatigued. “A little rude. But you’re not wrong.” He inhales and lets out a sharp breath. “What’s in it for me?”
Gray holds out a hand. “What do you want? I’ll give it to you. Anything, so long as you help me.”
“Let me go. I want to be free again.” He wants to reclaim what’s his and end this nightmare. Gray glares at him with glassy black eyes. “No. I’m not just letting you go. Don’t get too greedy.”
“You just said that you’d give me anything.”
“Anything but that. We fought hard to get you here. I’m not going to just let you go. But… I’ll let you come with me while I find them. Just a day or two out, like the old times. Do you want that?”
He remembers the times that Gray would take him out of his cell, on road trips across the country so that he could see the sun. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, those times were some of his best memories. He nods once. “I would like that. And could you take the muzzle off? I’m not a rabid animal.”
Gray shrugs. “The amount of people you’ve bitten says otherwise. But alright. Let’s get you out of here.” He undoes the straps on Raven’s legs, then takes Raven by the shoulder, nudging him until he turns around. His fingers have to dig into Raven’s skin in order for him to get a grip on and undo the tight leather straps.
Once the leather straps are undone, Raven is able to pull his arms out of the loops on the jacket and let them fall free. His muscles burn as blood flows to his hands for the first time in months. He holds out his hands to Gray, as the sleeves of the jacket are held shut by more leather straps. Gray undoes these so Raven can roll up the excess material from the sleeves. His long white fingers uncomfortably like those of a skeleton’s. He hasn’t seen his hands in ages. His nails are chipped and dirty, crusted with blood.
Gray removes the muzzle, clips it onto his belt, then pops off the charging wire and closes the port so Raven can’t tamper with it. Raven pushes the hood back and drags himself to his feet, leaning heavily against the wall. His head spins as he adjusts to his sudden new height. He pauses, examining Gray. Then he says, “Would you look at that? You’ve set me free.” He lunges, abruptly grabbing Gray by the front of his robes and pinning him against the wall by his neck. “Bad move.”
Gray says, “Raven, get your hand off of my neck.” He seems remarkably unconcerned. Raven glares at him. “I should just kill you right now, for all you’ve done to me.” He tightens his hold on the man’s neck. Gray sighs. He sounds like a tired teacher having to tell off a student for the umpteenth time. “Don’t talk to me like that. We talk like civilised adults, or we don’t talk at all.”
“I don’t care what you say. I’ll kill you– I will.” He’s a bit rattled, though. He forgot how much Gray just doesn’t care about the threats he makes. Gray reaches up and grabs his wrist. “Come on, let go. You won’t kill me, because otherwise you’ll be stuck down here for the rest of your life with no one to talk to. You’re just trying to scare me to get what you want.”
Raven does not like this turn of events. Everyone else– they’re all terrified of him. Gray, however, does not seem scared in the slightest. His grip loosens a little and Gray ducks under his arm. “Thank you. Now, shall we go?”
He’s still not happy about this. Gray left him here on his own for two months while he was gallivanting about in Australia, and expects him to just forget about it like it never happened. So instead, he says, “You think you’re not scared of me. I’ll find out your deepest fear. I’ll make you regret keeping me in this place.”
Gray turns abruptly. His voice is tense. “Raven. I said stop. Don’t be a creep. I might need your help but without me you’d still be rotting down here, you freak.” He turns to the barred cell door, opening it and stalking through.
Raven doesn’t move to follow, rather responding in that quiet voice. He’s still leaning heavily against the wall. “I see I’ve touched a nerve. My apologies.” He looks away. “I am just… You left me here. I haven’t seen another person in two months.”
Gray turns, looking back at him. He lets out a breath. “I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have called you a freak. It’s been a while since I’ve talked to you. I forget you can be… unsettling. And I’m sorry that I left without telling you I was going. They basically deported me. I had five minutes to fill a backpack with what I needed. I didn’t have anything but the essentials, and the clothes that I’m wearing right now. The agents– they wanted you in solitary isolation until you started asking for us. I wanted to talk to you, I really did. They just wouldn’t let me.” He gestures toward the door. “Now, come on. You remember that I’m technically breaking you out, so you have to be quiet until we’re out of here.”
He nods. He’s not very worried about Gray snapping at him. He’s been called a lot worse things than ‘freak’ and ‘unsettling’. He’s more worried about how shaky his legs are. The soles of his feet scrape painfully against the uneven floor. There are straps around the bottom of his feet, holding the cuffs of the pants down so he can’t wriggle out. They make it much harder to balance. He must undo them when he gets the chance. He makes his way out of the cell, into the larger underground room. Gray pulls open the metal door that’s set in the stone wall. Raven frowns as he both sees and remembers what’s on the other side of that door.
A long set of spiralling stairs, leading up and out of view. After not eating, drinking, or even standing up in so long, he’s very weak. But there’s no way he’s letting Gray know how badly he’s doing. Gray obviously doesn’t care all that much. After all, he left Raven alone for two months without so much as a goodbye. He doesn’t care that Gray was supposedly sent away, he must have had some idea as to what was happening beforehand.
As he follows Gray and mounts the first step, he once again has to lean against the wall in an attempt to not fall over. His head spins and the edges of his vision fade to black. Do not faint. Do not faint. He takes another step, hearing Gray’s voice. It’s distorted, like he’s underwater. His ears ring like someone’s hitting a gong in his head and he tries to retreat to level ground.
But his foot slips and he collapses, head glancing off the edge of a stair.