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Ken knows she’s fucked the second that the guard takes her down a sharp left turn in the hallways around Proton. She had hoped, naively, that Clown’s workers had just finished the rest of Proton—the other two “quarks” in the “Proton”. But Ken has a pretty good sense of direction, especially because she built all of the fake-nature inside of Proton with her own two paws. She knows that the tree all the way to the left with the leaves that go up a little bit more than would be natural creates a ray with the edge of the circle of the cell that points directly to the north, and that means that the way she is being dragged is not, in fact, to where the cells are.
She is being dragged out of Proton. Which makes the rope tied around her wrists make just a tad bit more sense. The guard, like usual, isn’t looking at her, just staring dead-eyed forward and holding the other end of the rope holding her hands together.
She might—this might be it. This might be the end for the great Kenadian. This might be how she dies. Because she’s doubtlessly going to see Clown, and he is doubtlessly not going to be happy. She broke Wemmbu out of the prison that was the only reason that Clown kept her around. She has no use anymore, and she is actively harming his ability to do what he wants.
So. Okay, so. So. He’ll try to bargain out of this, but he needs to get ready, still. He needs to be ready. He takes a deep breath in, and steadies himself. He had known this was a possibility when he started on this stupid escape plan, but past-Ken had really wrote a lot of checks that current-Ken does not want to cash. At least Wemmbu will get out? At least whoever is going to go in next will have a way out. At least his values will be respected. He’ll stop someone else from being trapped.
He swallows around a sudden wave of fear, a second-wave, a kickback. A small, childish kitten inside of him doesn’t want to have to go into that room and hear Clown tell him all the reasons his plan was stupid and he shouldn’t have done any of that, with his stupid, evil, very persuasive voice. He tells that voice to shut the fuck up.
All too soon, Ken and the guard arrive at Clown’s office. It is a strange, almost liminal space, way too normal for a man as strange as Clown. Ken almost doesn’t see Clown when he enters his office, because instead of being at the desk, he is lounging on the couch pressed to one of the walls.
Clown beacons him closer with a ‘come hither’ motion, “You can leave us, guard. Ken, come here.”
There really isn’t any other choice. He sits daintily on the edge of the couch, as far from Clown as physically possible. Clown doesn’t even dignify that with a response, sitting up momentarily in order to hook his hands around Ken’s shoulders and drag him down so that he is laying half-on Clown’s lap.
“That wasn't a good idea, Ken.” Ken almost bursts out laughing at that. What kind of evil supervillan-ass…? It’s just his fear of Clown which keeps him tethered to what he should be saying in this situation.
“‘re you gonna kill me?” Ken tries to make his voice into a confident drawl. It doesn’t, like really work, but it is close enough to satisfy him.
“No. Ken—I’m not mad at you like that—” Like Ken would care about Clown being mad at him. “You don’t want to leave.” He says finally, as if that means anything to Ken.
“What?” Ken says, unable to stop his incredulity from slipping into his tone. He’s a little enboldened by the fact that he at least has a chance to survive this encounter.
“You don’t. You like it here, I know you do. Do you really want to go back out to the main server? You’re going to get hurt.”
“Well, that’s—that’s my right, as a person, an—and, I’ve survived it before.”
“Can I tell you a secret, Ken?”
“Uhm, sure?”
“It’s going to get worse.”
“The—the server?”
“Yes. It is going to get so much worse. And I promise you that neither you, nor all of your friends, want to be out in the main server while that happens.”
“My friends?”
“Here’s how this is going to go.” Ken can hear the sinister little smile creep up in Clown’s tone. “I’m going to give you a little assurance that you’ll stay, and then I am going to put you back into Proton. In a couple of days, there is going to be a new shipment of prisoners, among them Parrot and Wifies. I’m sure you’ll enjoy getting to talk to them again.”
“What’s the—what’s the threat, though?”
“It’s a rather large faction that’s forming. They have it out for Parrot for some reason, I don’t know.”
Ken swallows.
One of Clown’s gloved hands come up to card through Ken’s hair, mindful to avoid her ears, the other sinking around Ken’s hips like a seatbelt.
“I know you have a problem with self-sabotage, Ken.”
That doesn’t—Ken has no idea where the hell this could be going, but he knows that he isn’t going to like it. It’s Clown, Ken never likes it. “Which is why I’m going to make sure that you can’t.”
“You’re not going to ever make it so that I hate you, Ken. This is for your own good, trust me. You’ll thank me later.”
Panic, like wildfire, begins to creep up Ken’s body. That’s never good. That can’t be good. He doesn't want whatever the fuck this is, no matter what Clown says. Clown’s not going to be able to convince him that he does. He’s not—he doesn’t want this. He wants to go home. He wants to be free.
One of Clown’s hands comes out of his hair and trails down to his right hand. It ghosts across his wrist, and that already feels agonizing. There are so many veins there, weak little things that hold all of his lifeblood in them. He feels nauseous with the force of his fear. Clown should be nowhere near them, Ken’s so weak there.
Well, he’s weak everywhere. But there especially.
“Clown, whatever this is, you don’t have to do it. You don’t have to do this, you—”
“Shhh. I’m not mad at you, this isn’t a punishment. I just can’t have you getting out. You understand that.”
Ken doesn’t, Ken doesn’t understand that. He’s not a monster, he can’t understand why Clown would do what Clown does on a regular basis. He doesn’t understand. Clown says he loves him, but how can that be the case?
“There are three nerves in your wrist that allow you to move your hands.” Ken’s aware of them, Median, Ulnar, and Radial, “If I damage them, you’ll have a much harder time using them.”
“If—If this isn’t a punishment, can you at least give me weakness or something, I don’t want—” He feels like a kitten. All of his intelligent decision-making and knowledge of the world is gone and he is just scared and betrayed. It’s Clown. He can trust Clown. He should be able to trust Clown. Can he? He’s scared. He shouldn't be able to be scared when Clown is around.
Clown pauses for a second. Ken can’t see his mask, but they can picture the movements he is making—tilting his head to the side, in “thought.” Clown is never really in thought. Ken has never known Clown to take more than three seconds to make a decision.
“Maybe it is a punishment… ?” Clown hums. Ken surely had something witty to respond to that, but it is wiped off of his mind like dragging a cloth down a whiteboard. By the Pain.
Clown’s hand wraps itself around Ken’s wrist in it’s entirety—Ken is still skinny, all wiry muscle, and their time inside of Proton has made it even worse. Clown’s hands are large and his fingers are slender, and the size difference allows Clown to clench down fully.
Clown has a lot of grip strength; Ken should have expected that. What, he spends his entire time clutching the handle of an ax? or a sword? or a mace? That—
That grip strength is used entirely against Ken. It starts off mildly okay and than suddenly gets worse and worse as the grip increases and increases and increases. Against his will, Ken stiffens up. He can’t get past the grip across his hips, so his feet kick out wildly. He doesn’t think Clown notices, or reacts at all.
His grip just tightens and the pain just gets sharper. Snow and snow and repetitions of snow, ice cold in the inside of his arm. Hot coals and hot coals and repetitions of hot coals, burning in the inside of his arm.
There is only so much pain the body can take before it gives up, and Ken has experienced more pain than many. Have you ever suffocated in a six-block thick wall of obby? Because Ken’s suffocated in a seven-block thick wall of obby, and he still had to scratch his arms, open and bleeding, across the toothy walls of the hole that his presence forced into existence, in order to throw the next ender pearl, and the next, and the next.
It’s like that. It’s like cramming her body, achy and imperfect as it is, into crawl glitches and feel it fall apart as she shoves herself through holes one-third her size with a bed or a minecart. She is no stranger to pain, and her body knows that no matter how many signals it sends to her, she will not change her actions.
Against everything that her body wants, she takes a deep, shaking breath in, and focuses on the tools she has to make the pain less bad. It aren’t many, but she has some. She has some.
Untether yourself from your body. Sink into the earth. Sink into the couch beneath you, into the stone below the couch beneath you. Go away. Go home. The pain fills your body like an empty cup, and it kicks you out of your body. Ken lets the pain kick him out of his body, and so he floats around it and below it. It is so omnipresent and inescapable that it becomes nothing.
Still, it builds and builds and builds inside of him, and as much as Ken shelters their mind, they cannot shelter their body, and they cannot stop their bodies natural reactions. They think (?) they have gone limp, but they can’t access their senses enough to tell. At the very least, Clown’s arm around their hips has gone a little bit less rigid.
When they get closer to their body enough to feel that, though, the pain becomes unbearable again. It’s getting worse, as their body freezes up and freezes up and freezes up, and he gets worse and worse and worse, and his mind melds away, gone and down and gone and down and inside.
And slowly, the world around Ken goes dark. He slips down into the darkness inside of his mind, and his body falls out of his hands—too numb to to hold on to.
When Ken wakes up, he is in a bed. It’s Clown’s bed, because it smells like Clown and Ferre, and it’s so, impossibly soft. There is a body under him, skinny and wiry but undeniably muscular, and there are fingers dragging themselves through their hair.
The person is Clown, Ken can tell. He holds himself together and does not fight it. His wrists are wrapped in gauze—they still hurt, but it a distant hurt. His hands tingle.
Eventually, when he wakes up for real, Clown lets him know that he’s going to stay with Clown for a while, and then go back to Proton, “so that you can be with your friends again.”
And that’s fine. That is going to be fine. He can—he doesn’t mind Proton, not really, and it’s not like—he’s not going to be able to get out from under Clown’s thumb, so why even try? Why try to get out of Proton? What’s going to be on the other side for him? He can’t use his hands right. How is he going to survive The Threat?
He’s an indoor cat, that Ken. Can’t let him out, he thinks deliriously, or he’ll get hit by a car. What does that make Parrot? Or Wifies?