Chapter Text
She felt them first: a mumbling through the rough grey grain pressed against her cheek. Footsteps, heavy and armored and plodding straight for her. What little warmth the cell had not sapped from her left immediately. Paige Mahoney, Underqueen of London, curled tighter, pressed her knees against her chest until it felt like they might shatter her ribs and plow through her guts, and tried to ignore the livewire urge to run.
Closer and closer, louder against her cheek, louder in her skull and neck and chest. Their voices emerged: a mess of syllabic noise scattered with clear words like inconsistent seasoning. She pushed up, arm trembling, until her face was off the filthy floor and her back was against the wall, the thin black shift of cloth clinging to her back pushing away the coarseness as well as a tissue. She breathed deep, stared at the door, and waited.
It opened on angry hinges, the scattered bits of harsh fluorescent white that seeped through its cracks turning into a great, blinding thing that she blinked and squinted against every time it opened. Five Vigile silhouettes: red visors and grey-black armor, heavy gloves and steel capped boots that clattered on the cement as they stopped toward her. She glared at them as best she could, as best as the blinding light and drug in her bloodstream would allow.
Paige didn’t fight when they yanked her up by the arms, too weak, too cold, too wrapped in the pressing, blurring cotton that swaddled her mind. They lead her by the wrists on unsteady feet out of the room, two in front and three behind.
She knew the route by now; it was always the same room. Left, then straight for nine cells, and then left again. They were barely out of her own hole when the bruises they’d stockpiled on her body began to pulse with preparatory ache. Six of them in the hallway, lights like torches in her eyes, constant and unflinching. Questions and a beating, that’s what it’d be, that’s what it’d been every timeless, shut-in day so far. Questions and a beating, and then back to the cell to await Suhail’s waterlogged fancy.
They turned left and came to a door just like all the others: gray steel, no number, bare walls. It opened quieter than hers, soft like a breath in the wind, and showed a yawning, dim black turned the color of a thunderstorm by the gray of the walls and the white of the backdrop lights. Someone shoved her hard from behind and sent her stumbling into the familiar little cage. The walls were gray, the floor was gray, the ceiling was gray, and the grain cut up her soles like sandpaper underfoot.
She teetered, righted, stood still, and then turned back to face them just in time to catch an armored glove to her gut. It bent her at the waist, curled her around the cold hand in her stomach. Her knees trembled, her eyes watered. She spluttered and coughed and tried to suck in a breath. “Where’s the Mime Order?”
Paige blinked the tears from her eyes; the Vigile looked like all the others: more a uniform than a person, his mouth and jaw the only bit of humanity showing. They made a poisoned scowl. She turned, eyes on his visor, and spat lamely on the concrete. Always the same questions, always the same answers. She’d grit her teeth and bear it, just like yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that, and every day earlier until her memory touched with outstretched hands recollections of the time before she was set to die in a dim, dark hole.
“I said -” footsteps closing around her; the door clicked shut. “Where’s the fucking Mime Order -” he brought his hand back into her gut with the force of a ram, then his knee. Her legs buckled, but someone had their hands looped under her arms to keep her upright. “Where are your fucking terrorist friends, unnatural? What hole did they slink off into?” Another knee, another punch. Bruises on bruises on bruises; pain, a dull and marrow-deep throb, thumped in her stomach and spread like leaking oil to her legs and chest. She was shaking, teeth gritted, when the arms disappeared and she fell in a shaking, ragdoll heap on the floor. A puppet with its strings cut, a bag of shivering meat and aching bones.
Paige screwed her eyes shut and braced. Overhead were heated voices, only scant feet away and yet too far for her cornered animal mind to process. The words were like shapeless noise in her ear. They… they were arguing.
She blinked, sending unshed tears streaming out of her eyes. Once, twice, three times, before the room blurred into focus around her like a settling snow. They were hissing at each other by the door, five Vigiles in thundercloud silhouette with red trim. It went on for a minute, then two. Her aches quieted, her stomach eased, her body uncurled the littlest bit. “What?” She slurred, too addled to think better of the words dripping like spit out of her cottoned mouth, “done already?”
She knew the second it came out that she shouldn’t have said anything, should’ve kept her mouth shut like she always did. The nearest - the biggest - growled like an animal and took a step toward her. One of them caught his arm, but he shook it off like it wasn’t there and just kept on coming.
Paige tried to stare him down, tried to smirk, tried to muster any bit of that cocky pride that the Pale Dreamer had kept in stock for acting like a proper mollisher. But she was tired and filthy and wrung like a rag. She shrank away and she hated herself for it.
He didn’t stop, he might not have even noticed. The Vigile kept on coming until he was close enough to give her a kick in the stomach that had her curling like a turtle again before he grabbed her by her knotted hair and dragged her, thrashing, to her knees. “Change of plans,” he spat, fisting a hand in her thin black shift, “no questions today, mutt.”
He pulled and the cloth ripped away like so much paper. Her body went cold. “Whuh -” she gaped up at him, at the drape of torn black he held in a clenched fist like a trophy “- what - no.” He was eyeing her, even through his helmet she could tell, like a smiling hyena eyeing a fresh and lonely kill. “No,” she tried to get away, hands scrabbling at the floor, at him, at the gauntlet still serving as an armored vice in her hair. “No, no, no, no.” He dropped the shift and it fell limp and lame to the floor: a sad little pile of black fabric.
The hand not in her hair drifted to his belt - each click and shuffle of it was like a hand in her intestines, wrenching them around and twisting them into knots. This wasn’t happening, they wouldn’t do this. She was cold and panicked and trying to pull away and scream all while the other Vigiles watched from the door like perched grotesques, silent and still.
His fly came undone and her words became inarticulate animal cries of negation, of ‘stop.’ She tried to hit him, to lash out with her spirit, but the Archon had eaten her regained muscle off the bone, and the drug made her mind into a dull old knife left out in the rain. It hurt to try, it hurt like hell, but she did. Again and again and again until blood was spurting from her nose and her head felt like someone had run it through with a white-hot railroad spike.
A hand caught her hard across the face and shattered her back into her filthy skin, back into the dread and the panic and the cold, dark room underneath the Archon. “I had a brother in Manchester,” he stated, hand in his pants as he dragged her across the floor like a sack of smearing waste. “ Had. Not anymore, thanks to unnaturals like you. ”
She kicked and scratched and yanked. Before she would’ve been able to escape, before she would’ve been able to break his wrist and blast his spirit into the ether like a breeze scattering dandelion seeds. But for weeks her life had been the waterboard and the dark and the red-visor beatings; she was weak. She was skin and bones and barely even in her body. Her incoherent attempts to flee only left her cut and scraped, bleeding from thin little lines that the minute teeth of the concrete had cut.
“Bet he deserved it,” she bit out, voice cracking with panic and nerves and the urge to scream until she and everything else in a mile radius of her died. He threw her against the wall and the impact rattled her teeth in her skull. “Bet he - died like -” a knee to the sternum cut her off, knocked the wind from her, left her wheezing and grabbing at her chest.
Pain in her wrist, pain enough to draw a tortured little scream from her throat before she could choke it down. The Vigile had grabbed her bad wrist in a clenched hand and slammed it hard into the stone. He squeezed. The pain lanced in bolts down her arm, locking up the limb all the way to her shoulder, it prickled with raw, prey animal panic at the backs of her eyes. “No speaking,” he ordered, voice like a thunderclap.
“Eat shit.”
He squeezed again, harder this time. Until it was too much to breathe, until her head met the wall hard while her throat worked to fight down what was either vomit or a scream, until it whited out her visions in flickering spots, until another Vigile by the door said “no permanent damage, four-twenty-three.” She heard him grunt a reply and it stopped. Paige gulped down a breath, goosefleshed chest heaving while her watering eyes cleared and the world came back in uneven little waves. Something cold and metal clicked around one wrist while the world was still swimming, and then ‘round the other. Bleary eyed, she looked up to see her wrists in standard issue Vigilance cuffs, their metal glinting like a knife’s edge in the trickle-down light.
Without a word the Vigile - four-twenty-three - grabbed her by the throat and hauled her to her shaking feet. She could feel the wall’s grain drawing blood where it scraped and gnawed against her back. He hung her like a slaughtered pig: by her chains on one of the blood-rusted hooks that jutted like teeth from the wall, and stepped back, hand moving in his pants, to watch her squirm and kick, trying to catch the floor with her feet so she could stand.
The metal cut with all of her weight into the skin of her wrists, deeper with every moment she hung unsupported and too high up for her toes to catch the ground. It spiked a fresh wave of pain and nausea from her bad wrist, cut the skin and drew thin rivulets of blood that trickled down her pallid arm. Scalpel sharp humiliation burned in the corner of her mind that wasn’t consumed with panic, pain, rage, and fear.
Hung like a pig and squirming like a worm on a hook in front of a mess of Vigiles. She could feel their eyes on her dirty, naked skin as keenly as she could feel the cold and the wall, roving her up and down behind their visors, stinging like wasps. It made her flush and burn, it made her want to die, it made her want to rip each of their throats out with her bare teeth. And then there was the nearest one, the one who’d hung her - Paige kicked again, feet scrabbling down the wall and alleviating the pain for a flashing second before they gave way and it returned keener than before - stood there watching, grinning like a skinless skull while he stroked his filthy dick in his pants.
She stopped struggling, bit her tongue against the pain, and just hung there, glowering at him through the cotton swabbed world, wishing with every cell and breath in her body that he would fall over dead.
“What’s wrong, brogue? Can’t stand?” He stepped closer, caught her leg at the knee when she weakly tried to push-kick him away. “Here,” he said, fingers digging in around the patella, threatening to rip it right off its tendons if his hand so much as twitched, “let me help.”
Then he was inches from her, breath like wet rot on her face, and she was all but rabid: muttering, cursing, screaming, and thrashing - anything to get away to get him back.
None of it worked, none of it worked. He was close enough she could feel the weave of his uniform against her legs, could feel his armor against her chest when she breathed, could feel his gloved hands - warm like a fresh corpse’s - gliding up her legs. She didn’t even notice the pain, didn’t even notice the room or the cold or the pack of uniformed bystanders doing nothing by the far wall and the locked door. Only his proximity, only his nearness, only her visceral, body-and-soul denial.
His belt came undone, his pants unlatched. She watched him pull his cock from his fly like it was a loaded gun. It - it - fuck. No, it was big. The sight of it - the smell of it: sweat and stink - made her only thrash harder. Hard enough that he cursed, ordered her to stop, but she was incoherent with panic, barely even human.
First a blow to her stomach and then a blow to her face, rapid succession and hard as hurled bricks. They dazed her, stilled her, beat back the animal filling her brain and forced her to settle again in her body, blinking the unprocessed shapes into people and breathing like she’d dashed a three-hundred meter sprint.
“Damned boglander whore,” she heard him growl, and her eyes drifted down to the softly glowing visor inches from her face. She could see herself in it: haunted and filthy from her own sweat and dirt and dried fluids after weeks of torture. She looked away when something warm pressed itself against her lips.
His cock, veined and thick and olive, was laid against her, unmoving. Dark beside her corpse pallor skin, and dripping beads of precum.
Panic was a whirlwind in her gut. She wanted to scream, weep, rip out her hair and gouge out his eyes; instead she set her jaw, swallowed thickly, and looked him in the face. She pretended not to notice how much she was shaking, how her reflection quivered like a broken yellowjacket in his visor. Somehow, somewhere, she could hear Suhail laughing at her.
“Where’s that attitude, brogue?” His smile could’ve dripped oil, could’ve been the bare and sharpened ribs of some inhuman thing. It was all teeth, all hate, all piggish lust. He smelled like cigarettes and mex and Scion stitched cloth.
She spat “die,” like the words themselves could kill him. But her voice still cracked.
He laughed. He laughed and forced himself inside her.
It had been a stabbing thing with Ruben. Short, uncomfortable, and shallow. A pain there and then gone again as long as neither of them moved, as long as he didn’t keep trying.
It was worse here. A shearing, continuous, and deepening misery as he shoved his cock in inch by dragging inch. He was too big and she was too dry and the wall gnashed at her back and someone had stuck a hot iron rod inside her guts. She clenched and locked up instinctively, eyes screwing and face contorting into a raw and miserable grief. A sob clawed out of her throat, and then tapered into a mewl.
Deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. Filling her, stretching her, ripping her apart. Deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. Until he stopped, until every centimeter was in.
She opened her eyes, blinked away the tears, and stared at the ceiling, breathing thin, shaky breaths. His hand was on her arm, her leg was over his shoulder - every part of her that touched him she wanted to burn off.
“Tight for a boglander whore, ‘Underqueen.’”
Paige didn’t reply. Her hand spooled around the chain of her cuff and gripped it white-knuckled.
“And here I thought you must’ve let every unnatural from here to Edinburgh have a rut in the alley muck just to get them talking.”
Eyes on the ceiling, teeth bared and gritted against the pain. Silent.
The door opened, feet shuffled on the floor, and the door closed. She wouldn’t look down, she wouldn’t check to see. The ceiling - all its little cracks and faults and lumps; she watched them. He shifted, set his hips flush to hers, and lit a fresh bolt of pain through her stomach.
She hated that she felt it, that she felt him . Every bit, every vein, every quiver, and drop of sweat. Crystal clear, the memory of Warden in the Oxford training grounds leapt to her mind: he had been tortured, he had learned to leave his body, to shut down its sensations.
She wished so much that she had asked him to teach her now.
The Vigile shifted again, the breath in his throat shifting into a moan that tailed into a laugh. All right by her ear, all making her want to die. Slowly, he began to pull back and out.
She hated that it hurt less, she hated that it didn’t kill her, she hated with a feral, soul-deep intensity, that, the littlest bit, it warmed her.
He pulled until it was just his head inside her, took a breath to say “tight whore cunt,” and then thrust back in. His cock ripped a gasp from her the same way a punch forces out air. Eyes on the ceiling, fingers around her chains. Out slow, in fast, his cock buried itself fully in her guts and she felt it twitch.
He did it again, and again, and each time it hurt less, and each time that thrum of warmth, of shameful, evil, despicable pleasure coursed from between her legs with a little bit more strength. Out and then in - the force slammed her back against the concrete and made her chains rattle, made her exhale a little too hard, a little too breathy.
He grinned, and her skin could’ve fallen off her body with revulsion. “Knew it.” He laughed, and the sound echoed like a death rattle in the dark little cell beneath Westminster. “Brogues and unnaturals are all desperate for a good fucking, and brogue unnaturals are the queens of whores. You like it, boglander.” He leaned in, lips to her ear even when she tried to pull away and hit the wall, “you want it.”
She opened her mouth to say - something. A denial, a condemnation, a hateful, spiteful evil word that she hoped to drag out from the ether, something to make his eyes pop and his brain boil and his skin slough off his body until he was meat and ash and bones. But she didn’t, she couldn’t, because…
Because what if he was right?
He thrust in again, tip pressed against her womb, and the movement made her quiver, gasp, and screw her freshly watering eyes shut. Her body was reacting, her cunt was wet, and it felt good.
It made her want to weep, it made her nauseous, made her want to crawl out of her own skin like a wetsuit that no longer fit. Never in her life had she so deeply, utterly, and truly despised her body as she did in this little microcosm of hell. It was betraying her, it was reacting, it was twisting, violating, and lying to her. She didn’t want this, she didn’t, she didn’t, she didn’t.
“Stop,” she wheezed. “Stop, stop, stop - please.”
There was nothing in this world she wanted less, she would die first, happily, gratefully. She would die.
“No, no, no, no…”
Tears spilled out from her screwed up eyes, traced trails in the filth that caked her cheeks. He replied, but she didn’t hear it - her words weren’t really for him.
He hammered her again, and it made her wet, made her shiver and tremble with how deep his cock buried, with how wide it stretched her. The feeling only spurred more tears. This wasn’t fair, this wasn’t right, this wasn’t her. “ Please,” Paige Mahoney whispered, but the ceiling did not reply.
She tried to run away to her poppies, to her dreamscape, but the fog of the drug and the wretched pleasure and the cold and the scraping rock all did not let her. It gave her fuzzy, metallic pain that trembled behind her eyes.
In and out, harder and faster. Her arms trembled, her breath hitched, her tears dried on her chest and sternum and ribs. “Boglander whore,” “boglander whore,” “boglander whore - you want it.”
He shifted forward, pressed his body flush against hers so that he forced her knees up by her head and sped up. It drowned her, it buried her, it ripped away her every piece of self. She wanted to die. His cock fucked away her brain and she wanted more than anything to die and never come back to her meat.
Something was building in her gut, and each chain-rattling, breath-stealing slam of the Vigile dragged it wretchedly closer. An inhuman face, pale and skittering and fleshless, breathing wet down her neck - closer and closer and closer, until it hung just over her shoulder, revolting breath soiling her neck. Awful, evil, wretched.
His breaths came quicker, more jaggedly, his movements became jerky. With all his might the Vigile slammed into her, pinning her to the wall completely, and screamed. She felt him pulse and fill her, she felt the hot, thick cum flush with her womb, swelling her cunt. Something hooked a long moan from her belly with a barbed wire line and dragged it out into a sad, strangled sound.
The face unhinged its jaw and consumed her. Paige trembled, screwed her eyes shut, and came. She came in a dark hole, hooked to the wall, filthy, rank, and only half alive. She came, and something in her cracked and shattered.
He slapped her when he left. Laughed too - kept her dangling from the hook like a hangman’s corpse. She didn’t notice, hardly lived. Paige stared blankly at the floor, consumed by the false sensations of her body. The blood from her wrists, the aches from her bruises, the thick cum leaking slowly from her cunt and down her leg. It was warm like blood, a slow rolling trickle, dripping onto the floor. She wanted it to be blood. She wished it was blood.
It was a lie. It had to be a lie.
The door opened. The door closed. Somehow, she ended back up in her cell: a curled tight ball in the corner, barely breathing.
Please, let it be a lie.