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Whatever was holding him together has slipped its knot.
Cazador Szarr, they called him. The name feels brittle. Ill-fitting. Reaching inwards, he claws frantically for his body the way one might grope for the edge of a bed after waking from surgery. Tries to slip into his skin, feel the weight of bone and flesh. There is nothing. Just a wet, smothering emptiness, as if he has already been opened and his organs strewn across the floor.
Feel, he thinks. Begs.
Anything to prove he exists, even if it destroys whatever is left of him in the process.
Anything at all.
The nothingness gives way without warning, flooded by a vision so sharp it seems more real than his body – that naked child, hanging limply from the low bough of the cherry tree on that sun-washed hill. Petals drifting lazily in the warm spring air. Head splinched to the side, black hair rippling. The branches creak softly as the small body sways, darkening the grass beneath it. And he wishes beyond hope and grief that the pretty body could have been his. That the soothing winds had carried him into the sweet safety of oblivion.
Something yanks him from the peaceful vision. He cowers on the floor of a dusty bedroom, half-hidden among toppled dolls and broken toys, porcelain faces catching moonlight. Footsteps over wood. He freezes. Run? Hide? Lie there and let it happen? The memory stutters. A hand clamps his throat.
Painted ceiling. Still body. Morning light.
He stands on his tiptoes to see into the mirror. Swollen, black eyes stare back.
Should have hidden.
His mind recoils, retreating back into the sack of flesh. Curling in that way he has done for so, so long, to become small, as small as he possibly could, trying to disappear. He is vaguely aware of his body trying to follow suit, weak muscles pulling him inward, tying himself in a knot on the stone.
Why can’t he feel?
Not his body. Not the cold seeping into his bare legs. Not the coarse comfort of the straitjacket cinched tight across his chest, the chain at his throat, nor the strain of his arms pinned and folded around his waist.
He knows why Master keeps him this way. It has been explained to him often enough, patiently, as if to a child who refuses to learn. So he doesn’t hurt himself. So he doesn’t throw himself into walls or claw at his own skin or tear himself open in those quiet, unseemly ways that make such a mess. Because he can’t be trusted with his own body. Because he’s sick. It keeps him safe.
Something must, because the boy inside Cazador Szarr is weak. So very, very weak.
Master says he cares.
He has never known another meaning for that word, so he believes him.
The pain his loving master gives him is the medicine he needs. And he has proven it, again and again and again, every time he came apart; every time the world went thin and unreal; every time he stopped responding and had to be broken open enough to feel his way back into himself. Nobody else could do what Master does for him. They would lose him. They would stop too soon. They wouldn’t know how much it takes. Master does. Master always knows. And he is grateful to be his only, eternal patient.
Where is he?
There was no single moment where it happened. As the years leeched out of him, sensation thinned, bled away, scraping his sanity out of the husk of his corpse.
Pain is the only treatment that cuts through.
Please come back
Even that doesn’t last. The relief flares bright, then drains away too quickly, leaving him more distant than before.
Every time, it takes a little more with it. And he craves more. And more. And more.
It has been too long.
Please find me
Time tears, as if sections are being cut away and discarded. His thoughts arrive late or not at all, skidding in and jittering away.
Screams and fire in the night. Mother's blood on his walls. Little Aimi was only two. Just relax. Close your eyes. This will be over soon.
The visions suffocate him like wet canvas.
He needs something to cut through, to light him up from the inside, to prove there is still a body there to hurt.
Anything. Anything at all.
Black-haired children blur into overgrown graves.
He turns the truth over in his mind, the way he’s been taught to. He’s sick. Declining. Just a weak, pathetic little boy with no name worth speaking. Seam-split and threadbare like a stuffed toy pulled apart by too many hands.
Lying trussed on the stone, he feels a whisper; a thin, phantom mourning of a hope long since buried. A long-extinguished hope for an end. The gods never noticed him. Not then. Not ever. Even the ones who count the dead.
***
The cold in the cell shifts.
The iron chain in his mind goes taut, drawing him towards his only god, tugging at the fraying strings behind his eyes like a rag puppet.
Master is there.
Standing over the twisted thing on the floor: writhing, spine arching in involuntary spasms as though trying to snap itself. His nerves beg in crude anticipation of the relief of the violence he craves. And in his head, the plea, over and over, stripped of dignity; stripped of self.
Break me
A touch.
Please
Two fingers, light as shadow, wiping his desperation from his greying eyes.
“Oh, my love. My sweet, sweet little boy.”
Canvas scrapes against the floor as buckles are worked loose from the boneless, unresisting body, tugging and dragging out from under his weight. A faint pinch at the back of his neck. His collar is unhooked from the floor chain.
“You need my help. I see it. I see you. I will help you.”
A sound. Chain, drawn upward, creaking softly. The cell lifts. Or he does. It’s hard to tell. His arms are above him now, pulled long, joints sagging. The floor drifts away until only the barest brush whispers against the floor.
The figure before him bends. Straightens. Something heavy shifts against stone. Two lengths of heavy chain in each of his master’s slender hands.
***
A chain cuts the air. Something whispers against his back like a feather. But he hears it punch the stale air from dead lungs. He tries to latch onto the sensation, any sensation.
Nothing.
Another low whistle. An ugly, meaty thud.
Whistle. Thud. Whistle. Thud. His back should burn, but the fire never reaches him. He isn’t anywhere the chain can touch.
He remembers when this kind of beating used to finish him. When the contusions and lacerations and ruptures shut him down, broke him open, forced his master to stop his treatment. Now it barely registers. Proof, as if any were needed, of how much of him is already gone.
Crack.
Something gives inside the body. A fleeting burn flares in his side before slipping out of reach.
“I know,” Master says quietly.
He senses a light, idle finger tracing a line along his rib.
“It helps. Doesn’t it?”
Yes. More
He needs more. Needs to cut through whatever thick, dead layer has settled over him. If it doesn’t work… There is nothing left that can.
He will keep slipping, thinning, coming apart in quiet, unremarkable ways until he fades into his husk.
More
His thoughts whimper. Maybe he does too, because he hears a voice.
“There, there,” comes the voice, “I have got you. I know what you need.”
Master.
The air tears. Iron slams. Again, again, faster and faster, each hit shaking his brittle frame like a sledgehammer through glass. The floor is slicked red. He registers the violence, trying to feel it.
Another snap, another rib.
He’s got me. Just like he said.
He tries to make space for it. By loosening something inside himself, prying at the dead weight until there’s a gap big enough for the pain to get in. It doesn’t work. He needs something that will split him open and pour itself inside, so the collapse has nowhere left to go.
“Look at me.”
His body obeys without question. Lets his master peer through his bars. Gazes back like he's the only thing left in this godsforsaken world. And he basks in it. The assault stops sliding off his skin. Begins to land. Erupts into that cleansing fire. Braced into the onslaught, the world is hauled back into focus. The prison of his skin batters into the boy cowering inside, and gods, it feels good. He scrabbles to grasp onto the wisps of relief that lick through him, clutches at the flesh from the inside.
And for a moment, it begins to work.
There is no room for the child inside. No rope. No spring light. The images are smashed aside.
For the first time, he sees his master. Really sees him. Light slides down his long, white immaculate curls. A mastery so complete it seems utterly effortless. Something stirs. A long-dead reflex where desire used to live; a dull twitch in a body that no longer answers. The beauty exposes him; makes him abruptly, viciously aware of the splintered void inside him, and he searches his master’s face. For warmth. A recognition. Any sign that what is happening to him matters. But he finds clinical indifference. A doctor, administering his dose.
And he is only a patient, whose body refuses to finish dying.
Relief gathers beneath the blooming pain, thick and narcotic.
He clings to the rhythm. But it's still not enough. The relief crests and slides away through the gaps.
Save me
***
The chains fall still. The body swings limply like a butchered carcass. The sudden quiet rings in his mind. The ache dissipates, directionless, unspent. Panic prickles thinly beneath the numbness. His nerves strain forward, reaching, begging for more, hurt me, break me to pieces, the ugly craving coils tighter and tighter.
Master peers through the bars of eyes.
His vision blurs, tears streaking uselessly down his face as his face twists around his misery. He tries to hold the gaze, tries to give his master something to work with – relief, gratitude, need – but it all leaks out, thin and formless.
Come and find me, he begs. Rip me out of my skin. Grind me into dust.
“Oh, my sweet love. You’re tired. You can’t go on like this.”
He hears himself scream in his mind, but no sound has come out.
Master’s face is just inches from his own. Fingers thread into his hair, steadying his head as he peers between his eyelids.
“I think,” he says, calm and thoughtful, “we need to find a way to reach the person inside.”
Yes. Carve me up. Pare me away. Tear me out and feed me to the void.
“Let me in.”
There’s a sharp sigh of metal.
The words slide under his skin.
So does the blade.
Searching for nerves to nick and fray, lighting up one after another as the steel severs meat. His head falls in surrender onto his master’s shoulder, tilting himself into the knife, leaning into his lover’s embrace to let the feeling in.
A soft, contented hum of quiet pleasure ghosts past his ear, Master’s cool breath on his skin, echoing his own.
Nerves buzz violently, stimulated, alive in a way they haven’t been for too long.
This feels good. This feels right.
“Let yourself go, my love.”
Slow. Intimate. Flayed. The blade peels him open layer by layer. He tries to let it pry him open. He presses back against the lacerated gore from within, chasing the sensation from the inside, trying to widen the opening.
Then he finds it. The way out. And he hears it.
The sound that echoes around the chamber is nothing he recognises.
Raw. Ruptured. High and breaking. Then hoarse and animal. He realises with distant shock that it is him. That his body is making that sound without asking him, without restraint, without shame. Ripped straight out of his chest on barbed hooks. Sublime sensation floods in, burning white, poisonous, delicious, ecstatic. Wiping his vision clean. Purifying the numb rot in his corpse.
Master nuzzles his neck. “That’s it. Open.” So gentle. So lovely.
It's pressing deeper. Cables in the abdomen part. Wet depths beneath. Comfort. Screeching. Retching.
And something inside finally gives way.
***
Something is strange. The noise reaches him after it happens, like thunder following lightning. The sounds are so ugly it is as though he is being peeled from the inside. He listens with distant, sick fascination.
Sweet, glorious anguish, administered directly to his soul. Dark, sweet medicine, paring him from his fleshy prison.
Some sensations arrive. Others don’t. As if whole routes have been cut out of the circuit.
Where is he now?
Not here.
“That’s it,” says the voice, quietly. “Don’t fight it.”
He folds inward instead, smaller and smaller, drawn toward a point deep inside. Retreating into the tiny safe place that the knife is carving for him through the dead mess of viscera. He curls into it instinctively, tucking himself away.
“Keep going. Further back. You don’t need to be here for this.”
Master’s voice slides in after him, low and steady, showing him where to go, nudging him inward, away from the noise and the heat and the shaking, tearing flesh and spurting blood.
“Quiet, now. My sweet, broken boy. You’ve suffered for so long.”
Master draws him in.
He tightens around his mind like the jacket around his body. Firm. Decisive. Inescapable. The man he reveres so very painfully and deeply is there with him now, close behind, gathering him up, folding him inward. Tight like canvas. The buckles click home in the quiet spaces of his skull. Sewn shut. A perfect, crushing embrace. The body can thrash, cry, writhe. That no longer matters. This part is secured, wrapped so neatly it cannot struggle or reach or make itself known.
“I’ve got you.”
The anguish, the despair; they begin to lose definition, bleeding out at the edges as he feels himself gently lifting away.
“Let go.”
He is somewhere else.
A sunny hillside, grass moving in a cool salty breeze.
He allows himself to shrink into the light. Leaving the screams and iron and stone and filth behind.
The world ahead is simple.
A little cage waits at the top of the hill. A place just big enough for a body curled inward. He gathers himself and slips inside. The cage closes behind him.
He feels the wind on his face, the sun beating down, pressed against the bars. Looks up to the horizon. And there is the tree. The same low bough. But the child is gone. No swaying body. No small feet.
Only the empty noose, swinging slowly in the wind.
He tries to remember why it mattered. The reason slips away.
The rope drifts back and forth, close enough that he can see the shadow it casts as it moves. Close enough to want. If he could reach it – if he could step into it – he would. But he cannot. So he lies there in the sun, perfectly still, perfectly safe, watching the broken promise of death drift in the air.
Far away, somewhere beyond his reach, carried faintly up through the ground, he understands distantly that something continues without him. Torment beyond imagining, raging for eternity; a body is being torn apart, violated, again and again and again; the ceaseless undoing of a creature forever denied release.
That part is finished.
It can never touch him here.