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toyybox · 3 months

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Spiderwebs #25: Slaughterhouse

Masterlist

content: captivity, defiant whumpee, hunger strike, mention of feeding tube, threat of vivisection, strangulation/choking, attempted murder, Heather does not have a good time specifically (she’s fine in the end)

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How could he leave this hell? Such questions were pointless. Maybe Jackie couldn’t make it stop, and maybe he was stuck there for good. He had tried compliance, and he had suffered enough for it. He had tried to run. Was else was there but to bite the hand that fed? He would fight, and he would keep fighting. Until it was physically impossible, or until he had won.

Winning, for Jackie, became less clear-cut. He wanted to go home, of course, but he would have settled for anything. Winning an argument, or winning the irritation of his captor. Winning absolutely anything, anything at all, just to feel some semblance of control. Just to get something back, just to have something to keep.

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He wasn’t sure how long it had been. He was losing focus. Losing track of time. Time was a fallow, a valley, an absence of itself. Sleep came to him at odd hours, so the days meshed together, marked only by disjointed events. The only things he saw were the walls of the room, never changing, until that sight faded to the back of his mind.

“Eat,” Heather said.

“No.”

“Eat.”

“No,” he repeated calmly.

The bowl of cereal lay untouched on the writing desk. It was sugary cereal. Jackie didn’t even know she had sugary cereal. It looked good, and Jackie was hungry, but he was even more angry.

So was Heather, as he expected. Her eyes narrowed to slits, and her scowl gouged deeper. Her hand darted to him—he flinched—and she grabbed the collar of his shirt. “Jackie, I know you’re upset, but you’re going to eat or I’ll bash your head into this fucking table.”

He managed to smile. "Be my guest.”

She definitely looked like she wanted to, but… she let go instead, her seething stare never leaving him.

He made a point to stare back, not to blink, not to glance away. “Coward.”

He flinched again, as she moved, but he didn’t feel the anticipated pain. Instead, she stormed off and left him there with the cereal.

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Still, Jackie didn’t eat it. Heather came back the next morning.

“What’s wrong with you?” she snapped. “Why won’t you eat? You’re only hurting yourself.”

“Am I?” He steeled his pleasant expression. It was French toast, this time, glistening with syrup. He was so, so hungry. But he could control himself. He wouldn’t eat. He wouldn’t. He would stop looking at the food. There were worse things than an empty stomach.

“What do you want, then?” Heather asked.

“I want to go home.”

He felt a spark of satisfaction as her eyes ignited with wrath, even though he knew he would pay, even though he knew this couldn’t realistically last long. But he was far beyond caring, and even further beyond self-preservation.

He refused her food, he refused her pills, and he refused to participate in her experiments. He tried to stoke the anger in him, going over every little injustice until it was ingrained in his bones, but his rage was slowly losing steam. Despite that, regardless of what he felt, he was stubborn. And he didn't know what she might have been putting in his meals. Nobody was beyond petty revenge, least of all Heather.

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By the third day, she seemed to realize he wouldn't listen to reason, because didn't ask him why he was doing this, or what he thought he would gain, or threaten to bash him against the furniture. She still brought food with her, as if that would have any effect. It was cherries this time. He had once mentioned his liking for cherries, and Heather had clearly not forgotten.

“I could always use a feeding tube," she said.

“How creative.”

“Eat.”

“No.”

“Do I need to sedate you?” Her voice had gone cold, which scared him even more than the wrath in her eyes.

“Maybe.” He didn’t want to, but he forced his head up, forced himself to look at her.

She let out a disbelieving little laugh. “You stupid—”

“I’ve heard it all before, Heather. Go on. Skip the insults and sedate me.”

Coward indeed, because she didn’t sedate him. They both knew that was an easy way out—it would mean nothing, and he still would have won. She left the room, once again. That brought them to the fourth day of his hunger strike.

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The day had gone by as usual. Jackie ignored the twisting complaint of hunger and waited, sitting on the bed, acutely terrified but unable to let go of this thing he’d grasped. Call it stupidity, call it foolish, but a rose by any other name had just as many thorns. Maybe he didn’t have guillotines or gun-bayonets, but he was tired of being a doormat. He was tired of being a lab rat. There! He said it. He was tired of hunger, too, but Heather hadn’t come back with the offer of food yet. In a way, he was glad. Jackie wasn’t sure if he could resist eating for a fourth time.

His room had started to lose its neatness. Normally, Jackie would keep it clean. He’d put everything away, keep everything in its proper place, make the bed and arrange the furniture. He usually had nothing else to do. But recently, he ignored those pleasantries. He knew it would annoy Heather, so he kept the basement as dishevelled as possible. A part of it was fatigue—he was too tired to walk more than a few paces, let alone clean—but that didn’t sound as impressive.

The hours ticked away. He fell asleep, fell out of it, remained in a vague haze for the rest of the time. He tried to read, but he couldn’t focus on the words. The descriptions of sausages irritated him, anyway. The light seemed to get brighter until it was unbearably acute, like the lights surgeons used. He was cold, and his skin was numb, even more so than before.

The lock to the door clicked. This jolted him back into awareness.

Heather descended the stairs and walked over to where he was huddled on the bed. Each clack of her heel against the floor sounded impossibly loud. It echoed, not just throughout the room, but seemingly in the hollows of his chest and the chambers of his heart. She was not carrying any food.

She stopped in front of him. “I’m impressed. You don’t give up easily. I can respect that.”

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say.

She leaned in a little closer. “I have a deal for you.”

He stared without blinking, and he held his breath, not even noticing that he was doing it.

“I’ll give you one hour,” she continued. Her voice was so soft that he had to strain to hear it. “If you don’t cooperate by then, I will tie you down and cut you open. I will leave you like that, and if you still haven’t learned your lesson, I’ll let you heal so I can do it again. It’s really not difficult to keep you conscious. If I skinned you entirely, it would only take a few days to grow back. But I can wait as long as I need to.”

Jackie knew she wasn’t bluffing. Coward or not, she was skilled with the scalpel. He heard the way she spoke the first time, saw it in her eyes—she liked doing it, or she found it too interesting to care, and she enjoyed the way he pleaded. The metal tools, the restraints around his wrists, the taste of blood—he would feel it all in excruciating clarity. She had a way of speaking; he saw it all, detailed and vivid.

“Your choice,” she said. “You can’t win this. I know you must feel terrible. Trust me, I can make you feel worse.”

She left without another word. The door locked behind her. He was breathing very quickly. He felt dizzy, and he felt tired. He thought he might faint. The lights were too bright, and the room was too small. His skin felt too tight—his body, his flesh, the thing that would be the end of him. His nerves, his veins. He was nothing but a body and a scared, beating heart, and he really could not win this.

But he couldn't give in. Though it was a stupid hill to die on, it was all he had left. He knew that, if he gave up now, he would not have the will to fight again. Heather would make sure of that.

The hour went by too quickly. He’d barely had time to gather his thoughts and his spiking heartbeat when Heather came back. She wore latex gloves. She held the scalpel in one hand and coils of rope in the other. She stepped towards him silently. It was a good time to say sorry, for sure, or to start praying.

He stood at the farthest wall, ready to run, ready to fight, ready to hide, ready to break down into tears. She stepped closer, and closer, and closer…

He tensed. She was close enough to grab him now, but he was also close enough to grab her. He needed to, because the alternative was too much to bear, because this was it, the crux, the fork in the road, the ultimatum, the only factor between living and becoming a hollow husk. Even if he failed, at least he would go down fighting.

Her hand—the hand holding the scalpel—hovered near his side.

Her expression was oddly calm.

Jackie was scared. Of course, who wouldn’t be? But this was it.

He grabbed her wrist, with a strength that surprised both of them, and wrenched it down. He shoved his full weight into her, caught her off guard. They both went sprawling on the ground. The scalpel clattered across the floor, a few inches away.

He twisted her arm. She winced, it hurt her, he was hurting her, this was wrong. This was all wrong. There was a ringing in his ears, like whining metal, and he could feel his pulse beating against his veins. He pinned her throat down with his other hand. He pushed his knee onto her chest, holding her in place.

“Jackie—“

“You bitch,” he spat. Contempt bubbled up in the back of his throat, hissed straight through his voice. “Go to hell.”

“Jack—“ She gasped again, hoarsely. She tried to shift under him. With her free hand, she attempted to grasp his wrist, blindly clawing at it.

He said nothing else. He was feeling lightheaded, his skin flushed. Her face was going pale. In a few moments, it would go blue or purple, or so he’d heard.

Her gasps grew quieter, hoarser. She struggled like a wren caught in a fist, being slowly crushed to death, still twitching and screeching. He’d forgotten how human she was, how fragile. She was a person, just like Jackie, just like anyone else. Her clawing grew more desperate, but weaker, and her skin felt so warm against his.

“Jack, Jackie, please.” Begging. He’d never heard her beg before.

She made a strained, hitching sound in her throat. Her eyes were wet and shiny. Her pupils were dilated, black as velvet, round as moons. Her hair was strewn across the concrete, caught in painful tangles. Her breathing came in quick and stilted, then there were large gaps of silence with only her struggling, only the sound of his own lungs still pumping and her quiet whimpers. He thought of her unmoving, a corpse, a body without a soul. Like a pig hanging by a hook, eyes like stones, skin like wax. He imagined this would be easier.

Each moment dragged on like nails on a chalkboard. She refused to die. She sputtered and coughed and whimpered but she would not die. He wasn't strong enough to crush her windpipe. It was taking too long, and he was already feeling tired, already losing his grip. And he knew this wouldn't work.

“P—Please.” She barely got the words out. There was a tense, whistling pitch to them. One more gasp—it sounded painful, scraping and coarse. “I’m sorry. I—I’m sorry—“

An apology. I’m sorry. Was that all it took? He was weak. He was gutless. To snuff out a life, to kill the sum of that flame—the thought of it made him sick. He let go.

She lay there, gasping for a minute, rasping and wheezing, just getting the air back into her chest. He noticed a large, plum-dark bruise on her neck with a fuzzy detachment. He couldn’t have done that. It didn’t fit the view he had of himself, to give bruises, to almost choke someone to death. He was not a murderer��really, he wasn’t. He was not a wolf at the door, not the sly fox in the rabbit hutch after all. She was completely unrecognizable to him, the way she was shaking.

Heather staggered to her knees and then to her feet, leaning against the wall. Quickly, she went for the scalpel, held it tight with trembling hands. Her eyes were wide as mirrors. Her hand clutched at her throat. She looked at him like he was a rabid dog, scimitar jaws and hunched shoulders, a snarling animal with blood soaked around its mouth. He held her gaze, still on the ground.

She stepped backwards, still staring at him—then, she ran, bolted up the staircase. He heard the door shut. He heard the door lock. And then he was alone.

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Taglist:

@theelvishcowgirl

@lthrboy

@whumpy-wyrms

@yassifiedinformation

#I'm sure this will have no negative effects #for anyone #whump #whump writing #Spiderwebs toyybox #my writing #defiant whumpee

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