Chapter Text
He faces the torture with courage for the first few days. He knows it's days, because let him see the sun rise and set through the narrow bars of a window. He marks the hours by the sound of a church bell somewhere outside, where the bell's cries are heard but his are not. The torture is the respectful sort. A french officer stands and watches, his hands held behind his back. He sneers when blood gets on his boots, and he kicks the guard in the shin for it. He asks questions they both know Sharpe doesn't intend to answer, and he looks half asleep at every session in the white-washed office.
By the second week, they take away his daylight by blocking off the window. He'd grabbed discarded food off the street, and bloodied his feet on the rough stone climbing high enough to stick his arm through the bars. It had been a pear, rolled over by a cart and rotting through the center, but the flesh had been sweet and cool. He licked the juice off his fingers and slept actual sleep for an hour afterwards, as if it had been a grand meal that had filled his aching stomach. The punishment had been worth the cost.
Shuttering the window makes the air in the cell damp and thick. Sharpe lays on the ground where it's coolest, and also because the uneven pavers that form the floor make his ass hurt when he sits on them too long. They make his ribs hurt when he lays down, but better a fresh breath of air to go with the pain. It'll all keep hurting anyway, as long as they keep hitting him for not answering questions. Besides, if he breathes shallow enough, his ribs only hurt a little bit, and he doesn't care to breath in the shit-stinking air more than he has to. He pillows his torn shirt under his head, and fakes sleep through the dead hours.
He assumes there are others that they're questioning, as some days they don't come for him at all. Maybe survivors from the company he was attached to, maybe just general unfortunate souls who'd wandered by. On the empty days they toss molding bread under the door and onto the filthy floor. It makes him sick every time he eats it, sometimes enough to throw up, but there's no other choice.
The real trouble starts in the third week, the day the officer stops appearing. In his place is a sweating, round-faced man. His dark beard is patchy, almost sickly in appearance, but clearly well kept. The edges are always clean, just the same as his short, greasy hair. The beard makes his chin look something like a horse's dappled ass. He wears a butcher's apron. Sharpe first sees him while being walked into the room and sat on a wooden chair. Chair, not stool this time. They'd liked the stool because they could knock him to the ground easier. The sight of the apron, of the rolled up sleeves and the death-pale blue of the man's eyes strikes fear into Sharpe. He can tell that this man is different from the officer. This man is not bored, but wide awake and brimming with interest.
They tie his feet and wrists to the chair, pulling the rope taut until it cuts his skin.
"Captain Frog get the day off?" Sharpe says. He tries to make himself smile with the quip, and hopes that it deflects attention away from the fear in his eyes.
The man looks down his flat nose at Sharpe, eyes looking colder than even Wellesley's do after a lost battle.
"I am given reward," The man says, his french accent so thick it's almost unintelligible.
Sharpe is quiet, glancing around, before venturing an unsure "Congratulations?"
"You are reward."
Sharpe's legs and back tense. They were tense already, but now his body seeks to fold inside of itself, to protect itself. It makes him press back in the chair, ankles testing the strength of the rope as he squeezes his knees together. None of these things help, they make the rope bite. He wants to ask what the man means by his words, but also knows there's not a good answer.
The man speaks again, mouth twitching in what may have been a smile. The motion strikes Sharpe as painfully familiar. "I get information. Useful information, from your friends. Unlike your... Captain Frog. So, I get reward." He nods his head, indicating Sharpe. "Get useless thing to play with."
The man snaps his fingers, motions to the guards that stand either side of him. One walks forward and ties a blindfold over Sharpe's eyes, the other presses a rag inside his mouth and a gag over it.
No voice, no information to give, no information wanted. No voice means no pleading, no spilling the truth to make it stop.
Sharpe feels cold. The hair on his arms stands up, sickness blooming in his belly. He keeps it down because that very well might kill him with the rag in his mouth. The thought of suffocating on his own vomit makes him feel even more sick, and he breathes shakily through his nose to try and get the air he needs.
He won't scream. He's certain he won't. He'll hold onto that, at least. They'll see the scars on his back, and then they'll learn they can't do worse than that. Can't do worse than everyone else who's tried to destroy him through pain and punishment. And even if he does scream, he'll be stronger than them. Until they die, he'll remain and he'll fight. He'll survive until he sees a British bullet ricochet through their skulls and spit their brains out the back. Then he'll stomp their heads for good measure. Like murdering rats in the gutter.
All that anger does nothing to stop him from jumping as something cold touches the base of his neck. He tries to lean forward and away from it, but hands grip his hair and hold him fast. His teeth grind down on the gag and he presses his tongue against it to keep it out of his throat. It tastes something like piss, though that's all his mouth has tasted like for a week.
There's a small pinch to the skin on his neck. It makes his shoulder twitch, his head turn until the hand claws his scalp and makes him turn it back. Slowly, the pain increases, as do his breaths. He can barely hear himself but he knows there's a noise escaping the back of his throat. It rattles inside of him, a tremble riding all the way down to his stomach. It hurts enough now that he'd exclaim something, if he could. But he can't and doesn't. He tries shifting his shoulder to make it stop and it does nothing. More now, like teeth sliding into the skin. It's pressing, slicing, seeking entry. His small noises get a little more insistent.
It breaks the skin. He jumps when it does, and it goes deeper, and it goes fast now, and he's trying to twist away. Turning his head, twitching his shoulder, and they fight him back into place. Hands on his shoulders and one around his throat, crushing him back into position. The biting at his neck begins crawling through muscle, he gasps and the rag chokes him, and feeling it press against the roof of his mouth he gags on it.
The pain slices, quickly and violently, outwards. The tear is deep and ragged, and Sharpe feels blood spill down his neck. Almost hot compared to the cold he feels. Pain screams up and down his neck. The hand on his head is shaking, and just beyond the pounding of blood in his own ears he can hear the sound of laughter.
He's trying hard not to whimper at the pain arching through him. He knows his ragged breaths are layered with subdued sounds of pain, but they're not screams. No, they aren't that.
His arms are shaking. Can't hold onto the arm rest, fists clenching until the knuckles are white and the rope embeds in his skin.
The tool presses into the skin again, to carve another line. Teeth biting, like a saw, back and forth as it rips skin and nerves and self control.
The man never gives Sharpe his name, so Sharpe names him the Butcher. And the Butcher carves his initials deep into the back of Sharpe's neck, one slow, painful cut at a time.
G B D
Sharpe cannot keep track of the days, though the church bells keep ringing out the passing hours.
Time passes, and when he is not in their hands, he passes it with half-awake wondering in the dark.
He tries to think of anywhere else. He starts at the beginning, in London. Tries to imagine the streets, the sounds, the scent. It smelled much like his cell does- shit and filth and stale air. And when he walks down the streets in his mind, he finds the pains in his body become the places the whip, the book, the hand struck him as a child. So he releases that back into the dark quickly. The warm and kind things are too distant there, if they exist at all.
So India. No, India he lets go of quickly, too. The warm air of it suffocates him, and the grit of the flagstone floor is like the coarse dirt he could never get out of his boots. And besides, his mind will always chain him down to the flogging and the twitching face of Hakeswill. The Butcher's face doesn't twist like Obadiah's, his eyes aren't filled with that maddened hatred, but every time he sees Sharpe brought into the room that violent smile twitches into his round cheeks. There's no one left from those days whose gentleness and concern he can remember. Lawford is gone back to England, the rest flung to the wind. There's no salvation with them.
So then he turns to the rifles. The Chosen Men. Their memory is close and warm. He fiddles with the idea of if they'd come for him. They might want to, he thinks, but would never be allowed to. No, they're too valuable, and he's too replaceable for that. They'll be given to a new officer, given new orders, sent new places without him. They, too, begin to slip through his fingers. They'd be wise to forget about him. People die in war, people get hurt in horrible ways. He doesn't know long he's been captured, but he's sure it's long enough now that they'd have given up on him. Even Patrick would have to admit defeat sometime.
Even Patrick could leave him behind if he really had to. That's what Sharpe would want him to do, anyway. Move on and do well for himself.
He sits up in the corner of his cell, scratching his finger over the rough stones until his fingernails crack, and he decides. This will be the end of it. An adequate way of dying. He was born into violence and he'll die to it the same way. Small, useless, and unwanted. His sins had found him out. Couldn't forget that line, could he? Somewhere in hell the headmaster was laughing at him and waiting for Sharpe to join him any moment now.
It's not dishonorable to recognize when you've been defeated. A good leader doesn't keep throwing lives at a lost battle just to satisfy his ego, and Sharpe always wanted to be a good leader.
When they open the cell door, he looks up at them passively. Perhaps they would think they'd broken him, but Sharpe doesn't see it that way. He's not broken, but completed. The book of his life has closed. Its ragged pages have soaked up the last of his blood, so he'll find a way to put it on the shelf and let it finally be done.
Butcher notices, when they bring Sharpe back to the torture room. This time he smiles wide at Sharpe and has them hold him upright. He looks Sharpe up and down like a proud father, nodding at him as he hangs limp between the guard's arms. Sharpe does not want to react to him. His fingers are holding that quiet, empty peace he'd found just moments ago, but under those dead eyes, peace trickles through his fingers.
Butcher reaches up and clutches Sharpe's cheek, stroking it with his thumb. "So the fight finally leaves you! Good. Now, now this can be fun. Now I see what I can make you into."