Chapter Text
Kaz Brekker wakes to find himself in an unfamiliar room, draped from head to toe in silk, and living a life utterly unlike the life that he was living before his last moment of consciousness. Panic isn't an option, not yet (or maybe not anymore?), because it won't have any sort of productive outcome.
His clothes were the first thing he noticed because they left him cold , lying on the ground of whatever room he's in, shivering and covered in goosebumps. That's the second thing that he notices, the way that every inch of his skin is smooth and hairless and wrong. He pushes down the bile rising up in his throat at the knowledge that not only has someone undressed him without his consent, they've also thought it necessary to make modifications to his body as well.
But he doesn't panic. He doesn't panic. He doesn't have his cane, that's the next thing that he notices when he instinctively reaches for it to help push himself to his feet and finds that it's nowhere in sight. There's nothing in this room except for him, and the bed he woke up on. There's not even a door here, no visible lock for him to pick, no window to shimmy open and out of, no guards to fight his way past. Nothing.
He slides his hand along every inch of the floor he could reach, then along the wall all the way around looking for any kind of crease or latch or opening. There's nothing. The walls are white enough to feel sterile, but he also doesn't think he's seen anything this white since he was a child. He's seen things that are supposed to be white, things that have since been covered by dirt and grime and blood and never been cleaned again. Sterility, however, hasn’t had any room to exist since the first invasion.
He’s tired already, and he’s done nothing. He already woke up groggy. He can’t remember much from before, can’t put together the context for what’s happening to him now. He just feels tense, and unsettled. A person who isn’t Kaz Brekker might have described themselves as afraid.
Before he has the chance for any further exploring, a door opens without preamble. How it manages to exist without leaving behind any sign or trace of it is a mystery to Kaz, but the mystery isn’t as concerning as the creature that stands tall and wretched in the doorway.
It doesn’t matter that he’d just had all of those intelligent and grounded thoughts about not panicking, it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know where he is or what’s out there, it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t have his cane and he’s not properly dressed and he’s completely unarmed. He sees an opening, he lunges for it. He’ll push through his pain and run for as far as his legs will carry him, and after that he’ll crawl.
He doesn’t get more than halfway to the exit before he hears a jarring, high-pitched, miserable noise. It’s accompanied by a sharp stab of pain in his head so sudden it sends him to his knees. His vision starts to blur and he’s almost overcome with nausea, but just as he’s about to finally fill the room with at least a little bit of color in the form of emptying his stomach, the noise stops. So does the pain.
He’s lying on his side, watching the door disappear again. He’s in so much pain he doesn’t think he could run for it again even if it were open.
“You skins always have to do things the hard way, don’t you? Should have kept you out for another few days.”
His chance at a way out gone, Kaz finally gives his attention to the creature left behind with him. He stands taller than Kaz, easily towering over him by a couple of feet. He has to be at least 7 or 8 feet tall. Human but inhuman at the same time, the alien's entire existence just feels sterile.
He smirks down at Kaz, and it's that expression that makes Kaz realize he knows exactly who he is. It's the last face he saw before he'd been taken– the last thing he even remembers, really. It was shocking enough the first time. He'd thought they were ugly, grotesque things until the Darkling had removed his head and Kaz had realized that for years he'd been looking at a mask. These creatures that had dominated every single aspect of his life, steamrolled his world until there was nothing good left in it for him, and he'd never seen any of their real faces.
Now, Kaz is getting a good look at the face of the creature he's wanted dead for years. His skin is like ash, but his features are perfect in a way that's almost distressing. It's like the man was chiseled out of marble. Kaz wants to take a hammer and smash it all to pieces.
“Where am I?”
“On a craft back to Ravka,” the Darkling says, with that same smug little smile. “You can kiss your precious planet goodbye. I doubt you’ll ever have a chance to even glance at it again.”
No. No no no no no, he’d expected him to kill him, he hadn’t expected him to put him on a ship and take him somewhere. There’s no real escape from this, if he’s actually been taken off of earth. He can’t escape. He wouldn’t last more than two seconds on his own out there, even if he could manage to steal some kind of escape pod he’s not sure he would know how to navigate back to Earth if he tried. He’s never even left Ketterdam, how is he supposed to survive space exploration?
The nausea is back now, for a completely different reason.
“Kill me,” he says. He never thought he would ever say anything like that, not when he’s been yelling at himself to keep fighting for as long as he can remember. He didn’t escape death so many times before just to succumb to it now.
What would Jordie think, if he saw you? He thinks, for a split second. He pushes the thought out of his head. Jordie isn’t here, so it doesn’t much matter, does it? Jordie didn’t even survive for long enough to see the first invasion, so he can’t possibly weigh in on how Kaz should feel in the face of something like this. They knew each other in a different world.
“You really thought that you stood a chance against me and an army of beings more powerful than your little finger,” the Darkling laughs. “You thought you were so tough, swearing at me that you wouldn’t go down without a fight, that you’d never submit, but where are you now? At my feet where you belong.”
Kaz works up as much saliva as he can, just to spit at the Darkling’s feet. It’s going to bite him in the ass, he already knows, but he can’t sink much lower than he already is.
“I see I was wrong to think you were ready to have a real conversation,” he frowns down at Kaz, much more disappointed than angry. “We’ll try this again when we’re closer to Ravka.”
He pulls out some kind of device, more high tech than anything Kaz has seen from any human, and presses a button on it that fills the room with gas. He’s playing dirty then. He’s just going to keep knocking Kaz out or playing noises anytime Kaz doesn’t behave?
Kaz doesn’t have time to air his complaints. He’s unconscious again before he even opens his mouth.
The next time he wakes, he’s in a proper room.
The door in the room has a real lock, which makes him feel like it’s his birthday.
The room is large. Not just large in the way that a room in any rich person’s house is large, it’s not just spacious, it’s also the fact that every single thing inside the room just feels so much larger in a way that makes Kaz feel small. It’s like he’s a child again, and the minutes seem to last longer and everything around him seems more consequential and it takes more steps to make it from one end of something to the other.
It makes a certain amount of sense for where he thinks he probably is. Every single one of those creatures dwarfs all but the tallest humans, and although Kaz isn’t short by human standards, he’s not exactly a giant either.
He’s still wearing the same silks he was draped in early, meaning there’s no chance of finding lock picks he’d left behind in pockets. He has to be creative. He has to try and look for something already in the room…and so much here is already completely unfamiliar to him in a way that hurts his brain. He's still without his cane, as well, meaning he should go ahead and write off ever seeing it again. It has to still be on earth. ‘
No. He has to stop thinking like that, giving up before he's even started. He's alive, which means he's still alive to fight.
He thinks he’s looked through every part of the room that he can physically reach before he finally finds a hairpin on the ground. He breaks it in the specific way that he needs to in order to turn it into a proper lock picking tool, and prays to gods he doesn’t believe in that the locks on Ravka are anything like the locks on Earth.
He really wants to collapse back into that massive bed again and let it swallow him, considering wandering the room without his cane and crawling around on the ground for who-knows-how-long is probably doing irreparable damage to his leg.
He can’t do that, though, because if there’s going to be any hope of him getting out of here it’s going to be soon. Something tells him that the longer he stays the worse it’s going to be. He hasn’t even properly met his captor yet, short of their ugly last exchange and the painful memory of his final moments on earth.
It takes him longer than any Earth lock ever had. If he had any other options, he would have given up and exhausted them before going back to this, but he doesn’t have any other options, so he picks at it and picks at it and picks at it until finally it cracks.
The door swings open, and he’s hit with the sudden chill of the air outside. So the hallways aren’t heated then, fine, Kaz will survive until he gets somewhere warmer. He wishes he had something to wear other than the thin layers of silk he’s draped in, but the adrenaline will keep him warm.
Kaz takes one step out the door to see that it stretches into a long, decadent hallway. He’s in some kind of a palace, certainly, this whole place is more luxury than he’s seen in his entire life. He takes a deep breath….and it’s wrong. He can’t take a full breath. He breathes again, and it’s still not enough. He’s breathing deeply, but it’s still short. He walks further down the hallway, trying to catch up to a window he sees a bit further down the hall so that he can try and get some context for the world around him.
He can feel his pulse quickening. He starts to feel lightheaded, maybe because no matter how much he breathes, it just can’t seem to be enough. It could be the cold, too, the feeling in his fingers already feels like it’s going away.
It could be the air– the thought does occur to him– but the idea that he can’t even survive out here for long enough to attempt a proper escape is too horrifying to entertain. It could just as easily be some after effects of whatever drug he’d been under for who knows how long.
He pauses a second down the hall, touching the wall to keep himself steady. He tries to take another deep breath, but somehow it makes it all worse. He may as well be breathing in nothing at all. He breathes again, his chest starting to ache from the effort of it.
It’s an extra effort just to keep his mind in the right place and stop from hyperventilating. He tries to stop focusing on his breathing at all, trying again to take more and more steps further down the hall. He keeps one hand tracing the wall, but even the wall feels like ice against his fingertips.
His limbs feel like lead, his steps not nearly as precise as they’re meant to be. There’s a hammering coming from somewhere, a loud pounding sound that he can’t recognize. He thinks it could be some kind of alarm, far enough from the sound of a human alarm that he hadn’t recognized it, but he can’t seem to find out where it’s coming from.
Another step forward. And another. He was after…something. He wasn’t just blindly walking– he had a goal here. What was it? The window. He looks toward it again, sure that he has to be almost there, but it feels nearly as far away as he was when he’d started.
He’s already not sure he can make it that far, but even if he does, what comes next? Would he be able to break it open? Get out of here? If they’re filling the room with some sort of gas, perhaps. His heart is pounding– oh, that’s the sound.
It’s sharp and insistent, pounding and annoying and inescapable. It’s inconsistent, hearts aren’t supposed to sound like that. The thought prompts another attempt at breathing. He can feel tears prick at the corners of his eyes, a humiliating reminder that even though his mind refuses to be afraid, his body is.
He feels one roll down his face and stop halfway down it. Feels it freeze onto his cheek.
His muscles are trembling, and not just his leg, every single muscle in his body is screaming at him to turn the fuck back.
What is he even doing here? He’d left for a reason. He’d wanted to escape, but he doesn’t see any exits. The hallway is nearly empty. Just the door he’d come from, the long hallway leading to a sharp turn, and a window– the window. Fuck. He’s almost there now, just a few steps further. He’ll crawl if he has to.
He stumbles toward it. He’s going to try to punch through it, but as he traces his fingers over the glass he can already tell it’s thicker than any kind of material he’s ever seen on earth. He’d sooner break his hand than make any progress breaking the window.
Then, there’s the view.
He knew he wasn’t in Ketterdam anymore. Wasn’t even on Earth. But this…it’s just wrong. Alien and unsettling in a way his mind can’t seem to catch up with yet. He feels a sickness in the pit of his stomach at the vastness of it, the coldness. It’s cold in the hall, it’s so cold his tears are freezing to his face, but what he sees out the window looks like a kind of cold bleakness his language has never thought to find the words for.
The sky is too dark. There are too many stars, but he can’t put together a single constellation. There’s no warmth in the light that is there, either. Every single shadow feels too long, somehow, and the structures in the city ahead of him are unlike anything that should exist.
He can’t look at it any longer.
One thing is certain: even if he could break this window, Ravka doesn’t want him there any more than he wants to be there. If the hallway is killing him, he doesn’t want to know what the open air would do to him.
He turns away. If he makes it to the end of the hallway, he doesn’t know how long it stretches before he gets to another room. He doesn’t know how to find an exit. He doesn’t know where to go once he does. He knows of one place that won’t fucking kill him…and it’s the place he just walked out of.
So he laughs. He laughs and he laughs and he laughs until he’s buckled over, nearly on the ground. He feels euphoric somehow in his grief, in how completely nothing everything seems. What had he always said?
No mourners, no funerals.
He’ll certainly have neither, here. He almost wishes he had the guts to die out here, freezing to death in the miserable air, rather than keeping himself alive just to see what more miserable fate his captor has in store for him.
He shouldn’t be this calm. He should be panicked, and the panic should be spurring him to action. Instead, he stumbles until he falls, and he crawls pathetically back to where he came from on his hands and knees. He doesn’t have a choice anymore, if he ever did.
When he finally makes it back into the room, he’s gasping, body screaming for air. He kicks the door shut behind him and lies on the ground, gasping for it. He takes breath after breath after breath, in and out…in and out…in and out…in and out….
His mind finally settles again along with his breathing, the rush of relief at being back here almost humiliating. Now, he knows. He’s trapped in a way that brute force and cleverness can’t fix. The door could have been unlocked and it wouldn’t have mattered.
This room isn’t a cell, but it may as well have been. And worse– and he’s just walked right back into it. He lies miserably on the room’s thick, plush rug and thinks of the sky. It’s a special kind of grief, knowing that him and the ones he loved are looking at a different set of stars.
Notes:
they're in Ravka, so you'll see Ravkans <3 this is the warning that I can't keep Nikolai away from this relationship, unfortunately. I do have quite a bit of this planned out but no posting schedule or anything, just vibes, I'm just throwing this one out into the wind.
also, this might end up being the most unethical thing yet so keep your expectations high in terms of "will this make me feel ill" but also "will there be weird sex" bc the answer is probably both to both of those things.
Chapter 2: you are the hammer, i am the nail
Summary:
Kaz and the Darkling have a conversation.
Notes:
some trigger warnings here!
normal amounts of psychological abuse + some actual physical abuse/violence/hitting, dehumanization, psychological horror, suicidal thoughts, general very awfulness.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
When he wakes up, he’s back in the bed. He doesn’t remember crawling back into it. He would have remembered if he’d actually done it, because it’s taller than any bed he’s ever been in and takes real effort to climb into. It makes him feel small and stupid like everything else in this room does. The very effort of getting into it is a humiliation.
But he’s back in the bed, and he’s wearing a different set of silks (which means someone’s changed his clothes), and he has a faint headache that seems to be warning of pain to come if he doesn’t handle it delicately.
He can feel the wrongness of the whole situation. The bed is warm– warmer than Kaz is– as though someone else had been in it. The sheets are too smooth. They’re made of a fabric Kaz has never felt before, probably one that’s never existed to him before this week. Probably stolen and milked from some other enslaved planet’s resources. He wants to open his eyes, but his eyelids still feel so heavy. He’s afraid of what the light will do to his head. He’s tempted to drift off again but…no. .
Someone picked him up off the floor, redressed him, and moved him back into this bed that has clearly been recently occupied by another person. He has to open his eyes and face what’s happening to him whether he wants to or not. He still doesn’t even know what he’s doing here or why he’s still alive. Why didn’t they kill him back in Ketterdam?
He slowly lets his eyes flicker open, letting his eyes adjust to the unfamiliar light of the room. Then, he sees him– the Darkling. He’s just sitting there. Watching. Waiting. He doesn’t seem angry even though it’s clear that Kaz had attempted to escape. He doesn’t seem impatient either. He’s just been waiting. He’s not blinking, but then, Kaz isn’t even sure if these creatures need to blink.
He doesn’t look uncomfortable in this space. He’s lounging there in a chair not far from the bed, drinking some kind of beverage out of something resembling a mug and watching Kaz like he’s entertainment. Kaz can smell it from here. It smells almost like coffee, but not.
It occurs to Kaz seeing him there, comfortable and completely at ease, that this is likely his space. Kaz has woken up in his bed. It’s humiliating. It’s infuriating.
The Darkling speaks before Kaz has even had the chance to fully sit up.
“You sleep like a corpse. It was starting to make me wonder if humans were even easier to break than I’d thought.”
“What do you want from me?” Kaz rasps.
The Darkling takes a long, slow sip of his drink, completely unbothered by Kaz’s question or the way he’s looking at him like he wants to rip him apart– would, if the idea didn’t feel so daunting in his present condition. “Want from you?” He says, with a bit of a laugh. “I want you to accept reality.” He gestures to the room they’re in. “This is it. No more rebellion. No more schemes. You lost, and now you live by my will alone.”
He lets the words settle in the air before letting his gaze flick back to Kaz, his gaze someone even fiercer than before. “You belong to me now. That’s all you need to understand.”
Kaz feels a sickness settling again in his stomach that has nothing to do with the quality of the air. “No,” he says, with a slight shake of his head. It’s quiet, meant to be half-under his breath. It was for him, for his own ability to process this, but the Darkling heard it anyway.
“No?” the Darkling sets down his drink, and Kaz finds himself instinctively pushing himself further back toward the headboard. Kaz isn’t a coward. It’s some kind of evolutionary response, a natural reaction toward encountering a predator like this. “Did you think I was asking?”
There’s nowhere for him to run, though, not in the Darkling’s own bed. Not when the air outside of this room is poisonous.
You live by my will alone.
He tries to push aside the overwhelming horror of the situation. The longer he dwells on it, the higher the chance is of it pulling him under completely. He needs to find something that’s still his, and if the one thing he still owns is his pride then fine.
“No, I knew you weren’t asking. Your kind don’t ask. They take.”
“Says the thief,” The Darkling scoffs. “The murderer.”
The audacity of The Black General to call Kaz the murderer. “You’ll call me that, after culling my people and taking everything you have for your own broken planet?”
The Darkling presses his lips together in a sign of contempt. Kaz can’t properly read his expression in his face. It’s easier now that he has a face to him and he’s not just some mask– the mask Kaz had really thought for years had been these creatures' true faces– but it’s still almost impossible. His eyes are black throughout, Kaz can’t see any of the signs he’s learned to look for there.
“You call my planet broken?” He laughs, “I saw you made it far enough in your little escape attempt to see out the window, to see the kind of progress we have here compared to the wasteland you call home.”
“You’re the ones who made it a wasteland.”
“You were destroying each other long before we got there. Someone needed to step in and save your planet from the disgusting beings who inhabited it. You’re lucky we kept as many of you alive as we did to work it– although how you made it as far as you did, I certainly couldn’t say.”
It’s Kaz’s last straw somehow, the reminder that his existence as a ‘flawed’ being would have been enough to have him taken out right after the first invasion if he hadn’t managed to fly under the radar for so long. If he hadn’t formed a resistance. It was survival, as much as it was rebellion.
He doesn’t care if he feels half dead, he launches himself off the bed and lunges at him with the goal to hurt him in any way that he can. If he can just be lucky enough to wrap his fingers around the Darkling’s throat–
Kaz slams into him like slamming into a brick wall. He throws a punch expecting at least some resistance, but he can feel the wrongness of it the moment his knuckles make contact with the creature's skin. It's too solid, too unmoving. The shock of it reverberates up his arm, jarring his wrist and causing a sharp pain that elicits a hiss of pain from him.
The Darkling barely moves. His head tilts just slightly in acknowledgment, but aside from that he simply looks down at Kaz as though he were nothing but an annoyance. Kaz knows he felt it, but it wasn't even enough for him to really react to. It's enough to make Kaz want to scream– but why should he be able to hurt him? He couldn't even beat one of them on his own planet, on his own turf, did he really expect to be able to do anything to him here?
But he can't stop, not yet. He grabs onto him for leverage (ignoring the way that his skin feels not right, not human, he doesn't feel the usual instinct to recoil from it like human touch) and reaches up his other hand to try and claw at him. They haven't kept good care of his nails while they had him out, they may not have even realized they can grow like this. Kaz doesn't know how much the Ravkans have ever bothered to know or care about human biology. He scratches against the smooth surface of the Darkling's armored skin, kicking and scraping and clawing at him, but it's like fighting a statue.
Knowing he's outmatched doesn't calm him down. If anything he's even angrier than he was before, it burns hot inside of him, slowly mixing together with the panic inside of him like a disgusting soup. He just can’t accept that he can’t seem to make him feel anything like this. He hits and kicks and scratches until he’s completely spent.
“Are you through?” The Darkling asks, sounding almost bored. Then, before Kaz even has the chance to collect himself, he feels a sharp, sudden, explosive pain across the side of his face. His body is hurled across the room. He slams into the floor, fighting to breathe as he feels the air knocked out of him. He tastes blood.
He looks up at the Darkling, who seems to be staring at the hand he’d just backhanded Kaz with and then back at Kaz like even he hadn’t expected that outcome. His surprise hardens into something more smug, more unbearable for Kaz to be witness to.
“That was meant to be gentle, so perhaps now you can imagine what it may feel like when I actually mean to hurt you,” He walks toward where Kaz is crumpled on the floor, reaching down and picking him up by his neck, pinching him and carrying him by it like he’s a prey animal caught by the scruff. The Darkling tosses him back onto the bed.
“Are you ready to behave now?” He asks.
Kaz’s head is spinning. He feels dizzy and disoriented, he can’t agree to anything in this condition. He won’t. He shakes his head no, feeling as he does so that the Darkling had to have pinched a nerve or something.
“Use your words.”
“Go to hell.”
The Darkling simply sighs, disappointed apparently by Kaz’s continued defiance. He walks out of Kaz’s line of sight, but Kaz is too exhausted and in pain to move into a position where he can continue watching him. When he comes back, he has some kind of tablet in his hand.
Before he has a chance to ask what the Darkling is doing, the room gets colder and colder until it may as well match the temperature outside. He shivers, not really caring anymore if it reveals to the General that he can't handle this.
“This is a much more comfortable temperature for someone like me,” the Darkling muses aloud, as though Kaz had even asked. He didn't need to ask what he was doing. It's obvious it's just another attempt to try and break him. He finds himself slipping underneath the large bed's warm covers before he can think about it. “The climate of your planet is bearable just fine, but not my preference. It's expensive and annoying to keep this room to your standards.”
Does he expect Kaz to beg for warmth, then? If it were just a matter of expenses he would at least have the decency to provide Kaz with warmer clothes, but it's not about that. He simmers with rage, but what is he expected to do?
“You have nothing to say now?” The Darkling pushes. “You were so talkative earlier.”
“This is what passes for hospitality in Ravka?” Kaz hisses.
“You're not a guest,” the Darkling says, with a wave of his hand. “You're property.”
“Feeling so sentimental that you wanted a keepsake from the war?” Kaz says, because he's too weak and too fucking cold to try again to do any damage. It's a weak comeback, too, but it's all he can think up right now. “Either way, you should treat your ‘property’ better.”
He says the word like he doesn’t believe that it’s true, or at least that's how he wants to say it. He doesn't know how to make him bleed, but he'll find a way. He tries to spin this as a positive in the only way he can think of. How long has he wished he could find some way to get this close to the Black General? To find some kind of weakness to exploit, to see him without his weapons and his armor.
Sure, the odds feel…ridiculously stacked against him…but if there's any way he could kill him here, what would that do to their army? Could it give his planet a fighting chance?
Maybe it's fruitless, but the alternative is giving himself over to despair and begging for death again. He never wants to feel that way again. He can't.
“It isn't just the temperature I can change,” the Darkling says, fiddling with the controls more.
Kaz can't put his finger on what's happened, at first. The temperature feels the same. The lighting. The change is so gradual. The Darkling continues to stare at him, interested in watching exactly how Kaz reacts when he realizes. It hits him in waves. He feels that same lightheaded feeling from earlier, but that could still be a consequence of being thrown around. Then the dizziness comes back. The shortness of breath.
He didn't, did he? Kaz may not even need to beg for death, if the Darkling is granting it just like this. He has to realize Kaz needs it, otherwise he wouldn't have gone through the trouble of flooding the room with it anyway.
The small protections this room offered him are gone. He may as well be in the hallway again, fruitlessly chasing safety. Even then, he still can't run, not in this condition. Besides that, he still knows the air outside is worse than this. The air outside would actually kill him, this is just uncomfortable…and speaking of uncomfortable. The room gets even colder. The Darkling's just having fun with him now. Kaz curls into himself under the blankets, trying to seek warmth, trying to minimize the amount he even needs to breathe.
He takes slow, steady breaths that aren't enough, trying not to hyperventilate as the Darkling watches him in some kind of amusement. He doesn't want to give him the satisfaction of using him as entertainment, but he can't control the way his body reacts to this.
“Stop–” he finally breaks as his vision starts to blur again. “Don't.”
“Humans are so…fickle. It was just last month you were begging me to kill you, were you not? And now you'll do anything to survive. You're so desperate that you'll do whatever I want just for a little bit of oxygen– something my kind hardly needs.”
Kaz knows the Darkling's intentions were to mock him, but he can't bother to waste emotion on it. His brain is stuck on two words– last month.
“What do you mean last month?” He asks, wrapping his arms around himself even tighter. “That was…a few days ago.” He tastes the words as he says them, trying to see if he can find any truth in them. He knows they're wrong as they leave his lips, but he wants to hear the Darkling say it.
“It takes months to travel from Earth to Ravka even at lightspeed, surely even a creature as simple as you can understand we couldn't have made the journey in a few days no state of the art our ships are. We had you in cryo.”
Kaz just stares at him. He doesn't really know what to say. It's logical. It makes sense. That doesn't mean he has to like it, or that he has to understand it. He'd heard that the aliens could do things like that, that they had that kind of technology, but it never applied to him. He's never seen Ravkan tech do anything but destroy.
Still…a month of his life gone, just like that. More, probably, since it's been a full month since they'd tried to wake him up. Months. It would take him months to ever see the Dregs again, if they're even still alive.
He wants to hurt something. As it stands, he doesn't think he could hurt anything in this condition. Doesn't think he can do anything but lay here curled up in blankets begging for a chance to breathe properly.
In…and out…in…and out…it's no use, really, he knows that. He's dizzy, lightheaded. He feels a headache coming on.
“It's pathetic, seeing you like this,” the Darkling says. He's towering over Kaz now. Arms crossed, looking over him. “It isn't as though you haven't been through worse. Torture, humiliation, war…and the oxygen levels in the room are enough to take you out…although I have to say, you're much more harmless like this. Maybe if I turn them down a bit further…”
Kaz watches as he takes out his tablet again, fiddling with the controls in the room until what he's faced with is much closer to what the air was like outside. Kaz's eyes widen. Surely he's not going to actually kill Kaz here just to make his point…? But then, what does he know about keeping humans alive when he's spent the last half decade killing them.
“You don't– you don't need to do this–” he says, a pathetic crack in his voice.
“I think I do, if it makes you understand the way that things are here. The air in this room is mine to give. You don't get to decide how much you get.”
“But–” Kaz rasps.
The Darkling cuts him off while he struggles through his second word. “What you don't seem to understand is that every single breath you take here is a gift from me, and if you're not grateful enough, I can always make it stop.”
Kaz watches as he makes some more adjustments on the tablet, the air becoming even more foul in way that makes his entire chest feel tight. It's like breathing glass. He huddles in on himself even more tightly. His hands (always steady, always reliable) are shaking.
“I don't– I don't wanna–" his voice slurs, unfocused as he slips into an almost childlike panic. He shakes his head, but that makes him feel even more lightheaded. He thinks he might pass out, but he's afraid that if he does he's never going to wake up.
“You never do, do you,” the Darkling tsks.
“"Please, I'll– I'll do whatever you want, I'll be good–” his voice is so thin it's barely audible, but the Darkling hears it.
“There,” he responds, voice dripping with satisfaction. Kaz closed his eyes somewhere along the way, but he can feel the way the bed dips when the Darkling sits on it beside him. The air slowly starts to fill with oxygen again.
Kaz still can't speak, too busy trying to figure out who it was that had just spoken a moment ago. Surely not him. Not Kaz Brekker.
“You said you would be good, but are you ready to be grateful?”
Kaz wants to say no. Kaz wants to bite him. He wants to say he can fuck off and shove his gratitude up his ass. He doesn't want any of that more than he wants to breathe, more than he wants to live somehow still.
“Thank you,” he rasps, the words tasting like bile and ash.
“For what?”
“For…letting me breathe.”
“Was that so hard?”
Yes. He curls tighter in on himself, and pulls the blanket over his head. It's childish maybe, hiding like this, but he can't stand to be seen right now. Can't stand to see him, either.
He feels the Darkling's big, firm hand stroke his back from outside the blanket. “You fashioned yourself some kind of leader out there. Your pride kept you alive. I understand that. Now you need to understand that here, your pride will do nothing but kill you.”
It's not true. The Darkling was the one killing him, Kaz's pride is only what he's pinning the blame on. He won't for a second believe he actually needs to be grateful to him for letting him breathe when he's the one who brought him to this broken, forsaken planet in the first place.
I hate you, Kaz thinks. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. The words feel hollow, but they're all he has.
Notes:
...anyway. enjoy the fucked up food. i did, in fact, enjoy writing it.
Chapter 3: habits won't die
Summary:
Kaz does some exploring.
Chapter Text
He can breathe normally, something he hates that he has to feel grateful for. The Darkling still seems under the impression that Kaz deserves to be punished, or at least that he doesn't deserve to be rewarded– that the inconvenience of making himself mildly uncomfortable so that Kaz can stay at a reasonable temperature just isn't worth it.
Either way, he can't deny that strategically it makes sense for him. And he's been at war with the Darkling for long enough to know that he's nothing if not a decent strategist. It's still so cold that Kaz hates every single second he spends outside of the blankets and covers of the bed, the goosebumps covering his skin and cold sinking into his bones almost the second he sticks so much of a toe out from under them. He causes less problems this way, certainly, considering his plans otherwise would definitely be to snoop or bother or irritate or fight. He doesn't particularly care if fighting sends him straight into the wall these days. He just doesn't want to be here.
It's not like it's enough to kill him. He's not getting hypothermia or anything. It's not even quite as cold as the world outside of these walls is. It's just enough to keep him where he is. If he had proper clothes, if he had some kind of protection, if it were just a little warmer.
The Darkling doesn't even bother speaking with him for the rest of the day, although Kaz isn't exactly fighting for the chance to speak to him either. He still has questions: what's happening in Ketterdam? What did he do with Kaz's friends? What's next for him? He already knows he's not going to get any kind of satisfactory answer about them, though, so they're not worth asking when it's going to once again boil down to him depending on the Darkling.
He comes in and out all day, never staying gone for any meaningful amount of time, but every time Kaz watches the door shut, he hates himself for the fact that it's unlocked and he still can't walk out of it. He could have free rein of the room, too, to poke around in if it wasn't unbearable. Or if a part of him weren't just a little bit afraid of the Darkling coming back to find Kaz poking around after he'd already promised to be good. When the Darkling is here, it almost seems like he could be in some kind of call or meeting, except that Kaz doesn't even hear him make a sound.
Eventually, he looks like he's actually getting ready to leave for the rest of the day. Kaz has already been lying around for hours, curled up under the blanket, going completely ignored. He's dying for the chance to be alone without the alien's stifling presence.
Just ask , he tells himself. Sure, it could look suspicious, but he also wouldn't be surprised if the Darkling underestimates him.
“Where are you going?” Kaz asks as soon as the Darkling begins to open the door.
“Planning to throw another tantrum the second I'm gone?” He asks. “Should I chain you to the bed after all?”
“Go ahead,” Kaz scoffs, “That way, when I freeze to death here, you'll know exactly where to find my bones.”
“Ah, no, not quite,” the Darkling says, the joke apparently going over his head. “I've studied your species’ decomposition quite a bit, up close. In these temperatures you'd stay in the bloated stage for days. Skin slippage wouldn't even start until maybe the end of the week. Bones come much, much later. You wouldn't look like bones for months. You'd just be a pale, curled-up thing slowly giving into decay.”
Bloating. Skin slippage. Decay. He wishes he'd never made the joke in the first place, because now memories of those things are the only thing clouding his mind.
The Darkling just laughs at him. “Don't like that, do you? You look like you’re going to be sick. Thought a rebel like you would have a stronger stomach.” The laugh dies down, and he looks at Kaz with a stern gaze again. “To answer your question, I'm going out.”
“If you won't even be here, it doesn't matter how uncomfortable the room is for you,” Kaz insists, trying to push the mental picture he'd been stuck with out of his head. “You may as well turn on the heat.”
“It's expensive,” the Darkling responds, with a quick wave of his hand, “and you've done nothing to show yourself worth the extra money.”
He leaves, letting the heavy metal door clank shut behind him. This is it, then. His best chance, if he can manage it. The moment the door shuts, Kaz throws off the covers– and instantly regrets it. This was the stupidest way to do it. His misery has clearly sapped some of his reasoning abilities, because now all of the carefully collected body heat he'd been building up since morning is gone like it had never been there. Even if he were to slide back under them now, it wouldn't be the same.
The cold hits him like a slap. It's all-consuming. It bites his skin with teeth, sinking into him and refusing to let him go before he's even really braced for it. He'd thought he'd prepared himself for it, but it catches him off guard like he's never experienced it before, despite knowing he’d already suffered it this morning. He forces himself to endure it, forces himself to push through it as he rolls over to the edge of the massive bed, swinging his legs over the side of it and hopping off of the edge.
His feet hit the ground with a thunk and the stiffness in his leg is immediately noticeable. The chill is sinking into it specifically, and he struggles to take his first few steps despite the tightened muscles and throbbing ache that hadn't been there with the same intensity this morning. The cold weather always makes him feel this way, but it never really got this cold in Ketterdam.
He can relax it later. He likely won't have any choice but to relax it later. With his luck, he really will be staying curled up under the covers in the Darkling's bed until he rots there, until he becomes one with it.
The floor under his feet may as well be ice. His fingers go numb first, aching and going stiff within moments. Then his toes. He's not wearing shoes. He doesn't have socks, either. No gloves, that's been the most difficult thing to realize. A trembling starts in his jaw and spirals down his spine until he's a shivering mess.
He has to push through. He has to. The entire room feels like it's punishing him, but he finally starts to move despite it. He starts by checking every single drawer he can find, seeing nothing of value. Nothing he even recognizes. He goes to where the Darkling was sitting and working earlier, seeing some kind of screen. It was like what the Darkling had been using to change the temperature, but much bigger.
As he gets closer to it, it almost sounds like it's humming somehow. He reaches out to touch it, but the swirling, shifting screen doesn't seem to react to him at all. It's a touch screen of some kind, but it doesn't register that what Kaz is doing is touch.
It makes sense. Your body didn't seem to register the Darkling's fingers as touch, either.
He shakes his head. It's not a helpful thought. It's getting him no closer to figuring this out. He looks for some other way to activate it, he looks for any kind of button, even, but it really does appear that touch is the only thing that could activate it.
Reluctantly, he has to move on from it. There's a few different weird-looking orbs, but once again, despite Kaz fighting against his stiff fingers to fiddle with it, nothing happens with them. He wouldn't be surprised if they only react to the owner's touch as well.
He finds a stack of papers with something handwritten on them– rare, from his understanding, considering how much everything in this room seems to rely on advanced technology. That means they're probably important if they were important enough to write out by hand, but they're not in any language he knows how to read. He scans over it, looking for even a single letter from his own alphabet, but it's all Ravkan writing and alien symbols.
He can't read it. He can't understand a single letter. He'd been building up people who could try and fight against the Ravkan's for years, but they've never gotten any sort of hint as to what the details of their language could be. It's a code he can't crack, no matter how smart he is. It's simply beyond his capabilities.
His frustration builds the longer he keeps at it with no success, just like it had when he'd escaped from the room for nothing. He can be told again and again to be good, but what does it matter when it seems like he can't even have the option of causing any real problems?
The closest thing to helpful he can find is a sketched-out map of Ketterdam, but it's not Ketterdam as he's ever known it. It looks like it should be a map of his city, but it's not. The geography is right, but every location is wrong. All of it is labeled in a language he can't read.
He goes through the Darkling's dresser last. He doesn't expect to find anything useful, but he can at least find more layers of clothing than what he'd been given. Every garment he has is huge , built for someone much bigger than Kaz. When he puts it on he feels the same as if he were trying on some kind of costume, a kid wearing his father's suit to pretend at being professional. It's really not much warmer at all than what Kaz has been wearing underneath it. It's the same silky fabric. The Ravkan's must really run hot-blooded.
He was hoping looking around like he has been would be the kind of physical activity he needed to warm him up. It wasn't. He’s not about to completely give up, though. He scans his brain to think of which lead was the most promising, then makes his way back to the orbs again. He needs to be quick about this. The numbness in his toes is turning into tingling, which he’s sure is a bad sign, but he absolutely refuses to have done all this suffering for nothing.
Though metaphorical, his rage and frustration burn hotter than the cold (not that it helps with the goosebumps). If he can't turn on the screen and the Ravkan language may as well be glyphs from the ocean, he'll force something else to give. Something here is going to break, and it may as well be this damned orb. He picks up one of them. It's smooth at first glance, but his fingers do find subtle indentations. They're pressure points. Possibly made for fingers. There are small cracks as well, like it's meant to open up somehow.
It's no different than a lock to him, really. It's unfamiliar, but that doesn't make it unknowable.
He finds the same pin from earlier, abandoned on the ground near the door from when he'd picked the lock.
It resists like nothing Kaz has toyed with before– but he knows the feel of pins inside a lock, and although this is similar it's still wrong. It's not a lock. He can't expect it to really open like one. He still feels for weakness in each of the pressure points, in every single crack or divet. Press. Listen. Adjust. The orb begins to hum, or maybe he's imagining it? He can't shake the feeling that he's waking something up rather than opening it. Eventually the pin slips into a seam that wasn't there a second ago, less like a growing crack than the parting of ribs in a chest just wide enough to reach the heart. He feels more like himself than he has since he'd left Earth. He can't stop the ear-to-ear grin that spreads across his face as it gives way, the pin slipping deep enough to shift something within in a way that finally changes things irreversibly.
The moment it finally clicks apart, it doesn't shatter. It exhales, like something breathing. It hisses like a gas leak, and every single shadow on the room suddenly seems to deepen. A slow leak of something black and inky starts to come out of the cracks, blacker than the emptiness of space itself, a complete absence of anything. It feels like some trick of the light, until he runs his hand through it and finds the darkness almost tangible. It absorbs what little warmth the room has in every single spot that it touches. Kaz drops the orb on the ground, his face falling along with it. The tendrils of darkness begin to stretch out even further, slithering over the floor like liquid malice as it slowly swallows even more of the room.
What has he done? This was reckless, he realizes now. Everything about this place had taken on such an unreal quality, like a twisted nightmare he's not lucid enough to control but is just lucid enough to know he might wake up soon. That doesn't make his actions without consequence, and no one is here right now to save him from this.
Kaz backs away from it, but it's not quite chasing him. It creeps slowly, taking its time. Kaz has broken it open. This isn't how it's supposed to function. It's probably meant to have direction to it, or to actually fill the room with some kind of speed. He watches it slowly spread like gutter sludge inching downhill. He studies it. It's familiar to him. He hasn't seen it, but he's heard of it.
The Darkling. The Black General. They call him these things for a reason. This, then, is the reason? He's heard of the things he does to people with these shadows. A pit in his stomach begins to grow at the thought of how he might use them against Kaz, now. He should have thought of that before insisting on breaking them apart.
He watches it until the cold fear turns into something more complacent, his emotions about the matter numbing just as much as the rest of him. He can't feel any part of himself.
Eventually, he gives up watching the spread and makes his way back to the bed despite the fact that it's the same distance away from him as the door is. The shadows are either going to swallow him before the Darkling comes back, or they aren't. He's either going to die for it, or he isn't. There's nothing more he can do about it one way or another, anymore, and he suspects investigating any of the other orbs left behind will have almost the same results. He curls up under the blankets again, still shivering, heart racing, his chest feeling tight again despite the fact that he does have more than enough oxygen now.
He can't get warm no matter how much he tries.
When he finally closes his eyes, he dreams that he's on Earth again.
He's not in Ketterdam, he could never be that lucky. He's not in any place that he recognizes. His eyes adjust to see that he's in some kind of forest, with shadows twisting between every single tree.
He walks through the forest for what seems like ages, trying to get out of it, only to find himself wandering past the same spots, before he realizes that every single tree is actually a set of harsh, armored legs, and each one belongs to a near identical form. Dark, dominating, towering over him. The sky isn't the same blue as it was when the dream had started. It's not even the familiar, foggy grey he was used to. It's red. Pulsing. Alien.
The Darkling tilts his head slightly as if recognizing him, then smiles, dropping a pile of snow down from the sky. It lands right on Kaz's head, heavy like lead more than snow. More piles of snow follow, coming down on him faster than he can slough it off of himself until he's almost buried underneath it. As he's buried, he hears laughter from above, the same as when he'd been laughed at for paling at the idea of his own rotting corpse.
He can't breathe, he can't see anything, he can't feel anything but the cold and the helplessness. Finally, just as he begins to believe that he really is going to die there, a hand breaks through the snow to try and pull him out of it.
He grabs it and realizes two facts at once: his gloves are gone, and the hand that had finally helped him out was that of a corpse. The corpse is wearing his face, and the longer he looks at it, the faster it rots away.
He wakes up sweating under the blankets, despite the temperature seeming unchanged. If anything, it's colder. The shadows have spread even further now, shrouding half the room in darkness and finally starting to poke at the corners of the bedsheets.
“Well,” the Darkling says, his voice just as cold as the snow was, “You've certainly made quite the mess here, haven't you?”
Notes:
I would love to hear what you think in the comments!
Chapter 4: a fever you can't sweat out
Summary:
And just when he thought things couldn't get worse, a plague. Plus, a surprise visitor.
Notes:
hello I am back. still here. needed to subject Kaz to further horrors.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Kaz wishes he hadn't woken up at all. It's not just the Darkling threatening him into compliance, he also feels absolutely miserable. He's shivering and cold, his teeth chattering uncontrollably like he really had been buried in snow. He tries to move, but his limbs feel like they belong to someone else, all heavy and slow. The only reason he knows they're still his is the pain– the soreness that creeps into every single muscle.
Maybe it's the change in atmosphere. Maybe it's because he was thrown into a fucking wall yesterday. Maybe he's coming down with something.
There's a few more points to support the latter possibility. His head is pounding, something that's unfair to wake up with. Headaches are supposed to come after a long day of dehydration and overexertion, not a gift he gets to wake up to after several hours of sleep. He's dizzy on top of it, and he feels weak in a way that he shouldn't.
He yawns— another thing that's not supposed to happen after as much sleep as he knows he’s had— and immediately feels like something with claws has been scratching down his throat in his sleep without his consent. He's almost convinced if he looked in the mirror he might see it bleeding. What the hell is happening to him?
“Did you sleep well?” The Darkling's voice fills the room, powerful and every bit as intimidating as it surely wants to be. It's the voice of a man who not only doesn't care if Kaz slept poorly, but is likely actively rooting for it.
Kaz just groans in response. If the Darkling would like to stop talking, Kaz will gladly sleep a few more hours. He can't imagine interacting under these conditions.
“Nice try. You're not going back to bed until you explain why I returned to see you nearly swallowed in shadows. You're lucky I didn't let them wake you instead.”
Kaz ignores him, pushing through the ache in his joints to move his head underneath his pillow instead of on top of it just to drown him out.
This was not the right answer, if the goal was deescalation. He hears the creature's heavy footsteps, and the blankets are ripped off of him, the pillow wrenched off his face.
He startles, his hands clumsily scrambling at the empty air trying to snatch at the blanket to cover himself again. It's no use. He's too sick to follow through, and the result is some kind of pathetic writhing. The exertion is too much for him, and a coughing fit hits him, forcing him to sit upright.
He glares at the Darkling as soon as the coughing subsides, curling in on himself with his back against the headboard. It's further proof that looks can't kill, otherwise the stare he's fixing him with would be enough to disintegrate him.
“Well?” The Darkling demands, as though he can't tell Kaz is basically seconds away from just dying himself. At this point he can't even be too angry about it. It may even be the preferable outcome.
“I didn't do anything,” Kaz rasps. “They did that on their own.” Perhaps his most transparent lie yet.
“Do you think I'm an idiot?” He asks, his voice low and dangerous.
“Yes,” Kaz responds.
“You don't know what you're dealing with. That orb predates your entire species’ understanding of matter. I thought you could be trusted to be left alone for one evening–”
“--You did not,” he interrupts, coughing a few more times before he's able to choke out the rest of the sentence. His cough is deep, and productive. He can feel something rattling around in his lungs. It's how Jordie sounded, once. “You just didn't expect me to be clever enough to figure out how to get it open.”
“You're not clever,” the Darkling corrects. “You're reckless and you're stupid. You're not here to play with my weapons like they're toys, you're here to lie still and look pretty.”
“Well, you should have known I wouldn’t be good at either of those things,” he snaps, his voice sounding even raspier and more hoarse than usual. Every word is painful to speak. He wants the blanket back. He wants to go back to sleep.
“I don't care what you're good at. You'll learn. Breaking you down until you are is the point. I'm going to see what will happen if I strip someone like you down to nothing. If you keep testing me, I'll sate your curiosity myself by showing you firsthand what those shadows can do to you.”
He's sweating. He can feel the beads of it slowly dripping down his forehead, but even the fact that he's sweating doesn't change how fucking cold he is. He can't track the Darkling's threats, he doesn't have it in him to be afraid of whatever the monster wants to do to him when he already knows he's going to die soon exactly like Jordie did. He can't argue about this now. He can't even think up a retort.
Instead, his voice comes out sounding small and weak like it's meant for someone else: “I think something is wrong.”
He sounds scared, which the Darkling no doubt enjoys. He flinches at the words as they come out of him, hating that he's even having to imply that he needs help. But he does. His entire existence rests on the whims of the creature who spent half the day yesterday freezing him and taking away his oxygen for fun.
“The only thing wrong is that you still think your best option is to whine rather than obey. I was going to bring you breakfast, but if freezing you isn't working perhaps I ought to starve you as well.”
He doesn't even understand what Kaz is trying to say. Can he really not look at Kaz and tell something is wrong? He feels like it's obvious. The Darkling clearly wants to keep him, he's made that clear enough, but would he really not care if he neglects Kaz here to the point of death after all the work he's done to bring him here? The part of Kaz that says he should just lie down and take it, lose himself to the pain and close his eyes and drown everything else out until he just dies here. The much more insistent part is saying that he can't, he hasn't lived through everything he's lived through to die as some neglected Ravkan pet in the bed of his enemy.
"No,” he says, using most of his remaining strength to stress its seriousness. He starts to cough again, feeling each cough burn at the back of his already sore throat. He almost can't breathe. He wants the blanket back. He wants him to do something— anything-– to actually help him. “I'm sick. I need…I need help.”
“You're not going to be able to cough your way out of punishment,” the Darkling scoffs. “You think I'll believe this little performance? Convincing timing, make a mess all over the room and then fake sick to get out of facing it.”
“I'm not,” Kaz says, and his head hurts too much to try and do anything else to sound convincing. He shivers again, the effort of forcing himself to stay sitting up becoming too much for him. He takes an unsteady breath, trying to get enough air in his lungs to choke out any more of an explanation, but before he gets the chance to, a wave of nausea crashes over him, sharp and fierce and sudden. It's violent.
He barely has time to turn his head before he's vomiting bile and stomach acid on the side of the bed next to him, dry heaving after once nothing else comes out. He feels empty. He thinks, distantly, that this might be the worst that he's ever felt. Worse than drowning, worse than Jordie, worse than starving for weeks crawling through sewer drains as the world disappeared above him. By the time it's over, he can't even bring himself to sit up again, he just curls into a pathetic ball and lays down next to it.
The Darkling is quiet. Quiet enough that for a second, Kaz can shut his eyes tight and pretend he's not there. Pretend he didn't just see Kaz in that disgustingly humiliating moment. He hears the Darkling move, feels him like a shadow leaning over him.
“What's wrong with you?” He asks, his voice sharper. It's not cruelty this time, it's confusion. Kaz opens one eye just to see him staring, looking at Kaz like he's having some kind of mechanical failure that he doesn't know how to fix.
Kaz just groans. He doesn't know what's wrong with him, he told him that he's sick. Kaz feels a large, cold hand on his forehead. He flinches away from it, rolling over onto his stomach just so that he can't touch him anymore. “You're hot,” the Darkling said. “You're supposed to be cold.”
Great, he's an idiot. He's fucking useless. Kaz can't be the one to teach the alien what a fever is when he's busy dying from it. If he still had it in him to speak, he would ask him to go ahead and make things easy by putting a bullet through his head and sparing both of them the trouble of trying to figure out how to cure him. He doesn't have it in him to speak, and even his current misery isn't actually enough to outweigh the part of him that refuses to die like this.
Instead, he shuts his eyes even tighter and tries to focus on something other than how much every part of him hurts. Maybe when he wakes, he'll be back on Earth and all of this will have been the nightmare. Maybe he won't wake at all.
He does wake up, to his disappointment, feeling no better than when he'd fallen asleep.
There's someone else in the room. He doesn’t dare move, both because he's not sure that he has the strength to and because a large part of him is worried it's going to result in punishment for throwing up and falling asleep earlier since the Darkling is just that incompetent at taking care of humans. They're arguing, too, and as long as they still think he's asleep they might let something slip.
He strains to hear them, but his brain still feels like it's swimming in mud. It's foggy and frustrating. Nothing sounds like real words, but he thinks he should understand it. He listens for a full minute before he realizes the obvious, and the fact that it takes him that long to realize they're not even speaking his language is a testament to just how sick he really is.
If he can't make out the words, he can certainly make out the tone. The new arrival is upset, he sounds almost like he's lecturing about something, and the Darkling sounds ready to kill. Is he still that mad at Kaz, or is he just that mad at the person he's arguing with?
Then, Kaz feels the tickle at the back of his throat. No. Not now. The tightness in his chest feels like it's rising, the pressure swelling just behind his ribs, and he can feel that his lungs are about to do something about it. Despite how hard he tries to will his body into silence, a wet, disgusting, gurgling cough makes its way out of his lungs and leaves his whole body shuddering. He tastes something disgusting and metallic in his mouth with it.
The arguing stops mid-sentence and a tense silence settles over the air, the kind of silence that only happens when someone knows they've been overheard. He hears footsteps, two sets of them across the room and toward the bed. He shuts his eyes tighter, like that might make it possible at all to pretend to still be asleep.
“It's under the blanket?” the new voice says, in a language Kaz actually understands this time.
“Yes,” the Darkling says tersely. “He hides there when he doesn't want to be held accountable for his actions.”
“It's a common response of their species to environmental stress. Burrowing under insulation can help conserve body heat and reduce sensory input during physiological distress. Do you really not know this, General, or are you being intentionally cruel?” the newcomer asks. “No, don't bother answering. I already know.”
“Save your lectures, Princeling. I've razed planets older than you.”
The prince mutters something else in the language Kaz can't understand, and then Kaz feels a hand reach out and touch him over the blanket. It's not the Darkling's hand. The Darkling would never be this gentle with him. So it must be the prince, then.
“I know you're awake,” he says, in a soft, gentle voice. Like Kaz is a small animal, or a scared child. “You don't have to move, just let me look at you.”
Kaz loosens his grip on the blanket slightly. He can at least acknowledge that getting the help of someone who feels even the slightest amount of empathy for him would be better than letting the Darkling continue floundering at attempting to nurse him back to health.
Kaz feels the air hit him again as the blanket is slowly pulled off of his head. He hadn't realized how stifling it was under there until the blanket was gone. He looks up at the newcomer, feeling his jaw fall open at its appearance. The Darkling is still the only Ravkan he's seen without their armor and helmet. He didn't know what to expect from an alien prince, but this one is…nearly indescribable.
The Darkling has horns like a demon, which Kaz assumed were standard for the species, but the prince's are much more similar to a rams. His skin is a pale blue color and his eyes completely black, but the rest of his features feel…distinctly humanoid. Blonde hair. Facial features all where they're meant to be. He's even taller than the Darkling, which Kaz hadn't thought was possible. Not every human looks the same, so it makes sense not every Ravkan would look the same, but Kaz still can't look away from him.
“Oh,” the alien prince says, with genuine surprise in his tone as he looks down at Kaz. “It's adorable. Look at it–”
“Him,” Kaz corrects, although that’s the least of the things happening right now that needs correcting.
“His clothes, too,” the prince asks, like he's already forgotten that he's supposed to be here to help with Kaz's sickness instead of fawning over him like he's someone's purebred puppy. “How did you find them in his size?”
“Technically they're children’s clothes, I sent his measurements in for a custom fit but naturally it's going to take awhile.”
“Ha!” The prince responds, sounding overjoyed by the whole situation. “How smart. I wouldn't have thought of that, I probably would have modified what he already had. Did you bring any of it with you? I'm curious to see how the garments there have changed over the past few hundred years.”
“None of it was suitable. Disgusting rags. You should have seen where I found him, trying to form some pathetic little human army. Fashioned himself a rebel leader.”
“They had the intelligence for that?” The prince's brow furrows, and suddenly he's studying Kaz again, staring into his eyes. He reaches a hand out and places it on Kaz's forehead, to feel his temperature. It’s a human enough action that Kaz wonders if he's seen one do it before, and that's how he knew to.
“Hardly,” the Darkling says, with a wave of his hand. “If they'd really had the intelligence for it they would have been able to keep it up for longer than four years.”
“You have to take their lifespan into consideration, four years is a lot for a little human. How old is this one?”
“How am I supposed to know?” the Darkling responds.
“You could ask me,” rasps Kaz, ducking away from the prince's warm hand. He's already irritable that they've been speaking about him like he's not here the entire time. Now they're asking questions about him like they couldn't possibly know the answer without even considering the obvious solution that is actually talking to him. It's worth straining himself over.
“How old are you?” The prince asks. “You're burning up, by the way.”
“Seventeen,” Kaz responds, his voice hoarse and shaky. “And I know.”
As soon as Kaz answers, the prince has already redirected all of his attention back toward the Darkling again. “See? Four years is 23.5% of his life. That's not an insignificant number for this species.”
“You don't have to talk to me about the way the human species works. I'm the one who's been maintaining peace there for the last decade.”
“Maintaining peace?” Kaz says, moving from annoyed to legitimately angry in less than a second “Is that what you call massacring everyone you think is ‘unfit’ and enslaving the rest of us? Your kind cut down anyone who fights back in the streets and you call it maintaining peace?”
He dissolves into another coughing fit after, the consequences of working himself up too much.
“You certainly don't act like you know how they work,” the prince argues. He’s responding to the Darkling's comment to him, not acknowledging Kaz had spoken at all. Kaz looks to the Darkling, ready to see if he, at least, is going to acknowledge what Kaz said or the fact that he's dying again now.
He doesn’t. “I can't begin to imagine what you might mean by that, your highness. I've already made several changes to this room to make it a suitable habitat for such a finicky species. You can certainly feel how warm it is here, do you genuinely believe a scorching temperature to be my preference?”
It's hardly scorching, Kaz thinks. He’s been shivering since he first got here, except when he's burning up with fever. Still, he can admit the temperature is back to some kind of normal since Kaz woke up again. The Darkling must have fixed the levels back to what they're supposed to be for Kaz's comfort before fetching outside help. If Kaz didn't already know that no one here is listening to him he would point out that he was freezing him to death until a few hours ago.
“Not to mention the oxygen,” the Darkling continues, “I'm spending a fortune keeping the levels like this.”
“What about solar light?”
“What about it?”
“If humans don't get enough light from their star they get depressed and lethargic. You can't tell me you didn't know this. Where is he supposed to get that? This enclosure also doesn't feel like enough space. We'll do something about that.”
“‘We’ won't do anything. I'll do what I believe is best for my pet, and you'll stay out of it.”
“No,” the prince says simply, shaking his head. “That's unacceptable. He's ours now, I've decided. Besides, you came to me for help because he's ill, and I'm telling you that what he needs is someone who actually has his best interests at heart.”
“You can't do that,” the Darkling frowns.
“Am I misunderstanding you, General, or are you presuming to tell a member of the royal family what he can and cannot do in his own palace? You took him from his planet as property of the crown. I’m the crown. I say that we’ll do something about that.”
Kaz can’t follow how he’s supposed to feel about all of this. It was way too much information at once for him to process, some kind of weird roller coaster of emotions between the horror of the reality that they’re really here talking about keeping him like some kind of a pet again vs. the slight hope that his conditions are going to improve now that someone else is involved, someone who at least seems slightly less responsible for the enslavement of Kaz’s race.
He wants to go home. He wants his own clothes back. He wants to be on his own planet breathing his own air. He wants to kill these psychotic, fucked up alien creatures with his bare hands.
He feels nauseous again, the terrible sensation hitting him like a bullet. He doesn't have time to warn either of them, he just doubles over again and dry heaves over the mattress until he's choking.
“See,” the Darkling says, exasperated. “That. Why is he doing that?”
The prince stares at Kaz with concern, then frowns. “I'm…not sure. Further tests seem necessary. Walk me through everything you've done with him since picking him up off of Earth.”
The Darkling starts to talk, and Kaz leans back against the pillows again, listening to someone else describe his life like he's not the one being discussed.
Notes:
let me know what you think :) i've been saying for ages i'm giving Kaz bronchitis.
Chapter 5: pick your poison
Summary:
Kaz hydrates!
Notes:
doomed to make poor decisions in every single universe
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
He dozes off again while the Darkling is talking about him, as much as he'd tried to stay awake. The story, from the Darkling's perspective, is more than a bit flawed. Kaz, the rebel leader deserving of death— who, really and let's be honest, shouldn't have survived the initial culling of anyone who wasn't perfect physically fit to work— who the Darkling chose to ‘rescue’ on a whim and bring here because he'd been considering bringing one back on his return to Ravka anyway. How lucky for Kaz, then, that he was ‘saved’ from the death he ‘deserved’ and brought instead to a much more ‘civilized’ planet. Of course, tragically, you can pluck the rebel out of the rebellion, but you can't take the rebellion out of the rebel. Kaz bites and scratches and fights and argues all the time and refuses to stay still— a natural consequence of taking a feral one out of a sewer drain but still annoying to deal with— and making the room too cold for him to want to wander in was the best way to keep him in one place. How was he supposed to know it would make him sick?
Kaz doesn't know if they get around to arguing about the oxygen or if the Darkling can't begin to imagine a way to spin that where he looks like he's been doing anything except for brutally mistreating him. He doesn't know if he should tell the prince about the stunt with the shadows, either, despite how desperate he is to hear the monster tell it from his perspective.
He only lets his eyes flutter shut for a second, but when he opens them, the prince is perched beside the large bed, attempting to force a cup up to Kaz's lips. If they're going to poison him or drug him, he doesn't want any part of this. He turns his head away from the cup, causing a rather large, annoyed sigh from the alien prince.
“I told you, he's uncooperative even when you are offering him help. He can't do anything until he's properly trained.”
“He's not uncooperative, he's scared,” the prince snaps. Then, turning his attention back toward Kaz, his entire demeanor changes from irritated to endlessly patient and gentle. It's as though he thinks he can shatter Kaz just by looking at him too harshly. “Come on, baby, will you drink the water for me?”
“‘M not scared,” Kaz says, meaning for it to come out with a level of violence that was completely lost when it had to travel through Kaz's hellscape of a throat to do it. Every single word scratches him on the way out, and he didn't even have it in him to doubly insist he's certainly not ‘baby’ either. Instead, he uses all the strength he can manage to reach up and swat the cup out of the prince's hand.
The prince is a statue, like the Darkling was, strong and completely unmoving, so the effect is much more like Kaz is just attempting to impatiently grab at it. The prince pushes it once more toward Kaz's mouth, and although he wants to argue that he can take it himself, he doesn't think he could lift anything right now. It's a lost cause. He's desperately thirsty, so thirsty that the need for it makes his entire body more restless. He doesn't remember the last time he's had some like this.
He parts his lips, letting the prince give him the water. He gulps it down greedily, unable to stop himself from wanting to chug it as soon as he gets a taste.
“Woah, not that much,” the prince laughs, “you have to slow down or you're going to make yourself sick.”
He pulls the glass away, gently putting a hand on Kaz’s chest to push him back down when he tries to follow after it. Kaz hates the way he talks to him, he's decided. He thinks he almost prefers being thrown into walls than being treated like he's this incapable.
“Have you been giving him water?” the prince snaps at the Darkling again, back to the cold irritation he was sparing Kaz from. “He's severely dehydrated. That can't be helping his illness.”
“He had an IV in the ship.”
“And since arriving here? Humans need three liters of fluids a day.”
“That much?” The Darkling sounds surprised, which should tell Kaz quite a bit about why his time here so far has been such a complete disaster.
“Tell me you've at least been feeding him.”
“I was going to bring him something before he got sick.”
“Maybe the medbay or research wing would be more suited to look after him…” the prince says, staring at Kaz like he’s deeply considering how he might respond to a move like that. Both options make his stomach churn. Things certainly aren't ideal with the Darkling, but being trapped in some kind of ‘research’ wing, being poked and prodded like an experiment is even worse. Not to mention, likely a billion times harder to break out of.
As horrible as Kaz finds the idea, the Darkling dislikes it even more. “Absolutely not,” he shakes his head. “They won't do anything for him. I didn't even want to involve you, but we're the only two people here who have the necessary experience with his kind needed to look after him. I took him, he's mine. I'm not going to turn him over to be your little experiment. You can get your own human for that. I can point you toward a whole planet full.”
“We should ask him what he'd prefer,” the prince says. It's the first time anyone has suggested something as radical as asking Kaz about his own preferences since he got here, and he almost doesn't believe it when he hears it.
He blinks up at him, like at any second he could start laughing again and reveal he's only joking by suggesting what Kaz wants could be taken into account. “What?”
“Do you want to stay here with him, or go somewhere else with me?”
‘Somewhere else’ he says, like he hasn't already revealed that somewhere else is a lab or a medical test center. No, thank you. He also thinks that if he had to listen to the prince or people who saw him the same way as the prince talk down to him in that cloyingly sweet way all day and night, he would go insane. The Darkling says awful things almost all of the time, but at least he doesn't talk like Kaz is too stupid to understand him. He resents him enough to respect him, at least a little bit.
“I want to stay with him,” he says.
“See?” The Darkling replies, voice dripping with smugness. The prince frowns, but what can he do about it? Kaz made his choice. Is he going to admit he only wants to respect it when he agrees with him?
“Fine,” the prince responds, his voice significantly more terse. “Then I'll be converting the adjacent room. You've made your choice, but that doesn't mean I'm leaving your care in his hands.”
As annoying as he finds him and as much as he didn't want to be experimented on, he can't deny that he still feels like something of a weight has been lifted off his shoulders when he hears this. He still doesn't want to be here, but at least now someone will be around to guarantee he's not being tortured for fun. He can have three meals, water, oxygen. Apparently, as he goes through this list of desires in his head, his standards have managed to drop all the way to the floor.
The Darkling, meanwhile, is absolutely seething at the idea that he might possibly be expected to share. Good. Let him seethe. How much closer can Kaz get to escaping if he doesn't have to fear the Darkling's retaliation again? He has no doubt he'll find some way to still punish him, but as long as it doesn't accidentally kill him, Kaz thinks he can withstand anything if it means getting back to Ketterdam and seeing his team again.
It does occur to him that if he's going to be able to talk anyone into bringing him back to earth, it's the prince. He doesn't know exactly what power he wields here, but he doesn't have near the same deep resentment for him that the Darkling does. If Kaz can manage to get him on his side, if he can somehow show him that Kaz isn't better off here…
“What's your name?” Kaz croaks, figuring having something to call him is the absolute first step to winning him over.
“Ah!” The prince replies, the thought that Kaz might want to know his name apparently not occurring to him until now. “I suppose if I'm going to be checking in on you, you should know what to call me. My name is–”
The sound that leaves his mouth is the most confusing combination of sounds Kaz thinks he's ever heard. He stares blankly at the alien prince, feeling somehow even stupider than before he asked. He tries to repeat it, but it feels wrong on his tongue and sounds even worse afterward. It's even more obvious he got it wrong by the way the prince winces at it, and the Darkling can't seem to manage to hide how amusing he finds it.
Great. He's being kept as a prisoner by beings whose names he can't even pronounce.
The prince looks at him with too much pity, and then says, “Maybe…Nikolai, then? That's a close enough human name. Can you say that one?”
Of course, he can say that one, it's in his language. He can't speak alien, but that doesn't make him stupid. “Nikolai,” he repeats, to prove he can.
Nikolai claps once, like it's impressive or something, then he reaches out to ruffle Kaz's hair. Kaz is too worn out to properly shake him off this time; he just sits here and takes it. Nikolai's hand is warm, and firm, and could crush his windpipe like a flower if he felt like it. “Excellent,” he says, “Are you going to be okay if I leave you alone here with him? I need to get a few things to help make you better again. I won't be too long.”
“‘'M fine,” Kaz says. As if to prove it, he tries to sit up again and stand to his feet. The world spins immediately, forcing him back down again. His head throbs. He shouldn't feel like he'd just run a marathon when the only thing he did was fail to stand up. “Don't need anything from you.”
He feels that familiar tickling in his throat again, and another coughing fit takes over him. Nikolai sighs and picks up the cup of water again, letting Kaz drink until his cough relaxes. When he stands up, he gives his full attention back to the Darkling, “Try not to kill him while I'm gone. In fact, if you could be nice to him, that would be great. You shouldn't have a pet you can't properly care for.”
“If I were doing that horribly, he wouldn't have chosen to stay with me,” the Darkling says, still sounding just as smug as when Kaz first announced his choice. Nikolai looks between them again and then sighs. They talk for a few more moments in Ravkan before Nikolai finally leaves.
When Kaz finally turns his attention away from the door, he finds the Darkling is glaring at him. No, not glaring at him exactly, that doesn't feel like the proper word. He's staring at him intensely, like Kaz has done something other than just sit here and be talked at and about. There's so much suspicion behind it.
“If you think he's your ticket home, you're naive,” he finally says. “The Little Prince wants you properly cared for, but I know him well enough to know he'd think your precious planet is the last place you would receive that care.”
“I can change his mind about it,” Kaz says. There doesn't feel like any point in pretending that's not what he's after, from him. He'd be stupid not to try it.
“Who do you think marked Earth as ‘beyond saving’ in the first place?”
“You,” Kaz answers. It's clear the implication is that Nikolai is at fault, but that just….doesn't add up with what he's seen. “If he's interested in humans, he wouldn't have wanted us destroyed.”
“He's disappointed in humans. He thought you were curious. He reported back from his scouting mission on Earth that your planet had an abundance of vital resources, and that trade could be considered when your species advanced. Imagine how sad he was to find out that your species achieved controlled atomic collapse and immediately weaponized it. You tore the universe apart at the smallest seam, only to use that power to vaporize your own cities. We had no choice but to step in.”
Kaz is silent. The easiest thing to believe is that the Darkling is saying what he needs to turn Kaz against the one ally he's managed to make, but…it's the kind of thing that would be too easy to uncover as a lie, if it were one. He wouldn’t tell Kaz something Kaz could disprove by a single question. The Darkling is the Black General, but Generals fight the wars they're asked to.
The Darkling isn't done kicking Kaz while he's down. “He’s always going to think you coming here is the best thing that could have happened to you, regardless of what I do to you.”
“Okay,” Kaz says. He has nothing else to say. He stares at the Darkling back, because two can play at that game. He has half a mind to go back to sleep again, but he doesn't want to let his guard down again in front of him so quickly. It's silly to be worried about, because if he's going to kill him, he can just as easily do it while Kaz is alive than while Kaz is asleep, but the way he's looking at Kaz tells him he may kill him just to take something away from Nikolai.
“You never asked my name,” the Darkling says. Is he… is he serious? Is he jealous because Kaz didn't ask him his real name?
“I don't care what your real name is,” Kaz says, still staring at him. He doesn't think he can hurt the feelings of the real, actual Black General by refusing to care what his name is, but he may as well try. Does he just want Kaz to ask so he can watch him fail at being able to pronounce that one, too? He's not going to willingly offer the Darkling further opportunities to humiliate him.
He looks at the door. Nikolai only just left, but how long will this take? He just said he was going to grab a few things.
“No, I don't expect you do. You've made it clear whose attention you're after.” Kaz isn't even looking at him, and he can still feel his eyes burning a hole through his skull. Kaz finds them hard to read, completely black with no clear pupil, but it doesn't take an emotional genius to figure out he's unhappy. “Don't think that being sick makes you untouchable. I'm not that merciful.”
Kaz really is sick enough that he'd forgotten the snooping and the shadows and the Darkling's anger at what he'd unleashed, but now the memory of all of it and the reminder that he's still certainly going to face consequences for it makes his stomach knot up in a way that has him wanting to crawl right back underneath the covers again. “So you'll freeze me again? Suffocate me? Starve me? Your prince won't let you.”
“I'll make him see reason. It will be clear to him soon enough once you're well again that you're in desperate need of a firm hand. I'm creative enough to think of a myriad of ways to punish you.”
Kaz's chest tightens even further. There's an overwhelming not-right ness about it, a ringing in the back of his head that keeps telling him he's going to die here in a strange monster’s bed light years away from his home, no one ever knowing or caring what really happened to him. And the only beings who could help him don't want to, or don't know how, flailing in their complete incompetence. He’s too distracted by his panicked realization that he still can't seem to catch a full breath that he doesn't even bother gracing the Darkling's attempted threat with a response.
Yeah, sure, he's going to punish Kaz. Kaz's entire existence here is a punishment. It's difficult to take it seriously when he's already in this much pain all on his own.
“I'm back,” Nikolai says in an annoying sing-song voice as he waltzes back through the door with a bag full of mystery items. “Everything alright in here?”
Kaz answers with another coughing fit, and the Darkling tries to look as though he wasn't seconds away from murdering him for hurting his sensitive little feelings.
Notes:
things are about to get weird, btw. like. freaky. okay. cool.
Chapter 6: will you bite the hand that feeds?
Summary:
Kaz finally eats.
Notes:
freak shit ahead and then extra freak shit next chapter. what i am doing to Kaz is foul so....very sorry for that. anyway.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Nikolai rushes to his side, like Kaz hasn't already coughed a billion times today and this one coughing fit is going to be the thing that finally kills him. He's so panicked. Yes, Kaz was just thinking about how he's going to die here like this and he still feels like he's going to die here like this but also Nikolai clearly doesn't realize that humans get sick literally all the time and it's not just some freak thing. Plenty of people get colds or the flu or some disease or another and don't die from it.
But also, Kaz is going to die from this one.
Nikolai pulls out a somewhat scary looking mystery liquid, filling some sort of syringe with it. Oh, hell no. Kaz isn't having anything injected inside of him. He wore himself out arguing with the Darkling, he's not sure he can manage to advocate against this as well. He just shakes his head no, hoping Nikolai manages to get the hint.
“It's cough medicine. I made double sure it wasn't toxic to your kind. It's going to make you feel better, okay?”
Kaz shuts his mouth even tighter, shaking his head once again.
Nikolai just sighs, giving the Darkling a look. The Darkling says something to him in Ravkan.
“If I wanted to kill you I would have plenty of easier ways to do it,” Nikolai says. “He's offered to hold you down and force your mouth open, but I don't think you want that, do you?”
No, obviously he doesn't fucking want that. Why would he want that? He considers his options…yes, he wants to get better. Yes, if they wanted to kill him, poisoning him like this would be the least efficient way possible, but just because Nikolai says it's nontoxic doesn't mean it is. Where is he even getting that information? Is he just guessing? Is it based on experiments he ran on humans literal centuries ago?
Then he coughs again, and his chest burns and aches so terribly that he knows his only option is to comply with the mystery drug unless he wants to feel like this indefinitely.
He parts his lips slightly, and Nikolai grins to reveal sharp teeth. He reaches out to ruffle Kaz's hair again as he brings the syringe up to Kaz's mouth. “Good boy, just close your mouth around this okay?” Nikolai slowly pushes the liquid into Kaz's mouth, and Kaz can't stop the face he's making as it floods his mouth. Acidic, artificially flavored with something fruit adjacent he couldn't begin to describe, sweeter than anything he's ever tasted but somehow he can feel his mouth burn as though it's on fire. Is he sure this isn't toxic to him?
He understands why Nikolai's administering it like this, if he'd been given it any other way he would be spitting it out. “That's it,” Nikolai says as he pushes the rest of the liquid into Kaz's mouth, only removing the syringe once Kaz has swallowed it. He reaches out a hand to wipe away some of the liquid running down Kaz's chin. Kaz is ready to turn away and recoil from the touch, but it's the same as when the Darkling had touched him. Not skin. Not human. It's warm in a way Kaz needs right now. He doesn't look away from it. “You took it so well.”
Kaz locks eyes with the Darkling as he says it, who's looking at Kaz with something…almost hungry. Kaz's face feels a bit hot suddenly, in a way that's different from the fever hitting him.
“He's changing colors,” Nikolai points out, which only makes Kaz's blush deepen. “Is that because of the medication?”
“It's a flaw in human physiology,” the Darkling says, his eyes still not leaving Kaz. “They change color when they feel too much— shame, desire, guilt. It's how their kind betrays themselves. It's a circulatory response where the blood rushes to the surface of the skin, typically the face, triggered by emotional stimuli. Do you really not know that?”
Nikolai frowns, apparently not enjoying hearing his own condescending words from earlier being thrown back at him. Good, maybe they'll destroy each other and save Kaz the trouble. “I knew their pigmentation could change, but I thought it was environmental. I didn't realize it was tied to their emotional state. Why would they evolve like that?”
“It's involuntary, so it signals authenticity to their kind. It evolved as a form of non-verbal communication. You've seen for yourself how much his species benefits from collaboration.”
“And how destructive they can be when they lack it,” Nikolai adds, now studying Kaz just as intensely as the Darkling is. The creature's words from earlier creep into his head. He's disappointed in humans.
“Maybe next time you could try talking to one instead of reading about it or dissecting it,” the Darkling scoffs. He still sounds incredibly smug, like he's loving every second of finally having something to feel superior about in regards to Kaz.
Nikolai chooses to ignore him, instead opting to put his advice into practice by turning his attention back toward Kaz. “What are you feeling then, sweetheart?” He asks, in that tone he reserves especially for Kaz.
“Nothing,” he mumbles. Truthfully, he's not even sure why he reacted like that. Something in the way the Darkling was looking at him. The words Nikolai was saying.
The tightness in his chest seems to have subsided, at least, the urge to cough no longer overwhelming him quite so often. His throat is still sore, the nausea still at the forefront of his mind, he still feels like he's been dropped out of a spaceship. But if the medicine's one job was to cure his cough, it sure seemed to work faster than anything else Kaz has ever taken.
He still feels hot, his body completely unable to regulate its temperature, and he's starting to feel restless in a way that's almost unbearable combined with how exhausted he still is.
“Nothing?” Nikolai repeats. He definitely doesn't believe Kaz, after all he'd just been informed that he doesn't just blush over nothing. There's a pause where Kaz isn't sure if he's going to pursue it further, but finally he changes the subject. “Well, do you think you can eat something?”
Eat something. How long has it been since Kaz has eaten? His stomach growls in response to it, like it knows what they're both talking about. Both creatures look to Kaz's stomach, then back at each other. Do neither of them know the answer to that one, or are they both just embarrassed that they've done such a horrible job of looking after him that his body itself is yelling at them to finally feed him?
The thought of keeping something down though is almost equally horrible as the thought of starving, and having to take his medicine over again because he threw it up after the first time would be less than ideal. “I don't know,” Kaz says. A rare admission.
“What did you bring him?” the Darkling asks, with an intensity that doesn't match the situation.
Nikolai replies with a word Kaz doesn't understand…frankly, not a good sign.
“It’s a soup,” the Darkling explains, picking up on Kaz’s confusion. Nikolai pulls a thermos out of his bag. A soup. A soup could…probably be fine.
Nikolai brings the thermos up to Kaz's mouth for him to drink from it, and Kaz takes a deep breath. It's just soup. You can't really go wrong with soup. How bad can it be? The thermos presses against Kaz's lips and Kaz drinks from it as Nikolai tilts it back into his mouth.
It's battery acid laced with black pepper, it's so strong that if Kaz’s nose hadn’t been stuffed up so bad that he wasn’t even able to smell it the scent might have given him some warning of what was coming. It tastes oily and sharp at the same time. It stings as it goes down, and Kaz feels like his entire mouth is starting to numb.
He needs it out of his mouth, and he needs it out of his mouth now. Kaz waves his arm a bit, causing Nikolai to lower the thermos in concern. Kaz spits it all back out again— any bit of it he wasn’t forced to swallow— straight back into the thermos. Nikolai makes a bit of a face, clearly disgusted by Kaz spitting it straight back into the thermos.
He doesn’t care if he’s disgusted, he can’t be any more disgusted by it than Kaz is. He sticks out his tongue, trying to get some kind of air on it or something. He gestures for the water, hoping maybe it would be better if he could wash it down with something, but the water almost makes it worse.
“I don’t understand what the problem is,” Nikolai says, more to the Darkling and to himself than to Kaz. “I triple checked that the ingredients were nontoxic. It shouldn’t be dangerous to him.”
“It’s disgusting,” Kaz finally spits out. His can feel his eyes welling up, tears threatening to spring out of them not because of any emotion he’s feeling about it, but because his body is working overtime to flush whatever the fuck that was out of his system.
“Oh baby, don’t cry, it’s okay.” Nikolai shushes him, reaching out to wipe away at the corner of Kaz’s eye. He's too close. Kaz can feel the warmth of his hand before it even makes contact with Kaz's face, and something inside of him coils tighter at the feeling of it. It is hunger, but not just for food. He wants to push him away, but instead his breath hitches when Nikolai brushes his cheek. “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. It’s so hard seeing you like this. What would make it better?”
“I’m not sad,” he snaps. His legs shift beneath the covers. He can't get comfortable. Maybe it's the fever, or the soup, but the warmth spreading through him won't seem to go away. He's restless. And he’s starting to get just enough of his strength back to be irritated by the whole situation. “The soup is shit.”
Nikolai looks a bit taken aback. He looks at the Darkling, who just shrugs in response. “That wasn’t a very nice thing to say,” he says. It’s not scolding, because he’s not even talking to Kaz. He’s talking to the Darkling about Kaz, like it’s his fault Kaz was rude about the soup.
“I told you he’s not well behaved.” He waves a dismissive hand. “What my pet was trying to say is that he doesn’t like the taste. I could make him apologize, if you’d like?”
Yeah, fat chance of that happening. He doesn’t know what it would look like for the Darkling to ‘make’ Kaz apologize, but he wouldn’t have much luck with it. Nikolai’s frown deepens. He likes the idea of that as much as Kaz does.
“No, it’s fine. I thought he could handle it but…well…” he looks at Kaz again, not because he’s talking to him, but because he’s still trying to figure him out. “Humans are much less developed, it makes sense that the flavors we use here are too advanced for them. I don’t remember much about Earth food but I do recall the ingredients being much more bland. He’s just not used to having flavor.”
Earth food does have flavor. He can fuck off, too, with this ‘humans are much less developed’ bullshit because Kaz didn’t like his cooking. He almost says as much, but then Nikolai puts the thermos aside and pulls out a handful of something that looks a lot more like plain crackers instead.
“These were supposed to be eaten alongside, I picked them up because I thought I remembered tasting something similar when I was there. Do you think these will be fine?”
“We feed them to animals, of course they’re fine. You already know they aren’t toxic. I say even if he doesn’t like them he should eat them anyway or starve.”
“And that’s why he’s dying under your care,” Nikolai sighs. He puts one in his hand, and holds it up to Kaz’s mouth. “Open.”
“Just give them to me,” Kaz tries to argue. “I can eat by myself. I don’t need to eat out of your hand.”
“Nonsense. You’re ill,” he insists, still holding his hand up to Kaz's mouth. Kaz's hands are essentially trapped under the blanket now, harder to free with Nikolai sitting on top of it. If he wants to eat— and he does want to eat, even if his stomach is still turning over and churning at the thought, twisting with hunger and….something else…an uncomfortable fluttering heat he's still pretending not to notice— he has to put up with it.
The medicine is still burning through his system. Nikolai reaches up his other hand to tuck a stray piece of hair behind Kaz's ear, and he shivers a bit at the touch even though Nikolai isn't cold. Every single touch from his weird, inhuman skin feels even worse. Or better. Or both.
He wants him to leave. Instead, he lets Nikolai push the cracker into his mouth, taking it on his tongue. The pressure against his mouth is gentle and insistent, and Nikolai's fingers brush the edge of Kaz's lower lip.
Through it all, he can still feel the Darkling's intense stare. The cracker does taste like nothing at all. It melts on Kaz's tongue and basically dissolves into his mouth without him having to chew. He swallows what remains of it, then opens his mouth for another.
“There you go,” Nikolai says gently, in a voice that touches something inside of him he can’t really name. “Just like that. Open up for me.”
He can feel his face turning pink again, the heat rushing to it fresh when Nikolai presses his fingers again into Kaz's mouth. For a second. Kaz wants to close his mouth and wrap his fingers around him. His eyes widen at the thought, not sure where it's coming from, but it makes his hips shift before he can stop them, something ugly and needy crawling through him.
“Hm,” Nikolai says, feeding Kaz yet another cracker. He leans in close, looking into Kaz's eyes. Kaz presses his thighs together. He doesn't know why he's acting like this.
“What?” The Darkling asks, as though he hasn't been watching Kaz just as intensely.
“He's changed colors again,” Nikolai explains. So it hadn't escaped his notice. The need spiraling inside of him mixes with a twinge of dread. “I don't see what's having this effect on him. He's…squirming. I don't believe this is a usual symptom of his sickness.”
The Darkling moves even closer, until he's directly behind Nikolai looking down at Kaz. Next to the two of them, Kaz feels so small. Even smaller than usual.
He shifts again under their gaze, his body still tense and restless. He's thinking about the Darkling's strong arms pinning him down, holding him still while he writhes beneath him. He's wondering how his warm, statue skin would feel pressing over every inch of him in a way he's never been allowed to have before. The thoughts flood through him without his permission, filthy and clear, and it makes him go even warmer. His face turns even redder.
This is…bad. It's bad, and it's weird. They did something to him, they had to have done something to him. But what? And why don't they realize it?
The Darkling tilts his head. Then, he laughs. It's full, and genuine, and truly delighted in a way Kaz doesn't think he's ever managed to make him feel before. He's laughing at him, there's no misunderstanding that. It fades into nothing but a smile, and he finally speaks:
“Look at him. Flushed, unfocused, squirming under your touch. It seems the stimulant you gave him wasn't just for his lungs.”
No. It can't be…they're not saying what Kaz thinks they're saying.
Nikolai's eyes widen as he looks back at Kaz again. “But I triple checked that–”
“Non-toxic doesn't mean no side-effects. It must have aphrodisiac effects on humans we hadn't realized. It's the only thing that makes sense.”
“It's…fine…” Kaz grits out, despite the humiliation burning through him.
“Because you like it?” The Darkling asks.
“Because I'm normal,” he basically hisses. He's beyond angry now, that emotion twisting together with everything else to make a cocktail he's never even dreamed of before. He wants to hurt them both even as he knows he doesn't have any way to. “I'm not feeling anything. You're misunderstanding.”
“Misunderstanding? If we uncovered you, then, we would find you soft and unaffected? Or by ‘normal’ do you mean that you're always aroused like this?”
“Don't,” Kaz says too quickly. He already knows his body is betraying him. He knows that he's hard and aching and pressed tight under the blanket. He doesn't need them to see him like that.
“So the pigment change…is a sexual response?” Nikolai asks, more thinking aloud than searching for a genuine answer. He's still studying at Kaz, warming to the subject like it's a book he's reading and not Kaz sitting here humiliated underneath him. “Human mating behaviors are unusually complex. Humans are hierarchical. It makes a certain…sense, then, that submission for some can be linked to arousal as a survival strategy. Evolutionarily speaking.”
The Darkling lets out another quieter, more mirthless laugh. “You're not wrong. Some of them even tried to mate with my soldiers. They understand power, even if they pretend not to.”
Kaz's jaw is clenched so tightly that it aches. His eyes flicker between the Darkling and Nikolai. Everything he is, his rebellion, his years of fighting and hard work, reduced to this because of some reaction his body is having to something entirely out of control.
“Go away,” he says, despite it being the last thing his body actually wants. He looks away from both of them, unwilling to have either of them see just how little he means it. “Leave me alone.”
“It's my room,” the Darkling responds coldly.
“I don't care,” Kaz snaps, his voice already starting to sound more breathy than fierce. He’s rubbing now against the bedsheets, trying to chase some kind of friction despite the unbearable presence of their eyes on him.
He can feel his body betraying him in tiny ways. His fingers are twitching, his hips shifting, he wants to shed his already thin clothes.
“He's losing coordination,” Nikolai points out helpfully. “We should–”
“We should do nothing,” the Darkling cuts in.
“What?” Nikolai asks, distress and concern soaking through. “We need to help him.”
“I'm–” Kaz starts to say, but he can't manage to form words. It's like he's confused, too distracted by the overwhelming need coursing through him that's so different than what he's used to. He has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from making a noise, leaning back on his pillow and groaning instead as he tries to kick the blankets off of himself. “You need to–” he starts, but those words get caught in his throat too.
“His language centers are collapsing,” Nikolai responds. “That's neurological. This can't be better than–”
“Please,” Kaz says, but he still doesn't even know what he's asking for. It's hot. This room is fucking hot.
“He's begging. You're being cruel.”
“I'm doing what he asked,” the Darkling responds, as though nothing about this is remarkable at all. “It doesn't matter if he begs. He said he wanted to be left alone, so we leave him alone.”
Two minutes ago this was what he wanted, but now rejecting any and all help from them for this may have just been the worst idea he's ever had. He whines without being able to stop himself.
They don't move. They don't help him. They just watch.
Notes:
yes it's true i never run out of fresh new ways to make him suffer. :/ :/ gotta keep things extra uncomfy in this one. please let me know your thoughts.
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