Chapter Text
Antibiotics on the island are expensive. More expensive than bullets, drugs, and the people who need them, but Jason has money. Plenty of it.
Vaas’s skin is hot and sticky, he's feverish, his bandage is soaked. Jason slowly peels it away from the inflamed flesh, millimeter by millimeter. The stuck skin stretches, the scab tears with a crunch, and he laughs when Vaas starts to scream. He wipes the blood with the removed bandage and pours whiskey over the wound. Vaas wheezes, arches up on the old mattress, his bound legs pushing against the floor.
"Hurts, does it?" Jason asks cheerfully and pours the whiskey into his own mouth. He wants to stick a finger in the wound and add, how about now?
Vaas doesn't answer. He breathes through his teeth and tries to kill him with the look alone.
"Open wide."
The man smiles at him and obeys. Sweaty, beaten, face twisted in pain. Jason places a white oxycodone pill on his tongue and watches as Vaas chews it and chokes on the bitter crumbs. Then, all business, Jason jabs a needle into his vein. The plunger pushes the antibiotic into the blood vessel, the needle slips out, leaving a bright red bead on the skin of Vaas’s inner elbow.
"Sleep, shitbag," Jason smiles back, stroking Vaas’s dirty cheek with a dirty palm in a tender gesture.
He doesn't know yet what will happen next.
He doesn't know why he dragged Vaas, half-dead, to one of his tiny hideouts in the jungle. Jason had been high; he only remembers the knife sliding between the ribs, and there was something deeply intimate about it. The sound of flesh tearing under the blade was wet, the meat gave a greedy squelch, swallowing a couple of inches of steel, and splashed hot blood on his fingers. If he tries hard, he could probably jerk off to the memory.
How Jason tied Vaas up, how he hastily stitched him with unwashed hands and a non-sterile curved needle, how he collapsed right there next to him, nonchalantly pressing his forehead to the tan shoulder—Jason simply doesn't remember. He remembers regaining consciousness about twelve hours later and, after seeing Vaas, starting to howl with laughter. Jason also remembers the price he had paid for that insane trek.
Every muscle in his body ached. His kidneys had filtered the adrenaline; torn ligaments burned like hell, reminding him once again: every action has a consequence. Want to carry a huge motherfucker through a river and forest on your own back and feel like you have wings? Sure, no problem. You'll pay later. With interest.
Yesterday, while Vaas lay there unconscious, Jason, after laughing his ass off, took a selfie with him on his useless smartphone, gave his ribs a good kick, and went to get himself some breakfast.
He came back an hour later, and Vaas was still alive. Chuckling, Jason threw the backpack over his shoulder and went to report to Citra. He came back in the evening, and Vaas was still alive.
For a moment Jason just stood there, watching. Then his backpack hit the floor. The floorboards creaked under his boot soles, the safety clicked softly, the muzzle pressed into Vaas's cheek.
"You’re awake, asshole?"
Not waiting for an answer, Jason moved the pistol aside, swung his free hand, and backhanded Vaas hard across the face. The dry, cracked lips burst like overripe grapes, smearing his fingers and Vaas’s chin red. Vaas groaned, his eyelashes fluttered, the thin eyelids twitched. His cloudy eyes searched for a long time to find focus.
"Good morning," Jason snarled, wiping his palm on his pants. The muzzle jabbed into Vaas’s cheek again, moved left and right over the teeth beneath like over a xylophone. Vaas stared at Jason for a few seconds, then moved his bound hands, slowly transferring his gaze to them, as if even moving his eyes was agonizing.
"I..." Vaas coughed, pressed his hands to his chest, immediately cried out, jerked, shuddering on the cot. Jason watched his convulsions with pleasure, squatting next to him, cheek propped on his fist. The pistol's muzzle scratched the floor.
For a while, all Vaas could do was breathe, ragged, with a moan on every exhale. When the worst of the pain had passed, he turned his head to Jason and spat out. A red thread of saliva stretched from his lower lip to the rotten pillow. The old brown stains on the stale pillowcase subtly hinted that he wasn't the only one who'd drooled blood on it.
"Did I..." Vaas rasped, staring at Jason's heavy boots, "...make it to heaven?"
Jason's eyes went wide, a look of near comical surprise on his face, and then he was seized again by a choking, hysterical laugh, real and uncontrollable, the kind that leaves your throat raw afterward. Vaas offered a faint smile and groaned.
That night, Jason drank and watched Vaas die. He watched him shiver with fever, thrash about, piss himself, and whimper. The wound on his chest was inflamed; he stank like a dog's corpse rotting in the sun. Jason sat propped against the wall, silently and viciously gulping down alcohol, watching him with kind, drunken eyes.
In the morning, he ground up two oxycodone pills, mixed them with water, and forced the slurry into Vaas's mouth. Vaas choked, his teeth clinking against the tin of the mug that had never been washed.
When Vaas finally fell asleep, Jason headed to the village for antibiotics. His head, buzzing with static, was empty; his exhausted body refused to handle the spirits. Vomiting barrel-aged liquor into the lush green bushes, Jason thought that life was good. Laughing in the process was a mistake. Just another lesson Jason was unlikely to learn.
🌴🌴🌴
...Vaas flinches from the gentle touch as if he'd been kicked, freezes for a few seconds, visibly tense under Jason's unfocused gaze, and forces himself to melt into the cot with feigned relaxation, giving Jason an oily smile, like a receptionist at an expensive hotel.
"Estás loco, hermano? Finally lost it?" he rasps and even finds the strength to rub against the rough, calloused palm.
"Yeah," Jason keeps smiling, caressing Vaas’s cheek, gently running a thumb over his stubble. "You should have died when you had a chance."
Vaas thinks that the kind, slightly bewildered expression on Jason’s face doesn't fit the scene. Then there’s suddenly a knife pressed against his lips. Fingers covered in dirt and dried blood squeeze his cheeks hard, the blade pushes further, scraping against his teeth, scratching the enamel, and Vaas jerks his head nervously.
"Uh-uh—" Jason squeezes his cheeks harder, nails digging deeper, breaking the skin. Vaas doesn't make another sound. He hesitates for a short moment and reluctantly opens his mouth. The knife slides over his tongue, leaving a nauseating metallic taste, the edge presses lightly against his palate.
"Wanna crack your head open," Jason lightly raps his knuckles on Vaas’s shaved head. "Look inside. See if there's a brain in that fucked-up skull of yours, or just a drug stash."
Vaas's pupils are wide, he's breathing hoarsely, touching the cold blade with the tip of his tongue. He doesn't understand a fucking thing, isn't even sure if this grim, shitfaced Jason, shoving a knife down his throat, is real, because the old, real Jason had wanted him dead since their very first meeting.
Jason’s face is close, he reeks of stale booze, and there's not a single rational thought in his eyes. Nothing in his eyes at all. They’re dark and empty, like outer space. The flip side of catharsis. Vaas wonders what Jason had to take to get a trip this strong, but he can't recall ever having one like this. Not from psilocybin, not from amphetamines, not from acid.
"Where the fuck did you even come from?" Jason peers into Vaas's left eye, then his right, and slowly pulls the knife out of his mouth. "How did I ever live without you?"
"Bored?" Vaas licks his cracked lips. It's hard to speak; his brain is sacrificing cognitive functions, trying to go into standby mode to kickstart the regeneration process. Vaas thinks he can hear the synapses between neurons firing.
"Fucking piece of shit," Jason suddenly snarls, baring his even white teeth in a creepy smile, and then spits in Vaas’s face - strong, agile, coiled up like a carnivore about to pounce, anger flashing in his drunken gaze.
‘Come on,’ Vaas reads in his eyes. ‘Make a move, show some character, crack a joke about my brother, COME ON.’
Vaas doesn't move. Doesn't even blink. He's suppressing laughter. The spit feels pleasantly cool on his burning cheek. He doesn't have the strength to be scared, but he's curious about what else Jason will do, how far he'll go.
"Hey, Jason," Vaas whispers hoarsely when the other's gaze becomes unfocused again. "I need to piss."
The room already reeks sharply of urine, and Jason grins venomously.
"Really?" Lying in pissed-soaked pants on a pissed-soaked mattress is supposed to be disgusting, but Vaas doesn’t really care. "Suit yourself."
He tries to relax, but it doesn’t help. One thing is to piss yourself in a fever, another is to do it deliberately while a not-quite-sane bearded dude with a knife is staring at you. All that's left is to approach the issue philosophically. Sooner or later, the dam will break.
Vaas wants to ask why Jason hasn't killed him yet, but the words won't come. His thoughts tangle, consciousness slips away, and he gratefully sinks back into feverish sleep.
🌴🌴🌴
On the fourth day, the fever slightly loosens its clawed grip. Jason feeds Vaas hardtack soaked in water and corn porridge from expired MREs he'd stashed under a floorboard in the corner. The wound is still festering and feels like an ember under his hand. Jason changes the bandages twice a day, sticking them to Vaas’s chest with duct tape.
Jason doesn’t sleep. At night he's drunk and cheerful, mumbling something under his breath, talking to himself, staring at sleeping Vaas, searching for courage within himself and not finding it. Somewhere on the fringes of his consciousness, a thought scratches away: it's humiliating to act like this. To become like him. Even worse. Back then, in the cage, Vaas at least provided them with a shit bucket.
Jason purposefully gets wasted and smokes himself stupid on local sativa to check out of reality, to not give himself even a chance to think with a clear head. To not let himself think at all. God knows what kind of thoughts he could end up having. He could, for instance, stop considering himself human altogether. He could cut him. Burn him. Scoop his eyes out with a spoon and make him eat them. Pour boiling water down his throat. Bury him alive.
He could hand him over to Citra.
The thought of Citra is especially irritating, and Jason washes it away with more alcohol. The floor is littered with bottles, food scraps, bloodied bandages, rags, used syringes, cigarette butts, wrappers, empty tins and beer cans; everything is covered in fat, glossy flies. The sticky strips hanging from the ceiling hum and sway like power lines, and the fucking ultraviolet bug lamp burned out a hundred years ago.
Jason sits on the floor, buried up to his ears in trash, gulping warm whiskey and not taking his bloodshot eyes off the man who destroyed his tiny personal zen, shattered his world to splinters, sawed his life into "before Rook Island" and "after" with a serrated knife. He doesn't feel anything and he isn't trying to. He doesn't want to justify himself to himself.
At dawn, Jason, high out of his mind, decides to go check the traps. With absolute confidence, he crawls out of the hut on all fours and passes out two meters from the doorstep, face first in the grass.
He wakes up around noon. If it weren't for the dense canopies of the tropical trees, the vicious southern sun would have fried him to a crisp.
His head hurts. His mouth tastes like shit. Jason lies on his stomach, gathering the strength just to peel himself off the ground. After a couple of attempts, he gives up and just flops onto his back. Jason's terribly, maddeningly thirsty, but he pulls a joint from behind his ear with suicidal stubbornness.
An indistinct noise comes from the hut, and by the time Jason has finished smoking, Vaas appears in the doorway. Even the crust of dried blood on his face can't hide his sickly pallor and the terrible dark circles around his sunken eyes. He stands hunched over, one hand clutching the doorframe, breathing with wet, asthmatic hitches. In his other hand he holds Jason’s machete.
"You gotta be... fucking kidding me..." he manages between heavy breaths.
Jason only stops laughing when his diaphragm seizes up with hiccups.
"Timing, Vaas!" he yells through the laughter, pointing a finger at him. "Your timing sucks!"
"Nah," the man hawks and spits on the ground. "You're just a fucking cheater."
Jason suddenly trips over reality. His eyes even clear up a bit.
"What," he says in a sly voice, "You play Dota or something?"
"Fuck off, pretty boy," Vaas snaps back peaceably, tosses the machete aside, and slides down the wall looking like he just ran a hundred-mile marathon. "I was organizing local Counter-Strike tournaments when you were still sucking on your mom's tit. We're not savages here, you know."
He's joking, of course. No one on Rook Island believes in the Internet, just like no one believes in Christ.
After sitting and catching his breath, Vaas gets up again and hobbles toward the nearest bushes.
"Where?" Jason inquires politely, but he doesn't go for the Browning in his holster.
"To take a shit, okay? I'm not shitting myself, amigo. Feel free to shoot me."
Jason draws some conclusions from everything that happened. All jokes aside, if he had woken up ten minutes later, Vaas would have had him gutted. Unlike Jason, he certainly wouldn't have hesitated.
Shrugging off the hangover, Jason hurriedly cleans Vaas's wound, shoves a pill into his mouth, injects the antibiotic, feeds him and gives him some water. Then he ties him up tightly, thoroughly, binding his shoulders, thighs, and knees with reinforced duct tape, tapes his mouth shut, hangs a lock on the flimsy door, and disappears until evening. The next day, the scene repeats itself, only Jason is angrier and his hands shake as he wraps Vaas in the silver tape.
🌴🌴🌴
Vaas is woken by some commotion outside. No light seeps through the cracks in the walls. Probably, Jason's back, and Vaas feels a joy like a dog meeting his owner, because every single part of him that can be numb is numb, and his left leg has been seized by cramps multiple times already. Immobilization is a terrible torture. The gentleman knows his stuff.
A loud metallic clang rings out several times, then a dull thud, and the door slowly swings open. Vaas is blinded by the beam of a flashlight, squinting at the figure in the doorway. The man first recoils from the horrific stench pouring out of the little room, curses, covers his nose with a bandana, and then ventures inside again. Getting a good look at Vaas, he lets out a string of profanity and raises a rifle, but then jerks awkwardly, his eyes crossing in surprise as he looks down at the blade that has sprouted from the center of his chest, and slumps to the floor, collapsing into a messy pile as if all the bones have been removed from his body. Jason plants his foot on the corpse's back and yanks his machete free from between the shoulder blades.
"Told you," he mutters sourly, wiping the blade on the dead guy’s shirt. "It's all about the timing."
Vaas stares with his eyes wide. Jason has killed a Rakyat.
"See how much I care about you?" his captor says mockingly, correctly interpreting Vaas's look, and a sudden fear knots his insides. What if Jason isn't pretending? Not drowning his grief in alcohol, not reflecting, not going through an existential crisis, not suffering from the aftermath of a nervous breakdown? What if Jason has genuinely, truly gone off the rails?
Kids grow up so fast.
"Now, how am I supposed to explain this shit to Citra? Fu-uck..." Jason sighs, deeply, with a completely normal frustration, and the knot in Vaas's guts unties itself.
The kid hasn't snapped. Pity. It would have made his life so much easier.