Content warnings for squick - bodily functions, emotional trauma, starvation, etc.


It was dark when Pepper woke up and he blinked several times before realising that the blackness really was that all-encompassing. This was not where he'd been before. He lifted his hand up, wriggling his fingers in front of his face (at least, that's where he assumed his hand was) but saw nothing, nothing but perfect black, not even the slightest movement.

If the room was light-proof, was it also air-proof? Sound-proof?

He spent a moment considering that, wondering how much air could really be in there. It depended how big the room was, of course, which he couldn't tell just lying here. All he could tell so far was that the floor was hard and bumpy, not small lumps like sharp stones and gravel, but uneven - like slab rock laid down that someone had never bothered to smooth out. Probably because they didn't much care whether or not their torture victims were comfortable.

Shit, was there maybe someone else in here? Or... even worse... an expired someone else. He'd never been bothered by corpses before, but suddenly the idea of getting up and moving and tripping over a dead body, or even just the idea of sitting here and not realising that someone was lying dead and decomposing just a few inches away, was hard to bear. He felt like a child sitting in bed terrified of the monster in the closet, sure that at any moment he was going to hear the creak of the door slowly opening, the soft sound of feet on floor, maybe the click of claws, coming closer and closer until--

God he had to stop thinking like that. He sat up fully, hoping the movement would force his mind back to the physical rather than dwelling on irrational fears and wild imaginings, and immediately hissed with pain. The Cruciatus had left him aching, muscles stretched to their limits with how badly they'd tightened and cramped during the bouts of the spell, and the movement jolted them out of rest into red hot flashes of pain again.

Fuck. He needed to stand up. He could walk this off, like a stretched calf muscle or twisted ankle or whatever, it was completely the same principle, the pain was in his mind.

Hands on the ground, ignore the cold and damp - he had to be underground, a basement maybe, how far under for this temperature in spring? How far north was he? - move his weight to his arms, get his feet under him--

His elbows unlocked and he landed heavily on the stone, jarring pain shooting through all his joints and the breath knocked out of him, head smacking audibly against the rock, and he felt tears prick at his eyes.

He was not going to cry, even in legitimate pain.

For several minutes, probably, he lay still, the only measure of passing time the thud of his heartbeat and the steady in and out of his breath. Slowly, too slowly, the pain faded away until once again it was more of a dull ache, more prominent than before maybe but still manageable, ignorable, able to be dealt with.

This time he managed to climb to his feet, pausing once standing with his arms out, ready to brace his fall if his legs proved incapable of holding him. But though he teetered a little, he did steady himself after a moment, and he felt a small rush of success that was depressing in its insignificance - that someone who had done his early work days in a war should be proud of the fact that he could stand was ridiculous, really.

Arms still out in front of him, he started to take careful steps forward. He didn't know what hazards might be in this room, whether it was a wall in front of his hands or steps on the ground, rocks or boxes or bones that might surprise and trip him and send him tumbling against that unforgiving rock floor once more. One slow shuffling step, then another, and a third, each one taking him absolutely nowhere through the darkness, closer and no closer to the edge of it.

It was six steps before he found a wall, and he leaned against it, eyes closed as he tried to figure out how long each step had been. A foot, maybe less, they'd been too cautious to be anywhere near as long as his usual leggy strides. Though, all that told him was that he'd been lying about five feet from a wall. What he needed to do was find a corner.

Moving ever so slowly, he paced his way around the room, trying to guess his steps at around about a foot long each. It was hard, unable to see to the point of being completely blind, but at least if he focused on his spatial awareness, he thought he could get a vaguely accurate count, and it distracted him some from the hurt.

The total he came up with was, at least, more than a holding cell. Ten feet by twelve, or thereabouts, and he'd found the door on the third wall he walked along - a big heavy steel thing, with only a rusted over hole where the internal handle had once been. He tried to bend down to see if he could see through it, but it had been as black as everything else - either there were spells on the cracks and chinks or the next room was as dark as this one.

The rest was not encouraging. The walls were damp, water dripping down them in more than one place, the stone behind slick and slippery with thin algae build ups from the wet. He thought he'd heard scampering twice and hoped he was wrong - if it was mice, or rats, it couldn't be good. There wouldn't be enough food down here to feed them, and he'd heard (and read) horror stories about rats nibbling on people while they were still alive for something to eat.

Eventually he sat back down, having exhausted the things he could accomplish. As far as he could tell the room was completely bare, nothing inside but himself and his fear.

*

He'd estimated two to three days that they'd tortured him, tearing information out of him until there was nothing left and then keeping going until he would have said anything at all, anything they wanted, if only they'd stop - but by then they didn't care what he said. During that, the craving for cigarettes was not something he particularly dwelled on, far more urgent things occupying his mind like the fact that he felt as though the blood was boiling in his veins and his muscles were tensing and tightening to extremes.

Now, though, he was alone, sitting in this dank basement with nothing he could focus his mind on to distract himself from what he was feeling. Which meant that it had been days since he'd had a fag, gone from smoking half a pack a day to nothing, and really that was hardly the worst of his worries right now, he knew that in his mind, but that did not mean that he didn't feel as though his entire skin was sloughing off, itching in every square inch, every nerve ending irritating him. How he yearned for a cigarette! Benson and Hedges gold, specifically, his brand, the one he had smoked since he was fifteen - over half of his life. He wanted it so badly he could almost imagine how one felt in his hand, almost taste it.

He lay still, concentrating on not moving, and even then his hands shook. If he relaxed his mind the trembling was more violent, fingers fairly banging against the ground, but if he focused carefully he could control it almost to the point of stillness. It helped the itching, a little, taking just the very edge off by focusing on something else. The cold floor helped a little too, oddly enough, though never for very long and only on the portions of his body that were pressed against it, so he shifted periodically, moving and rolling to give each place momentary relief.

Right then, he would quite honestly have picked a cigarette and a single match over a beef sandwich. Maybe even a glass of water as well.

*

But then, the hunger had actually faded fairly quickly. Pepper supposed that his body was capable of realising that if it didn't get fed while he was having crippling hunger pangs, the kind that felt as though his stomach was folding in on itself and eating him from the inside out, then there probably wasn't any food to be had. His body was clearly intelligent and wise.

The thirst was not so simple. It began slower, mouth steadily drying out, lips losing their softness and becoming cracked. It did not help that after a while the silence had become viciously cloying, clinging to him every time he moved as though it was attached to him, part of him, seeping into his skin and hair and clothes, thick like molasses but capable of crawling into his mind and driving him slowly and inexorably crazy.

To dispel this conclusion, or at least hold it off, he sang nursery rhymes, holding back the quiet with weak, quavery voice, as though even that was starving.

London Bridge is falling down,
falling down, falling down
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair Lady.

Build it up with wood and clay,
wood and clay, wood and clay
Build it up with wood and clay,
My fair Lady.

Wood and clay will wash away,
wash away, wash away
Wood and clay will wash away...

He coughed, the spasm coming from somewhere deep in his chest that he wasn't sure was entirely healthy. Instinctively he ran his tongue over chapped lips, but the trick required that his tongue itself have extra moisture.

There had been water on the walls, he remembered, slick with algae, and at first he balked at the idea - but the idea that anyone was coming any time soon, when they didn't know where he was-- when even he didn't know where he was-- was getting to be almost laughable. If he waited too long to hydrate himself it would be all the harder to stay healthy... or as close to healthy as he could manage, given the circumstances. And really he was lucky that there was that water, because the only other option was the corner he'd been using as a latrine, and oh if he'd balked at the wall slime, he really did not want to get to the point where he was willing to do that. (What's worse was that he knew he would, if he had to, that he couldn't bring himself to lie down and let himself die if there was that option, a chance that he could still get out of this dark, cold hell and back to where he was supposed to be.)

It should probably have scared him how good it tasted, not caring about the weirdness of the slime (some of it inevitably ended up in his mouth, the texture not like any actual food he could think of having eaten in the past, foul and abhorrent except for the fact that it came with water, blessed cool water) or the diseases that were probably living in it, just glad for the moisture.

Build it up with bricks and mortar,
bricks and mortar, bricks and mortar
Build it up with bricks and mortar,
My fair Lady.

*

The floor was cold. Like the silence the cold was pervasive, though unlike the silence, which preyed on his mind, the cold preferred to crawl into his joints and set up home there. He had to move, to fight it, to keep warm and mobile so that he'd keep being able to, so he wouldn't end up lying curled up on the stone with bruises forming in his skin, incapable of stretching out a limb without suffering flashing, cutting, slicing, shooting pain.

Mostly he walked, back and forth across the room's twelve foot length; at first he counted the times, one and two and three and four and twelve and seventeen and twenty nine, but he got muddled and lost his count and had to think too hard which set came next - was it eighty or ninety that came after seventy nine and hadn't he already done that number? His joints ached and he didn't think they bent as easily and smoothly as they used to, but it was starting to get a little bit hard to remember how he'd used to feel.

Pain - has an Element of Blank -
It cannot recollect
When it begun - or if there were
A time when it was not -

He wasn't sure how long it had been when the cramps started, blinding flashes of pain in his lower abdomen that had him gasping, sucking in air, dropping to the ground so he could ball himself up tight and small, whimpering. Fuck, it wasn't like there was anyone to hear him, anyway. But god, oh fucking god what was happening, was it hunger? Had his body ceased its intelligence and wisdom, having gotten to the point where it needed sustenance?

Only when the agony had subsided a little did he slide a hand in between his pulled-up thighs and feel around, trying to find where was tender, what hurt, what was wrong. Now that it wasn't so bad that it was blocking his very thought processes it seemed like it was too low to be his stomach after all - and yes, he felt a lump, something hard and round... no, cylindrical, long.

Pepper laughed, though there was no amusement in it at all, the sound hollow. His bowel. He hadn't even thought about that, sort of figured that if he wasn't eating maybe it made sense that he wasn't crapping, but of course it was never quite that simple, was it.

And apparently his body did not like the current state of affairs any more than he did, if it was still finding new and exciting ways to protest them. What would come next? He wasn't sure whether it was more comfortable not knowing or knowing but this, this unsurety about the future, it was not comfortable. His imagination was too vivid. He had seen too many bad ways to die.

*

There was very little to do but sleep as his muscles continued the process of atrophy, as his body slowly and inexorably consumed itself in lieu of any other sustenance. Sometimes he got up, the movements taking far, far longer now than on the first day he'd been there (whenever that had been; with no day and no night, no clocks or any kind of external focus point he could use to gauge time, how long it had been was a complete mystery), and he'd pace the room for a while, exercising limbs to keep them...... he did not have a word to fill in the blank.

He pissed in the corner, or possibly more than one corner now, too disorientated to keep track of direction, or he found a wet spot on the wall and awkwardly angled himself, pressing against the vertical stone so he could reach enough to get as much of the moisture as he could. There were pins and needles and he walked them off, and he was sure of the presence of rats now and if he heard one he preferred to be on the move, not wanting to make himself an easy target.

But mostly he just lay still and slept, and though he almost never had before, for some reason now he found that he was remembering his dreams. Not the details so much, but concepts and images, the colours so, so bright and varied, shades and hues all across the rainbow. People and sound. Things, so many things, things that he should be able to remember better than he could, things that seemed like a lifetime ago and a world away than here in this little basement.

He dreamed about Jo, about curling up with her in bed, about her naked body pressed up against him, about kisses and touches, and he woke up cold and hurting and blind and alone, not even half hard, and at some unknown point over the last several days his tear ducts had stopped working, so he just lay on the ground, body wracked with dry, broken sobs.

*

Pepper woke in pain, wishing he could be encased in a hard shell so that he wouldn't forget himself and move and be forced to suffer the increasingly agonising shooting fire that plagued his limbs now. He opened his eyes and the blackness didn't change, just as complete as before, and he felt again like crying. He'd been feeling like that a lot lately, ironic now that he couldn't, when all his life he'd been able and never wanted to.

There was something on his hand.

He lay still, very very still, trying to decide whether he was imagining it - certainly his mind was not the paragon of sanity and stability it had once been, and he'd had more than his share of crazy imaginary symptoms so far. If only he could see... except a small voice in the back of his mind wondered what would happen if he suddenly could, if he could even process the information coming into his brain anymore. He couldn't remember what it was like to have all that going on around him, so many objects to be aware of all at once when down here there wasn't even anything he could handle, movement and colour and light.

But that did not tell him whether or not there really was something on his hand.

He was imagining it, he decided, and relaxed, but then a few moments later he changed his mind, no, there really was something. What was it? God, what could it be when there was nothing even down here?

Finally he could bear it no longer, the issue bloated to excessive proportions, and he prepared himself against the ache of his muscles as he moved his other arm, swinging it up and slapping the back of his hand as quickly as he could (both so the thing, whatever it was, would not be able to escape, and because he'd always been a fan of ripping the bandage straight clean off, getting the hurt over and done with and then moving on).

There was something, he was certain now, and he paused, not sure what to do next. Whatever it was was dead now, some kind of bug-- no, a spider, it had been a spider.

He'd never been particularly upset by spiders anyway, but he thought he should probably have felt more at the idea that a squashed, flattened spider was on his hand than he did. Instead he felt... nothing. A vague knowledge, that was all, no emotion or care or much real interest.

Except that he was hungry.

If he didn't think about it, it wasn't real, he decided firmly, and rolled to his side a little, bending his head down, putting his mouth to his hand and swallowing down whatever he could get off of whatever was left. It wasn't much, not even a teaspoon, and with the dryness of his mouth and throat it was difficult to swallow and he wanted to gag and it tasted-- he didn't know how it tasted, maybe his senses had warped since he'd been here, maybe it was all wrong and even the most crisp, delicious beer in the world would taste like he was gulping down sewer water and the carbonation would burn his throat.

Unable to hold himself up any longer he lay back down on the stone floor, closed his eyes, and tried not to think.

*

Human teeth were not designed for cutting through human skin, but Pepper was persistent and desperate and it couldn't hurt worse than he already did when he tried to move, fairly dragging himself across the floor in search of water. The stone grated at him, probably scratching or at least raising welts. He didn't feel it, and he couldn't see it.

His hand was thin, partially wasted away, and even when he got it open there was not much to be had, but it was more than nothing and that was enough. Blood trickled weakly out and he lapped it up, for the moisture and some vague idea about keeping nutrients in his system rather than letting them leak out, falling to the floor where he could do nothing but try to lick it up with tongue dry like sandpaper. It was salty and if anything only made him thirstier.

He gnawed for a little while, swallowing what he could, forcing it down a throat that had mostly forgotten how to go about the process of eating. Too long, it had been too long.

Maybe he wasn't even locked up down here. Maybe it was the rest of the world that was gone. It seemed inconceivable to him that, somewhere beyond the edges of this darkness, there could be people going about their everyday lives, waking up in the mornings in warm beds and not wanting to get up and go to work, but going anyway, and chatting with their colleagues, drinking coffee from the coffee machine that everyone wished was better but tasted nothing like the good stuff from the cafe down the road, until it was time to leave and head down to the pub down the road that did the happy hour and those great mixed drinks with two little straws in, never just one, always two, and they'd bend at the neck and maybe there'd be a little paper umbrella on the edge of the glass and they'd get a bit tipsy and laugh with each other and maybe saw a few things a little bit embarrassing but in the long term it really didn't matter did it? because they'd still get to go back home afterwards and feed their kids and play with the dog and listen to the wireless until it was time to go to bed, fuck their wives and fall asleep again.

This room was the only piece of reality left and it was sucking the life out of him.

He was tired, too tired, so he stopped moving, and then he fell asleep.

*

How to tell the difference between sleep and wake? They were both so shy of the line now, he never slept deeply, drifting into greyness that was only one small start away from a vague sort of consciousness that let him be aware of the room but never fully alert, mind too sluggish to connect to anything that was.... not that anything was going on, really, for him to connect to.

His hand itched and he wasn't sure why. It felt strange, on the back, around between his thumb and index finger, and then moving up his forearm a little too. It was there in the back of his mind though he never really cared enough to investigate. What was the point?

At least he didn't hurt anymore.

*

This is how the world ends: not with a bang but a whimper.

***