He wonders if it's Stockholm Syndrome.

He wonders if it's worth it.

After a while, he stops wondering.

Every time Chainsaw tries to kiss him, or fondle him, or those twistedly gentle hands stray too close to intimacy, he thinks of that moment

and smiles. Every time, the torturer is infuriated. And every time, Will wins.

After the fourth failed caress, he tries to turn it around, ruin with mockery what he can't touch with pleasure or pain. "Never thought I'd see you give in this fast," he purrs, his fingertips sliding down Will's stomach, lips brushing the bloodied shell of his ear. "What's the matter, Willy? Where's that fighting spirit of yours? Or are you just so hot for me you don't fucking care anymore?"

"That tickles," Will breathes, grinning in spite of ever-present fear. "Do it again."

He watches as Chainsaw withdraws his hand. Watches, thoughtfully, right up until the torturer punches him in the stomach and his world is briefly pain again.

And he analyzes.

This... bizarre strategy, hit upon by some insane combination of instinct and guesswork and whim, is working. Chainsaw has no idea how to deal with consent-- at least in this context, and maybe ever.

Poor bastard.

He pauses, coughing blood, to reexamine the thought. Does he really feel sorry for this son of a bitch?

Yes.

Slowly, momentarily unaware of his surroundings, Will grins again.

"Wipe that fucking smirk off your face," Chainsaw growls, circling to grab him by the hair and yank his head back. "No, wait. Let me."

All right, that's a novel use for a rotary saw. Lips, cheeks, forehead-- the flesh comes off his face in tatters, and the revelation is driven from his consciousness by a choking wash of blood.

That's fine. He torches soon after, and in the blessed instant of nothingness, it all comes back. Epiphany. Sympathy.

Pain blurs into pain, sharp or blunt or electric; it distorts his sense of time until all he's really sure of is that Chainsaw has yet to take a break. How long can a man go without food or rest, down here? Four hours at least, he knows. Five? Six?

Eight?

At what Will estimates as something like the six-and-a-half-hour mark, Chainsaw pops out into the hallway for a drink of water, leaving Will on the floor bruised and bleeding but in possession of all his limbs. He discovers he's free to move, and sits up, closing his eyes and leaning back against the  wall with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees. Fear is an old friend by now. He hardly notices the racing of his pulse or the tightness of his breath.

Clothing is long gone-- he calls up the image of Chainsaw using his shirt as a rag to mop up blood, then discarding it red-stained and stiffening into the corner. The same fate for his pants. His underwear suffered a brief change of career to gag and then met a grisly end, along with Will himself more temporarily, at the hands of Chainsaw's namesake.

Injuries are minimal, surprisingly. A lovely purple bruise down the outside of his left arm, shoulder to wrist; another one dark and red across his stomach; assorted less magnificent specimens dotting his back and sides. A cut on his lip, slowly scabbing over. Apparently good old-fashioned fists have an allure that power tools just can't match, at least this time around.

In the minute and a half it takes him to make this dismal inventory, Chainsaw finishes up and saunters back in, unashamedly naked and aroused. Will glares dully until control forces him to stand and approach.

"I'm gonna call your bluff, Willy."

The torturer sounds very self-satisfied. Will stifles the mad urge to laugh, restraining himself to another repetition of his customary smirk. His heart's not in it, somehow. As soon as  Chainsaw touches him, though--

--he grins, broad and bright, making no effort to escape as those terrifying hands glide from shoulder to neck to jaw. The kiss is rough and forceful, a voiceless expression of power: Chainsaw taking what Chainsaw wants. No control prevents Will from biting his tongue, only intuition and the hot swell of triumph. He sticks to his working formula, kissing back just as hard, taking back his stolen volition. Everything tastes of salt and copper, blood from his split lip smearing across both their faces.

Instead of getting angry and backing off, Chainsaw yanks Will closer, half-throttling him in the process. It feels a little like drowning for a moment, and panic almost overwhelms his enthusiastic artifice, but he clears his head and breaks Chainsaw's grip.

His tormentor smiles sharply, and Will curses in the privacy of his mind-- goddamn impossible game, you win only by surrendering-- no, somebody has to teach this asshole that sometimes 'consent' doesn't mean 'lie there and take it like you're paying me'. He goes on the offensive, not to get free but to get the upper hand. Again, surprise. Chainsaw's off-balance, mentally if not physically. He doesn't know how to react.

In their struggles they hit the floor-- Will first; that's going to be quite the bruise to add to the collection on his shoulder if by some miracle he doesn't torch before it forms-- and roll. Chainsaw comes out on top, and for a moment it's a sinister echo of those first few minutes, that first violent mockery of a kiss.

Except now, Will knows what he's doing. Knows what he wants and how to get it.

He's amazed to discover that, however briefly, lust can overwhelm fear.

Grabbing Chainsaw's head, he pulls him down and crushes their mouths together. His lip hurts. He doesn't care. Pain is meaningless noise against the signal of desire. There's no hiding how much they're both into this. They break, gasping for breath; Chainsaw supports himself on one hand and sends the other roaming down Will's body, sharp fingernails raking over his bruise-reddened stomach, until it finds his erection and squeezes.

"You're sick," he pants, lowering his head to lick a trail along Will's jaw.

Streaked with sweat and blood, his bruised flesh crushed painfully against the cold tile floor, Will can do nothing but grin. "You're one to talk," he retorts, sliding his hands into Chainsaw's hair and kissing him again.

In hindsight he probably should've been expecting the bite to his already-bleeding lip. It's a very Chainsaw thing to do. Nevertheless, it's out of the blue and he flinches at the sudden pain, trapped between torturer and floor. Panic rears its ugly head again, and he controls it, putting the adrenaline to other uses. Fuel for the fire of lustful cooperation/resistance-- strange how those two words can mean the same thing. He thinks he'll never get tired of that startled flicker in Chainsaw's eyes. Especially now that it's not immediately followed by dismemberment.

And then Chainsaw's hand moves, and he's being gentle instead of mocking, and Will briefly fails to keep in mind that this is a game. Role becomes reality; he gasps, hands fisting convulsively in Chainsaw's hair, straining to thrust into that practiced grip despite the weight of a man pinning him down. The torturer looks smug-- and then very smug-- and then Will growls something incoherent and kisses him with brief, distracted aggression, and he doesn't look smug anymore. Angry, maybe. Calculating. Hard to tell, through fear and pain and pleasure and triumph.

From one moment to the next he feels his mental grip on the situation fail. Everything's too much-- no idea what he's doing-- god that feels good-- shit, this is terrifying-- how the hell did he think this would work?-- oh fuck do that again--

Sensing weakness, Chainsaw leans forward and digs his fingernails into Will's bruised shoulder, hard.

"Son of a bitch," he gasps, wide-eyed. The sudden sharp burst of pain is like a breath of strong mint, clearing his head, focusing him down into nothing but a method and a goal. It hurts, yes-- but that's nothing new. Noise on the channel. Irrelevant. What matters is the game, played by rules unknown and inconstant, to an objective only half-understood; he has the advantage, if only he can keep it, because-- because--

The epiphany spins away unrealized; thought, sense, and memory blur out into a haze of white noise, fragments of Sun Tzu, of Francis Dolarhyde's diary, of Larousse Gastronomique with a note scribbled between paragraphs in blue fine-tip marker.



A moment of nothingness.



He inhales, shuddering, and stares up at Chainsaw in frank disbelief, lifting a hand to his unmarred throat as the sense-memory of the past thirty seconds replays. Words fail him. You bastard doesn't cut it. The ghost sensations of orgasm and crushed trachea chase each other across his consciousness.

Before his incredulity has time to fade, his tormentor is sitting up and transmitting a silent command, with a face like the cat that finally ate the canary after a long and arduous hunt.

"...Oh, you are kidding me," says Will unthinkingly, even as he's scrambling to hands and knees, lowering his face to the tile. The combination of blood and sweat and semen in varying degrees of staleness tastes predictably disgusting. He's almost too astonished to be humiliated-- almost.

Producing enthusiasm for this would be a superhuman feat, and probably pointless besides. He doesn't try. Mechanically, shivering with revulsion, he laps at the floor until control no longer forces him to do so.

"Nasty, isn't it," comments Chainsaw, grabbing Will by the hair and yanking his head up. Deprived of nodding, too dazed and sickened to speak, he blinks a vague affirmative. "Let me help you with that."

Six words you never, ever want to hear from a torturer in a shitty mood. Will's stomach tightens with nervousness as silent orders force his mouth open and his eyes shut.

Pain. Burning, horrible, liquid pain, searing his lips and face and tongue, filling his mouth, choking him, overflowing and splashing down to blister the skin of his shoulders. Compelled by command to remain still and by instinct to breathe, he fights a losing battle not to inhale the stuff. To the sound of Chainsaw's mocking laughter, he coughs until his lungs are empty and forces himself not to fill them again. Fear (of what?) keeps this resolution steady for a moment. Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen.

The gasp, when it inevitably comes, is the single most painful breath he's ever taken. And not instantly fatal, more's the pity; he coughs and chokes and wishes desperately for the breath to scream. It comes out more of a gurgle, a horrible wet bubbling sound whose memory follows him through the blankness of renewal.

Out of all the things he's ever heard and wanted to forget, that sound is one of the worst. Helpless-- agonized-- pitiful-- pure vocal shorthand for everything he doesn't want to be. It ranks right up there with the wet little squelch of Hannibal Lecter driving a knife into his gut.

That connection triggers another split-second mnemonic waterfall, a leak in the dam of memory, pain to pain through a desultory sequence of related torments. Will blinks shakily back to reality, knowing these things get easier every time, wondering if he'll ever really get used to them. Probably not. Chainsaw is standing over him holding a crowbar.



Chainsaw is standing over him holding a crowbar.



Shit.



There is an interval of unpleasantness.

Time runs too quick in some places, too slow in others, and at certain moments becomes utterly irrelevant. Mostly it's slow, stretching around the deforming influence of broken skin and broken bones and, he begins to worry, a broken mind. Is the same agony that distorts his sense of the flow of time going to start distorting other things? How would he tell? People say you break, after enough torture. They never mention how.

Before he can start wondering if his little strategy is safeguard or symptom, his thoughts are interrupted. Chainsaw drops his pliers (Will shudders involuntarily) and stretches, catlike in his languid satisfaction.

"Man, you are tiring me out," he comments, ghosting a hand down Will's ribs to the raw mess at his waist (another shudder) and squeezing until fresh blood runs down his red-streaked fingers.

Will doesn't force a laugh. He's not sure he can. It would almost certainly come out a whimper.

"I'm gonna go have a shower," the torturer continues, digging in his fingers and grinning at the squelch. His lips find Will's ear and he kisses the lobe with exquisite delicacy, recalling (intentionally, Will is sure) another whispered message some hours ago. "If you have any fun without me," he adds, almost as an afterthought, "I'll rip your cock off and choke you with it."

At the sight of his victim's head dipping in numb acknowledgment, Chainsaw snickers, and the sound of his mocking laughter lingers in the room long after he's out the door and up the stairs.

Not a hallucination. Just-- for the first time, the phrase my memory playing tricks on me applies. Will chuckles despairingly at the thought.

Inventory. Clothing-- status unchanged. Injuries-- he glances down and shudders again, violently. Would torching himself count as fun for Chainsaw's twisted purposes? Better not risk it. He's not sure he could do it in any case. The thought of stumbling around in the spotlit dark in search of some reasonably painless instrument of temporary fatality... another sickened tremor to add to his collection. He stays put, shivering on the cold metal table, uncertain if this too is a calculated assault on his sanity. (Knowing Chainsaw, what isn't?)

There is an interval of unpleasantness. Will discovers that peace and quiet are no longer representative of safety. The dull, oppressive silence and the steady throb of torn flesh combine to destroy any burgeoning comfort before it can take root.

After this false respite, the sound of Chainsaw making his way back down the hall is almost welcome. The press of control against his mind is less so. Obedient to a command not his own, his body stands and approaches the doorway, arms held steady by its sides. That's a strange one. Preventing him from fighting? Or...

Chainsaw grins when he enters the room, damp hair a wild freshly-towelled mess, clean pale skin shining like steel in the harsh light. "Shit, Willy, don't tell me I broke you already." His hand darts up, closes on Will's jaw, pulls him forward-- he stumbles-- and releases just as suddenly. "Didn't even get up, did you."

Will glances down at the single trail of fresh bloody footprints from table to door, and understanding dawns. He shakes his head, a slight ruefulness colouring the motion. No and no. He's not broken.

Breaking, maybe.

Blood trickles wet and red down his sides, down his legs, as control directs him to stand motionless in the centre of the room. The edge of the table is cold against the backs of his bare thighs. Chainsaw circles it, grinning strangely, half-lit in snatches and glimpses by the stark halogen glaring down from above. Unable to move anything but his head, Will swallows, trying not to shake and mostly failing.

There's a screech of metal dragging over tile, a brief glint from the left as a corner catches the too-focused light; Chainsaw is moving the chair, to some indecipherable purpose of his own. The noise repeats with the stool, lighter, in the opposite direction. Will judges both sounds to end just about at the walls of the room, and wonders.

"Hey. Willy." The words issue forth from the darkness, bouncing around the room until their point of origin is hopelessly obscured.

A querying glance, directed at his best estimate of Chainsaw's location, serves for yes? better than Will's unsteady voice ever could.

"You remember that deal I made, right when you got here?"

"If you can make it to the door? I'll let you go. Cross my heart, hope to cry, stick a needle in your eye."

His nod is slow and disbelieving, his mouth too dry to venture speech. Fear and hope wage a bloodthirsty war in the pit of his stomach, a sickening, disorienting, terrible/wonderful surge.



"It's still on."



Control releases. Will catches a flicker of movement by the door before the lights snap off and the dungeon is plunged abruptly into a lightless gloom.

He moves quickly, quietly, before the afterimage of the light can fade from his eyes. His knee brushes metal; the chair. Will steps around it, tracing its outline with his fingertips, his ears alert for any clue to Chainsaw's location, his breath a rough near-soundless rhythm.

One outstretched hand encounters cold tile: the wall. He slides along it until his fingers encounter the hard lines of a plastic case. Broad oblong, vertical, maybe a foot by a foot and a half-- he closes his eyes in the dark, flattens his palm against the rough surface. A map of the room springs up in his mind; he's a third of the way down the left wall, in the middle of a set of six power tools, two in front, three behind. After those, in the direction he's facing, a set of chains and then the wall with the door. As an added bonus, that corner is also the last known location of his pants.

Relying on the darkness to disorient him was, he concludes with a small cold smile, not Chainsaw's cleverest moment.

Slowly, deliberately, as naturally as possible, he takes a step towards the door and lets his ankle knock against the leg of the chair.

The response is near-instantaneous; Chainsaw must have been close. "Wrong wall," he taunts, and the air stirs with his approach-- but when his hand darts out Will has already moved, and his fingers collide too early with a bare and bloody chest. Grinning savagely into the dark, Will presses his advantage-- grabs the startled torturer's wrist and yanks, pulling down/pushing forward. His shoulder collides with Chainsaw's sternum; his leg hooks around the back of a knee; acting almost purely on instinct, he bears down until they both hit the floor in a bruised tangle.

One of his arms is trapped awkwardly between them, the other hand pinning Chainsaw's wrist to the floor. The torturer's left leg twines around his right, holding him in place, and his free hand-- Will drags in a hissing breath as sharp fingernails find the wounds at his side, ripping, tearing. They're both liberally smeared with blood. So much for Chainsaw's shower. He clenches his fist and turns the trapped arm to a weapon, driving his elbow into the torturer's gut. A grunt of pain is his reward. Useless: he needs freedom, not revenge.

The nails buried in his side move away. He inhales gratefuly, warily, leaning his weight on Chainsaw's pinned wrist and on the forearm now laid across the torturer's chest.

Bloodstained fingers fist in his hair, and Chainsaw drags Will's head down, crushing their mouths together. Changing the rules. He accepts the challenge, kissing back hard and heavy, shifting his arm from its place across the torturer's collarbone to flatten his palm against the floor, the better to support himself with. His heart races, fired by arousal and alertness. This is Chainsaw. He's going to attack any minute now.

He doesn't attack.

The press of lips and tongue is nearly an assault in its own right, but it stays firmly just this side of violent. Despite himself, Will discovers he is relaxing into the savage peace of it. It's incredibly easy to be distracted from the big picture by the pressures of the moment, by brutal passion and the mingled heat of their breath.

Part of him is still analyzing this when Chainsaw bites.

Maybe that's why he bites back.

Either way, the rules have changed again, and he can feel his grasp of the situation reasserting itself as the sharp taste of copper floods his mouth. Pain is focus. This is not the first time Will has discovered this. Dimly, he wonders when Chainsaw will catch up to the lesson.

His lip is bleeding. It smears across both their faces, invisible in the pitch-black room. He lifts his hand from the floor to Chainsaw's face, deliberately trailing his fingers through the mess as their tongues slide hotly against one another. The torturer's surprise is tangible. Good.

Breaking the kiss, Will tilts his head and licks blood from the path of his fingertips. A flashback to pink-stained tile; he brushes it aside. Unimportant. The laughter he can feel vibrating in Chainsaw's chest, now-- that's the sound of triumph in the making. His tongue swipes across a copper-flavoured cheek and he grins silently, breath puffing out over damp skin in warm shuddering gasps.

Chainsaw shifts under him. He tenses, feeling the direction of movement, and when a hand shoves at his chest to roll them both over he moves with it, pulling Chainsaw on top of him and then using momentum to send him tumbling off the other side. The force of the movement separates them briefly; he doesn't manage to scramble on top again. That's fine. Chainsaw's hand slides around the back of his neck and yanks, and sharp teeth fasten in his bleeding lip. That's fine, too. He kisses back, just as rough, giving as good as he gets-- or trying to. Chainsaw is better at this than he is.

That's fine.

Lying on his side in an intimate tangle of limbs, kissing like his sanity depends on it, Will feels a hand slide down the shallow curve of his spine. Over his shoulder, down his back, around one narrow hip and detouring briefly up towards his navel-- irrationally, he remembers for a moment he had a scar there once.

And then Chainsaw's fingers wrap around his cock, and he remembers other things.

The plan shines brightly in his mind, half-formed, a lighthouse of dangerous impossibility. It's hard to keep strategy and tactics in his head when all he wants to think about is the touch of that hand, so he lets go, intentionally giving in to the mindless heat of desire. At the heart of it, that's the only strategy that matters, anyway. Tried and tested. Works like a charm.

His hands cup Chainsaw's face and he moans, low and demanding. An order more than it's a plea. Which will piss Chainsaw off to no end, but that's immaterial. Instinctively, he knows the fluid rules of their game have shifted in his favour for now. Revenge will be based in lust, not pain. He can deal with that.

He is momentarily startled when he feels the sudden absence of the hand at his groin. "Fucking tease," he whispers, smirking invisibly in the dark, sparing little thought to how far he's taken this role. It works. It works wonderfully, and that's all that matters.

"You should know me by now," Chainsaw breathes, and his lips are a hair's breadth from Will's cheek, close enough to tickle without ever touching skin. "I-- always-- deliver."

His hands slide warm and dry down over Will's shoulders, and he shifts position in the same motion, crowding close, his erection pressing tangibly against a stomach taut with innumerable tensions. Panic flares; there's something unknown in that movement-- something new-- and Will is uncertain for one heart-stopping instant whether to struggle or lie still, accept or reject, want or deny. The rules are murky, a free-spinning compass, refusing to halt and point the way. He freezes.

There's a low chuckle, a puff of warm breath against his face, and he knows that he made the right move; the interplay of fear and lust is something Chainsaw finds exciting.

Whether or not exciting Chainsaw is ultimately good for him...

It had better be.

(It's going to be.)

The moment is broken by a pair of hands continuing their journey down his sides to his waist, holding him for a moment in a bizarrely tender grip-- and then skating over and around and turning him so the length of his spine is warmed by Chainsaw's skin, his shoulderblades pressed back against the torturer's collarbone, hot breath humid against the back of his neck and a familiar rigid shape nudging up between his buttocks.

When did Chainsaw's cock start feeling familiar?

Skip it. More important things to (oh fuck) worry about. Like the warm arms wrapped around his waist, or the sharp teeth raking his shoulder. Like the way the torturer moves again, sliding his hand around and back and between to press the pad of his thumb against Will's anus.

There is no lubrication, except maybe blood. Will is suddenly and briefly terrified. Through Chainsaw's laughter he reminds himself that this can't possibly be any worse than dismemberment. A thin comfort, but under the circumstances it's the best he can manage.

--he is, he realizes, thinking about the intimate touch of Chainsaw's hand as something to be endured. That's wrong. Lust, not pain. Sex, not torture. Never mind the combination of both in one: no. I want it, he whispers silently in his mind, desperate and afraid. Want you. Want this.

Fuck.

He's not sure which is worse: that it might be a lie, or that it might not.

He's not sure which is true, either.

When the intruding hand is replaced by the head of Chainsaw's cock, he finds out.

It's messy and painful and glorious. It hurts; other things have hurt worse. Every breath is a ragged sucking gasp, every nerve afire with sensation-- good or bad, he's not sure he can tell anymore. He's not sure he wants to. Blurring the lines between pleasure and pain can force you to associate ecstasy with agony... or allow you to associate agony with ecstasy. Will chooses the latter, and moans softly as he feels Chainsaw's hand slide forward around his hip to his groin.

The touch of those fingers is a splash of pure pleasure across a nervous system already drenched in bright and beautiful pain. He drowns willingly, wholeheartedly, in the combination. The torturer's derision takes third tier in Will's awareness to the savage harmony of stroking hand and invading cock. He can barely think through this sensory barrage, which suits him fine. Less chance to fuck something up.

Half-consciously, he realizes this is turning into another kind of contest. Each near-inaudible gasp from behind him feels stifled, suppressed. Chainsaw wants to outlast him, on a point of pride.

Will considers this with as much conscious thought as he has left, and concludes that he agrees, even as he's moving on instinct to control his breathing and force himself back from the looming edge. He has to lose the battle to win the war. And he had better do it as sincerely as possible or Chainsaw will know. An honest fight not to be the one who comes first-- good thing the torturer is better at this than he is, then.

His self-control is good, but not good enough. He feels himself slipping under the relentless assault, and smiles briefly into the lightless room. The sound of mocking laughter is welcome, announcing victory as it crows defeat. His gasping turns to panting turns to a rapid open-mouthed inhalation that seems to stretch for days, dragging air into his lungs like Sisyphus' boulder ascending the hill only to crash back down and repeat the journey. Again and again he breathes, desperate for sensation, for cessation, for triumph, for release.

The moment of orgasm is violent and incredible. It's never been this painful; it's never been this good. He has time for a moment's obscure, unfocused guilt before reality intrudes, too vivid to ignore. The floor under his hands is sticky with blood and semen. Chainsaw pants and moans audibly behind him, bruising his hip with strong fingers; belatedly, Will remembers screaming. Through tearing pain now mostly undiluted by pleasure, he grins.

At last, Chainsaw comes, dropping out of frantic rigid shudders into a heap and remaining utterly still for a moment. Just a moment. Then he's rolling to one side, pulling out and releasing his painful grasp on Will's hip. There is an interval of a few seconds where the only clue to his location is the radiated heat of his body, and then he crowds close again, reluctant to leave arm's reach for long in the blind dark.

Relaxing seems unavoidable for both of them, after this; Will accepts the brief respite with gratitude.
He stretches, slowly, settling himself more comfortably on the cold tile floor. Chainsaw's arm drapes around his waist, and the exhausted torturer nibbles absently on his shoulder.

It hurts, but far more important is the sensation of his fingertips brushing denim: the remnants of his mauled, discarded jeans, tossed in this very corner some hours before.

At a particularly vicious bite, he tenses, wincing. His hand closes on the hem of his pants. The sleepy chuckle from Chainsaw is forestalled by a grunt of surprised pain as Will's elbow catches him forcefully in the stomach.

A few seconds' grace is all he's going to get, and he doesn't waste it. Will springs for the door, dragging his hand along the wall for balance and direction-- yanks it open, closing his eyes against the painful spill of light into the room-- and stumbles through, slamming it behind him, throwing the bolt for good measure. When he hears the shout of rage, before he can feel control forcing him back towards the handle, he calls:

"Thought you said that deal was still on."

Silence.

From within the room: "You bitch."

Laughing silently, Will opens the door.

Chainsaw stalks through, grabs him by the throat, and kisses him with unprecedented brutality, tearing open his lip and licking the bleeding wound before finally releasing him and stepping back.

"Get the fuck out of my house."

Will goes.

Halfway down the road towards the subway, he stops running for the first time. Each breath writhes painfully in his lungs like a trapped animal trying to escape. There is no one around; Chainsaw's house is not a popular destination. His face and thighs are streaked with blood. It splatters across his chest, his stomach-- he twists to examine his back and discovers scratches beaded with stark red, each one accompanied by a memory of when and how it was inflicted.

Swallowing, he pulls on his jeans, shoves his hands in his pockets, and walks barefoot towards the subway. The button of  his fly is broken, but the zipper still works. It's enough for modesty, if not comfort, and he doubts a pair of pants could make him comfortable at the moment regardless.






When he gets home, the first thing he does is collapse trembling on the couch and stay there for a good half hour-- thirty-six minutes by the clock on the wall.

The second thing he does is call Eights.

"Yeah?" Her voice is slightly hoarse as she picks up the phone.

"Hi." He honestly doesn't know what to say. "It's--"

"Will?" One of Eights' questions-that's-not-a-question. There's a short silence, and when he doesn't seem inclined to elaborate immediately, she adds: "Ain't talked to you in, what, three days? How you been?"

"Four," he corrects absently. "Four days. I've-- what happened to your voice?"

She's quiet for a moment. "Jazz," she says finally. "Contract. Just got back."

--well. That explains... "How long?"

"Since? Twenty minutes. The contract? Sixteen hours. Fucking insane."

He swallows; the sound must carry over the line, because Eights' voice softens as she asks quietly, "What'd I miss?"



"Don't worry about it," he returns after a long pause, cradling the phone against his ear with one bloodied hand and rubbing his forehead with the other. "We'll-- we'll catch a coffee," the phrase stolen from her vocabulary, a subtle reassurance, "tomorrow or something, and I'll tell you then."

"All right." The sound of Eight-Hour Chainsaw deciding not to pursue a line of inquiry is nearly audible. "Tomorrow."