#i have a whole-ass au for it in my head (shocker) that ends happily though

[wingedquill]

soulscream

whumptober day 1 | alternative prompt: "broken" | word count: 1572

fandom: Stranger Things | characters: Steve and Robin | cw: daemon-related torture, major character death (ish) | tags: daemon au, unhappy ending (for now)

Robin will hate herself forever for it, but part of her sees the whole “getting kidnapped and slapped around by Russian guards” thing as a big fucking adventure, a wild story that she’ll be able to tell people when they ask her how she spent her summer, right up until they start beating Steve’s daemon.

And then everything gets really real, really fast.

Her ears start ringing after the first hit, like it’s her they’ve just suckerpunched instead of Steve’s fucking soul, and all of her clever plans of a glorious escape turn to static in her brain. Steve screams, short and agonized, and she can feel his whole body spasming against her.

They’re tied back to back. She can see Estella but he can’t, he couldn’t even see the blow coming.

This isn’t happening. This isn’t—this isn’t something that happens.

The guard draws back his arm again. The baton comes back down. Steve screams again, somehow louder.

“Who do you work for?” the guard asks, swinging the baton back and forth like a batter getting ready to hit a home run. He sounds almost bored. Like this is something he does every day. Like this is normal.

“I—I don’t—” Steve gasps. “I don’t—please—please no—”

Another whistle of air, another crack. Estella whines, high and animal-like, like she’s a real dog. The general laughs from somewhere behind her.

“They start leaking Dust, after a while,” he says. “I’ve always found it a pretty sight. Most disagree. I will not have my men stop when you start to dissolve, Butterscotch. Who. Do you. Work. For?”

“No one,” Steve sobs. “No one, please—”

Another swing. Another. Another, another, another, too fast for Robin to track, too fast for her to distinguish them.

“Stop!” she hollers. “Stop, we don’t know anything, we’re just kids, he doesn’t…he didn’t do anything to you, stop!”

“Would you rather we ask your hummingbird?” the general snorts. The guard lifts his foot, lets it hover over Estella’s paw. “You did spit at me, after all. You did something.”

Achilles curls up against her chest, whole body vibrating like a tiny heart. God if they started…if they started hitting him…one strike of that baton would be enough to kill him, to kill her.

The guard crushes his foot down. Gold starts to seep out from underneath it, pooling over the floor like dry ice smoke. Steve’s whole body contracts, jolting so hard that for a moment Robin thinks he’ll knock them both over.

“Please,” Robin whispers, watching helplessly as Steve’s soul bleeds all over the cold tile floor. “Please.”

It’s all either of them can say for the next—hour she thinks? Longer? Steve stops screaming at some point, stops struggling against her. If it weren’t for the feeling of his breaths, and Estella’s long, continuous whimpers, she’d think he was dead.

“Stop,” the general says eventually, when there’s a veritable pool of Dust around Estella, bright and gleaming as a firework. Fuck, they were supposed to be watching the fireworks today, they were supposed to steal a gallon of ice cream out of the freezer and lug it up the big hill behind the mall, they were supposed to be goddamn children about it—

“You are very good at keeping quiet,” he says, and there’s rustling behind her. Steve’s warmth disappears from her back, and then she’s being hauled upwards, hands gripping her arms. She doesn’t fight them. She doesn’t want to give them any more excuses to—god there were knives on the fucking table, and pliers, and a fucking bonesaw, and she doesn’t know if the Russians are planning on using them on her, or Steve, or Estella, and—

“Most men would have spilled everything by now,” the general continues as his men bully Robin forward, and she can finally, finally make eye contact with Steve.

He’s conscious. Standing. But there’s something horribly, horribly wrong with his eyes.

They’re shuttered. Or empty. Or gone, or—

“Steve,” she croaks, trying to reach for him. One of the men yanks her arms back, hissing a command in Russian in her ear.

“But you’d let us break you without answering the most basic question. So either you are a better spy than any man I’ve ever trained, or you truly are just a know-nothing child.”

He tuts, almost sympathetically. Behind Robin, there’s a rattling of chains, a loud whine, the sound of a body being dragged over the floor. Steve twitches, tears slipping from his empty eyes as he’s finally able to see what they’ve done to him. Estella makes a noise like a sob, legs twitching as she tries to gather them underneath her.

She fails. They keep dragging her like a sack of meat, smearing gold across the tiles. Bile sloshes in Robin’s stomach.

“For what it’s worth,” the general says, shoving Steve towards the door. He stumbles over his own feet, whole body hunched over in pain. “I do hope it’s the former. I truly do. But either way…either way we are out of time to ask you things. But worry not. We will learn something from you nonetheless.”

“What are you gonna do to me?” Steve croaks.

Me. Not us. Robin wonders if the thought of them hurting her is so unthinkable Steve hasn’t even considered it, or if he’s trying to keep them from realizing it's a possibility.

“You have seen our accomplishments, yes?” the general says. He parades them out of the cell, one hand on Steve’s shoulder like he might try to run. Like he wouldn’t get a bullet in the soul for trying. “You have seen the rift. We believe there is another world on the other side, and we would like very much for our scientists to explore that world. But there are many possible dangers that we do not yet know how to prepare for.”

“So you wanna throw me in?” 

Steve doesn’t sound like he’s discussing the concept of being thrown into a fucking hellworld with his torturer. He sounds like he’s asking his fucking basketball coach if he really wants him to play the second half.

“No,” the general laughs. “No. We do not want to see what you might get up to unmonitored. But there is a test you may help us with.”

If she were a hero, Robin would tell them to do it to her. She would tell them that Steve had had enough. She would tell them that they’d already broken him.

But she’s not a hero. She’s not a hero, and she’s watching a daemon bleed on the ground, and this doesn’t fucking happen. So her vocal cords stay frozen shut, and Achilles stays safe against her heart, and she does nothing to stop whatever’s about to happen to Steve.

They push through another set of doors and there’s the rift. Most of it looks just as it had before, a violent mess of red and black spreading over the wall like a disgusting fungus, but there’s an opening right in the middle. Not quite big enough for a person.

“I’m told we finally broke through while we were having our…discussion,” the general says. He inclines his head, and the two men holding Estella start dragging her over to a massive cage on the end of a chain. “And so you get to assist us with our first, and most important test. To make sure the daemonic bond can survive unscathed between dimensions.”

“No,” Steve whispers, glancing between the cage and the rift. “No, you—what’s that gonna do?”

“We don’t know,” the general says. “Hopefully nothing.”

Steve looks at her wildly as the guards bundle Estella into the cage. Help me. Do something. She can read that as clear as if he said it.

But she can’t move. She can’t speak. Her feet are frozen to the floor and her tongue is glued to her mouth. She’s a bug encased in amber, and she can do nothing but watch as the two guards hoist Estella’s cage between them.

“Steve,” the daemon groans, Dust spilling from her mouth like vomit. “I love—”

The guards hurl the cage forward, right through the opening in the rift.

Robin stands there.

Steve’s knees buckle.

“Get her out,” he gasps. “Get her out, get her—get her out, get her out, fucking get her out of there!”

The general barks an order and the two guards scramble for the chain. Steve collapses entirely, limbs jerking and thrashing against his binds.

“Get her out!” he wails. “Please, dear God, get her—”

And he just…stops.

All at once, like the power’s been cut to his brain. His limbs stop jerking, his eyes stop rolling. He goes completely and utterly still.

Robin stands there.

The general leans down, presses his fingers against Steve’s jugular. Frowns.

“Playing dead will not work with me, Butterscotch,” he says.

Robin stands there.

The two guards haul the cage back out of the void. It’s empty.

Everything freezes for a minute. The general stares at the cage, and for the first time in this entire fucked-up ordeal, Robin thinks she catches a flash of guilt in her eyes.

He murmurs something under his breath.

Robin will spend the next week pouring over Russian dictionaries and anthropological texts to learn both the phrase and the meaning behind it. When she does, it won’t tell her anything she doesn’t already know.

Living broken. 

Severed.

Steve is severed. His soul is dead. He'll be an empty shell for the rest of his life.

And Robin just stands there.