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forwhump · 2 months ago

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a/n; spoilers for the first three sentences : it’s been haaaaaaaard to always call silas “silas” because he calls himself “seven” for so much of the rest of the story that I get confused when I think about him & it alternates in my head LOL

tw/cw: captivity, medical torture, random acts of violence, gore, amputation, caning

living weapon whumpee

Asset Eleven Seventy Seven, they call him.

Seven, he thinks of himself.

Unfortunately, Seven has no will of his own.

He spends a lot of consecutive time in that small, grey room, in that grey bed, under those grey sheets. Surgeons in black come and go to poke and prod at him — so do doctors, so do nurses, always in black. Seven’s hair is black; everything else is kinda grey, his clothes and his sheets and his pallor. One of his legs is a polished, silvery chrome. Everything else seems to be discoloured scar tissue.

When he gets to leave the grey room, he gets muzzled with iron and taken further underground. They take him to spaces they call arenas, made to look like the wilderness or like cityscapes or desert landscapes, things Seven has never seen, things he doesn’t really understand.

He doesn’t need to. They take him to these places, and they remove the muzzle. The shackles.

They tell him to kill, so he does.

It’s fun. He’d be a filthy fuckin’ liar if he said it wasn’t. It’s the only bit of fun he has. It’s colourful, too. The arenas, too, colours Seven was unfamiliar with, but the colours of violence are his favourite. Splashes of red and pinks and yellows over the endless grey. He doesn’t care for bruising, the blues and the purples, the patterns of them. He doesn’t know why. He’s sure it’s something from before, something he doesn’t remember.

He knows there was a before. They won’t tell him, and he couldn’t ask if he wanted to, but he’s sure there was. Doctors come to poke and prod at him. Soldiers come to escort him downstairs. Before they do, they muzzle him. They strap him down. Soldiers are always standing guard, hovering close when the doctors come to inspect him. They watch him, and they’re weary. He did something before, something probably horrible. He makes them uneasy. He doesn’t know why, but he likes that he does.

Still, he does what they tell him to do. He sits in his little grey prison, and he kills when they tell him to kill. Time passes. He isn’t sure how much.

The cityscape probably isn’t his favourite arena, but it’s where he’s most comfortable. There’s a lot of concrete, a lot of grey. It reminds him of home.

The uniform they give him is black. It’s the only clothing they give him that’s properly fitted to him, a bulky silhouette that he imagines makes him look like a nightmare. Seven hears a lot of last words, and a lot of them are some version of what the hell are you?, or, amongst themselves, some version of what the hell is that thing? Or please, but that speaks less to Seven.

Above him, hundreds of feet above him, massive fluorescent lights in the ceiling act as sunlight. The buildings are all hollow blocks of concrete, windows carved from the walls but hollow, emptied of glass. Seven is allowed weapons during these times, he’s allowed to inflict violence to his heart’s desire, but Seven’s never been allowed anything that might potentially show him his reflection. He couldn’t even begin to guess why. He also doesn’t care enough that he’s ever thought too hard about it.

He doesn’t need his reflection, anyway. He knows well enough. He can see it in the way they always look at him. He can see it in the way the soldier looks up at him from the concrete, his helmet knocked away, his mask bunched up around his throat. He’s crying, and that always makes Seven smile.

Slowly, he pulls his hands from the opened cavity of the other soldier’s stomach, shreds of tissue and his uniform. They wear black, like Silas. It’s almost funny.

Even slower, Silas stands. He takes his time pulling his bloody hair back, tying it into a shitty knot at the nape of his neck with bloody hands. He toes the corpse at his feet over onto the open wound that was once his abdomen. Slower still, he steps over him.

“What the hell are you?” The soldier snivels, pathetic, and Seven thinks, hah.

He crouches next to him. With a shaking hand, the soldier reaches for his gun, and Seven catches him around the wrist. Crushes it.

The soldier screams, flails with his other hand, and Seven takes him by that wrist, too. Braces his other hand against his ribcage. Pulls. The sound is as loud as any alarm, echoing off of concrete and metal, a crack and a wet, fleshy sort of sound as Seven severs his arm at the socket. He pulls it from his torso, threads of flesh and sinew that snap, veins pulled loose and stringy.

The soldier doesn’t scream. The noise he makes is kinda soft and really wet.

Seven digs his fingers into the open wound and he does scream, that time. With a grin, Seven holds him against the concrete and opens his throat with his fingernails. The soldier gurgles, something panicked, and Seven grins again as he pulls out a handful of flesh and his windpipe.

He dies quickly. He dies messy.

Seven stands. Wipes blood from his cheek with the back of his hand. Smears more blood over his face for his efforts. Steps over another body.

There’s a specific target today. Seven doesn’t know why, what the point of any of this is, why they give him rules, sometimes, but it’s more to do than sit in a bland, grey room, so he does what they tell him to do. Today, he’s looking for somebody in particular. They’d had a picture of him, taken in front of a wall that looked a lot like any of the walls in the district. He was a particular threat, they said. Seven should be careful. Seven needs to do everything in his power to make sure that he dies.

Seven finds him in an empty, grey building, one with a lot of windows, a lot of fluorescent sunlight. He’s bigger than the other soldiers have been. Noticeably. Not big like Seven is big, but he isn’t one of them, either. He’s somewhere in the middle, something between them. Seven starts to think he might be in for a better fight, and he’d be lying again if he said he hadn’t been itching for one. Slaughter is fun, but that’s because it’s his only fun. Monotony is monotony.

He doesn’t get a fight at all. The soldier looks up at him, in a black uniform, but it’s different from the soldiers and it’s different from Seven, too. He looks at Seven different, too. He looks at him, and he looks at him for a long time. Seven doesn’t recognize the look on his face. He doesn’t say what the hell are you? or what the hell is that thing?

He says, “Silas?”

He says it with a sort of familiarity that stops Seven in his tracks. He doesn’t look tense, or like he’s scared of him at all. Seven doesn’t think he likes that. He thinks he’s disappointed.

He closes the distance between them and takes him by the throat. The soldier flails, but not for a weapon; he grabs Seven around the wrist.

“Silas!” He says loudly. “What are you doing?! It’s me!”

He’s saying a lot of things Seven doesn’t know, but he says it like he should, and it makes him feel — Seven doesn’t know how it makes him feel. He doesn’t like it. He can’t quite breathe around it, and he doesn’t know how to make it stop. His lip pulls back from his teeth.

“It’s me!” The soldier tries again.

Seven lifts him off his feet.

The soldier flails again. Grabs Seven’s forearm. “Silas,” he chokes out as his face starts to purple, “what are you doing? It’s me. It’s Hal.”

Seven can’t explain why he does it, because he doesn’t think about it. It’s an instinct more than anything else, but with a snarl, he drops the soldier on his feet again.

He inhales deeply, covering his quickly bruising throat with a shaking hand. “What the fuck was that?” He rasps.

Seven snarls again. Takes a step back.

The soldier watches him closely. His voice is getting rougher when he says, “what’s wrong with you? It’s me. It’s Hal.”

Obviously, Seven doesn’t remember Hal, and he doesn’t like the way it’s making Hal look at him. There’s something doe eyed and pathetic about it, something pitying, and it makes Seven’s skin crawl with something like disgust and he doesn’t know why. His hands have been shaking since he woke up in that grey room but they shake a little worse with this. Again, he considers killing him. For some reason, he doesn’t. Takes another step back, instead.

“It’s me,” he repeats, eyebrows pulling together in the middle, like he’s hopeful this time it’ll spark something.

Seven angles his head. He doesn’t fuckin’ know.

The soldier looks at him again. Studies his face. “Silas?” But his voice has gone unbearably soft.

Seven’s shaking hands twitch. He takes another step back.

The soldier drops his hand and Seven can hear him swallow. “You don’t know who I am?”

Seven shakes his head once, just barely.

“What the fuck?” He exhales softly. He pulls himself up a little straighter, looks at Seven a little closer, studies him like he’s looking to catch him in a lie. Seven doesn’t think he has it in himself to lie. Did he use to?

Crushed, apparently, by whatever he finds in Seven’s face, the soldier exhales, “what the hell did they do to you, man?”

But Seven doesn’t know. Seven doesn’t know fuckin’ anything, not before and not since.

That feeling he doesn’t like, the one he can’t breathe around, the edges of it are sharp and they wedge under his ribcage and it hurts in a way that’s unfamiliar. Usually, these slaughters they send him on are senseless, violence for the sake of violence. All the soldiers killed in these places had been green, unprepared — they never stood a chance against Seven. It’s never even been close.

Except this one. It’s bigger than the rest of them. It isn’t afraid of him. It remembers him, and it isn’t afraid of him.

Maybe that’s what his problem is. Seven doesn’t remember a lot, but in all the grey time and slaughter he remembers, he’s never come across even a single person who hasn’t been scared of him. He doesn’t quite know what to do with that. What could he have done that the shadow of it is still splattered across the walls and ceilings of this place but this one, lone soldier isn’t still afraid of him? He looks disappointed, in fact. What does he know?

What he says is, “we’ve been so worried about you, dude.”

For some reason, it hurts under Seven’s ribcage just as much as the other thing. He can’t even begin to guess why it hurts.

“You went to find Wren and you just disappeared,” he’s saying, and he says it with a sort of familiarity, like he’s already forgotten Seven has no idea what he’s talking about and Seven feels like he’s out of his element, Seven feels like he’s drowning. “You all just disappeared. Fuckin’ Point’s been gone, too. We thought —,” and he exhales sharply, “we knew something really fucked up had happened to you.”

Seven snorts. He can’t help it.

The soldier smiles, kind of sad, but he has a big smile, regardless. “I’m glad you’re not dead,” he says, and it feels like a punch to the chest for some reason. “Is Wren okay?”

Seven tilts his head.

“Wren,” the soldier says slowly. “Who’s been with you. Right?”

A lot of people are around Seven, pretty constantly. He doesn’t know a single one of them by name.

His face is falling again. “You have no idea what I’m talking about,” he realizes. Seven kinda shrugs, and he asks, “do you remember…anything?”

He heaves a wide shoulder. The soldier exhales like Seven hit him. Seven’s already forgotten what he said his name was, and he couldn’t ask again. It’s guilty, the pain this time, and that surprises him.

“Oh, man,” he says softly. “Wren’s gonna be so bummed.”

The sunlight, leaking in through the windows, turns red. The bellow of the alarms start to pound, so loud it makes the soldier jump as Seven’s lip curls away from his teeth. He’s familiar, unfortunately, with the sirens. His time’s up.

The soldiers swarm not seconds later, and Seven scoffs but kneels obediently to be muzzled and shackled.

“Silas —” the soldier starts to cry, and then he’s gone, dragged from the grey building with his hands tied behind his back.

“What did he say to you?” one of the soldiers hisses, urgent, but Seven couldn’t tell him if he wanted to. Wouldn’t, anyway.

With a growl, he cracks the end of his gun into Seven’s mouth, and Seven quickly tilts his face to spit blood at him before the muzzle is pulled tightly over his face. He smiles beneath it. Makes sure his eyes crinkle the way the soldiers’ always do.

Seven is taken from the arena, but not back to his grey room. He’s taken to a different grey room, stripped down to his grey, thermal pants and led into another grey room, so cramped Seven can’t stand up straight, has to duck his head. He gets shackled to the ground by his throat. They shackle his hands the same. They don’t remove the muzzle. They leave him there.

Seven can’t say for how long. It feels like it’s a long time. It might be days.

Eventually, a soldier joins him. “Did you remember?” He asks.

Seven tips his head back, bored. Of course he didn’t remember. He doesn’t remember anything.

The soldier curls and uncurls his fist. He says, “why didn’t you kill him?”

Seven couldn’t answer that if he wanted to. First, he can’t speak. Second, he doesn’t know why he didn’t kill him. He could’ve; he was bigger than the other soldiers, but he wasn’t like Seven. Not even close. What did he say his name was? How would Seven have known him, if that guy wasn’t one of these soldiers? What the hell is that guy? What the hell is Seven, for that matter?

The caged freak. Was he a soldier once? Was he like that guy? Why would they do this to him? What could he have done?

The soldier clicks his tongue, unimpressed. He’s been leaning hard on a cane, one that he apparently doesn’t need. He shifts his weight onto his feet and swings it up onto his shoulder.

Seven doesn’t know a lot of things, but he knows weapons. He thinks, ah, fuck.

“When the captain gets back,” the soldier explains, “you’ll be disciplined properly. In the meantime,” he says, and he swings his cane into Silas’ back. He can feel the way his skin splits around the impact, but he doesn’t feel himself starting to bleed so much as his back just starts to feel wet. “You’ve been a bad dog,” he says. “Point’s going to be disappointed.”

He swings the cane again. Hits almost the same spot, and Seven can feel the way his flesh splits, all the way through the meat of his back, a pain that resounds in his bones.

It’s probably not supposed to, but it makes Seven think. The soldier strikes him again, a solid strike to the chest, and this time, a steel barb at the end of the cane sinks through Seven’s skin and pulls a chunk of meat from beneath his ribcage.

It’s a pain that's really, oddly familiar, and it makes Seven think. He has a feeling they think that he doesn’t, that he’s incapable of conscious thought, and he can’t speak to tell them otherwise, but it isn't true. He’s left on his own so often he doesn’t do much else but think. He thinks, now, of how familiar this pain is, as the soldier swings again and skins a good portion of his back, peeling flesh back from tissue with a slick sound that’s almost as familiar.

It seems like an overreaction, really. To skin him for his failure? It makes him think. They’re scared of him, much more scared of him than he realizes, probably more scared of him than he can properly wrap his head around until he knows what he’s done to these people, until he knows what it is they remember when they look at him. They’re scared of him, they don’t trust him, and the field test was a lot more than just a field test. It has to have been. It was something else, something bigger, and Seven failed. Seven disappointed them. They didn’t like what they saw.

Why?

He can’t ask, and he doesn’t get a lot more time to think about it. This soldier is just like the other ones, and he’s seeing something in Seven he doesn’t like. He’s trying to get a reaction out of him, and he isn’t getting one. Seven kneels, shackled to the floor, and bleeds quietly, bleeds without a word of complaint.

The soldier doesn’t like that. He swings a little harder, swings the barbed end of the cane into Silas’ neck. Pulls his throat out.

Seven finally does make a sound, an involuntary gurgle. He slumps forward, watching the blood shimmer around his knees, and he doesn’t think much at all as he watches the way the colour shines in the fluorescence.

The soldier groans in frustration. “You used to be more fun,” he says.

He hooks the end of the cane into the hollow of Seven’s throat. It sinks through shredded tissue, scrapes the bone of his jaw from the inside.

It hurts for only a moment.

Mercifully, then, Seven bleeds to death.

When he wakes up again, in that bland, grey room, under those bland, grey sheets, his chest, his throat, and his arms are all bandaged. Beneath, he feels tender and sore. He can't remember why.

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