Chapter Text
The settings on Jon's collar were clearly not designed with the knowledge that the Institute was built on a warren of tunnels. Irritatingly, he's fairly certain that the signal gets lost once he's underground and thus remains on, rather than shutting off because it can't locate his coordinates in one of the designated areas. The glow of the green lights is eerie; he can't help but think about how, if something or someone, if Gertrude's murderer, is down here they could shut off their torch and creep along after him, but he would be unable to hide the same way. He's just as unable to hide his collar in the tunnels as he is anywhere else; Elias, the bastard, ensured in the terms of his indenture that Jon is not one of the lucky Indents allowed to cover up when not on duty and hide their status from the world. There's a scrap of wiggle room to be had in the collars of shirts and the like, but that wouldn't block the light. The only thing that would do that would be something like a thick scarf wrapped tight around the whole circumference, which is explicitly banned.
He feels constantly that there is something else down here, and he's pretty sure it's not only his imagination getting carried away with the already inherently-spooky tunnels that hid both Jane Prentiss and Gertrude's body. Down here, he would expect the temperature to be cool and constant, but some areas are positively frigid for no apparent reason and others are warm enough that he starts to sweat. His chalk markings aren't entirely behaving themselves, either.
Mostly, though, the worst foe the tunnels have to offer are the spiders. It makes sense that they would congregate here, safe from inclement weather and human interference, but that doesn't make it less upsetting to catch a cobweb with his face.
He's investigating an area where the tunnels seem far too irregular, almost like they've been mixed up from some previous orderly incarnation. Instead of the constant width of other areas, here they chop up into dead ends and narrow half-passages and too-wide expanses that aren't quite passage but aren't quite rooms either.
He shines his torch into a cubby of an opening to make sure there are no monsters- or, more likely, rats of monstrous size- waiting to jump out and bite his ankles, but there's no back. He crouches to get a better look, and the beam shines clear through, the ground sloping down a bit so he can tell that just a couple meters away it opens up into an entirely different section.
He tucks the torch into his shirt so that it shines up toward his chin before he can think better of it. What better place for the answers that are still so frustratingly elusive than a secret passage within a secret passage? He'll have to crawl, but it isn't far at all. Its dimensions are only slightly smaller than a plastic tunnel on a playground, and he hardly took any harm from those as a child. It's a bit uncomfortable, with his injuries from Prentiss still twinging and fresh, but he'd face far worse discomfort for answers.
He's only halfway through, which is practically no distance at all, just enough to take him completely past the outer threshold, when the walls start to groan.
He may be reckless, but he still knows when to retreat. Unfortunately, before he can the floor below him shoots upward quickly enough to smack into his jaw, rocking his head back to smack into the low roof of the tunnel.
When he's done blinking away stars, the passage on the other side is gone. He can't see his light. He can't even see his collar's lights. The entire tunnel has closed up around him like the snap of a Venus fly trap. The straight edges of it are gone entirely, curved to fit nearly skintight around him.
He writhes, he can almost swear he can hear the tape of Laura Popham pleading for the cave to take her sister instead of her. Jon came down alone. He has nothing to offer in exchange for himself.
His arms are pinned tight to his sides, and the wall rests against the crown of his head, but his legs kick with a freedom that's disorienting by comparison. He was fully within the tunnel when it changed, but now if he tries he can brace a knee against the wall and push.
For an instant, he thinks it's working. He slides back out of his stone straitjacket by a millimeter. Then the walls bear down, so tight all the breath is knocked out of him and he's too compressed to exhale, gagging as he tries in vain to breathe. He thinks he passes out for a second, but the wall is formed around the top of his torch and collar so no light can escape, leaving it too pitch black to tell.
Eventually, though, it eases. When he's caught what breath he can out of the stale air, he tries more cautiously to kick.
The walls- or what controls them- must be intelligent. He can wriggle his ankles to his heart's content, but both knees are shackled around with stone.
"Please let me go, please, please let me go," he murmurs, his own version of Laura Popham's desperate litany. Intelligent means it might be able to be bargained with, if he just had something to offer. He has nothing to rely on but a horror's pity, for all the good he's sure it will do him. For all he's gotten from human pity!
He thinks he might hit his head again when he feels the hands.
They're warm, human. Rough, perhaps callouses. Short nails. Entirely incongruous with everything he's seen in the tunnels.
"Help!" he shouts, as though whoever it is can break stone with their bare hands. He wouldn't say no to a pickax. It might shatter some bones, but he'd be more likely to live free and broken than trapped and whole. "Help me, please!"
The hands don't grab him, don't try to pull him out. They just trace up his thighs and over his arse, and Jon has a number of unpleasant realizations all at once.
Number one: his knees are pinned apart, nearly as far as they'll go.
Number two: a human being, were they possessed of such a talent, is certainly intelligent enough to construct the snare he's caught in. Plenty of the monsters from the statements, even down to Jane Prentiss herself, are human shaped, more or less. Might have even started out as human.
Number three: the stone closes tight just above the waistband of his trousers.
Number four: the hands are slipping under that waistband, under the waistband of his pants, too, and pulling.
"No, no, no, no, please." He doesn't have the space for his chest to heave in a sob, but it tries. This is stupid, he thinks incongruously. Of all the stupid, idiotic porn cliches. The tunnels were supposed to be safe. Not safe in their sum, but safe from that.
The owner of the hands pays no heed to his desperate begging and denials. If they can even hear them in the first place. His clothes bunch up above the place his knees sink into the wall, and the hands trace up over his thighs again and cup his arsecheeks. Then one of them moves, flicking idly at the piercing at the base of his cock.
Jon imagines that, if his assailant has a light, he must gleam. The collar doesn't care if he hates it or loves it, doesn't care if he's filing statements or exploring the tunnels, if he's alone or surrounded, if the person using him is human or monster. It's job is to register whether or not he's in a designated on-duty location, to pump drugs into his system to keep him constantly wet and sensitive whenever he is, to force his body and occasionally his mind to obey orders from anyone when it's on and from Elias even when it's off. It's on, therefore he's wet.
Elias will never know to punish him if in his head he calls this patron what he's increasingly come to view all his patrons as: a monster, his own personal bogeymen.
He realizes, as fingertips trace over his lips and his cunt twitches at the attention, that this is all unnecessary. The collar stays on in the tunnels. Whoever or whatever is out there could order him to strip, to hold still, to let them fuck him, and when they were done they could order him not to tell a soul about it. They could tell him to stay away, or they might even be able to order him to return to the tunnels at regular intervals so they can use him. He isn't sure if only Elias can compel that sort of ongoing action or it it doesn't matter because in order to get to the tunnels he has to be in the Institute, where orders from anyone at all control him.
A finger, about average in size (he's had enough shoved into him to know) dips into his cunt, while the pad of a rough thumb slides over his cock. He squirms, chest seizing against the stone as the shallow breaths it allows him come faster. The monster twiddles the piercing, making him gasp, which draws his chest into the stone and reminds him of the piercings there, in each nipple.
He hates it when it's like this, the careful attention to him, to his cock, like he's a partner rather than a toy. He doesn't want to enjoy it. Coming doesn't mean he really enjoyed it, he knows that, even if people in general are unwilling to carry the things they say about a normal person or off duty Indent being raped over to an Indent on duty being used. It still feels like a betrayal, like he's falling into every stereotype that justifies the indenture system at all.
The monster is unbearable leisurely. Time is hard to gauge, frozen in the dark, but Jon's fairly certain he's had days where he's had three patrons use the same hole in succession in the time the monster is devoting to this. He can't distract himself, can't zone out staring at the ceiling tiles or someone's desk or anything, because there's nothing. The monster doesn't even make a sound. Robbed of other stimuli, his brain starts running through the litany of facts he spirals through after the worst days, when he hates himself the most.
There's no such thing as being tricked into becoming an Indent, not really. If you failed to read what you were signing or couldn't think of another way to pay a debt or realized too late that it was all wrong, you'd been mistaken and wanted out, that wasn't real. Not really. Normal people would never sign that contract. Normal people read every piece of paper they ever sign, they pawn and borrow and steal if they have to (but never that class of theft which might offer a term of indenture as community service instead prison time; not that they'll be caught at, anyway), and they certainly wouldn't volunteer.
The first finger is buried in Jon's cunt up to the third knuckle for a moment, and then withdraws a bit as a second enters alongside it. His hips start to twitch into the pressure and his cries of denial and mercy start to fade into a wordless mewl without his permission, noise sliding through stale air.
Every Indent you see, no matter how dreadful their fate seems- barring, paradoxically, the scant handful of acts which are consider Indent abuse- wanted it. Maybe only subconsciously, but everyone in a collar is there because they don't aspire to be anything much more than a toy. Indents are passionate people: passionate for sex, for doing acts of service, for helping others relieve stress, for crime reduction (the number of Indents available in areas accessible to the general public being inversely proportional to the number of violent crimes).
The monster scissors the fingers in Jon's cunt at the same time they give the barbell through the base of his cock a sharp, cruel twitch, and he comes with a cry that doesn't even have space to echo against the walls confining him. He wonders if the monster can hear it at all.
It might seem distressing to the average citizen to give up control of their bodies and even their minds, but many Indents sign on expressly because they dislike difficult choices or know themselves to be incapable of making good ones (aside from signing the contract, of course).
Three fingers is enough for the monster to stop. Jon is braced for a cock, next, but instead the rough, damp surface of a tongue laps against the empty fluttering of his cunt. He wails, he hates this, hates when that stupid reciprocal feeling so many people insist on extends this far. He hates being party to his own debasement like this, and he liked giving and receiving oral worst of all back when he was experimenting consensually, and it's no less disgusting and terrible now.
He can feel himself squirt when the monster drives him into a second climax. He knows they noticed it, because they withdraw.
Now the cock punches into him, thumb returning to its former station stroking his own overstimulated cock. Mingled moans and sobs sink into the stone as the monster drives a punishing pace.
They work him through and past a third orgasm, making sure to bury themselves as deep as they can for their own. He starts to catch his breath, and for a long, terrible moment there is only him, the stone, and the cool air against the damp of sweat and slick and dribbling cum. He has just enough time to fear that they'll keep him here forever, half-immured as their own personal sex toy, vanished into the tunnels he's not supposed to be in at all, but especially not while he's still on sick leave. Then the stone drops him down just as quickly as it pulled him up to convenient fucking height, slapping his shins against the ground and nearly twisting an ankle when his right foot catches up at a ninety degree angle against it. A moment after that the space around him opens up like the expansion of a lung and he's able to scrabble backward as fast as he can, tangling in his still-downed trousers. The light of his torch skitters wildly over the ceiling, miraculously unbroken.
He pulls his clothes back on as quickly as he can and doesn't dawdle to explore any further. Climbing up the ladder into the Archives, it occurs to him that the monster didn't use a condom. Institute employees with regular STI screenings are allowed to do that, but guests and clients aren't. He has a soap bubble second of relief- he isn't keen on contracting anything himself, but Elias would have to declare him off limits, or at least declare condoms mandatory, until after he's had a clean STI panel of his own- before the dark, half-assembled state of the Archives reminds him that he's still supposed to be on sick leave, strictly forbidden from attending work, with ample time for a clean bill of health before he's allowed/required back.
When he gets home he digs out his least favorite saucepan, the one that would've been destined for the bin even back in uni if it weren't for the phantom of his grandmother's disapproval at throwing it out when it was still technically usable. He was wearing normal pants today specifically because he wasn't "at work," because Elias requires lingerie sets instead of his preferred combination of binder and pants and so wearing the latter means he's safe. None of his pants except the ones he was wearing when he signed the damned contract have ever been worn when he was being used. Those he just tossed in the bin, too frantic to find a way out of his indenture, the pain and shock far too raw, to do anything else then.
His grandmother wouldn't approve of him being stupid enough to become an Indent any more than she would approve of tossing usable cookware, so he figures it's a fitting last act for the saucepan, being packed full of paper with the tainted pants nestled in the middle and held out the window so the smoke alarm doesn't go off when he sets the lot alight. His arms get sore after a while, but it's a good sore, a clean, honest soreness earned by effort rather than forced upon him via sex or man-eating supernatural worms. He watches the smoke spiral up into the night sky, far above London and its people and Indents and monsters. When there's nothing left but unrecognizable scraps and ash, he dumps the glass of water he brought with him to the window into the pan and throws the whole assemblage in the bin.
Months later, Jurgen Leitner sits in the office that cost Jon's indenture and says genially, "Yes, that was me. I'm sorry to give you a fright, but I was too afraid to reveal myself, and it had been so long... And I was careful to be a gentleman about it, of course."
He excuses himself, unsure whether the sickening extra layer to the Institute or the revelation that his very first monster shared an origin with a more recent incarnation was more deserving of smoking his first cigarette in years. It's hard to ascribe anything like the same freedom to this trail of smoke, pressed into the Institute's dingy alleyway with a postage stamp of stars held up on the pillars of the buildings, too far to ever actually reach.