Chapter Text
For days, now, every awakening had brought silence. Oppressive, unending silence. Not even a scrape of a careless footstep. Not even a drip-drop from a leaky pipe. Not so much as a cough. Silence.
Had they gone? Had they truly gone?
Mycroft knew they hadn’t. Of course they hadn’t. They were not gone. They were lying in wait. They were waiting for him to drop his guard. To relax. To try to run once more.
They had to know he would not run, though. Could not. They had broken him, they had. In a thousand ways. Broken, shattered, destroyed—
It was so, so quiet. So unmanageably silent. Mycroft had never been what one might call social. He had never longed for the company of others in the way some did. He had enjoyed his quiet, his silence, his solitude. This, though, was different.
They had not fed him in days. It took him some time to even notice that. He was in and out of consciousness. Asleep more often than he was awake. At least he thought so. He was not certain how long he slept, when he did, nor how long he was awake. It was so dark, here. So dark and so quiet. Time meant little. Especially without their visits. At first, he’d tracked the days by the light through the windows. Then they’d moved him to this underground nightmare and he’d had to track by their visits. They came only during their daylight hours, he thought. Sometimes he could smell when they had recently eaten and base some count of days on that.
He had lost that count at day nineteen.
Nineteen had shattered him. Nineteen had been the closest to his breaking point as they were going to get. Yet he had not given up. He had not given up. He would not. He would not betray his people, his country, his very self. He would hold. He would still hold.
Something was making noise. Something with a high, thin voice. Something that whimpered and cried out in rasping, broken tones. Mycroft thought it might be himself.
He had become aware of the pain again. Some days it all faded out. He became one great ball of burning ache and it all sort of… lessened. Dampened, somehow. But it had returned and it had returned with a vengeance. His leg was the worst, he thought. It was the cause of his sickness. Or was it— Had he—
Mycroft tried to shake his head, trying to knock loose the thought he’d dropped. It had slipped right through his fingers, tumbling into the street and rolling away through a drainage grate. He could see it just beyond the bars. He could see the answer he sought if he reached just—
But why was he reaching for it anyway?
What was he reaching for?
Mycroft didn’t know. He stared into the grate for a moment, wondering why he had knelt down in the street. Unlike him, that. Mycroft never did anything without reason. He stood, smoothing his hands over the front of his crisp grey trousers. A fitting choice of attire for today, he thought. London was as grey as ever around him, though the rain had exchanged itself for thick, damp fog. The fog swirled around everything, making the buildings seem to warp and melt in his gaze. The street changed lengths indeterminately, the fog spinning from one end to another in dizzying patterns.
His mobile buzzed against his leg, the rhythmic pulses sending jolts of pain up and down his skin. Without checking the screen, Mycroft answered, pressing it tight to his ear. Its screen was uncomfortably cold. “Holmes speaking,” he said crisply. “Who is this?”
It was a terribly strange feeling to both understand and be utterly confused by a conversation all at once. Mycroft knew what the person on the other end of the phone was saying, as he knew precisely what to respond with, but he couldn’t quite hear it. He could hear the phone’s tinny speaker making noise, of course, and envision the person’s lips forming shapes and sounds and words, but he couldn’t make out a single one.
He frowned, something in his chest twinging with discomfort.
Soon enough, though, the call was over and Mycroft was striding across the pavement to his waiting car. He had somewhere to be. He was needed somewhere. Wanted somewhere. One of his feet was hurting. Likely just a twist, he decided, dismissing it. He’d probably done it when examining that grate. Why had he been doing that?
The car interior was wet. Mycroft found himself both extremely discomfited and oddly calm about that fact. He slid into the backseat, saying something he didn’t quite understand before snapping up the privacy screen. The leather of the seats was a dark, inky black, shining gently with dew. It would leave watermarks on his suit. Mycroft should have been more bothered by that.
The car was going rather fast, too. The fog blurred by outside, twisting buildings and pedestrians into wavy, blurring masses. A man in a business suit morphed first into a slim lamppost, then into a flat shadow on the street. A child in a pram swirled away into nothingness. A woman turned to look as the car screamed by and blurred into nothing but an open mouth and wide, frightened eyes.
They were too close to her. The car was too close. The car was too close and Mycroft’s foot was throbbing with pain, so much so that he felt it up to his knee, and he was damp and he was hot and the seats were cold and they were going so fast so fast and Mycroft opened his mouth to scream and—
The next time he woke, the silence had broken. Mycroft wasn’t on the London streets anymore. He did not remember ever being there, whether in life or in that strange in-between place between life and death in which he seemed to reside. All he knew was this place. This place, dark and damp and silent. Yet not silent. Nor dark.
They had come. They had come for him. They had left him until he went completely and utterly mad and they had returned.
No, Mycroft tried to gasp. No, please. I won’t. I won’t tell. Don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me any more.
It was cold. So cold and so wet and so loud. Shouting. Screaming. Flashing light.
Someone was touching him. Someone was reaching for him, pulling at him. Mycroft thought he might have screamed. He also thought his mouth might just be open and empty, his lungs too weak to pull in the air to resist. There was no sense in resisting, was there? It never worked. Not in a way that lasted. Not in a way that mattered. He was helpless to fight them; he was helpless to stop them.
They were back and they were shouting and— and someone was crying. Mycroft? Was he crying? He was so— Everything was so— His voice sounded so rough, so shattered as it sobbed and cried and called something out over and over and over. It didn’t sound like his own. He was weak, he knew. Dangerously weak. Dangerously weak and shattered and they were going to kill him this time. They had to. For what good was he? He was no use to them. Never was. Never would be. He was unbreakable. The unbreakable Iceman. At the expense of his body. At the expense of his strength. At the expense of his mind, he was unbreakable. They would kill him this time.
Mycroft welcomed it.
Mycroft. Mycroft. Mycroft.
That was his name. Why was he sobbing his own name?
Something shifted; someone screamed. Pain slashed through him from his legs up, burning so fiercely that it sent him immediately back into reeling, spinning, blissful unconsciousness.
They were killing him.
Slowly, of course. Inflicting as much pain as possible as they went. It was so bright, so loud, so… odd. They had moved him, Mycroft thought. Or he was hallucinating. He didn’t know. That in itself was distressing. This might all be real. He might be surrounded by masked faces. He might be bathed in harsh white light. He might be restrained, held down, pinned to a table as they cut slowly deeper and deeper, letting him bleed out minute by minute.
Or it might not. It might all be a creation of his mind. They may not even have had to work for this new torture. He might have invented this all himself.
Mycroft screamed. Tried to. They had covered his face with something, blocking off his mouth and nose. He was hot; he was shivering. He was being torn apart with sharp, pointed agony, radiating from every part of him. Radiating inward from the tips of his fingers and his toes; radiating outward from his chest and his very soul. The light blazed. Noise erupted around him as he strained and struggled, every muscle in his body shrieking as he desperately tried to escape, to flee, to make it stop make it stop make it—
Someone was saying his name. Sobbing it. Whispering it. Someone was crying his name again.
This time, Mycroft was almost certain it wasn’t himself. It was not his own voice, his own lungs. It was just a hallucination. He had hallucinated voices before. Voices he knew. Voices he loved. Voices he hated more than anything in this life or the next.
This voice sounded achingly familiar, yet painfully strange all at once. Rasping and soft, broken and choked-off. Mycroft, Mycroft, Mycroft.
Greg’s voice, he realised. He was hallucinating Greg’s voice.
It was a calmer realisation than he’d had in a while. The pain had dulled; it had washed over him to a point that he could balance it. It droned in him like a dull ache, more a constant reminder than an immediate flame.
Mycroft, Mycroft, Mycroft.
Even knowing it was an invention of his mind, hearing Greg’s voice was immensely calming. Mycroft wondered if it would be the last time he dreamt of Greg’s voice. He wondered that every time. He wondered if it would be the last time he heard it, even in this distorted, memory-fogged way. He wondered if every agonising breath would be his last, if every sluggish beat would be his shattered heart’s final attempt. He wondered that every day, now.
Mycroft, Mycroft, Mycroft.
Usually, when he dreamt of Greg, he wasn’t crying. In Mycroft’s usual fantasies—or nightmares, depending on one’s definition of hallucination—Greg was smiling at him. Smiling and whispering his name in a gentle, almost reverent tone. Mycroft, he’d say, grinning in that crooked way he had when he’d awoken from a good night’s sleep. Hi, darlin’. Missed you.
But he wasn’t saying that in this dream. And he wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t visible at all, actually; Mycroft could see nothing but blackness. Nothing but blackness and intense, almost unbearable heat. He might be sweating. He wasn’t sure. He could just hear quiet sniffles. Shaking breaths. The occasional hiccup.
Mycroft, Mycroft, Mycroft.
Mycroft knew it was a hallucination. He knew that. He’d grown rather comfortable with his uncomfortable unconscious in these past… weeks? Months? Years? He’d come to accept the austerity of his brokenness. So he hallucinated. So he dreamed. So he imagined. Anything was better than reality. Anything was better than the cold basement floor, the putrid air, the violence that came with every new dawn.
Mycroft, Mycroft, Mycroft.
Even the hallucinated tears of his love were better than the neverending silence of his real life.