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Like a carcass on a meat hook, his bruised body hangs by the wrists, suspended by a rope looped over the shower rod. His bare feet hardly scrape the linoleum tub beneath, forcing his burning arms to bear most of his weight. The knots have cut off his circulation; he can no longer feel his hands. Numbness frightens him; nerve damage, dead tissue.
Stupid to worry about future damage when there's a much more immediate threat to his health, which has a ponytail and a set of brass knuckles. His beady eyes track her frenetic pacing across the cold bathroom. The local soccer coach taught her how to throw a punch.
He always thought - always knew that she had the capacity for violence, more than anyone else did. Never expected to be on the receiving end of it. The reality is more blistering than he could have imagined. It's kind of sweet, seeing this secret side of her, being the focus point of this brutality. Or at least that's how he can spin it.
“What,” he rattles out, wheezing through a scream-raw throat. “You bored of me already?”
She whips around to face him again. Her glowering expression is twitching. He smiles as wide as he can. She's only used his torso as a punching bag, so far. Scared, maybe. They're fragile, eyes and teeth and brain and skull. Lasting damage.
She hits him in the stomach and all the air goes out of him. A wail rips from his throat; he turns it into a drawn-out moan, echoing off the tile.
His memory of the last few - hours? - is a jumbled mess of excruciating pain and blunt force trauma. He doesn't know how to put these fragments into a sequence - it's like reassembling a broken window with bare hands.
A strike to his ribs, then another. Spots static across his vision. Mistake, mistake. Don't be so fucking stupid, it's not cute anymore. Instinct tells him to get away and he flails, swinging like the gallows, shin hitting the side of the bathtub. His entire front will be mottled with nebulas of green-purple bruises beneath his shirt. Maybe it will be beautiful.
“Are you crying?” Shock and disgust in her words, like he's the sick fuck here.
Swallows back the choking mucus. “What did you - ”
She slaps him across the face. Slap is an understatement. The heavy brass echoes through his skull. Molars sink into his cheek, breaking the tacky pink flesh. His ears ring. Pain radiates all through his head, infecting his brain. Slick metallic blood coats his tongue. His jaw falls open.
A red-toothed grin distorts his mouth. He can't stop shivering - he tells himself it's because of the cold. “Why don't you cut off my tongue, if you hate my talking so much, I mean that's what this is about, right, how bad you need to take it out on me?” The tirade leaves him more exhausted than before. His chin drops, ratty hair veiling his face. When he looks back up -
She is holding a tire iron. Blinding silver in the fluorescent lights. Heavy, you can tell by the heft of it.
Fear swallows him whole. His heart pounds, threatening to break through his battered ribs. He starts to thrash again, only hurting his aching self more. “No no no no no - ”
“ - ll give you something to cry about,” she mutters. “You don't understand shit.” She grabs him by the ankle and drapes his leg over the tub's white rim. He shrieks, wounded animal shrill. Tears roll down his face freely. He wants to be anywhere but here. And she swings -
the iron
down -
Sheer shattering agony burns away all else. It is a moment of absolute rapture. Surely nothing can hurt more than this. The bone is splintered, his kneecap cratered.
He trembles. Bloody spit drools out of his mouth. His bruised ribs contract with hurt that's almost cute compared to the throbbing scream of his leg. He's whimpering, hiccuping, making these noises that say, look how happy it makes you to make me scream, look how pretty ugly I suffer.
She retches. His eyelashes flicker, dying moth delicate. Has a drop of sympathy wormed its way into her heart? Is this, if you'll pardon the irony, the breaking point?
“Gross,” she’s saying, “fucking gross, why would you - ”
Numbly, he becomes aware of the sickly sticky wetness clinging the crotch of his trousers to my skin. He is newly humiliated, shame sinking needles into his revolting guts. He shouldn't care about pissing himself when she broke his fucking leg. But he does. Somehow he's lost. His head lolls toward his shoulder like a doll's. Terror wracks through him, base instinct telling him that any moment might be his last.
“I don't do this for all the girls. You're just special.” Nauseating smile smears across his face. It's never been masochism, and he's far beyond the shielding satisfaction of biting the beast. Autosadism, maybe. Maybe he gets off on getting himself hurt.
A martyr must be brave, and in order to be brave, one must first be afraid. And he is very, very scared.
He makes things worse for himself. It's the only thing he knows how to do. When she punches him squarely beneath the eye, it doesn't come as a surprise. The second comes so fast it blurs into the first. The third is - yeah, the third is a shock. The fourth stuns him, and by the fifth he should know better. He stops counting by the seventh.
There's something broken in his face. His mouth is snarled into a mangled grimace-grin. Another blow hits, a rippling shockwave of pain, he doesn't know where - it's just noise, at this point, nothing novel to this escalating agony. His thoughts are in a constant scrambling screaming loop of stop, fucking stop, get away from me, stop hurting me.
Through the swimming haze of blood and sweat, he sees the glint of the knife. Something terrible is about to happen.
His pulse thrums through his whole body, a spasmodic electric current. Faintly he hears himself laughing. Laughter hurts but breathing hurts too, and he doesn’t have much control over his body's impulsive convulsions anymore.
He falls in a limp heap of bruised pulp. His knee shrieks anew, the pain freshly nauseating, radiating through his flesh in red-hot spiderweb fractures. Pinkish froth dribbles from his lips. One eye is swollen and gummed up. Something behind his face jostles. Concussion. Broken skull. Maxillofacial trauma. There are so many ways he is injured, a million throbbing hurts clamoring for attention.
Fingers dig into his wet face, lifting his head up and cranking his neck back. Her face comes into blurry focus through the stabbing pain. His arms are useless, feeble gelatin muscles. Liquid streams from his eyes and nose.
He allows her to tilt his head so she can see the swollen bloodied wreck she made of him. He wheezes with every struggling breath. His one open eye blinks, then flutters shut, trusting like an animal should not trust the butcher. What more could she do to me , he wonders with detached dread.
Her mouth mashes against his, sour tongue shoving clumsily into his bloody mouth. Dumbly, he kisses back.
As poetic is it, Saint Sebastian didn't die of the arrows. He was beaten and thrown into a sewer.
She shoves him away, skitters back from the blood smeared bathtub. He stares blankly at the cracked cream painted ceiling as she rinses out her mouth in the sink, gagging on the rushing water.
When it shuts off, when the only sound is dripping water and their labored breathing and the whirring AC and the pounding in his head, he croaks: “You gonna kill me, Ivy?”
The piss is cold and tacky against his groin. He still can't feel his hands and the light stings his eyes. More than anything, his leg fucking hurts , the sharp agony no less demanding than when his kneecap was first shattered.
“I - I don't. What the hell - ” She spits, kicks the cabinets. Her wavering silhouette appears above him. Grim mouth, flat eyes. Her words are resolute: “No, I'm not going to kill you, David.”
But he can see the knife in her hand. He closes his eyes, prepares himself, cold steel sinking into soft flesh.
She steadies his neck with one hand. He feels the edge against his skull. He is scared and in pain, but he is not alone.
But she only cuts off a bit of his hair. It is blood-sticky in her hand, like the crushed remains of a small animal. She looks at it instead of the ruin she made of him.
And she leaves him. Denies him the intentionality of murder.
He waits. He waits for some internal hemorrhage. He waits for whatever she knocked loose in his head to send him into seizure. He waits for the searing pain in his leg to subside.
None of this happens. He waits for hours, and none of this happens.
He is found, eventually. They clean his tender skin with cool clean rags. They give him a soft clean bed and warm clean blankets. He hates them very much.
Do you know did this to you, they ask, and he thinks of her eyes and her hands and his hair in her hands, and he doesn't answer.