f2020 | Backdated Adventures

The room is empty. That is, at least, the impression it gives before the hole in the center of the floor becomes apparent. The mouth of an oubliette.

Where a dungeon ought to be visible below, through the metal bars of the trapdoor, there's something even stranger. The rounded walls are covered in lush greenery, flowers blooming out of nothing, with the sun nowhere in sight. A circular bed covers most of the floor, absurdly luxurious for its location, with black satin sheets and an overabundance of pillows. It looks like the cage of a very spoiled pet.

And then there's the source of Kylo's irritation: a boy sprawled in the middle of the bed, nude besides the blanket he's managed to tangle around his body. His pale skin is inexplicably illuminated by moonlight despite the absence of windows, long black hair sticky with sweat, chest rapidly rising and falling on the verge of hyperventilation. The arm flung over his face is wrapped in bandages stained with old blood. He's too far lost in his terror to even notice he's not alone anymore.

Whatever Kylo was expecting to find, it wasn't this. He stops at the edge of the hole, staring down in silence at the strange tableau as if a few more moments will make sense of it— or quiet the stirring sense that somehow, somewhere, he's seen all this before.

It doesn't work.

"You aren't one of mine," Kylo says.

He crouches at the mouth of the dungeon, running his fingers curiously over the metal bars as if trying to determine their function. Surely the opening itself would be out of reach for the boy inside?

"Are you."

The boy freezes, holding his breath, as if keeping still enough might make him disappear. When the futility of it hits him, he slowly pulls his arm away from his face. His wide, impossibly blue eyes fix on Kylo as if he's trying to work out whether anyone is actually there or whether it's a dream - which is funny, because if anything looks like a dream, it's the boy and his cell.

He sits up, slow and cautious, to get a better look. It takes him a second or two to recognize his visitor, and when he does, he's shaken to the core. He scrambles backwards like a startled animal, to the edge of the bed, without taking his eyes off Kylo.

"You're the monster," he says. "Did they send you to kill me?"

Kylo's head tilts slightly, his unblinking eyes locked on the boy's face. Shrouded in his long black robe and peering down from above, the contrast between his dark, menacing bulk and the pale, frightened boy below is almost comical. Of course he's the monster. What else would he be?

"I am," Kylo agrees. He likes the way the boy says it: the monster. Singular. Exceptional. But—

"No-one sent me," he continues, fascinated. "I heard you."

The boy's shoulders sink - not with relief, but with disappointment. That immediately gives way to confusion.

"Heard me?"

He hadn't thought he'd made a sound. When he was new, he used to scream, but it's been ages since that impulse was beaten out of him. He'd sooner bite his tongue until it bleeds. He must be far gone if he's made enough noise to draw the monster out.

Kylo lifts a hand, tapping a finger to his temple as an explanation. A very slight and decidedly unpleasant smile pulls at his mouth.

"I heard you," he repeats— a low, dangerous murmur, coloured with something like amusement. "Perhaps you didn't know. It's not one of my most... entertaining talents."

Oh.

"I'll try to keep it down," the boy says, though it's obviously too late for that. Nothing about Kylo suggests that he intends to leave anytime soon, even if he doesn't look particularly angry. Maybe he's the type to play with his food.

"I'm sure you will."

His hand drifts back to the bars of the trap door, fingers curling around one slowly, thoughtfully. He absolutely is the type to play with his food. Other people's, too.

"But I know where you are, now."

The boy swallows, his eyes following the exploration of Kylo's hand. There isn't much in the way of security on that side of the door. It's meant to keep the monsters from escaping, not from entering. Flip one little switch and the door opens, the ladder descends, and the beast can be down here with him.

"What do you want?"

If not to shut him up.

Kylo considers. His fingers still, his gaze dragging over the boy in his lusciously verdant dungeon.

What does he want?

"I was promised," he murmurs. "This— all of this. I would be given the Arena, and the Arena would be given every criminal. Every delinquent. But you... you're not one of mine. I wasn't even told you were here."

That doesn't seem to surprise the boy.

After all, his entire existence is wrapped in secrecy. His name has been forgotten, his old life lost, his family - as far as he knows - wiped from the face of the Earth.

"No," he confirms. "I'm not yours."

He doesn't like that. Hates it, in fact.

"Then why are you here?" he asks, a touch of venom slipping into the question.

The boy puts his hands up, as if giving an exaggerated shrug, before he extends his arms to gesture all around him. The flowers, the moonlight, the magic Kylo can't see or appreciate from so far above.

Fine.

Kylo seizes hold of the metal grating, exhales... and wrenches it out of its bracketing, seemingly uninterested in discovering any of the dungeon's hidden mechanisms. The resulting tangle of deformed iron clangs discordantly as he tosses it aside.

And then he finds the ladder. A vicious tug has it unfolding and reforming into a narrow flight of stairs, which saves him the trouble of grasping the edge of the hole and dropping down into the boy's cage.

The boy flinches at the sound. He nearly dives off the bed when the stairs descend, but thinks better of it. There's barely two feet between the edge of it and the wall. He's not nearly small enough to go skittering around on hands and knees.

Alright, then. He squares his shoulders and raises his fists instead. He's nowhere near as strong as he once was, half-starved and feverish with sickness, but he'd rather lose a fight than take a beating.

It's... cute, watching the boy prepare himself for a fight he has no chance of winning. Amusing, certainly, and almost admirable. Kylo all but flows down the last few steps of the ladder, an overlarge shadow looming over the pale figure raising his fists from the spill of sheets on his oversized bed.

"You'll fall," he notes, advice over attack. His gaze drags from the blanket tangled unhelpfully around the boy's body to the rest of his surroundings, then back to the startling blue of his eyes. His own narrow.

"You're sick," he realises aloud, frowning. "Where's your healer?"

Realizing that Kylo is 100% correct and also doesn't seem intent on hurting him after all, the boy slowly lowers his arms and slumps back. That fight would have ended quickly, anyway. He can barely keep himself upright, he's so exhausted.

"You tell me," he says. "I never know where anyone is."

"Except when they're visiting you."

Kylo would likely be more annoyed at the non-answer had it not been prefaced by that strangely satisfying demonstration of something rarer than simple obedience. It isn't often that people listen to his advice, consider and then choose to follow it.

Admittedly the crushing weight of fatigue hanging over him probably had more of a role than anything else. Kylo's rarely encountered such miserable exhaustion even among prisoners deliberately deprived of sleep for the purposes of interrogation, but he sees no devices or instruments nearby. The boy's bed is warm and soft, bathed only in the gentlest moonlight.

He glances back up the ladder to the mouth of the dungeon.

"You can't control it," he murmurs, attention swinging back to the boy's face. "Can you. What is it? Shape-shifting?"

Edited (too many kylos) 2020-10-20 06:12 (UTC)

"Something like that."

The boy also glances upward, considering the path to escape right in front of him yet making no attempt to even inch toward it. Instead, he rearranges the blanket so it's a bit less twisted around his limbs.

"If you could hear me from all the way outside, shouldn't you already know what it is?"

Kylo fixes the boy with a particularly flat stare.

"If you heard someone screaming. All the way outside. Would you know what was happening?"

"Usually," the boy says, "they bring me something to help. But sometimes, if I get too calm, they won't get the results they want. So they leave me like this. They know I won't be able to hold it off forever."

None of that is precisely an answer, though the boy seems to think it might be. Everything's out of focus for him, cognitively. He's tipping to one side and hasn't noticed yet, despite the increasing likelihood he's going to topple off the edge of the bed.

"We all sleep eventually," Kylo murmurs.

He thinks of the condemned in their cells across the courtyard, curled in on themselves and oblivious to the passing of time. Safe if only for now, hidden away in an untouchable world that exists only for them. Fear is a strange paralytic, in the end.

The boy is drifting in front of his eyes.

Why, he couldn't explain if asked. Perhaps it's because he feels like he's wandered into a liminal space where actions don't necessarily have consequence. Perhaps it's that part of him believes he must be imagining all of this— the secret chamber with the secret prisoner, the terror in the night that only he can hear. But he reaches out a hand and a thought, and the air the boy is about to tumble through becomes an emptiness his exhausted body can lean on.

"Even me."

Backdated Adventures

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