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Arthur has been without John for five sleep cycles before he’s finally pulled from the hole the King had stuffed him in.
“Hey!” he snaps as cold, formless hands pull him forward, through spaces that would surely break his mind were he able to see them. “Get your fucking hands off me!”
The Dancers pay him no mind. One of them presses a hand to his mouth, stifling his protests as he is dragged through twisting and turning passages. He’s lightheaded by the time the hand falls away, though he’s not sure how much of that is from a lack of air and how much of it is a consequence of existing in a place meant to break the mind, spirit, and soul.
As soon as his mouth is free, he begins his protesting anew. “Let me go! Where’s John? Tell your King that if he doesn’t give him back, I’ll—”
Then, something wraps around his throat, and he chokes on his words. His lungs burn as he struggles to breathe, but he is helpless to do anything but struggle against the hands holding him tight.
And when the blackness comes to claim him, he has no choice but to welcome it.
. . .
When Arthur comes to, he’s lying on something cold and hard and deeply uncomfortable. Groggy and disoriented, he goes to rub his eyes—more habit than anything—and finds the motion of his arm arrested by something equally cold and hard and uncomfortable.
It takes him only a few moments to chase away the sleepy disorientation and realize that he’s chained down by his wrists and ankles.
Even though he knows it’s a fruitless endeavor, he struggles against his bonds. The metal rattles, and something in the room—a presence he hadn’t noticed until just now—shifts in response. “Good morning, Arthur.”
For a brief, delirious moment, Arthur thinks that it’s John. But the voice isn’t right. It’s too far away, colored by the space they’re in rather than confined to the inside of Arthur’s mind.
This is the King. And Arthur is still alone.
Arthur’s chest tightens with anger. Though he’s not in the position to be making demands, he still can’t help but spit, “What have you done with John?”
“I returned him to where he belongs.”
Arthur sees red, and he instinctively pulls against the chains again. Their rattling is barely audible through the rushing in his ears. “He was not yours to take!”
Quick as a whip, something cool and scaly wraps around Arthur’s throat. “He was me,” the King growls as Arthur struggles to breathe. “He was never yours to have.”
Arthur can’t speak around the pressure on his throat. He makes a series of strangled noises, and the King laughs. The sound of it makes Arthur’s skin crawl. “You have caused me more trouble than you’re worth, Arthur Lester. I should tear you limb from limb and scatter your remains in a place where they will never die.”
The pressure on Arthur’s windpipe loosens just enough for him to croak, “Then why don’t you? Too much humanity left in the part of yourself you stole?”
“Less than that. My wayward soul is … locked away. He won’t be troubling either of us.”
“You’re lying.”
“And what purpose would that serve? You hold no power here. I can do whatever I please.” There are more things surrounding Arthur now—tentacles, he thinks half-hysterically—that brush against his skin, as if curious. “And I will.”
“Fuck you,” Arthur spits.
The King chuckles. “All in good time.”
“What is that supposed to—hey, don’t touch me!”
The tentacle slipping beneath his worn and tattered clothing doesn’t falter. “You see,” the King says as he begins to work at Arthur’s clothing in a way that feels almost clinical, “I am a … collector of sorts. You can call it a hobby if that’s easier for your mind to comprehend, though I would call it more of a … fascination.”
“If you’re about to offer to show me your collection of novelty snow globes,” Arthur grits out, “I’m not interested.” His clothing is gone now, leaving him bare and vulnerable. He resists the urge to squirm.
“You are truly insufferable,” the King says with a sigh. “But you also, however briefly, carried a piece of me within you. It seemed a shame to simply throw you away after that.”
Arthur bites back a protest about being treated like a fucking takeaway container. Instead, he says, with more bravado than he feels, “So what—you’re going to cage me? Put me on display like an animal?”
“Mm. Not quite.”
Then, in one clean and quick motion, something sharp carves through Arthur’s skin from his collarbone to his navel.
Arthur screams. It’s involuntary, torn from him ragged and raw and weeping. It’s meant to be a quick thing, Arthur thinks, as most screams are, but then there are tentacles worming into the wound, wriggling beneath Arthur’s skin and slowly peeling it away from the rest of his flesh, and he can’t stop the agonized wailing that continues spilling from his throat like water from a spigot. The pain is bright and sharp, and it’s like nothing Arthur has ever felt before because he’s never had the displeasure of being flayed alive, and he can’t stop himself from spasming on the table, trying desperately to get away get away get away oh god oh fucking Christ.
“This is the point where John would describe to you what’s happening, no?” the King says conversationally. Arthur can barely hear him over the ringing in his ears. “I suppose I can indulge that. You see, Arthur, I’ve cut through your torso, and I’m peeling you apart layer by layer. I’ve just pinned your skin to the board you’re laying on—which of course, you won’t be able to feel, given that your nerves are no longer connected to that part of yourself.”
The King sighs. “The human form is a repulsive little thing. So … vulnerable. However, you were able to carry a piece of a god within you, so there must be something here worth considering. I’m going to find out what it is, and then I am going to put you on display in my halls for all who visit to witness. Many of the denizens of the Dreamlands have not seen a human in such a … detailed capacity. I imagine you’ll be quite interesting to them. For the first hundred years or so, at least. And when they grow bored of you—well. I’m sure I’ll be able to make use of you in some other way.”
Arthur isn’t sure how he manages it around the pain gripping every part of him like a vise, but he croaks out, “Please. Don’t, please, I’ll—I’ll do anything, please—”
“Begging?” The King chuckles. “I thought that was beneath you. What happened to ‘fuck you’?”
Fine. Arthur grits his teeth and says, “Bastard.”
“That’s better,” the King says, and he sounds so fucking amused that it makes Arthur sick to his stomach. He’s about to snap that he doesn’t appreciate being condescended to, but then the King reaches into the opening in his torso and rips, and he vomits.
Or at least, he tries to vomit. The thing the King is holding is his stomach, as the King readily informs him, and no matter how much Arthur’s body tries to expel the contents of it, the grip around his esophagus is too tight to allow anything to escape. Arthur’s lungs spasm, and his whole body spasms, and none of this should be possible—he should be fucking dead, his body is—Christ, his body is—
Something cracks—multiple somethings, one by one. It would be excruciating even if it were felt in isolation, but combined with everything else, it whites out Arthur’s mind entirely until all he can comprehend is his own slow dismantling. “Bones are shockingly easy to break,” the King says, sounding almost disappointed by the fact. “For something that’s meant to protect your vulnerable parts, you would think they would have more structural integrity.”
All Arthur manages in response is a choked wheeze. His lungs inflate and deflate, inflate and deflate, exposed to the open air with nothing left to protect them. His mind can hardly comprehend the unnaturalness of it all, tripping on the fact that this shouldn’t be happening, this can’t be happening, it’s not possible, he should be dead, he should be bleeding out and dying and dead.
He should be dead, and he’s not. And the horror of that grips Arthur’s heart just as the King reaches into Arthur’s chest and cradles it in the palm of his hand.
“There we are,” the King says with a satisfied sigh. “Such a delicate little thing, isn’t it? The human heart.”
Arthur has lamented the loss of his eyes many times over the months, and to a lesser degree, he has also found himself grateful to be spared the sight of the horrors surrounding him. However, he has never been more thankful than he is in this moment that he cannot see. He thinks that the sight of his heart in the King’s hand, red and bloody and pulsing, would break him completely.
If he isn’t already broken, that is.
There is no going back from this. The knowledge hits him suddenly and acutely enough that it’s almost a physical pain, another harmony in the cacophony of agony that has consumed him. This is permanent, and there is no escape, and he is going to die here, pinned and spread vulnerable beneath the King’s hands.
Or he is going to survive. He can’t decide which possibility scares him more.
“Put it back,” Arthur gasps. The words are slurred together, barely recognizable. “Put it back put it back put it back.”
The King pulls Arthur’s heart further from his chest, and Arthur dissolves into unintelligible half-pleas and uncontrolled sobbing. “How hard can I squeeze,” the King muses, “before you pop? Why don’t we find out.”
“No,” Arthur gasps. “No no no no no—”
Then, the King squeezes, and Arthur’s body is set ablaze, and he falls into the blackness that follows with heady relief.
. . .
Arthur wakes with a scream lodged in his throat. He thrashes, disoriented, and then cries out when the motion tugs at the dozens of points where his body has been adhered to the surface beneath him.
Or, he tries to cry out. All that escapes his throat is a weak hiss of air.
“Ah,” the King says. Then, there’s a tentacle at his throat—no, through his throat, there’s a hole in his fucking throat, he can feel it, and he would gag were there still any way for him to do so. “I took the liberty of removing your vocal cords. Your whimpering, while gratifying, has gotten on my nerves. In any case, you’ll have no need for communication from this point forward.”
Arthur thrashes again, despite the pain it causes him. Bastard, he tries to say. Fuck you. How could you do this. Put me back. Let me go. Please. Please. Please. But nothing comes out. Only air from his miraculously-still-intact lungs, hissing like a punctured tire.
“Much better,” the King says, sounding so fucking smug about it that Arthur wants to claw at his face and rip out his eyes. “Now. I would hold still if I were you.”
Arthur only has a moment of confusion before something trails up the side of his face and brushes against his ear.
His sightless eyes go wide, his lips forming a silent plea, but he can do nothing to stop it as the tendril slips into his ear canal, pushing forward and forward and—
And when the tentacle pushes past the momentary resistance of his middle and inner ear and lodges itself securely in his brain, Arthur shatters.
It’s the last vestige of control Arthur had over this situation. His mind has always been the thing he could rely on when everything else failed, and it’s gotten him out of more than one sticky situation in the past. He’s pickled it in liquor, sure, and put it through more sleepless nights than he cares to count, but it has still served him well. His body is his body, yes, but it’s been broken and battered before.
Now, there is a piece of the King inside his skull—a physical piece, poking and prodding and sending uncontrollable twitches throughout Arthur’s entire nervous system—and Arthur doesn’t know how to process the complete and utter despair that crashes over him. His chest is cut open and his organs are displayed like cuts of meat at a butcher and his skin is stretched and pinned and his lungs inflate and deflate in the open air and his blood rushes frantically through his stretched and molded veins and arteries, and there is a tentacle probing his brain matter, and Arthur has never felt less human in his entire life.
And he knows, with bone-deep certainty, that he will never be whole again.
Arthur goes limp. As his exposed lungs heave with panicked sobs, more tentacles slip into the gaps between his internal organs, wriggling into his stomach and pushing through his intestines. He probably feels it, but he’s gone so numb that he can’t be certain. A tentacle coils around his cock, another caressing his hole for a moment before pushing in and up, and Arthur finds it in himself to be horrified when despite everything, a small shock of pleasure makes his hips twitch.
“There,” the King says. “This is a delicate matter, and I need you to behave. Perhaps giving you something else to focus on will take your mind off … well. Your mind.”
The tentacle in Arthur’s ear squirms and pushes further in, and this time Arthur does feel the pain of it, acute enough that his body goes rigid. He can hardly breathe as the tendril begins to … fuck, it’s in his brain. It’s in his fucking brain, and that shouldn’t be possible, but none of this should be possible, and Arthur can’t even find comfort in his attempts to rationalize his situation because every twitch of the tentacle inside of his skull makes it harder and harder to focus his thoughts into something resembling coherency.
The tendril in his ass is moving, Arthur recognizes distantly. He can feel it slipping through his exposed guts, prodding at the lining of his stomach, wriggling further still, using his body as the fucking sleeve of bloody flesh that it has been reduced to.
Fuck. Fuck. Arthur is sobbing again. The panic and terror have begun to creep in again, and he grasps desperately for the numbness, because there’s nothing he can fucking do. He’s stuck, and he’s not escaping, and there is no point in the fucking adrenaline that his brain is pumping through him in copious quantities because he can’t do a single fucking thing. His cheeks are damp, though that could very well be with blood or a myriad of other fluids. He’s pretty sure his brain is leaking out through his nose. Or at least, it feels like it is. His mind is one big haze of static, and when he feels a pressure at the back of his eyes, he gasps sharply.
“Oh, don’t worry,” the King says, disarmingly gentle. “Those are still my eyes. I wouldn’t do anything to harm them. Not when they serve as such an excellent reminder that you are mine.”
The word echoes in Arthur’s mind: mine. He wishes he could protest it, but lying here, pinned and spread open and violated in every possible way by the King, he has never been so thoroughly used.
He has never been so thoroughly owned.
The tendril in his ass squirms further up, and Arthur gags as it reaches the hole in his throat. It curls out into the open air, and he feels it brush against his lips before pushing insistently inside. It pets his tongue, leaving behind the awful aftertaste of his own goddamn digestive tract, then pulls out and pushes, quick and spit-slick, into his right nostril.
“Be still,” the King snaps as Arthur spasms, a knee-jerk reaction to the thing crawling up his nasal passage. “You’ve been so well-behaved up until now. Need I remind you what’s at stake for you?”
If Arthur could laugh, he would. It’s such a fucking empty threat, and they both know it. There is nothing at stake. There is nothing left for him after this. He’s been taken apart so thoroughly, violated so thoroughly, that death would likely be a mercy at this point.
Still, the terror clings to him—the animal instinct to protect himself from harm. So he forces himself to go limp once more.
Perhaps as a reward for good behavior, the tendril around his cock begins to move, slick with something that doesn’t bear thinking about. This time, Arthur does laugh—a horrific sensation that makes his exposed organs shift and slip against one another. If this is the King’s pitiful attempt to—what, get him off? Then it’s not going to work. As if Arthur could ever feel anything approaching pleasure while his body is lying pinned like a fucking butterfly to a board, skin spread and organs exposed, mutilated beyond repair.
Then, the King does something—pokes at a certain part of his brain, squeezes in the right way, burrows into him so thoroughly—and something like pleasure rushes through Arthur like a lightning strike. He can’t help bucking his hips, and the resulting pain as his skin pulls against where it’s pinned down makes fresh tears spill from his eyes.
Fuck, no, he—he can’t enjoy this. He refuses. He tries to will away the sensation building inside of him, the flames licking at the inside of his skin, but it won’t budge. The King is—he must be doing something to him. The thought that Arthur is simply getting off on this is—
No. It’s not possible. The King is manipulating him. That’s the only possible explanation.
“Humans really are remarkably simple,” the King muses as he continues to wring awful pleasure from Arthur’s broken form. “I thought you might be different, but you’re just as crude as the rest of them. What a disappointment. I have half a mind to throw you in a hole to rot for the rest of your hopeless, miserable life.”
Hours ago, Arthur might have feared the prospect of being thrown into another hole. Now, though, he can’t imagine a relief quite as sweet. He thinks he would really and truly do absolutely anything to earn the privilege of being dropped head-first back into the prison pits, and the thought sickens him. He’s suffered through so much, survived so much, and every inch of that headstrong resolve has fled him in this moment. He feels like he’s truly lost himself.
But … fuck. He’d like to see anybody else do better when they’re in the middle of being fucking vivisected.
“But,” the King says with a sigh, and Arthur’s mangled stomach drops, “I’ve already gone through the trouble of pinning you up so wonderfully. And you do have my eyes.”
They’re not yours, Arthur wants to snap—or perhaps to sob, or perhaps to plead. They never were. But he can do nothing as a tendril strokes just beneath Arthur’s eyes, almost tenderly. Arthur squeezes his eyes shut, and the King clicks his tongue. “You do have a propensity for making things difficult for yourself.”
The pain of having his eyelids stripped away is fleeting. The nausea of realizing that even this has been stolen from him is much less so.
Arthur doesn’t even notice when he comes. It’s lost in the haze of everything else, in the fogginess of his invaded and muddled mind, in the constant and rhythmic pulsing of his organs. He only realizes that it’s happened when the King sighs, as if disappointed, and says, “Well. I suppose that’s that, then.”
The pressure inside his skull increases, and the last thing Arthur hears before he finally, blessedly falls into unconsciousness is the wet sounds of dozens of tentacles moving inside him, sorting his insides into new and horrible configurations.
. . .
Perhaps if Arthur had known that that was the last time he would sleep, he would have appreciated it more.
He doesn’t sleep any longer, pinned as he is, spread open and on display for anybody who happens to grace the halls of the King. He doesn’t sleep, but he still feels it all—the pain of being spread open, the numbness behind his eyes where his mind has been stretched and shifted and rearranged to the King’s liking, the throbbing of all the parts of himself that were never meant to exist in the open air. He is aware of every single awful moment of it, and it is endless, and it is the worst hell Arthur could have possibly thought to conjure for himself.
Perhaps worse, though, is how Arthur’s entire body sings with relief when the King visits and reaches into him and entwines his tendrils with Arthur’s ligaments and tendons and fucks him until he cries. Because it’s awful, and it’s violating, and it’s disgraceful and disgusting, and it’s the only respite Arthur gets in this terrible, lonely place. The King stuffs him full, pressing against all the spaces inside him that make him gasp and writhe, and the only thought running through Arthur’s mind as he feels the first brush of tentacles against his skin is how fucking thankful he is.
He can’t even bring himself to feel ashamed of it anymore. He thinks it should probably horrify him, how much he looks forward to the King’s visits. How much he looks forward to any visit—even the people who stop to stare at him, murmuring to their companions about what a beautiful piece of artwork the King has in his collection, how unique it is, how delightfully cut apart and pasted together.
But it doesn’t. What would be the point? It wouldn’t do any good and would only serve to make things more unbearable than they already are.
Instead, Arthur focuses on the scant moments of pleasure he is gifted with. He sucks on the tentacles that are pushed between his lips and clenches around those that are thrust into him and feels the liquid that is pumped inside him slosh when the King presses almost tenderly against his stomach. He allows the orgasms to wash over him, tastes his own spend on his tongue when the King offers it to him, and shivers when the King leans close and murmurs, “You are mine, Arthur Lester, and mine alone. Remember that.”
Arthur remembers. He remembers, and he knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that for all of the King’s lies, in this, he speaks the truth. Arthur’s body has been dismantled and remade to the King’s pleasure, and every time the King fucks him, he remakes it anew. He thrusts inside Arthur from impossible angles and molds Arthur to whichever shape contents him, and Arthur stares forward with sightless eyes that can no longer close and takes shallow breaths with a throat that can no longer speak and feels the heaving motions of a body that is no longer his, pulled apart and remade in brilliant gold.