Chapter Text
“So,” says Parrot. “The prisoner?”
“You’re not gonna like him,” says his best friend, twirling the cell keys on one taloned finger as they trace a circular path downward to the jails.
Parrot tilts his head. He’s hardly got an easily-bruised ego. “Why not?”
“Well,” considers Theo. “Maybe it’s just that I don’t like him.”
“Why don’t you like him?”
Theo gives him a little look, and then he turns his face towards the cell, where a soldier sits, crouched against the far wall. A laurel crown glints around his head. He’s a little bloodied, still, and his overalls are covered in mud. He looks different without his armor, but Parrot does recognize this one—he was standing at Saparata’s side.
Theo clicks his tongue. “I just don’t like liars.”
“Flame is gonna kill you guys so hard,” says the soldier. “It’s not even gonna be funny. So, like, you guys should really let me go. Not even—I’m just saying—like, in your own interest.”
“He’s solo, bro,” chirps Theo. “You don’t know him. Everybody says they know him and they just do not. Save yourself some dignity.”
That, strangely enough, makes the soldier laugh. “Solo! Solo, wow, solo. Nah, that’s my teammate, buddy, and mark my fucking words, he is gonna be pissed.”
Theo just turns to Parrot with one eyebrow raised over his sunglasses.
Teammate, he mouths, with a look of total exasperation.
“Right,” says Parrot. “Let me take it from here.”
As soon as Parrot steps into the cell, the captive’s face twists in anger.
“King Parrot,” he says. “Flame put you on that throne.”
“He helped, sure,” Parrot defers, diplomatically. He’s a diplomatic person, really. “Let’s talk business, though. What do you know about the movements of Cindercrest’s army?”
“Flame put you on that throne,” says the captive, again. “And you’re paying him back by letting your kingdom starve?”
“Okay,” Parrot sighs, and he drops his head into one hand. “We don’t have time for this. Reina?”
From his left steps Reina, face stoney. Her straight black hair looks a little matted with blood and dirt and all the detritus of battle. He wishes he could give her some time to rest. But they need this information, and they need it now.
Strangely enough, the captive just laughs.
“Parrot,” Theo whispers, carefully, just behind him. “Are you sure about this?”
He doesn’t answer Theo. King Parrot watches as Reina sets up her work station. A table, a chair, a bucket. Blades and needles. The captive laughs, high and maybe a little panicked, now, as he presses himself into the corner of the cell wall.
“Flame’s gonna crash out,” the captive mutters. “He’s gonna lose it. Oh my god. Hope you like your army. If you kill me—if you kill me, he’s gonna ban everybody here. Do you want that? ‘Cause I don’t think you want that. If I—I mean, you shoulda seen what happened to the Mist guys, really, like—”
“We won’t kill you,” says Parrot, calm. “Reina’s just going to ask you a few questions.”
“Oooh, that’s what they all say,” jokes the prisoner. He’s handling it well, which is unfortunate for everybody involved. This would all be much simpler and easier if he just saw the torture implements and freaked out and told them everything they needed to know.
“Reina?”
She nods, silently. Parrot hasn’t known her for that long, but—well. There’s a bit of a glimmer in her eye.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” he says. “Prisoner—”
“Lomedy,” hisses the prisoner. “My name is Lomedy.”
“Prisoner,” Parrot continues, smoothly. “I know you’re not really interested in listening to me, but if I were you—I’d think now is a good time to start talking.”
And then Raina grabs the prisoner by his hair and drags him over to her station and holds his head under the water until he starts thrashing, and Parrot leaves.
“It’s always Flamefrags,” he complains to Theo, as they climb the stairs back up and out of the prisons. “Like, the chungies always pick Flame to be their, like, imaginary best friend. Why not Wemmbu, bro? Or like, Swight, or something? They gotta pick the loner.”
“Everybody’s got such a good imagination,” Theo agrees. They both quicken their steps as an animal wail of pain chases them up the spiral castle stairs. Parrot hopes the captive breaks quickly. He doesn’t like hurting players like this.
Lomedy didn’t exactly try to end up in this kind of predicament. Maybe he asked for it by signing him and Flame up for Cindercrest’s war. But he really just doesn’t think he deserves this knife in his hand.
It’s not even good torturing. Back in the day, you worked your way up to the bad shit. That way, if the easy shit didn’t work, you had things to fall back on. Let you build up the horror, instead of just dropping people straight into it. This whole blade-through-the-palm, stuck to the waterboarding basin—it’s just not classy.
These newgens, Lomedy thinks. They just don’t know how to do it right.
“Where’s Cindercrest’s army going?” asks the lady. She’s the torturer. She’s got an awful fuckass black bob and she’s dressed stupid. Lame. No aura. In the Mafia, they were so much more intimidating. No face, no hands, no voice. Just a silent, unfeeling administrator of pain. And sometimes he was the one doing it. And sometimes it was being done to him—as a punishment for his own mistakes.
Most Mafia players didn’t get punishments. They got killed instead. Flick of the fishing rod; gone in an instant. But Lomedy was more than a nameless no-trim—he was leverage. So he went to the torturers when he messed up. And he also went to the torturers when his best friend messed up. Can’t put a diamond-trim out of commission.
Look what I can do to your little no-trim friend, is what Ash would say. You don’t want to see poor sweet Gold Sword hurt again. Be better, Iron. Don’t disappoint me.
Iron Sword tried his best, but nobody could live up to Ash’s expectations. So Lomedy got hurt again.
And that’s all to say that little miss bad bob and her subpar waterboarding tactics really will not get anywhere with Lomedy.
“I dunno,” chirps Lomedy. “They like to wander. Might get lost on the path of life, y’know?”
“That’s funny,” says the lady in a way that makes him think that she really doesn’t think it’s funny at all. “Really funny.”
Then her nails scrape the back of his scalp and she fists a handful of his hair and forces Lomedy’s face down into water and it’s cold. Impossibly, bitingly cold; so deep and freezing it bites right into the animal part of his brainstem and he automatically takes a breath of not-air.
Sometimes, when you choke, it’s not an immediate panic. There’s a moment, before it sets in, where your body assumes there’s an easy out, still. That all you need to do is cough a little and the problem will right itself. But the problem doesn’t right itself; the problem is that he is dying and his lungs are on fire and everything aches a deep desperate awful ache and he would do anything to survive. Water in his lungs.
There’s thrashing, in that trapped prey way, but the thrashing makes it worse because he can’t move his right hand, on account of how it’s pinned viciously, brutally, to the wood.
How annoying, he thinks, distantly. Most of his scars are hidable. Not this one. Flame’s gonna be upset. Flame’s gonna take his hand and turn it around in his and get all fretful around the edges. Flame’s not a crier, but he would weep if he saw Lomedy like this; kneeling on stone in an awful little cell, brutalized, suffocating.
And he can’t even raise his head because this player is holding him down.
Like a wild animal. She’s holding him down under the water and he can feel bubbles of air trace along his face as they escape his mouth and nose and his eyes were closed shut but somewhere in all the drowning he opened them and now that too is burning and in fact maybe its all burning, all up and down his soul & body & mind, a whet-sharpened edge of critical terror morphing into blobs of black over everything—what a terrible torturer; she’s going to kill him right off the bat—
Until the hand pulls up and Lomedy starts suffocating on air instead until the burning fades there’s choked-out water all over the floor and he’s curled over, limp, soaked through to the bone and shivering, one hand still strung up unnaturally, pinned in place to the basin like a dead butterfly.
“Where is Cindercrest going next?” the lady asks.
Lomedy can’t reply right away; he needs to cough and choke and clear his throat first, and even when he does speak it’s ruined and rough.
“You wanna know soooo bad,” he laughs, and the terrible torturer drags him up by the hair and forces him back under the cold cold cold water.
This time, at least, he’s prepared for the cold, so he doesn’t breathe in immediately. Somehow, that’s almost worse, because now he has to wait until his body gives up anyway and tries to drown, which it does, eventually, as everything freezes, and eventually becomes black and dying, and eventually becomes gagging on ice water helplessly as the hand holds him down.
In the Mafia, you couldn’t see the hand. You could only feel it in your hair holding you down and it became an invisible deity that gave breath or took it away.
That’s maybe why so many people took the lava out instead of trying to make it through another day of Mafia prison-life. That, at least, was control. That, at least, had autonomy. This—pinned in place, held down, drowning, dying—this is pure, awful helplessness.
No control, no nothing. Life or death in the nails scratching against your scalp. Life or death in the water. Life or death in the hand tugging him back above the surface.
She leans close to look Lomedy dead in the eyes. “Is this some kind of game to you?”
Lomedy cracks a smile. “Little bit, yeah.”
There’s a reason he never took the lava way out.
“Fuck you,” Parrot’s cronie hisses, and then she holds him under again.
What’s there to say about drowning? You drown once, you drown a thousand times. Never gets easier. The dying is so instant and awful and immediate that it begins to feel as if he’s never going to breathe again. It would, on the whole, be much easier to just give up.
“Where,” she says, again, and Lomedy just laughs.
Her face twists in rage. This, too, is bad torturing. It’s not very intimidating at all to know your torturer has emotions. She looks kinda young when she’s angry; coal-black eyes shaded by her straight black bangs. Really, can’t be any older than Lomedy.
“Cindercrest killed my teammate,” she says, under her breath.
Ah, he thinks. So that’s what this is about.
“Dead teammate,” he echoes, slowly. “Welcome to the club.”
“You—”
“That’s Unstable for you,” Lomedy drawls. “You haven’t seen even half of it yet, newbie. That’s why your torturing is terrible, also, by the way. Bro, if I was, like, any more of a noob you woulda just killed me straight up. You can’t kill the person you’re trying to get info out of, that’s like, stupid. Where’s the info comin’ from if there’s nobody to tell you it? Like, I don’t know how much waterboarding you’ve done before, but if they start to stop moving then you’ve done it too—”
That, unfortunately, is where the lady snaps. She yanks the knife out of Lomedy’s hand, which blanks out his mind in agony and then slams her boot right in his stomach and he falls, instantly, curls up around the ache in his chest and the pain radiating up his arm and all of the blood coming from the brand-new quarter-wide slice right through the center of his hand.
She storms out. Or she must, because when Lomedy regains sense she’s gone, but in the in-between is just waves of white-out pain rolling over and over and over and a bit of screaming.
It’s good, actually, to get the pain out verbally; all whining and whimpering and sobbing, soaked and cold in his little corner of a cell. There’s a lot of helplessness and agony and drowning rattling around in his head, and he’s got to get it out. Can’t repress it like Flame. He’s seen how that ends.
It’s one of Flame’s bandanas that he ties around the wound in his hand; tight as he can. Lomedy stupidly—weakly—imagines that it’s Flame doing it; kneeling in front of him and pulling the fabric secure and fretting about infections or stuff stuck in the wound or Lomedy’s pain.
Shit, he would say. Shit, Lomedy, this is—oh, it’s right through. Oh, bro. It’s—I got you. I got you, Loms.
They lost each other back in Merchant City, after the arrow cannon started sniping people right out of the air, and in the chaos on the ground he couldn’t find Flame. Or anybody. In fact, the only thing he found was a swarm of Merchant City guards that got him surrounded, and trapped, and—
And when everybody else must have retreated, they missed him.
Lomedy talked a big game about Flame coming to save his ass, but if he’s being real—Flame probably thinks he’s dead. That cannon was sniping fully-geared players out of the air. And he—well.
Lomedy remembers how desperate he was after the Mist. He remembers how the great Immortal Demon knelt at his bedside and wept and held Lomedy’s hand to his forehead; remembers how Flame followed at his heels like a little dog; how he wouldn’t leave Lomedy's side for a week.
He would never leave Lomedy behind. So therefore he must think Lomedy is dead. Which means he’s not coming.
Which means if he’s not careful, Lomedy could vanish, here. Into the depths of this prison, into the dark, into void. Like so many Mafia members did before him, their names unrecorded, obliviated, forgotten. Completely destroyed; right down to the memory.
He doesn’t want to die like that.
Lomedy wants to be remembered. Is that so bad? He and Tyler—’cause his name was Tyler, before it was Iron Sword before it was Lomedy’s dead teammate—came to this server to turn over a new leaf. Start something good. But they spawned right into an obsidian box.
They never had a chance. Tyler started in the Mafia and died there. He never got to see this server.
Lomedy doesn’t want to die like that. He doesn’t want to die.
In the morning, Parrot does a debrief.
First, he asks Theo for a rundown of security overnight and receives an all’s well.
Then, he asks 4C about redstone shipments for the next weapon and receives a well, I can try.
Then he asks Reina for her information and she says I’m sorry, King Parrot. The captive is stubborn.
“Stubborn?” Parrot asks, glancing up from his paperwork.
“Stubborn,” Reina confirms, her face drawn in a grimace.
“Hm,” says Parrot. “What have you tried?”
Theo glances at him askance, and 4C looks a little sick. Neither say anything. They both understand the responsibilities Parrot carries.
“Waterboarding,” reports Reina, primly, easily. “And I stuck a knife in his hand.”
“Try fire,” Parrot offers. “And if that doesn’t work, there are wither roses in the castle somewhere. Diplomatic offering from the Nether. Just be careful handling them.”
Reina salutes. It really is so nice to have someone this loyal, especially when things are so dire across the kingdom.
“Horace,” Parrot asks. “How’s the construction of temporary housing in Merchant City coming along?”
He doesn’t watch Reina leave; he doesn’t catch the way his cabinet glances nervously amongst each other. King Parrot has other things to worry about.