#agrypnotics

It must have been two or three days by now, you would estimate. You’re not sure, though. You don’t know what time it is. You don’t know where you are. You only ever see the one guy, and you still don’t know who he is. Yeah, you know who he works for, you know this is because you fucked over Jim Walton, but you know nothing about him. You can’t manipulate your way out of this because you can barely get a read on him, and you’re starting to feel tired and spent from sitting on this goddamn chair for who knows how long.

You’ve gotten water and gross liquid food you’re pretty sure was initially meant for hospital patients and counts as some sort of torture. He goes out of his way to keep your hands tied up, and all you can do to keep them from going completely numb is occasionally roll your shoulders and wiggle your fingers. You just wish you had a plan. You wish you knew how to make plans on your own.

“The man I sent to your place never came back,” he says, after closing the door behind him. He’s not here all day. Most of the time, you just sit around on your own, feeling your own pulse in the bruises on your face. There’s nothing here to help you escape. Just you and a table. You really need to start keeping knives in your sylladex.

“Mm,” you hum, and tilt your head back toward him from where you were staring at the ceiling. “I’d wager he met the vampire I’m dating who currently lives there, then.”

You only get an irritated look for that. You do know that much about him: he is tired of you. That’s probably not good.

What’s also probably not good is the butcher knife he’s holding in one hand when he approaches your chair. “I want names,” he says. “Obviously you’re not doing this alone, so give me names.”

“What for?” you say, shifting just enough to roll your shoulders. It’s pride alone that makes you focus on his face instead of the knife, even though you feel hyper aware of its presence. “So you can tie them to chairs, too? We both know you don’t plan to let me out of this room unless it’s chopped into little pieces, so what motivation do I have to tell you anything?”

You catch him smiling before he walks behind you. Yeah, this is all not great. He says, “That depends on whether you wanna be dead or still alive for the chopping part.”

Your scoff gets lost in the noise of the chair scraping against the floor when he drags you over toward the table, your right side facing it. All you’ve gotten so far is a split lip and eyebrow and a bruise on your cheekbone -- not even a black eye, not one cracked rib. He’s not one for battery, you think, he was just trying to be imposing, and he’s learned that it didn’t work by now. Part of you wants to find it hard to believe that he’s suddenly going to be mangling you with a knife when he wouldn’t even punch you in the stomach a little, but he seems practiced in how fast he unties your hands and then re-ties your left to the chair. Like he’s done this one before.

Hammer, you think, my hand is free, I can deploy my hammer from my specibus and kill this guy. It wasn’t an option before, with how your hands were bound there would have been no point to it. He presses your right down on the table now, with only his human strength pushing it down, and you’re sure you could make it, but all you feel from your shoulder to your fingertips is the numb buzz of a limb that’s fallen asleep. You can’t focus enough to procure your hammer, as much as you try with your useless mind.

“You know,” you tell him, “whatever you’re doing won’t even hurt me with how numb my hands are from being tied back there all the time. We should really update our bondage contract, you and I.”

“Oh, it’ll hurt,” he says with an unaffected satisfaction in his voice that disturbs you. With the broad side of the blade, he pushes your pinky finger away from the others, like he’s separating it from the herd before hovering his knife above it and throwing you a glance. You’re watching your hand, thinking that you can definitely still move your fingers, but before you get to do that he uses his other hand to push them firmly down against the table. “Names, John.”

Whatever. It’s a pinky finger. You’ll survive without it, you won’t even bleed out from the wound. Right? You’re pretty sure you won’t. You’re not selling out Karkat or Sollux -- you barely think anyone could even do anything to them, with both flying under the radar pretty well, this is just a matter of principle. You’re not giving this asshole shit.

You look up at him, and say, pleasantly, “Fuck you.”

“Okay,” he says, and cuts off your finger.

It’s not the worst pain you’ve ever experienced. You think that might just say more about the sort of life you’ve led than about the pain of losing a finger. What you immediately suspect will haunt you much more is the sound of the knife going through your skin, and the bone cracking. You yourself also make a noise, the suppressed version of a scream, the clatter of your teeth when you attempt to grit them. Your arm flinches under his grasp, the rest of your extremities pull at their restraints, put you keep your lips pressed firmly together, breathing loudly through your nose. When he lifts the knife, the limp finger lying on the table, half an inch away from your hand, doesn’t look real.

“Was that worth it?” he says. 

And you realize that it was. The pain surging from your hand all the way up to your shoulder is sharp and clear, exquisite and focused, the polar opposite to the grainy static you felt in it before. You barely even think about it when you will your five foot tentacled stakehammer from your strife specibus, and close your remaining fingers around it.

The impact of it appearing in your hand bounces his grip off of you, and he flinches back like he’s already been hit. “What the f--” he starts saying, but before he can even finish swearing, you’ve already hurled your arm back and struck forward, the metal front of the hammer colliding square with his face and caving his skull in. Blood gurgles in his throat when he crumbles to the floor with a loud thud.

Well, that’s dealt with. You put your hammer down on the table and look for the knife he must have had. By now, your hand exists only in a cloud of burning pain, blood spurting from the stump of your finger, but your mind is clear and focused on the task before you. He let go of the knife when he fell, but it didn’t land on the table where you could reach it, it’s on the ground about a foot away from him. You take a breath, and throw your weight forward.

Your chair clatters to the floor, you land heavily on your bound left side, your hurt right hand only able to do so much to break your fall. This time, now that nobody else is here, you let out a strained noise, stuttering in your chest. You reach out, your palm slippery with blood, your four-fingered hand looking strange to your own eyes, and grab the knife.

Cutting the ziptie that’s holding your other hand while effectively lying on it is another task that takes you some wiggling, some undignified grunting, and spills blood all over your shirt and pants leg. As soon as both of your hands are free, though, you make quick work of the rest. You cut your legs free and plop off the chair, landing on your knees and your good hand, still holding the knife in your right. For a few seconds, you just kneel and stare at the man with the caved in face lying on the floor. He doesn’t look alive, but your luck has been shit lately. You raise his knife and bury it in his chest, just for good measure.

It comes back out with a squelch because you decide to cut off part of the jacket he’s wearing so you can roll it up and press it to your hand. Then you drop it, and wrangle yourself to your feet, stumbling almost all the way to the other end to the room in your attempt to balance yourself after being tied to a chair for days and also just having your finger cut off and killing someone. You make it back to the table and grab your wallet and phone from the far end of it, then shove your severed finger into your pants pocket without so much as looking at it. You’re getting the fuck out of here.

With your left pressing the fabric to your right, and your right clutching your hammer, you shoulder open the door, and find yourself in a deserted, basement looking corridor. There are few other doors, all closed, and an obvious exit at the end of an elevated hallway that seems to lead directly outside. You jog there, every impact of your feet on the ground reverberating through your injured hand, and when you shoulder open that door as well, you half expect an alarm to sound.

But your recent bad luck doesn’t seem to want to extend that far. When you enter a concrete backyard, there are no noises other than the door falling shut behind you, and faint street sounds. You turn around to stare up at the building you just emerged from, and find it to be a regular looking office building, high-rise, in what you immediately know to still be New York City.

“Jesus Christ,” you mutter. Using your thumb to continue pressing your makeshift bandage to your hand, you grab your phone with your other and power it back up. You need to… well. You want to be texting Karkat, but you need to be texting Dirk.

Immediately after entering your PIN, your phone vibrates in your hand so insistently that you almost drop it, flooding you with text messages and several calls you have missed in your absence. It pulls a wonky smile from you -- that’s nice to know, at least.

Karkat was very clearly worried about you, Dave wants to meet up for his birthday, and -- you check the date, and nearly yell out loud. It’s April 13. Holy fuck, it’s your best friend’s birthday, and instead of celebrating with him you just killed a guy who cut off your finger.

“Shit,” you breathe, and then you frown, because Dirk has also texted you. A single line, about the NYPD having found bodily remains.

Looks like your bad luck still extends well and far enough.

You text Karkat back first, trying to be reassuring but ultimately waving him off, then wish Dave a happy birthday, and then open your conversation with Dirk again to tell him that you need a paid off doctor that won’t ask you what the fuck just happened. Then you take several deep breaths, close your eyes, and swallow down the scream that has been stuck in your throat ever since that knife came down on you.