#fought

He is shirtless, bound with chains to a metal chair that is bolted to the floor, head slightly fuzzy from whatever he’d been drugged with, and he is in trouble. But he will work out a way to escape, or enough time will pass that Solo will come looking, or he will die without giving in.

He will not admit defeat. Or reveal any information, though so far, the man does not seem at all interested in anything besides pain for its own sake.

“Just so long as you know you have the power to make this stop. Now, then. Shall we begin?”

It’s very standard torture, at first. He’s beaten all over. Nothing he is not familiar with. Nothing he cannot handle. 

He spits blood onto the ground and looks up at his captor with disinterest. This is nothing. He had experienced worse in training.

The man grins. “Too easy for you?”

It’s a lit cigarette next. The smoke makes him cough as the burning end is pressed to his skin, over and over again. 

This is preferable to the beating, really. The pain is confined to smaller areas. He will be fine. 

Unfortunately, his captor seems to realize this, and increases his efforts. 

He kneels behind Illya, which is strange. Illya does not like it, does not like not being able to see him. To have some idea of what he is going to do, so that he can prepare to meet it. 

His left hand, wrist encircled by a thick metal cuff, is grabbed. He curls it into a fist and feels something brush across the back of it, feather-light and dangerous. 

A knife. 

“Open your hand for me, please.”

He does nothing. 

And then there’s a red-hot pain through his hand, and his fist unclenches. He can feel the knife that has been stuck through his hand from the back, between tendons, the point sticking out of his palm. 

It hurts. Still, he does not react beyond a controlled exhale. He will be fine. 

If his other hand starts to shake a little, he does not acknowledge it. 

His captor, however, does. 

“Now we’re getting somewhere. That really hurt, didn’t it?”

Illya does not respond. 

“I do hope you’re not too attached to this hand. I’m just getting started.”

Illya allows himself a brief grimace, the man being behind him, and steels himself for whatever other unpleasant experience is coming. 

It’s his nails. He’s heard about this kind of torture, of course, but he’s never seen it done, certainly has never had it done to himself. 

It’s indescribable. Something, he doesn’t know what, is forced beneath his thumbnail and pushed, separating it from the skin. It’s worse than the knife, though there isn’t nearly as much blood. 

It keeps going. All five fingers of his left hand. He’s sweating by the third one, and he cannot fail to notice that he is shaking, shivering really, as if he’s freezing. 

He cannot stop it. He wants to, wants to be totally motionless, unresponsive, but he cannot. It’s agonizing. It hurts. 

“Only halfway there and you’re already trembling. This should be fun. Unless, of course, you’d like to stop?”

Silence. The slow, steady drip-drip-drip of blood onto the floor. 

“Thought I’d ask. Don’t say I didn’t give you the chance to spare yourself.”

Whatever had been shoved beneath his nails is yanked free, and this hurts, but then they’re gone. His fingertips burn and throb. 

And then he feels what can only be a pair of pliers and he has the briefest of seconds to prepare himself for what comes next. 

His thumbnail is grabbed and pulled. This is–it’s worse than any other torture he’s experienced. It makes him feel sick, but he will not give this man the satisfaction. He swallows, takes a deep breath that trembles on the inhale and is far too loud on the exhale. 

Four more. He can withstand it. 

The next one. He bites down, catches his tongue. His mouth fills with fresh blood. Three more. 

The middle nail is removed slowly. He tries to hold his breath and cannot, tries to breathe deeply and cannot. Two more. 

The next is pulled quickly and aggressively. His hands are shaking hard. But the quick removal is far preferable to the slow. One more. 

The pinky nail is small and easy, relatively speaking. But then there is the sound of a lighter igniting, and the familiar smell of cigarette smoke fills the room, and the familiar burn presses to the fresh, open wound. 

He cannot stop himself from making a sound. He isn’t sure what it is, only that he makes it. 

“That was lovely. Immeasurable pain, yes? Don’t you wish it would stop?”

Yes, he thinks. Yes, I wish it would stop. 

Still, he says nothing.

The knife is removed from his hand, sudden and sharp. His whole body goes tense, then limp. He wishes his consciousness would fade out from the pain, but he remains unfortunately present in the moment. 

The man steps back in front of him, holding the knife, still dripping with Illya’s blood. He’s grinning, eyes bright, and Illya has never wanted to punch someone more. 

If he gets free, he’s going to kill this man, and he is going to enjoy it. 

If he gets free. 

His metal bindings are utterly unforgiving. His only hope is that he’ll be untied eventually, and then he can make his move. Or maybe enough time will pass–he’s supposed to be gone all day, and if he’s not back within that time frame, then at a certain point Solo will come looking. 

He could just give in. But he doesn’t know what will happen–maybe it will only stop for a minute or two. Maybe there is a camera, waiting to capture his defeat and show it to anyone who will watch. Maybe the man will just laugh at having broken him. 

The knife is making its way towards him. Small cuts on his upper arms. They feel like nothing compared to what has been done to his fingers. 

And then the man pulls a jar from the pocket of his coat and opens it, lifting a pinch of something white and grainy. He rubs it against the fresh, bleeding cuts. 

Salt. 

Salt in the wound. A phrase Solo had used just last week. Something stupid, they’d been playing poker, Illya had been winning, Solo had been jokingly upset. 

It burns with a sharp intensity, all over his upper arms, and he stops thinking about Solo. His breathing grows more ragged. 

And then the man steps behind him, and Illya knows what will happen. He fights it, closes his aching hand into a fist even as the motion makes his injuries scream in pain. The alternative will surely feel much worse. 

He feels the tip of the knife start to poke back into the wound it had already made, and relents, unclenching his fist. Getting stabbed again, on the other hand, would be worse than this. 

His bleeding fingertips are shoved, one by one, into the jar of salt. The texture itself hurts horribly, and then the pain of the salt in the wounds comes, and he cannot stop himself from trying desperately to pull away. 

There is nowhere to go. 

“Ready to give in yet?”

He wants to, almost. Wishes he was the sort of person who’d give in just like that. But he is not. He cannot be. 

“Your choice. Now, let me think…what shall we try next?”

He steps back in front of Illya, traces down his cheek with the point of the knife, leaving behind a trail of blood that Illya can feel drying on his skin. The knife continues on its way, down his throat and to his shoulder, where the point digs in, just a bit. 

And then a bit more. 

It’s so slow, the horrible push of the knife into his skin. He once again tries to escape it, an instinctual bodily reaction that he cannot fully control, but there is of course nowhere to go. 

He feels like he can barely breathe. It hurts and he just wants it to be over, but it keeps going, until at last he feels it reach the other side. His captor presses down on the handle, and Illya feels the blade move inside of his shoulder. He half chokes on a pained noise which escapes only as a low groan. 

This time, the knife mercifully stays where it is. And then the man applies his lighter to it, heating the metal, and Illya wishes desperately that he’d yanked it away like he’d done before. 

But the metal keeps getting hotter, and he tries to tell himself that this is good, because maybe it will cauterize the wound, but it hurts and there’s the smell of burning flesh and the nausea spikes and then–

The knife is pulled away, slowly, almost carefully, and Illya lets out a breath that is more shudder than anything else. 

He does not want to keep doing this. He can endure it, he is certain, but he does not want to. 

The man doesn’t even want anything from him, besides his suffering. If it was for a purpose, if he wanted information, Illya would feel…better. He’d refuse to give in, endure any amount of pain, to keep secret the things he is meant to. 

But this. There is nothing in it. Only himself and his suffering and a man that wants to see him break. 

“Shall we do the other shoulder now, or the other hand?” the man muses, toying with his knife. Illya stiffens. He does not want either, and does not know which would be worse. 

“Hand, I think,” he answers his own question. “We ought to give your shoulders a break.”

He doesn’t want to do this again. He thinks about the pain from before, still throbbing through his entire hand, and once again swallows back bile. Please, no, he thinks. Anything else. 

He doesn’t make a fist this time. Leaves his hand open, accessible. Shaking. 

No knife stabs through it. 

“Good. You’re learning.”

The first thing pushes beneath Illya’s thumbnail, and it’s bigger and sharper than whatever had been used before and he cannot stop himself. He makes a noise, not quite a scream but somewhere close, and he’s shaking all over and he cannot breathe and he cannot do this anymore, he does not want to do this anymore, there is a way out, there is a way out, and he hates himself for taking it even as he takes it. 

“Stop.”

It’s the only thing he has said the entire time. He thinks it should hurt, somehow, but his voice feels normal. 

“What was that? I didn’t quite hear you.” The object is forced beneath the nail of his pointer finger, and Illya just–speaks. 

“It hurts. Stop.”

His captor stands in front of him, having left the two objects poking out of Illya’s fingertips. 

“Was that really so difficult? Now, if it’s any consolation, you lasted a lot longer than most of my other subjects. The majority of them gave up round about the second nail of the first hand. Some didn’t even withstand the beating.”

He says this like Illya should be proud. Of what?

Of sitting still and silent while a madman runs torture experiments on him?

Of being unwilling to admit defeat?

Of giving up, handing the madman exactly what he wants?

“Well, I did say you could have a break, didn’t I? Tell you what, how would you like to move?”

Illya does not react externally, but internally everything focuses. This is what he has been waiting for. The opportunity to escape. 

“Yes, I think a new position might be beneficial for us. What do you think?”

Illya steadies himself, prepares for a fight. Physically, the man is much smaller than him, but he’s strong enough, and hasn’t been tortured recently, so the odds are fairly even. 

“And before you go getting any ideas,” and his captor retrieves something else from a pocket, “we can’t have you trying to escape, now can we?”

It’s a syringe, and Illya knows he’d been drugged before with whatever’s in it–it’s how he’d ended up here–and he does not know if he will be able to withstand its effects long enough to free himself. 

But it’s his only hope. He has to try. 

The needle slides into a vein, quick and painless compared to everything else that’s touched him lately, and he feels the drug sweep through his system. 

He sags, lets his eyes flutter closed, breathes as deeply as he can, and waits. 

The chains loosen. The handcuffs come off. And Illya opens his eyes, flies to his feet, and attacks. 

It’s difficult. The drugs are making him uncoordinated and dizzy, though that could also be the pain. There are metal strips sticking out from his fingers and his left hand is painted red with blood, slick and almost useless. 

Still. He is angry, and he is free. 

His captor fights hard. The knife, that awful knife, flashes, slices, but does not stab. He grabs Illya, pokes at him in the places he’s most hurt, tears the metal strips from his fingers, breaking the nails in the process. 

But Illya fights back just as hard. He pushes the pain aside, focuses on the fight, gets several hits in. His opponent is bleeding now, and it’s not nearly enough, but it’s a start. 

And then they get close, and the man grabs Illya’s left hand, digs his own nails into the places where Illya’s aren’t, and Illya’s vision goes white with pain and with fury. 

He doesn’t know exactly what happens. Everything goes kind of sideways and then they’re both on the ground and the knife is in his hands, stabbing over and over and over again into the body of the man who’d hurt him. 

There is blood everywhere. Illya does not know how much is his. He does not care. 

The man is dead, and he is free. 

He staggers to his feet, wraps his aching hand around the hilt of the knife, and gets out.