#hostage cw

Suki's just lucky she happened to be out of sight when the panic initially ensued. Or maybe that makes her unlucky- her heart races as she racks her brain for what to do in these sorts of situations. What would Detective Barlowe do in this case?

It's a dumb question to ask; for one thing, he'd probably have his firearm on him. For another thing, he'd be making a plan to save the other hostages in the vicinity.

Suki has neither of those things. But what she does have is a cellphone and his number. She nearly forgets to put her phone on silent when she dials his number. Ring. Ring. Ring.

He doesn't pick up. Of course he doesn't- he's off duty and even a detective who loves his job needs time away from work. Besides, it's not like they do anything together aside from work. She can't help but think this might be what Mister Godot was talking about when it comes to having a life outside of work.

Still. There's more stomping. And then talking:

"Is that all of them?" She shuts her eyes.

"They're all in the security room. Jason's got his eye on them."

Shakily, she opens her phone and pulls up Ray's number. She only hopes her typing is quiet enough: Hostage situation. There's at least three- they said the others are in the security room. She wavers. Please help

She crouches into a ball and waits. He has to answer sooner or later.

Time passes. She's not too sure how much actually passes, butno new notifications show up on her phone, the only noises she hears now being the sound of glass breaking and blares of sirens from afar. Idly, she looks up- there's a door staring her right in the face. There's no lock on it; the perpetuors must not be very similar with the place-

She sits up. Wait a second. Does she take her chances and try to escape? Or does she wait it out? She checks her phone- Detective Barlowe still hasn't gotten back to her. What would he do in her place?

BOOM.

"LAPD! Put your hands up!" The sound of boots on the ground follow alongside gunshots as she eyes the door that so close she could touch, but also so far to reach. She grips her phone and stands up, decision made. She can't just sit here and wait to be rescued- she has to be brave because that's what Ray would do-

A hand latches onto her arm. "Suki!"

She freezes and whirls around.

He's here. He really did come.

Something snaps. (Of course he did.)

"Ray-" His first name is clumsy on her lips but she hardly notices that. Or that her legs have given out just as she's lunging at him. Hands ball his jacket as she tries not to break. Tries not to and fails to.

Someone made it stop. He didn’t know why, or who, only that he was certain no one had said anything. It simply stopped, and there was nothing but his torn-open skin in the cool morning air. Drool slipped from his mouth. His throat hurt. Perhaps thirty feet back a small child cried and someone hushed it.

He flinched when a soldier approached. It was the younger one, the one with the extra insignia on his army-green jacket. He seemed to be in charge, if any of them were. He was clean-shaven, which he had not been on their long march yesterday. His dark eyes were not filled with satisfaction, or delight— only stoic calm. 

He lifted Samir’s chin with a finger. Samir looked up, noticed his hooked nose was crooked, like it had been broken. He looked young, maybe no older than Samir himself at twenty five or six. He trembled at the soldier’s touch. Something told him to spit in his face, and a stronger instinct immediately buried the first. 

“Samir,” the soldier said softly. “We are going to bring you inside, and ask you some questions. Will you answer?”

Samir shuddered at the sound of his name in one of his captor's mouths, in their tongue. His entire body was badly rattled from the screaming alarm-bells of pain, fading now to a horrible deep burn. He didn’t want to know what his back looked like. He felt a wave of nausea and gagged, vomiting stomach bile onto the ground. The soldier pulled his finger away from his chin just in time, stepped back so it would not spatter his boots. 

“Yes,” Samir rasped, in case the soldier was still waiting for an answer. He didn’t want to be hit in the face again like last night. “Yes.” I have nothing for you, asshole. You kidnapped the wrong guy. I’m useless. 

The man who whipped him untied him, slung him over his shoulder like a bundle of firewood. He let his arms hang limply, praying that they did not touch his back as they moved him.

The men were already back inside the old farmer’s house, boiling water for coffee and smoking cigarettes. He heard the unmistakeable tinny, scratchy sound of a recordplayer, Patsy Cline crooning Crazy. He scanned the room for Charlie but the were moving too quickly to get a good look behind all the men. He bounced against the soldier’s back as he was carried into what was once someone’s kitchen, tossed unceremoniously onto a wooden table. He yelped in pain, tears springing to his eyes. He couldn’t even think of infection or cleanliness in this place. 

He might not live long enough for it to matter. The statistics were not on his side, as his mother liked to remind him via links to dire-sounding articles late at night.

“Easy,” the soldier in charge snapped at Samir’s rough handling. Samir gasped at a flash of hot pain, like fire was racing along his back. He lay his temple on one elbow, focused on drawing breath. 

The soldier pulled up a chair and sat in front of him at the head of the table. He produced a soft pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, flicked a zippo. “Do you know who we are?” he asked casually. 

Samir tried to look around the room without lifting his head. There were empty cupboards with the doors ripped off the hinges, an ancient kettle on a squat woodstove. The table he lay on was handmade, thick and sanded until it was soft. 

The only two soldiers in the room with him were the whip-wielding one and the presumed leader, and he did not know if he should take that as a good sign or a bad one. 

“Charlie,” he rasped. 

“He’s fine. He’s having coffee with our friends. Are you going to answer my questions?”

Samir was trying to muster the will to nod, to go on with this nightmare when Achille and the soldier with the whip exchanged a glance.

Before he could understand what was happening he felt a foriegn object stuck into the broken skin on his left shoulder blade and he screamed hoarsely, knocking his forehead against the table as he writhed and bucked. "Stop," he gasped even after it was withdrawn. "Nonono, please..."

“My name is Achille," the soldier continued, smooth and collected. “I know yours is Samir. I know your friend is Charles and I know he is a journalist. What are you?”

“V-volunteer,” Samir blurted, terrified that the one who whipped him would stick another finger in his wounds. “I’m a volunteer.”

“What services do you volunteer, Samir the not-doctor? Hurry, little one. My friend has nine more fingers.”

“Anything— anything they ask of me! R-roads… buildings. We do.... we do buildings. Medicine. For— for civilians. We take it to the checkpoints for distribution.”

He waited, tensed for more pain like a kicked dog. He felt like he was in fifth grade again, and Jeremy Huffman had just bounced a kickball off his face so he was blinking dazedly up at a circle of boyish faces from playground woodchips. 

“Ah, the checkpoints,” Achille said fondly, taking a long drag of his cigarette so the cherry crackled. The insurgents had lost all five major checkpoints in May, pushing them into the hills and wilds and weakening their influence throughout the region.

“You have those hyenas to thank for all that walking we did yesterday. Scurrying around the woods like outlaws. Who do you do this for? Your government?”

“N-no,” he shook his head weakly. “No, it’s a nonprofit.”

“Sure,” Achille said, unimpressed. “It always is.”

“It is,” Samir whispered, feeling the condensation of his breath on the wood. “I swear. You can look it up, it’s called First Light. I’m—  I’ve only been here three weeks—”

He flinched and fell quiet when both his captors chuckled. 

“Unlucky,” Achille said. He put out his cigarette next to Samir’s face, ground it to a stump. The smell made him queasy, but he was grateful it had not been his cheek, or his eye. 

“Propaganda at best. That’s what your ‘nonprofit’ trades in. Pity for you, since they rarely cough up money for ransoms.”

Samir felt a flare of anger in his belly. How self-righteously deluded did these people have to be to ransom aid workers back to a nonprofit that’s trying to help their own people... The people they claim to care about and routinely fuck over?

“And no ransom means you’re as useless to us as those traitors out there in that field,” Achille continued.

What traitors? Did he mean the villagers? Those people had looked stuck in another century, dirty and hungry and forgotten. Was that why they had whipped him in front of them? As a reminder to them to toe the line?

“Well, not entirely useless,” spoke up the one with the whip. Samir turned his head to look at him, leaned up against a counter with his arms crossed. One of his fingers was bloody from digging in Samir’s back. 

“True,” Achille admitted. “There’s always the auctions, north of the border.”

“You’ll wish we’d killed you instead once you meet them,” the one with the whip smirked. “They got no mothers. No gods.”

“Your friend Charles doesn’t speak the northern or southern dialects,” Achille commented. “What use is he to your organization?"

“He’s a journalist. Like you said. He just needs a translator,” Samir whispered. He couldn’t think of spending the next hour in this pain, let alone a whole day, or two. It hurt. 

“And that translator is you?”

“Yes, Sir. Sometimes.”

Achille hummed in his throat, reached out and ruffled Samir’s hair. “You’ve been very good, Samir the volunteer. I am going to patch you up myself to make sure Bones doesn’t stick anything else in you.”

Samir did not dwell on the ambiguity of that statement. The one who’d whipped him- Bones- muttered something about coffee and left them alone in the old kitchen. 

“We may have had our checkpoints stolen from us,” Achille mumbled, rummaging through a rucksack and pulling out an army-issue first aid kit that looked like it was from another regime entirely. “But we still have our own supply chains, too. Like your organization, if you are who you say you are.”

He whimpered as Achille poured cool water from his own canteen over his back. Even water stung unbearably. 

“I told him to go easy on you, you know,” Achille said as he laid out his supplies next to Samir. “It was meant to hurt, not maim.”

Samir shook with cold that seemed at times to be horrible waves of heat. The table was hard and unyielding, and he could hear the voices of the men in the other rooms. He could hear the music, too. The record had been switched to Elvis.

He wanted Charlie, or any of his friends from the barracks. The director, or the kind-faced doctor from base. Thinking of them, of the whole world outside this kitchen made him want to scream. He did not want to be out here, deep in the woods and headed north with these men, these pseudo-soldiers whose only laws were self serving, greedy and hypocritical. 

Achille eased a wadded cloth between Samir’s teeth and waited for him to open, then to bite down. “I’ll be as brief as I can, but I have to be thorough.”

Even true to his word, the pain was so big, so all-consuming over so much of his skin that Samir screamed into the cloth, arching and writhing as Achille cleaned and disinfected him. Each time he turned his hips to get away, powerless to control it, Achille paused to push him back into place, surprisingly patient. Those crazy fucks in the next room kept on chatting and laughing, right over the bouncing tempo of Don’t Be Cruel.

“Almost,” Achille soothed as he cleaned the wounds that were lower, close to his ribs. 

Samir flinched constantly, knuckles white on the sides of the table.

“You don’t want an infection out here,” Achille murmured as he worked. “Even I won’t be able to help you then. We’ve lost more than one of our own to that. And we have no way to send the bodies back to their familes. Not since the checkpoints were taken. We bury them deep, so the coyotes don’t get to them.”