Malevoween Day 30: Imprisonment & Traps

More Vampire AU at Primmoth’s request. This one is for you, buddy!

In which Arthur very quietly wins an important battle against Hastur.

Tags & warnings: Vampire AU, blood, violence, mind control

***

“How long have you had him?” Hastur asks John casually. His long, gnarled fingers curl about Arthur’s face and fondle his cheek with a venomous blend of threat and possessiveness.

He has them kneeling side by side at his feet. John isn’t even sure what keeps them there. Hastur’s will? Their fear for each other? Merely their own doubts that they can move faster than he can if they try to get away?

John opens his mouth automatically but no answer comes out. He’s lost track, he realizes. He has to do the math. “About forty years.”

Hastur snorts. “And how long have you been bound to each other?” Disdain drips from his voice.

“Thirty-nine years,” Arthur answers quietly before John even has the chance.

It’s an act of defiance. An interruption, when he wasn’t asked or told to speak. He meets Hastur’s baleful red gaze with a serenity that puts John’s heart in his mouth.

Hastur sinks his claws into the skin of Arthur’s face. “You allow yourself to be chained to this pathetic creature.”

“You can do a great deal to us.” Arthur speaks up again, the insane bastard. “But you can’t make us ashamed of each other.”

Hastur laughs. It’s cold enough to burn, and Arthur’s yanked it out of him despite Hastur’s determination to ignore him except as a toy. “No? Then I can make you regret it in other ways.” He squeezes and pulls Arthur up off his knees by his face, his talons sinking deeper into Arthur’s skin till they must be punctured all the way through his cheeks, scraping into his mouth. Arthur makes a little sound of pain through his teeth, but he doesn’t flinch.

His eyes shift from Hastur’s baleful red gaze to John’s, and hold them, steady as a rock.

John fucking loves this man. This stupid fucking bastard who’s going to get himself killed. “Stop fucking antagonizing him, Arthur,” John whispers viciously.

Arthur ignores him. “You won’t kill me,” he says to Hastur. His words are muffled, slow and slurred around the edges, with Hastur’s fingers impeding his enunciation. “Torture me, surely. But you’ll keep me alive, because I’m a chain around John’s heart.”

Hastur’s head turns toward John, and he realizes belatedly that he’s growling. 

”Shut up, Arthur. You aren’t helping,” John snarls. He could kill him himself. 

Hastur studies John for a moment, and then drops Arthur into his lap. There’s something awful about the look in his eyes: daring John to prove Arthur wrong. Daring him to be unaffected enough to show that Arthur isn’t worth Hastur’s time. That John doesn’t care enough about him to make him worth keeping.

John can’t do it. It’s an automatic reaction, the way his arms come up around Arthur to steady him. The deepest part of himself demands that he pull Arthur close and safe against the threat of Hastur’s presence.

Arthur licks at his own blood where it spills over his lips. It drips onto John’s shirt. His face is more or less a mask of blood in the shape of a hand.

“You’ve forged your own prison, child,” Hastur says. Contempt soaks his voice, but it doesn’t fully cloak the note of elated anticipation. He’s a sadist, this old monster. John knows him too well to buy into the lie. He enjoys his air of alien detachment, but the truth is he feasts on pain, and the prospect of sealing John’s heart and soul into this torture chamber delights him. “You’ll only be freed of it when I’ve taught you the desperation to do it yourself.”

“Yes,” Arthur whispers into John’s ear. Their temples bump together as John twists his head to stare at him in horror. 

The idea makes John’s entire body go cold as death. How much pain would it take? How much of their mutual suffering before he finally put Arthur out of their combined misery with his own hands?

Arthur stares him down, fierce as a raptor. There’s not a shadow of surrender in his eyes.

John wonders suddenly: is this the first time he’s ever thought of fighting Hastur?