Chapter Text
Water filled his nose, his mouth, his lungs when Tommy tried to inhale, and he jerked, wrists straining against his bindings. His legs kicked out feebly, but the weight pressing down on his back held him still, head pressed down as someone’s nails dug into his scalp.
Tommy coughed and spluttered as his head was yanked back up by his hair. The dull pain in his scalp was nothing compared to the burning in his lungs and the blood rushing out of his head as he was forcibly sat up straight again.
Water trickled down from his face, from his hair, soaking into the fabric of his filthy, months-old shirt. His nostrils flared and he gasped for air, inhaling greedily and the best he could around the weird plastic gag thing they had shoved into his jaw and between his teeth and covering the lower half of his face once they figured out he wasn’t afraid to bite.
Oh, what a glorious moment that had been. Sinking his teeth into feathers and feeling the skin break beneath his canines. Ripping and tearing out flesh like a wild animal, but the adrenaline high and the fury was enough to make him lunge for another, despite the foul tasting blood and the feathers that stuck to the inside of his mouth.
In the end, he had been beaten, thrown in his cage, and gagged. He’d been forced to watch for what felt like days, weeks, as the rest of the people in cages were fed, but he was passed by.
They started feeding him again. Eventually. A process that soon became him being taken to another, tiny room, being pressed to the floor and forced to beg for the scraps of trash they gave him. It was humiliating, but it was better than starving.
The gag’s clasp was locked around the back of his head, while the gag itself was stuck in the hinge of his jaw, sitting on his molars and pulling the corners of his mouth out farther than what was comfortable. It was only ever removed for feeding, and he had to be locked down to the floor for that, because before he would just lunge for them the moment his mouth was freed. Now, they chained him to the floor. Like a dog.
Unlocking the clasp of his muzzle was an unachievable goal. It was some kind of futuristic alien technology, not an actual, physical clasp that would have been much easier to bust open. With his hands tied the way they were constantly, he wasn’t able to reach behind him to try and break the clasp. Ramming his head into the side of his “cell”, what really could only be called a glorified dog kennel, proved to do nothing but give him a headache. The clasp presumably sitting at the nape of his neck made it difficult to bang into and try to disable the device.
He coughed again, cringing at how raw his throat felt and trembling as a hand gently ran itself down the side of his neck in a mock-comforting manner. He forced his eyes open, ignoring the tear that slipped down his cheek and the glass vial that was placed there to collect it before it fell onto the floor.
A flash of brilliant white fangs in an inhuman mouth. Claws trailing down his neck and then up again. Tommy let out an involuntary whimper, unable to help it as more tears slipped down his face and were caught by glass vials.
He didn’t know why the aliens who captured him all those months ago collected his tears. Nor why they collected his blood, why they yanked out two of his teeth, why they cut him open and left him to bleed or why they burned him with their stupid fucking fire powers or why they would give him food or water or air that made him sick.
Or why they would do this.
There weren’t any other humans on the ship anymore. There used to be, Tommy knew. He remembered sitting in what could only be described as a cargo bay, each crate locked to boxes felt like they were hundreds of pounds. He remembered looking around and seeing twenty-three other people with their similarly terrified faces.
He remembered sitting in that room locked in a fucking dog crate with those twenty-three other people, howling obscenities until he was muzzled, fighting until he was beaten and chained. Forced to listen to the others cry themselves to sleep and as they talked in low tones. A few spoke English like he did. Most didn’t.
Tommy remembered their faces. Remembered watching each one disappear from their own kennel until he was the only one left.
A low voice murmured in his ear, words distinctly not english and very much not human in general. Another light line was traced down his throat, from his chin to his collarbone, this time instead of a hand the perpetrator was the very tip of a claw, hard enough to hurt but not enough to make him bleed.
His tongue prodded at the gag in his mouth and another whimper came from him as a result of the claw. The high pitched screeching noise that Tommy had come to assume with this particular alien laughing came as a result, making him flinch, knees trembling. The alien holding onto his hair was pretty much the only thing keeping him upright at this point.
Tommy’s wrists strained against their bindings, where they were firmly lashed to his back to the point he could barely move them, The alien fuckers who had kidnapped him learned their lesson quickly when they figured out he could undo his bindings when he first “arrived”, and now the added restraints made it impossible.
He coughed a third time, taking another sharp gasp of air as the fingers in his hair tightened. A quick glance to the side revealed the alien holding him’s grin, full of fanged teeth like a shark that could easily rip his throat out of they wanted to. The weird bony things that lined it’s hollow cheeks and jaw and nose glinted in the bright artificial light. It’s eyes had turned from a pale gray color to neon green, as they always did when Tommy was forced to go through this.
Oh the things he would do to this fucker if he was ever given the opportunity, if he was ever given his hands again, his mouth again. He would tear it apart for everything it and its alien brethren had done to him. Spit in its face, watch as it tried to collect that. Then he’d rip it limb from fucking limb, show it exactly how much pain it had caused him and the others while they had been there.
But Tommy couldn’t. He was stuck. One bony, clawed hand with a firm grip around his head and a heavy weight pressing at his back. The way they had bound his hands together left little arm or hand movement, and, as always, the muzzle was impossible to remove without his hands.
Tommy closed his eyes just moments before the bony alien thrust his head downwards via their grip in his hair. His head was underwater again, the rim of the tub or sink or whatever it was digging into his chest with enough force that Tommy was slightly concerned that it was going to break his ribs. If they weren’t broken already.
Tommy had done this before, a hundred times in fact, but it didn’t matter. Panic flared through him the moment he hit the water, and all the air he had regained in his brief break was lost as he screamed. Adrenaline slammed into his veins all over again, the painful high burning at his nerves and dissolving in his veins as he was pressed further and further into the tub, into the water. Bubbles spewed from his mouth and floated upwards, the one direction that Tommy wanted his head to go but couldn’t make it there.
His legs kicked out, whole body thrashed, but the bony alien held him fast, it’s weight bearing down on his back and grip tightening on his hair as he was thrust further down. Tommy screamed again, muffled by the muzzle and the water as bubbles streamed out of his mouth, and continued to thrash. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to die. He was just a kid.
Tommy had done this a hundred times, and he knew what he should do in order to make this routine the slightest bit easier to bear. Hold his breath, don’t panic, don’t move. It’d make the little breath he managed to get in his breaks last longer. But every time his head hit the water, he’d freak out. You would think that he would be used to it at this point.
There was no getting used to this.
Precious seconds ticked by, his chest burning the longer he stayed under. He kicked out again, he tried to wrench his hair out of the aliens grip, he tried to do anything.
But just as always, he was still pressed into the tub, his resistance futile against the unnatural strength of the alien. His chest burned, his lungs felt like they were going to burst. His fingers scrabbled at his restraints, legs trembling, but nothing was happening. Just as hundred of times before, he was forced to sit and endure.
Tommy tried once more to throw the alien off, thrashing the best he could, only to be pressed further down.
They—
They normally brought him up by now.
They normally brought him up before his vision started going out, before he could pass out. But here he was, struggles growing weaker as it grew harder to move, vision darkening no matter how hard he tried to blink to clear it.
This must be it, huh? They were finally killing him. Just like they killed the rest. He stopped being entertaining, so they were getting rid of him. Just like that.
Tommy wanted to scream, shout, cry, yell at the world— the universe about how unfair this was. He was just a kid, had been going through school, preparing for college, and now he was going to die because he got abducted by aliens. It sounded like an awful start of the plot to a science fiction movie, yet it was real. Instead of being the person eating disgusting popcorn in a dark room, he was the actor, except there was no script, no stunts, no cuts.
He wanted to cry, and scream, and beg for them to stop, please, please just stop. Let him go. He’ll be good.
The truth was, he didn’t do any of those things. He knew this was going to happen eventually. He’d known this was probably going to be his fate ever since that first guy disappeared from his crate one day, and it’d only been cemented by each person who vanished after that. Once comedians stopped being funny, they were fired. Once dogs refused to do tricks, they were either beaten or retired.
It was getting harder and harder to think now, harder to move and thrash as his lungs screamed at him for anything, any type of air. Thoughts slipped from his brain like sand from his fingers, falling into little piles in his lap, just out of reach.
Tommy wished that he could be a fish alien, because there has to be a kind of fishy alien right? He hasn’t seen one before, there wasn’t one on the ship, but he imagined there was a fish alien somewhere in the universe. He wished he was one of them, so he could breathe.
Or maybe he could be the alien with stupid fire powers, burn the bony alien and run away. Or the dark alien that liked to cut him open and leave him to bleed; it could teleport, that’d be useful for getting away.
But he wasn’t any of those. He was just Tommy, a human, and that was the whole reason he’d been abducted anyways, as had the others. Sometimes he felt more like a dog than a human, forced to do “tricks” in order to get food. Being beaten and burned and bled and drowned and poisoned for their entertainment.
He tried once more to suck in a breath, only to be met with water in his mouth and nose. When trying to spit it out, only more water came, filling his throat and lungs. He wanted to scream, to cry, but darkness was coming and pulling him away as his body twitched, face still shoved into the water by a bony, clawed hand.
Guess they got tired of beating their dog for not doing tricks.