Trust Exercises

Chapter 5

Pike stoked the fire in the pit at the center of the small room, the only light source in the insular space so late in the evening. The space was unadorned except for a symbol of the Everlight hanging over the one door, with a cabinet set in a wall opposite where Pike had pulled out the fire-starting supplies. He'd been told to sit on the floor there -- aside from the brasier and the cabinet the room held no furniture, and the very obvious smoke stains near the chimney at the ceiling unnerved him even though they had a very obvious source. Though the floor had been cleaned, the stubborn, faded stains at the corners of the room were similarly unnerving, and it was not as obvious where those had come from.

Pike took a pouch from the cabinet and tossed a handful of powder from it onto the flames -- it blinked almost imperceptibly for a moment, and let off a spicy smell before quickly burning off. Then she pulled a towel from the same cabinet. "Okay! Looks like that's ready. I'm going to get the priestess, you get out of those clothes and put this on and then we'll start."

Percy stared at the threadbare towel, one that had obviously been bleached to near disintegration from whatever horrors it had experienced in this room. She pushed the towel to him more insistently before he said, "I can't. I can't do this."

She tensed for a moment, visible now as she'd actually doffed even her armor padding so she wouldn't fry in the quickly unbearably heating room. "Percy. I get it. Or even if I don't get it, please. You've already gotten this far, you've already prepped. It's going to be all over before you know it, and you'll feel so much better and you'll wonder what you were so freaked out about when it's over. You said you'd trust me, so, just trust me."

"I can't," he said. His palms sweat in his gloves, and his fingers had gone numb along with his lips. An hour before, the priestess had given him an assortment of preparations to drink the green vial, an entire pitcher of water, and then the two black vials, which were supposed to do something to prepare him but only seemed to send him running to the outhouse. Now he couldn't tell if the skipped beats in his chest were from the tinctures or something else, but still, as hot as he was getting, he was not inclined to even take those gloves off.

"You can do this," she said, pressing the towel against his chest, and he didn't take it, but just flinched. "You can and you will! You can do this and I'll be right here with you." She tried to dissect this last-minute hesitation to find the right reassurance. "I'm a healer, the priestess is a healer. We've seen everything, you've got a towel, just pretend it's a public bathhouse with us." She must have forgotten that one time Vox Machina had all been together, he hadn't been there. Percy had excused himself to run an errand, saying he would catch up later. Nobody had said anything at the time.

"You don't understand, I just can't –" when he tried to move, she pressed harder, pushing him back to his seat on the floor – it was hard to remember exactly how strong she was despite her size.

"When I say healers have seen everything, I mean ev-er-y-thing. We know your situation. We know what... we know what people can do to boys when they try to end a noble line. It's... well, it's upsetting, but we're not here to make any judgements and nothing will leave this room. We just want to help you, and to help you you need to get undressed." she said.

He didn't nod, he didn't acknowledge this at all, instead his stare was elsewhere. She let the towel drop and grabbed his face. "Snap out of it!"

He blinked, he breathed, but there was still something wrong, his lip quivering slightly, incapable of forming words at first, until he could say, "What do you think happened to me, Pike?"

"I don't know," said Pike. "I don't know because you don't tell me. I want to help you, and for me to help you you need to tell me what's wrong. Can you do that?"

All sound stuck at the bottom of his throat, unable to bubble forward. He could only shake his head.

"Percy. Listen. You already took the prep. I know I said we're going to start but you've already started and you need to finish it. Those preparations, you only drink them with the expectation that you're doing the rest of the ritual and taking more preparations within a certain time frame. If you don't actually do it, well, what they do to you isn't fun. So look at me. Do you understand me? This is what we're going to do. You don't have to tell me anything. I am going to go outside the room and let you get undressed. Then when you're done I'll come in to check on you so – no, no, you're looking for exits, I can see that. There's just the door and the chimney and you cannot fit through the chimney even if you could somehow shimmy up there. Don't look at that. Look at me."

There was something wrong with him, and her bag of tricks was empty. "I can't try a spell to make this easier for you because of what happened earlier today. I wish I could but I can't -- this is something you've got to do yourself. And I know you can do it and you're going to do it, and I'm going to step out for a moment so you can. Do you understand me?"

"I understand you but I can't –"

"Don't think about that. Just try. Please. Do your best, that's all you can do. I'm going... I'm going to leave you alone now, and I'll knock in a few minutes to check up on you. Just take off your clothes and put on the towel. Two things, that's it. You can do it, okay?"

–

Mercifully, or perhaps not, Percy did not have any of his weapons on him – this may have turned out differently if the the only sharp thing in the room was a piece of flint Pike had used to start the fire. Alone, he could hear everything, the crackling of the brasier, the air sucking down the chimney, the soft sounds of the clergy going about evening work. But inside the room, he was alone.

He pulled off one glove, and then the other, his hands covered in their usual scars from his work, and now the prosthetic on the left to stabilize what remained of his hand enough to be functional. It was going to be a weapon -- that was all he was good for making, he knew -- but it wasn't one now, not yet, the acid burns from it leaking during the last test still stinging. But he kept it on even if it wasn't finished yet because he needed to get used to it, he needed to know how to tweak it to make it more comfortable, and it did, he thought, help make his hand steadier, or at least it had before, but now both his hands were shaking. He could start on his shirt buttons but fumbling with one made the second pop off and skitter onto the floor and into the brasier. His hands were useless, now, at what he had used to be good at, and now even at just undoing buttons, and that buttons could be replaced was a useless thought. Sometimes they couldn't, not soon enough to matter, anyway. Because who knew if he was ever going to get out of here, who knew if he was ever going to get needle and thread, it was not like this had never happened before, and he had just had to convince himself he was clever enough to just figure it out, to make-do without either, and try to fasten his clothes back on by tearing in ties or something and just ending up making a mess of it because he'd had no tools but his own teeth and battered hands.

Be a dear and get those off. I need to be able to see what I'm doing.

He didn't know if he'd torn off those fasteners himself, though. He remembered upon being returned to his cell that the shit bucket was empty; someone had obviously been in there, but his grubby clothes were in the other corner where he'd left them. And the ends of the thread had been jagged, uneven, torn not cut, but someone else's hands could have done that just as easily as his. But now, he knew it was him. Look at him now.

No it's not just that if I miss I might castrate you. That's not what I have in mind today. Here's a quick anatomy lesson -- your femoral artery is right about here. You do not want me to touch that, but see, now that I can see what I'm doing, I know not to do that. I can, instead, start here...

His trousers had been ruined from not just the attempts to tear them back together but from the blood inevitably seeping through, coagulating and crusting between his thighs.

I think I'm being rather reasonable here. We did check what you told us last time, and we did find it was a lie. You can stop this all just by telling us the truth, Percival. It's really that simple. We're not interested in anything else but the truth.

He didn't know how long it had taken for them to give him new clothes, but by the time they had, he'd grown ill with fever, curled up by the shit bucket where he'd puked up whatever small amount of fluid he could muster from his weakened guts. And though he couldn't remember where it was, for some time they had put him somewhere warmer and softer until the fever passed, and then before he knew it they'd thrown him back in the same cell, his own body's stains still dark on the dirt floor.

Please, be a dear and get those off. I need to be able to see what I'm doing...

He could try to think, as he usually did, but it didn't matter. Nothing he did really mattered. When the same source would just as easily tear into your body and mutilate you as swaddle you by the hearth and feed you soup, there was no thinking to be done. Your gods were capricious gods and the only thing he tried to do was escape. Cassandra had been left there, to be torn apart, and put back together, and torn apart, and put back together by them, so many times, in so many ways, the thought of it over and over for years and years nearly stopped his heart, at least the rest of them had had the good fortune to die in one night.

But maybe that was just it, maybe it didn't end, when your gods were capricious gods. It didn't matter who they were, what face they wore, they would always come back and find you.

"Buddy? Hey? Did you pass out again?" It was Pike, tugging on the towel he'd pulled over his face. He wasn't sure why it had been pulled over his face -- it had seemed like it had belonged there at one time, but he didn't know why. She reached a thumb and pulled one eyelid down and then the other, searching for evidence of something wrong.

"Are we done," said Percy quietly. The fire still burned the same in the brasier, the door to the outside hall open now, but the hallway dark.

"Uh, I left you alone for like ten minutes and you're still fully dressed and curled up on the floor."

"Oh."

"I'm sorry I took so long. I was talking to the priestess."

"...about the jam," he tried. He didn't know what he was trying to do. Was it supposed to be a joke? Maybe that was why Pike was giving him such a funny look.

"Did you hit your head or something?" she said.

Had he?

"I mean. You're obviously not okay, whatever's going on. We can stop. Miral said she could make something that would flush you out and it's not ideal but it's better than nothing and we can start again tomorrow or... we can take as long as it takes. The noon is particularly good for this kind of stuff, anyway." She sat on the floor next to him, and he still didn't move. "It's okay. Everything's going to be okay. I'm sorry for pressuring you. I should have prepared you better."

The fire crackled quietly and something was trickling back to him, a sense of time and place that he hadn't had before. The floor, while it was definitely softer than some places they'd made camp for the night, wasn't particularly comfortable.

He heard a muffled voice just outside the room that must have been the Priestess. "Markus can you get another acolyte and the stretcher? No, it's not that, he's just already fainted once today and I don't want to mess with it."

How embarrassing for whoever 'he' was, thought Percy, though after a moment he realized they were referring to him.

"Anyway, I did ask the priestess about the clothes thing. She said that the reason they ask is because people tend to either ruin their clothes or take them off anyway during the ritual, so she finds it's better to just have them off to begin with. But she said if you're okay with that, then you can just leave your clothes on, it's fine."

The present had animated his limbs enough to haul himself back to his knees, despite Pike's protests.

"It's fine," he said.

"What?"

"It's fine, let's do this before I change my mind."

Pike stared for a moment, and then gave him a pat on the back that almost sent him to the floor again. "All right then. Let's do this." She returned to the door and said something to those outside, and the priestess entered, a bemused expression on her face. But she had returned nonetheless, a bowl in hand and a pouch at her hip and she sat beside the brasier with them.

Pike sat again, relieved, as the priestess began pulling items from the pouch, staring with some kind of leaf, some kind of powder, an unfamiliar soft fruit, and a bottle of amber liquid. She took the leaf into her mouth and stripped it from the stem and took a swig from the bottle and began crushing the fruit with her fist and folding in half the powder. After about a minute, the fruit was fully blended in and she spat the liquid from her mouth into the bowl, filtering out the leaves through her teeth, and spat the leaf mush into the brasier, causing it to flare a strange blue color for a split second. She emptied the rest of the bottle into the bowl as well, and let it swirl around a bit, and the fruit seemed to dissolve into a thick goo.

Then, she passed the bowl across Pike to him.

"Drink," she said.

It didn't really look a consistency that could be drunk.

"All of it. Now. Before I change my mind," she said.

The smell wafting up from it in the heat was thick, strangely animal rather than fruit. He looked to Pike for some kind of confirmation.

"You heard her," she said. "Chug."

After a moment's hesitation, he lifted the bowl up to his lips, the smell like an overpowering wall.

"Chug," said Pike. "Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug!"

And to this chant he started to drink, if it could be called that. It was more like a sludge that slithered down his throat, feeling as if by its own power, but there was so much of it, and it pressed so hard on his senses that even halfway through the bowl became unbearably heavy and without Pike's support he couldn't have kept it angled so it would continue to drain. By the end of it, the bowl fell away and his hands quaked and little blue and orange sparks clouded his vision. The entire room swayed like he was on a ship for the first time, but even harder as he toppled into Pike.

"Woah there, easy, easy," she said, and she had caught him, of course, but as he opened his mouth to say something, to apologize, to say he felt weird, that something was wrong, the only thing that spewed forth was dark, acrid smoke, the taste having the same sting of his workshop's chemicals. Somewhere distantly the priestess had begun to speak, to chant, but it was only Pike who said, for the most part, real words. "I got you. I got you." The smoke escaping him billowed but not just out to wherever it could find -- it followed direction, now, it had guidance, from the brasier roaring on its own and the flue in the ceiling sucking it up. He tried to speak again, but words didn't work, now, and the fire only danced prettily before them in a way it hadn't before.

"Just breathe normally, all right?" said Pike with a cough, holding his chin steady with one hand, and she pressed a rag against his nose and mouth with the other, and at first he thought that he must have been drooling in this state, but the smell changed again, and the firelight dimmed, and the room, despite everything, grew cold.