The Oriental, pt 2
Title: The Oriental (2/3)
Author: princessdoe
Summary: In the dark. Abruzzi/Sara, Abruzzi/T-Bag.
Rating: R for smut, language.
It's about ten by twelve, not much bigger than a walk-in closet; the floor is bare concrete with a drain set precisely in the middle. A low-wattage bulb glints off the aluminum toilet and sink combo at the back. A board-flat cotton single mattress with no sheets is huddled in the right-hand corner, and to the left is a matted drift of what looks like old newspapers.
Abruzzi checks himself on the threshold so he can turn and look at Bellick.
"You have got to be fucking kidding."
Bellick slaps his nightstick against his palm. He's smiling, but his eyes aren't. "What's the matter, John? Not up to your usual discriminating standards? Not the Four Seasons?" He nods in the direction of Abruzzi's midsection. "You heard me, con. This is a strip cell. Fold up the blues."
Bagwell is already shimmying out of his clothes with the kind of practiced fluidity that Abruzzi normally associates with Jersey City showgirls. Naked, the freak drops his gear in the CO's hands and then props an elbow against the doorframe, drawling, "How's about a cigarette, boss, before the whip comes down?"
The CO, Green, looks revolted but also slightly pitying; Bagwell leans in a hairsbreadth closer and says ingratiatingly, "Oh, come on. One bone. It won't hurt you none."
"Here." With a nervous look at Bellick, Green flips the freak a Camel unfiltered. He catches it deftly and palms it between two fingers, grinning. Abruzzi moves slowly during their banter, taking off and folding his trousers, his socks, his undershirt and boxers; finally, he hands them over.
Bellick takes them with a nasty curl of his lip. "You have just two rights in the Oriental, boys," he says, "and that's water and air. Water's at the back, and I want you to feel free to suck all the air you can take. Other than that, Godspeed and all bets are off until Monday morning."
He swings around, showing them his back. Green holds the edge of the door and looks at them somberly. Abruzzi glances over at the freak, who's standing up in the middle of the cell, chest out like a bantam rooster.
"Two and a half days?" Bagwell says jauntily, in a tone that almost makes Abruzzi groan aloud. "Is that all you got? Is that it? Because, let me say, fuck you and fuck yours, I've done two and half months in this --"
Abruzzi obeys his legs and sinks downward, coming to rest on the thin mattress. He watches T-Bag with the kind of fascinated attention he's only previously felt toward car wrecks and dying men. As the door meets the concrete, there's a sigh like the air from an exhaling corpse; just before it slams shut, Bagwell scrabbles against it, lifting himself somehow with his fingertips along the smooth walls.
"You think this is going to bother me?" he yells into the narrowing seam. For a few long minutes the freak tries to hold on, arms and legs tightening, his muscles shaking, but in spite of it he's sliding down like fate. When he hits the floor his body is a pale white blur against the grey concrete, his fists pounding against the steel. He shrieks and curses in an almost wordless rant, the sound as raw as though it's tearing the blood from his throat.
When the last grinding echoes of the turning lock go silent, he does too.
After a while, Bagwell subsides to the floor. His gaze meets Abruzzi's. He's still panting hard; his ribs jerk visibly under the thin covering of his skin, and his eyes shine wetly in the dimness of the single overhead bulb. "Because it don't," he says conversationally, when he speaks at last. "Bother me none, that is. It ain't the first time Bellick's thrown me in here. They might call this a torture cell, but I'm telling you, I can do a weekend in this shithole standing on my head. How about you, paisan? Are you holding up all right?"
Abruzzi rolls away from him and faces the wall. On his next breath, the lights go out.
"Gimme a word."
The voice is only a few feet away in the darkness; it's much closer than Abruzzi would like. When T-Bag sighs it's as though the other man's breath tickles his ear, and he winces.
"A word. Gimme a word, any word."
Abruzzi moves slightly on the mattress. He's cold, lying without sheets or blankets on the thin cotton ticking. He's not going to think about how Bagwell feels lying on the bare floor. He mutters, "Asshole."
There's a sound in the darkness that combines both a shifting of position and an exhale. His skin crawls at the idea of the freak's air being next to his.
"That's no good, capo. Not enough letters. You don't know how to play this game, do you? I guess the hacks never dared to throw Mr John Abruzzi in solitary before."
There's a long silence, longer even than it seems because of the darkness, and then Bagwell says, "She. Heal. Loss. Sole. Lose. Ash." A scuffle in the blackness, and then a hot exhale over Abruzzi's face. "See? The game is to make words from the words, but you didn't give me enough. You have to have a word that is polysyllabic." The way the freak says it -- polly-sylla-bic -- it sounds like a joke, even to Abruzzi with his tenth-grade English.
"Something like," the dark voice hisses, "gangland. That would work, wouldn't it? Gaaanglaaand. Except the game is always better with plurals. So, let's say, ganglands."
In the pure blackness, there's a long emptiness that's punctured at regular intervals by a solid ticking. Not his watch, Abruzzi knows; Bellick took his watch months ago. The slamming, quiet beat in his ears is his heart.
"Ganglands," Bagwell repeats meditatively. "Pretty easy. Want to try this one, John? It's a long damn time to be sitting here in the dark."
Abruzzi shakes his head silently, knowing the gesture goes unseen. The forward career of Bagwell's voice is hardly checked, anyway. "All right, then. Slang. Sandal. Lads. Salad. Sand. Nag. Alas."
"Gala."
The voice is so rusty that Abruzzi hardly recognizes it as his own. It seems to make an impress on the air that he can feel on his eyeballs in the absolute darkess. He says tentatively, "Use the letters from the word, right? So, gala. G-a-l-a. Like, you know, an event. A nice party."
"Now you got it, campare." The smile is there, fully heard, even if Abruzzi can't see it. It's rallying, encouraging. "Come on, then. Gimme another."
Abruzzi thinks. "Septicemia."
"What?" T-Bag is laughing.
"Shut up, chester." Abruzzi's still trying to find a a comfortable position on the mattress. He remembers his lawyer handing him some papers. "It's a medical thing. I saw it on an autopsy report once." The chill from the floor cuts straight through his skin, settling into his bones.
"That's pretty good," the freak says meditatively. "Lot of possibilities there. Let's see... time. Seem. Scam. Pieces. Oh, yeah. This is a good one." Another smile. "Smite. Tame. Pet. Spite. Tease. Pact...."
Somewhere down the list, Abruzzi falls asleep.
Belmopan (a soft, hateful voice somewhere in the back of his mind drawls omen, male, blame, alone, just before he shuts it up) -- Belmopan, in Belize. Abruzzi's been there once before, years ago, to meet a Falcioni family cocaine connection from Colombia. The beaches were all white sand that looked like flour and he was amazed at the birds. He's forgotten the negotiations, the percentages, but he remembers the birds, that the air was filled with the flash of their colored feathers and the screeching lilt of their voices as they flew.
Now he's back there again, standing hip-deep in the warm blue waters of a sheltered cay. Palm trees nod apart and knit together in the breeze over his head. There's a pleasant weight in his arms, soft and heavy, and instinctively he cradles it closer. Nicole? No; not his daughter. He loses his balance, just for a moment, then shifts and digs his feet for purchase into the sugar-soft sand.
Slender arms tighten with a deliciously vague strength around his neck. He yields to that pressure, bows his head into a soft cloud of red hair that holds the scent of lemons.
"John," Dr Tancredi says. Her voice thrums through him. She smiles brilliantly, happily, up into his face; he's never seen her look like this before, like nothing has ever frightened her or disappointed her. The parrots screech in the trees and the sun shines. She wriggles sinuously in his arms, her feet kicking sparkles of water into the air. She's beautiful, so beautiful that his heart hurts. She has brown eyes and the reddest lips he's ever seen, and he wants to kiss them more than he wants his next breath. He exhales wordlessly on a long groan.
Her lips curve like she's enjoying his need. She tilts in his arms, her long, tanned legs sliding down around his as her arms wrap around his waist.
"John." When she says his name again it's no more than a sigh, but he shudders like she's struck him. The clean blue water licks around her waist as she kneels. She reaches up gently, the loose curls of her hair spilling over her arms, her dark eyes searching his. Her breath puffs against his abdomen, and suddenly he knows he's naked. He feels himself shake under her touch. Her lips glide along his thighs until he feels the long swipe of a tongue over his rigid cock, supple fingers tightening at the root as the burning, knowing heat of that mouth sucks him in.
He grunts with surprise. Pleasure hits him like a fist in the stomach, his brain stuttering under the shock of it. Hard and involuntarily, his hips arch into welcoming wet heat. The stunned reflexes of desire, deadened for the past two years, come alive again as he tangles his fingers in soft hair and against warm skin, desperately holding that gorgeous, assiduously sucking mouth tight between his legs so he can thrust hard and deep.
The picture of her is breaking apart under his fingers as he comes. It shatters as he shatters, the sunlight and the birds and the water and her beautiful face all flying apart, all flying into nothingness with him as he's wracked and groaning, until finally he's completely awake, completely aware.
He's sprawled on the bare cement of the Oriental. The cold seeping into his spine, the hard spare body between his thighs, are instantly and horribly familiar.
John Abruzzi scrambles backwards in the formless darkness, fast and crablike, until his back hits an unseen wall with a force that drives the air from his lungs. He scrubs a hand violently across his face and retches.
There's a low laugh from somewhere just next to his knee. Bagwell drawls, "John. John. Don't tell me you never played that game, neither? Come on, now. No need to take on like that, we're just passing the time. You seemed like you could use a little help there, and me, I like to help a brother-man out, you know what I mean?"
He lunges forward towards the sound of the voice. There's a black gush of air as he stumbles, then his head hits the far wall hard enough to raise stars. When he hears Bagwell chuckling, it sounds like it's miles away.
Abruzzi raises himself to his feet, weaving like a drunken prizefighter. He feels certain of the miniscule amount of floor under his feet and nothing else. Beyond the abbreviated reach of his senses the world seems to spin dizzily, and he tries to focus it with his hate.
"Kill you," he growls finally. Each breath wrenches his chest.
He lunges forward again, towards a barely-felt draft of warmth. From the scrabbling noises as the freak evades him he can tell he's only just missed. He can smell Bagwell's sweat. If he tries, he can almost hear the beat of Bagwell's heart.
"I know you're here, Theodore," he says pleasantly into the blind darkness, willing himself to calmness. "And this is not a big room."
He throws himself forward at the next sound he hears, and he connects.
Author: princessdoe
Summary: In the dark. Abruzzi/Sara, Abruzzi/T-Bag.
Rating: R for smut, language.
It's about ten by twelve, not much bigger than a walk-in closet; the floor is bare concrete with a drain set precisely in the middle. A low-wattage bulb glints off the aluminum toilet and sink combo at the back. A board-flat cotton single mattress with no sheets is huddled in the right-hand corner, and to the left is a matted drift of what looks like old newspapers.
Abruzzi checks himself on the threshold so he can turn and look at Bellick.
"You have got to be fucking kidding."
Bellick slaps his nightstick against his palm. He's smiling, but his eyes aren't. "What's the matter, John? Not up to your usual discriminating standards? Not the Four Seasons?" He nods in the direction of Abruzzi's midsection. "You heard me, con. This is a strip cell. Fold up the blues."
Bagwell is already shimmying out of his clothes with the kind of practiced fluidity that Abruzzi normally associates with Jersey City showgirls. Naked, the freak drops his gear in the CO's hands and then props an elbow against the doorframe, drawling, "How's about a cigarette, boss, before the whip comes down?"
The CO, Green, looks revolted but also slightly pitying; Bagwell leans in a hairsbreadth closer and says ingratiatingly, "Oh, come on. One bone. It won't hurt you none."
"Here." With a nervous look at Bellick, Green flips the freak a Camel unfiltered. He catches it deftly and palms it between two fingers, grinning. Abruzzi moves slowly during their banter, taking off and folding his trousers, his socks, his undershirt and boxers; finally, he hands them over.
Bellick takes them with a nasty curl of his lip. "You have just two rights in the Oriental, boys," he says, "and that's water and air. Water's at the back, and I want you to feel free to suck all the air you can take. Other than that, Godspeed and all bets are off until Monday morning."
He swings around, showing them his back. Green holds the edge of the door and looks at them somberly. Abruzzi glances over at the freak, who's standing up in the middle of the cell, chest out like a bantam rooster.
"Two and a half days?" Bagwell says jauntily, in a tone that almost makes Abruzzi groan aloud. "Is that all you got? Is that it? Because, let me say, fuck you and fuck yours, I've done two and half months in this --"
Abruzzi obeys his legs and sinks downward, coming to rest on the thin mattress. He watches T-Bag with the kind of fascinated attention he's only previously felt toward car wrecks and dying men. As the door meets the concrete, there's a sigh like the air from an exhaling corpse; just before it slams shut, Bagwell scrabbles against it, lifting himself somehow with his fingertips along the smooth walls.
"You think this is going to bother me?" he yells into the narrowing seam. For a few long minutes the freak tries to hold on, arms and legs tightening, his muscles shaking, but in spite of it he's sliding down like fate. When he hits the floor his body is a pale white blur against the grey concrete, his fists pounding against the steel. He shrieks and curses in an almost wordless rant, the sound as raw as though it's tearing the blood from his throat.
When the last grinding echoes of the turning lock go silent, he does too.
After a while, Bagwell subsides to the floor. His gaze meets Abruzzi's. He's still panting hard; his ribs jerk visibly under the thin covering of his skin, and his eyes shine wetly in the dimness of the single overhead bulb. "Because it don't," he says conversationally, when he speaks at last. "Bother me none, that is. It ain't the first time Bellick's thrown me in here. They might call this a torture cell, but I'm telling you, I can do a weekend in this shithole standing on my head. How about you, paisan? Are you holding up all right?"
Abruzzi rolls away from him and faces the wall. On his next breath, the lights go out.
"Gimme a word."
The voice is only a few feet away in the darkness; it's much closer than Abruzzi would like. When T-Bag sighs it's as though the other man's breath tickles his ear, and he winces.
"A word. Gimme a word, any word."
Abruzzi moves slightly on the mattress. He's cold, lying without sheets or blankets on the thin cotton ticking. He's not going to think about how Bagwell feels lying on the bare floor. He mutters, "Asshole."
There's a sound in the darkness that combines both a shifting of position and an exhale. His skin crawls at the idea of the freak's air being next to his.
"That's no good, capo. Not enough letters. You don't know how to play this game, do you? I guess the hacks never dared to throw Mr John Abruzzi in solitary before."
There's a long silence, longer even than it seems because of the darkness, and then Bagwell says, "She. Heal. Loss. Sole. Lose. Ash." A scuffle in the blackness, and then a hot exhale over Abruzzi's face. "See? The game is to make words from the words, but you didn't give me enough. You have to have a word that is polysyllabic." The way the freak says it -- polly-sylla-bic -- it sounds like a joke, even to Abruzzi with his tenth-grade English.
"Something like," the dark voice hisses, "gangland. That would work, wouldn't it? Gaaanglaaand. Except the game is always better with plurals. So, let's say, ganglands."
In the pure blackness, there's a long emptiness that's punctured at regular intervals by a solid ticking. Not his watch, Abruzzi knows; Bellick took his watch months ago. The slamming, quiet beat in his ears is his heart.
"Ganglands," Bagwell repeats meditatively. "Pretty easy. Want to try this one, John? It's a long damn time to be sitting here in the dark."
Abruzzi shakes his head silently, knowing the gesture goes unseen. The forward career of Bagwell's voice is hardly checked, anyway. "All right, then. Slang. Sandal. Lads. Salad. Sand. Nag. Alas."
"Gala."
The voice is so rusty that Abruzzi hardly recognizes it as his own. It seems to make an impress on the air that he can feel on his eyeballs in the absolute darkess. He says tentatively, "Use the letters from the word, right? So, gala. G-a-l-a. Like, you know, an event. A nice party."
"Now you got it, campare." The smile is there, fully heard, even if Abruzzi can't see it. It's rallying, encouraging. "Come on, then. Gimme another."
Abruzzi thinks. "Septicemia."
"What?" T-Bag is laughing.
"Shut up, chester." Abruzzi's still trying to find a a comfortable position on the mattress. He remembers his lawyer handing him some papers. "It's a medical thing. I saw it on an autopsy report once." The chill from the floor cuts straight through his skin, settling into his bones.
"That's pretty good," the freak says meditatively. "Lot of possibilities there. Let's see... time. Seem. Scam. Pieces. Oh, yeah. This is a good one." Another smile. "Smite. Tame. Pet. Spite. Tease. Pact...."
Somewhere down the list, Abruzzi falls asleep.
Belmopan (a soft, hateful voice somewhere in the back of his mind drawls omen, male, blame, alone, just before he shuts it up) -- Belmopan, in Belize. Abruzzi's been there once before, years ago, to meet a Falcioni family cocaine connection from Colombia. The beaches were all white sand that looked like flour and he was amazed at the birds. He's forgotten the negotiations, the percentages, but he remembers the birds, that the air was filled with the flash of their colored feathers and the screeching lilt of their voices as they flew.
Now he's back there again, standing hip-deep in the warm blue waters of a sheltered cay. Palm trees nod apart and knit together in the breeze over his head. There's a pleasant weight in his arms, soft and heavy, and instinctively he cradles it closer. Nicole? No; not his daughter. He loses his balance, just for a moment, then shifts and digs his feet for purchase into the sugar-soft sand.
Slender arms tighten with a deliciously vague strength around his neck. He yields to that pressure, bows his head into a soft cloud of red hair that holds the scent of lemons.
"John," Dr Tancredi says. Her voice thrums through him. She smiles brilliantly, happily, up into his face; he's never seen her look like this before, like nothing has ever frightened her or disappointed her. The parrots screech in the trees and the sun shines. She wriggles sinuously in his arms, her feet kicking sparkles of water into the air. She's beautiful, so beautiful that his heart hurts. She has brown eyes and the reddest lips he's ever seen, and he wants to kiss them more than he wants his next breath. He exhales wordlessly on a long groan.
Her lips curve like she's enjoying his need. She tilts in his arms, her long, tanned legs sliding down around his as her arms wrap around his waist.
"John." When she says his name again it's no more than a sigh, but he shudders like she's struck him. The clean blue water licks around her waist as she kneels. She reaches up gently, the loose curls of her hair spilling over her arms, her dark eyes searching his. Her breath puffs against his abdomen, and suddenly he knows he's naked. He feels himself shake under her touch. Her lips glide along his thighs until he feels the long swipe of a tongue over his rigid cock, supple fingers tightening at the root as the burning, knowing heat of that mouth sucks him in.
He grunts with surprise. Pleasure hits him like a fist in the stomach, his brain stuttering under the shock of it. Hard and involuntarily, his hips arch into welcoming wet heat. The stunned reflexes of desire, deadened for the past two years, come alive again as he tangles his fingers in soft hair and against warm skin, desperately holding that gorgeous, assiduously sucking mouth tight between his legs so he can thrust hard and deep.
The picture of her is breaking apart under his fingers as he comes. It shatters as he shatters, the sunlight and the birds and the water and her beautiful face all flying apart, all flying into nothingness with him as he's wracked and groaning, until finally he's completely awake, completely aware.
He's sprawled on the bare cement of the Oriental. The cold seeping into his spine, the hard spare body between his thighs, are instantly and horribly familiar.
John Abruzzi scrambles backwards in the formless darkness, fast and crablike, until his back hits an unseen wall with a force that drives the air from his lungs. He scrubs a hand violently across his face and retches.
There's a low laugh from somewhere just next to his knee. Bagwell drawls, "John. John. Don't tell me you never played that game, neither? Come on, now. No need to take on like that, we're just passing the time. You seemed like you could use a little help there, and me, I like to help a brother-man out, you know what I mean?"
He lunges forward towards the sound of the voice. There's a black gush of air as he stumbles, then his head hits the far wall hard enough to raise stars. When he hears Bagwell chuckling, it sounds like it's miles away.
Abruzzi raises himself to his feet, weaving like a drunken prizefighter. He feels certain of the miniscule amount of floor under his feet and nothing else. Beyond the abbreviated reach of his senses the world seems to spin dizzily, and he tries to focus it with his hate.
"Kill you," he growls finally. Each breath wrenches his chest.
He lunges forward again, towards a barely-felt draft of warmth. From the scrabbling noises as the freak evades him he can tell he's only just missed. He can smell Bagwell's sweat. If he tries, he can almost hear the beat of Bagwell's heart.
"I know you're here, Theodore," he says pleasantly into the blind darkness, willing himself to calmness. "And this is not a big room."
He throws himself forward at the next sound he hears, and he connects.