Note: This story is a sort of AU and sort of not. I suppose, imagine if a Lee Scoresby and a Lyra and a Iorek all existed in a world very similar to the one in the books, but this is not the Lyra destined by fate. And since alternate worlds exist in the books and it is suggested alternate versions of people may also exist, why not them? So some aspects of their lives are the same and some are different. This Lyra still went out and still helped Iorek regain his throne and still became like a daughter to Lee…but she won't be destined to journey to other worlds or need quite the same level of sacrifice for her involved in the books. Which is a long-winded way of saying 'Lee has basically become her dad and Iorek is like an uncle and they are all currently together for reasons'. And this Lyra does not have her alethiometer, which is a pity, but I suppose anyone who has finished the series can guess why. So…on to the story.

Warnings: Non-con (but no rape) and allusions to pedophilia and bestiality though no actual pedophilia or bestiality. Also quite a bit of violence. Quite possibly death.

Story

Being beaten was not pleasant, not in the sense of losing and even moreso when the beating was literal. Losing a fight smarted a man's pride but having the fight taken away and just being forced to take the pain without any chance of hitting back could flay a man's pride to ribbons.

Lee Scoresby was no stranger to pain or to fighting. He had made an art of using other people's smallness against them; he knew how to win fights, no matter how rough or dirty, and even when he lost the fight, when he limped away, licking the blood from his lips, squinting through his one good eye, he still counted himself among the winners. Because his fists were bruised as much as his ribs, and he was free and alive and 'you shoulda seen the other guy'. Never mind that the 'other guy' might not be so bad off in appearance. Lee Scoresby knew ways of fighting that left bruises where they couldn't be seen.

And when it was that kind of fighting, when it was battle rather than brawl, he knew how to use a gun, a knife, a stone, a boot, how to aim to wound. How to aim to kill.

People sometimes looked at Hester and thought 'rabbit' and applied every negative connotation to the man that went with the daemon. They thought he would be easily cowed, weak. They thought he would be timid. But rabbits are not timid so much as they are survivors. And, even more to the point, Hester was not a rabbit at all; she was an arctic hare. The thing to know about arctic hares is that they are at home when they are solitary and they are at home when they are in a crowd and the mothers protect their children fiercely and they are fast and they are free.

They are also the natural prey of arctic wolves.

The first man's wolf to lunge at Hester got a powerful kick that near broke the daemon's jaw, the second a swipe of her claws, unexpected in a herbivore, drawing blood. But wolves hunt in packs and it was the third daemon that managed to nab her.

Up to then, Lee could not honestly have said he was winning the fight; his lip was already bleeding, his back was bruised and torn under the force of a now shattered chair (his chair, darn it, he had liked that chair) and a blow to his side had felt rather like being caught between an anvil and a mallet. But he was doing better than the man now groaning on the floor, or the one lying still, and all three of those still standing had some mark, big or small, to show Lee Scoresby knew how to fight back. Lee's blood was singing in his veins, high on adrenalin, and he did not enjoy fighting but he did enjoy the rush that came with a dirty knockdown brawl.

They fought best, Hester and Lee, when they saw it coming and Hester could take a defensible position, someplace small and hard to reach, where she could watch his back or shout advise: "Behind you! Knife! Use the chair! Ooh, stop letting them hit you, Lee, get up! That's it, hit 'em where it hurts!"

Only the ambush had come when they were slightly drunk and thought themselves alone. Thought themselves perfectly safe. And Hester was not shouting out advise, she was fending off teeth and claws. This left Lee feeling divided and vulnerable, no, not feeling, he was divided and vulnerable, but he fought because there was nothing else to do, and he fought well. Right up to the point the daemon had Hester in her jaws.

The shock of it was enough to throw Lee when he went to take a swing with the remains of a chair leg. And it was still three on one. No, four on one; the man groaning on the floor had dragged himself up when Lee was distracted.

The man managed to grab Lee by his arms, and Lee was a seasoned fighter, he knew what to do about holds like that, but teeth were drawing blood on his daemon and she shouted, not even words, just pain, and the other three closed in, and one just hit him, in the stomach, taking his breath, and one had some rope, and, almost before he knew he was caught, Lee's hands were bound and his feet were knocked out from under him and the fight was over and he had definitely lost.

They could have killed them both then and there and left the body for his companions to find. Bindings suggested they wanted something different though. So, no matter what kind of idiot Hester called him afterwards, Lee felt it moderately safe to run his mouth.

"Mighty proud of yourselves, are you, jumping an unarmed man and his rabbit," he drawled out, going for utter unconcern, just as though he hadn't been soundly roughed up and then savagely bound. The ropes were tight enough to worry over circulation if he hadn't had bigger worries. Like the men doing the tying.

"Shut up, Lee," Hester growled. Lee wasn't entirely sure if she was angry about him antagonizing their attackers or calling her a rabbit. Knowing her, probably both. They hadn't bothered to tie her up either; it's not like she could run away with Lee bound as he was and her bound to him. Neither knew whether to be pleased they'd overlooked her or insulted.

"Don't worry about them," Lee told Hester, pretending to not know why else she might be upset, "Sure as sure, they be stupider than a cart of donkey's dung to go hunting in an armored bear's camp." He finished by spitting blood from his lip at the feet of his nearest attacker. Instead of rounding on him with his fist or boot, as Lee rather expected and had half braced himself for, the man just looked down at him and smirked.

"The bear en't here now, is he? He left with the girl. En't no one coming to save you now. And when they do come, we'll be ready."

"You en't touching them," Lee answered, the sheer icy touch of pure fear making him lose all of his contrived calm, because they were not going to touch his friends. "You sure en't."

"We sure are," the man answered, still smirking. It was the man he had left groaning on the ground. There was no sign of groaning now, not even a limp. He must have been faking. Lee was usually better than that to be taken in by such an obvious dupe. Then the smirking man turned to his companions, who seemed divided between glaring at Lee and Hester and helping the man Lee had rendered unconscious. There was no faking there at least.

"Bring them," said the man. He was clearly in charge of the operation. Lee wondered if he could use that.

They hadn't bound Lee's legs, an oversight the Texan fully intended to use, but it turned out the only reason was to force him to walk himself and he never got the chance to teach them their folly.

One of their wolves lunged at Hester, who naturally, still being free, dodged away, using Lee as a sort of shield knowing the wolf wouldn't want to touch him. No daemon would touch a human who wasn't theirs, just as no human would touch someone else's daemon. This went on almost comically for several minutes until the man in charge tired of watching. Then he walked over, sighed in annoyance, and kicked Lee in the ribs so hard Lee began to rethink how badly they wanted him alive, because that could easily have ruptured something inside him. Maybe it had. At the very least, Lee was inclined to think his ribs cracked.

It also fulfilled the man's intentions, stunning Lee's daemon long enough for the wolf to grab her up in her jaws, tight enough to hurt but not to kill.

Making Lee walk after that was as simple as carrying his daemon forward. They did it before Lee even had a chance to stand, still reeling from the kick and trying to remember how to breathe, when the pain of the stretch between him and Hester dragged at him. It still took him almost a minute to get his feet under him. No one helped him up. The leader smirked, amused, and Hester cursed. Lee would have liked to curse himself, but it was just about all he could do to breathe and get to his feet and anything else was beyond him.

They kept the distance between Lee and Hester painful for the entirety of the walk, never letting him near enough to ease it. Lee fell four times, unable to properly balance himself on the rough, terrain with his arms bound and being sore and in pain besides. He fell hard, equally unable to catch himself and no one did it for him. At least once he fell because someone's feet tripped him up. They would pause then and watch him try to get back to his feet, as awkward as a newborn calf, laughing and jeering, and the wolf with Hester almost seemed to be playing, the way she would move towards him, then away, tugging at his bond.

They got where they were going eventually.

It looked like an outpost of some kind; there was a high wooden fence surrounding three wooden buildings with an open bit in the middle. Lee glanced at the fence scornfully as he limped through the gate; that would be no barrier to Iorek that was certain. Even Lyra alone could have found her way past that flimsy fortification.

But he didn't want to think on Lyra coming to his rescue. He barely cared to think of Iorek playing the knight to his damsel in distress. For one, it was a bit humiliating. For another, his captor had all but said he knew about Lee's companions and had plans for them. Those plans Lee did not know but they did not bode well.

Still, just because those men were good enough to get the jump on Lee, five against one (ten against two, really, with the daemons), didn't mean they were prepared for an armored bear, no matter what they thought. And no one was prepared for Lyra.

Lee was made to go into one of the buildings. It was little more than a shack, dark inside and filled in one corner with barrels and sacks. It smelled unpleasant, part barracks and part fish and part burning oil, the cheap kind.

It wasn't just a storage shed though; there were metal manacles with chains attached to a post near the center of the room. They dragged Lee over to them as soon as he crossed the door and they attached them to his feet and his wrists before cutting away his bindings. Hester was put into a cage, one that would certainly have held a real hare but would be laughably easy for an intelligent daemon to get out of. It wasn't even locked, just latched. She made no move to try though, not with their captors still surrounding them on high alert. Instead she looked towards Lee and sat in her cage, wary and waiting. They put them just far apart enough to feel the tug, but not quite so far as to be a torture. Lee supposed they didn't want him completely broken or dead. Not yet, anyway.

It would help Lee to figure out what they had grabbed him for if he knew who they were. The outpost could suggest a military branch, or it could be borrowed. They could be bandits, or official soldiers, though the lack of uniforms suggested the former to be more likely.

"I supposed you're wondering what we brought you here for," said the smirking man who Lee had mentally dubbed 'Captain' in his mind. Whether he was a captain or not, he was certainly in charge.

"Not hard to guess," answered Lee. "You're here to die."

The Captain raised an eyebrow while the two men who had followed them in stared at Lee. One looked nervous, the younger one. The Captain looked amused. The other looked annoyed. Lee had a talent for bringing out mixed emotions in others.

"Is that so?" asked the Captain.

"Sure is," Lee answered. "You ever seen an armored bear in battle? Their jaws can crush a man's skull. And their claws are sharp as razors, six to a foot. They can rip and they can crush and they can slice. They're bigger than you can imagine. And they're smart. They can smell a trick a mile off. So what else is a man to think when a group of men are stupid enough to steal into an armored bear's camp and make a mess? You want to die."

"We know all about that sick little family you've got going on," said the Captain, still smirking. Lee was beginning to hate that smirk. He'd put up with a good deal of pain if it meant wiping that smirk off the man's face. "A man and a beast together out raising a little girl. We'll be doing the girl a favor taking her away from that. Do tell me…do you take him or let him take you? Does the little girl watch or join in?"

If he were hoping to either shame or anger Lee with his implications he mostly failed. Mostly, because suggesting either Lee or Iorek would do something so grotesque as to harm a child was hideous, not to mention threatening (because if the Captain could think it, could he do it?), but Lee managed to clamp down his sudden anger and focus on the other insinuations.

"Jealous?" he asked with a bit of a smirk of his own. "That little thing your lover uses not big enough for you?" And if that suggested that the insinuations were true and Lee was having sex with Iorek, well, nothing shameful for two consenting adults to have a bit of fun. They weren't; Iorek was not attracted to humans in the slightest and Lee didn't seem to be attracted to anyone as far as he could tell, but if their love had gone in that direction Lee would never have been ashamed. And his words finally did what he had been hoping, turning the Captain's smirk into a snarl.

Lee braced himself, expecting more punches. But the Captain did not move, just stood and looked at him with such fierce hatred it was almost worse than a fist.

"I'd watch my mouth if I was you," the Captain said. "We have ways of shutting you up."

"Now that, I'd like to see," said Hester from her cage, and Lee knew perfectly well what she was doing and did not appreciate it in the least. The Captain's wolf growled at Hester, a deep rumble in the back of her throat.

"Shall we gag him, sir?" demanded one of the other men. The Captain seemed to consider this for a moment.

"You got a gag for the rabbit?" he asked. The man looked confused for a moment and shook his head.

"Then not much point if you mean to keep them both quiet. Still…might as well. He won't need to talk."

Lee did not like being chained up. He absolutely hated being gagged. It was taking away his final method for fighting back.

"I don't think it will do a lick of good," Hester said, knowing perfectly well how Lee hated gags, and hoping to distract them from following through. "Lee can talk more with just his eyes than a priest on Sunday."

"Perhaps a blindfold as well, then," said the Captain, and Hester lowered her ears, thinking she had made things worse.

The gag they used was an old rag, and not particularly clean; it tasted of sweat and grease and if Lee had it in his power to spit it out he would have, but the man knew his way around a gag. If he weren't just gagged, Lee would likely have made comments about that. Hester obliged him anyway.

"Get a lot of practice with that?" Hester asked. "No wonder you all are so bent on getting a bear to sex up if that's what you get up to."

Lee had never loved Hester more. And had never so much wished she would shut up in his life. Whatever had been said about a blindfold, no one made a move to apply one. The Captain looked at Lee, then at Hester.

"I did warn you we have ways of silencing you both," he said, almost casually, not smirking, not angry. Then he walked over to Hester's cage, flipped open the top latch, reached in and grabbed her by the ears.

Lee screamed, loud even through the gag, and Hester went absolutely still from the shock of it.

No one touched other people's daemons. It simply was not done. Not even to one's enemies. Not even in the thick of battle, when any advantage could mean the difference between life or death.

The other men looked uncomfortable in the extreme, but no one said anything, no one stopped him. The Captain pulled Hester right out of the cage still holding her by the ears, and that was uncomfortable, painful even, Lee could sense that underneath, but that was nothing to the sheer wrongness of feeling another person's hands on his Hester.

It was not pain. It was violation, as surely as if the Captain had ripped Lee open and pushed his hand inside. His hands did not belong on Lee's daemon. If it weren't for the gag, Lee would be screaming obscenities. How could the other men, the other daemons, just stand there and let that happen?

Hester was not gagged, but she was in shock, a deep sort of shock that momentarily robbed her of all senses. This was followed by desperation and she twisted violently, struggling to kick, claw, bite, twist her way free. She was at a disadvantage though; hares are not meant to be held by the ears and she couldn't quite swing her body around to attack his hand. He was holding her out, away from his body, so she was able to do a lot of wriggling but wasn't gaining any purchase to attack.

The Captain looked at the wrathful hare in his hand, then at Lee, gagged but desperate, shouting wordless pleas as he struggled against the manacles holding him in place. The expression on the Captain's face was not anger, or hatred, or pleasure. He looked thoughtful. And with that thoughtful expression, as if he just wanted to see what would happen, he took a step backwards away from Lee.

The bond had been taut before; Hester too far away to be comfortable but not so far to hurt. One step backwards, still being touched, was horrible. Two steps was agony. Three steps and Hester found her voice.

"No, no, stop, please, you're killing us!" she shouted. The Captain took one more step and then just stood there, holding Hester and looking at Lee, that thoughtful expression on his face, like a scientist curious to see a reaction.

Lee was almost thankful for the gag, because if he weren't gagged, he would be begging. He could take pain, had taken pain many times before, but this was something else entirely, this was obscenity and violation, this was tearing something inside him that was never meant to be torn, and he screamed, and sobbed, and struggled, and for long minutes, the Captain just stood there and watched.

Then, after those long minutes, he walked forward and forward, right up to Lee. Lee sagged in relief and turmoil because he was still touching Hester, but Hester was close, Hester was not torn away.

"Let me tell you what is going to happen now," said the Captain in a calm, reasonable voice. "Your bear is going to come for you. We both know it. And we are going to kill it. Because we are not afraid of doing nasty things when necessary. And we are going to hurt you until you beg for your own death to follow him. Only we won't. We will keep you and we will keep the girl, and the girl won't run because we have you and you won't run because you won't be able to. And we will get money from the girl's father. You know, her actual father, not the pretend father you try to be. And maybe we'll let you go with her. And maybe we won't. And no, I did not have to tell you all my plans. You think I'm a stupid man, giving everything away. But you aren't going to tell. And that will hurt too, I think. Knowing and not being able to stop anything."

And then he turned away, went back to the cage, and dropped Hester inside. She huddled, trembling and small and weak as he redid the latch. Then the Captain turned to the other men.

"Watch them both." He said. "If the rabbit speaks, you have my permission to do whatever it takes to silence it. Beat it. Beat the man. Just don't kill."

And then he turned and went towards the door.

Hester looked towards Lee and neither said a word, one because he couldn't and one because she daren't. The Captain paused at the door, then turned and said, "Oh, and do blindfold him." And then he left.

Lee trembled, alone, without his voice, without his sight, with Hester too far away, and did his best to hold himself together.

Iorek and Lyra were going to come for him. He wasn't sure if he felt hope at that…or fear.