It's a new story! Danny spent twenty-six days waiting for someone to rescue him.

Un-beta'ed, so quibble away.

- o – o -

Distance

One

Danny wakes up to find Strausser standing over him. Naturally, Danny panics and bucks wildly, fighting against the bruising grip the man has on his wrists. He gets a fist to the stomach for his troubles. It's early morning, and Danny shivers as Strausser drags him out of the room in Independence Hall in his shorts and a thin shirt. It's cold. He has no idea where he's being taken.

It worries him.

Two

Sergeant Strausser doesn't pull his punches. He's also creative. He likes his knives. Danny learns each of these facts quickly. It's been almost forty-eight hours since this nutcase took him from one prison to a new one. Except this one is hell. Danny misses the plush surroundings—at least there, he knew he couldn't be touched. Not without his permission. (Not that he'd give it, of course.)

Danny also learns that his skull is thicker and harder than Strausser's nose. He gets a black eye and a fat lip for his trouble.

Three

Danny wakes up to see Strausser standing over him, again. He'd move to fight, except Strausser had him trussed up fairly well. The teen shivers as the second bucket of ice water is dumped over him. The sergeant reaches down to grope Danny, a sick smile on his face. His mistake is that he unties Danny's legs.

"Fuck you," Danny snarls, and snaps his legs up to kick Strausser. The man goes down in a heap, and Danny smiles viciously at the man. He's not going to let Strausser screw him.

He gets three bruised ribs for his defiance.

Four

His interrogator leaves him alone. Danny doesn't mind. The solitude is nice. He prefers it to having Strausser playing games with him. It definitely doesn't hurt as much as Strausser's games. There's no food that day, but Danny's used to that. There wasn't much in the way of food when he was in Independence Hall either, so it's no great loss. The most he ever ate was during the meals when he was near his mother.

His stomach growls loudly anyways.

Five

After the second day starts with no one there to torment him, Danny begins to worry. It's not usual. There's something wrong. Danny feels the unease and tension in the air like he felt the tornado's approach—it's not there, but it is, and it's settling deep in his bones and makes his jaw ache under his teeth. Something worse is going to happen.

He paces to keep warm and keep his mind off the fact that he hasn't been fed in two days.

It doesn't matter.

Six

After three days of no human contact, Danny is desperate for any kind of noise and begins talking to himself. He goes from crop cycles and the best times to plant various things to Maggie's list of medicinal herbs and how to harvest and store them, to Aaron's lessons of life before the blackout. He sings America the Beautiful in an attempt to get someone to acknowledge him. Nothing happens. He sings the National Anthem of the United States. He recites the Pledge of Allegiance, and the Declaration of Independence, and as much of the Constitution as he can remember.

Nothing happens.

Seven

Danny is grateful when, after the fourth day of isolation begins, a small slot at the bottom of the door opens. A bowl is shoved through and the slot slams shut just as quickly. Danny picks the bowl up and wrinkles his nose when he sees the contents. It looks terrible, but he hasn't had anything to eat in four days. Thin, watery gruel is better than nothing.

He scoops it out of the bowl with his fingers, licking each one to get as much of the food as possible. The teen tries to make it last. It only takes him a minute to eat what's in the bowl either way.

His stomach growls fitfully.

Eight

The teen wakes up, shivering. A second bowl of gruel had been delivered earlier that morning—or maybe late last night. He's tied to a chair. Sergeant Strausser's apprentice—a young boy with short, dark brown hair and a wide, innocent face—is holding a bucket. Danny thinks that the kid looks far too interested in what Strausser has to say. Danny would say something to the boy, but his mouth has been wedged open with something that allows the interrogator access to his mouth. Danny tries to breath through his nose to prevent a panic attack as Strausser holds up a pair of pliers and talks about how dentistry took a hit after the blackout.

His asthma gets him first.

Nine

Strausser has a new weapon to torture him with. Danny spends the ninth day tied to his cot, with Strausser putting various substances near his nose and mouth to see what will trigger his asthma. By the time a guard comes with lunch for Strausser—nothing for Danny, of course—Strausser has a decent list of what will trigger his prisoner's asthma. Danny wheezes his way through an asthma attack brought on by wheat as Strausser eats a meal that makes Danny's stomach sit up and take notice.

He doesn't beg for food.

He's not that hungry.

Ten

Danny screams into his gag for hours on the tenth day, trying to get away from what's being done to him. Strausser is holding his fingers straight, and is patiently explaining how to remove a captive's nails with a plier to the apprentice using Danny as a practice dummy. Danny struggles and whines, but it doesn't do him any good. The teen is pretty sure he's being tortured like this because of the four vertical stripes of blood stretching across the side of Strausser's face.

Next time, he'll claw Strausser's eye out like he was trying to.

Eleven

His fingers are wrapped in bandages when he comes to on day eleven. There's a bowl of porridge on the floor next to him, with a spoon in it. Danny cradles the bowl in his injured hand and uses his other to scoop the food into his mouth as fast as possible. He's too hungry to use decorum, and the food it still warm. It tastes like heaven, even though it's bland.

Danny throws up what he's managed to eat a few minutes later. He stays curled up on his side, too weak to move away from the puddle of sick on the floor. He holds his stomach and lurches onto his knees, puking up thin, watery yellow bile. The smell is too much, and he collapses back onto his side, whimpering in pain.

The porridge, bland as it was, as little of it as there was, was too much for him.

Twelve

Danny wakes up and discovers that he's been blindfolded. He's sitting in a chair. There are thick cuffs around his wrists and ankles, and a leather band over his chest to keep him from moving. He works his jaw and discovers that someone put a horse's bit in his mouth. Whatever his captors are going to do to him, they want to humiliate him or keep him from being heard. Danny begins grinding his teeth against the gag. In his experience, there is nothing he hasn't been able to chew his way through—and that includes Charlie's attempts at cooking.

He squeaks in pain—it's mostly a reflex action at this point, because having your nails ripped off your hands is a life-changing experience—as something sharp and tiny digs into the crook of his elbow.

The floating sensation is new.

Thirteen

Danny pants and whines, jerking in his restraints. There are hands all over him, touching and stroking and making everything feel so good. His skin is on fire. But it doesn't hurt. He just wants someone to touchmetouchmetouchmeplease!

The teen whimpers and thrusts his hips a little, whining into his new gag. He's being so inviting. Someone should see that. He can hear someone breathing heavily and whines more, jerking against his restraints. touchmetouchmetouchme

Why isn't anyone touching him?

Fourteen

Sergeant Strausser's hand in his hair is gentle. Danny shivers as cold water trickles down the back of his neck. The smell of strong soap hits the teen's nose, and he blushes in humiliation as he remembers the day before. How he'd mewled for someone to touch him, had whined in lust until he'd blacked out, begging someone to touch him.

Strausser's hand dips between his legs, and Danny closes his eyes, cheeks burning in humiliation as the sergeant finishes cleaning him up. Strausser finishes with a few rough swipes of the sponge, and picks up two needles from the table next to Danny. The teen jerks away as the first one is pushed into the crook of his left elbow. The second one is shoved into the crook of his right.

This is pure torture.

Fifteen

There's someone in the room with him.

Danny doesn't move, head lolling forward. A soft hand wipes a thin trickle of drool away from the corner of his mouth.

The teen doesn't react.

Sixteen

Help me. I'm trapped. Get me out of here. Help me. Help me. Help me.

…I'm scared.

Seventeen

…

Eighteen

It hurts.

Nineteen

Danny wakes up with a gasp of agony. His throat feels raw, and his arms hurt. A quick check shows that he has thick black bruises circling his wrists and ankles. A thick reddish-purple bruise stretches across his chest and biceps. There are needle tracks in the crooks of his elbows. Thin plastic tubes are taped to the backs of his hands. If Danny moves his hands, he can feel the needles shift under his skin.

Little dots of blood speckle the thin pallet under him after he pulls the needles out. When Strausser's apprentice comes in, holding a baseball bat, Danny lashes out. The boy crumples against the far wall. Strausser carries him out. Danny pukes up thin yellow bile as the implications hit him.

Even if the boy had been like Strausser, he didn't deserve to die.

Twenty

Strausser works him over with a leather sap and a knife. Danny focuses on thoughts of someone who would protect him and disconnects himself from the pain. Strausser cuts the legs of his pants away and pulls out something that makes Danny retreat as far from reality as possible when he sees it.

Danny's right leg stops working after that. The teen waits until his hands are free before he fights back.

He's knocked unconscious for his efforts.

Twenty-one

The drifting feeling is back. Danny's head lolls against his chest. There's a thin trickle of drool at the corner of his mouth.

Danny wishes it was the drugs.

Being electrocuted is painful.

He can't think.

It hurts.

Twenty-two

Danny whines into his gag as Strausser chains him back to the chair in the off-white-blue room. The thickly padded cuffs keep him from wriggling as Strausser lovingly tapes a wide, flanged needle—he calls it a pump, and says it's from an old hospital; it was used to administer drugs from an IV line—to the back of his hand. Danny can feel the needle in his vein, and it hurts.

He jerks in his restraints as Strausser attaches a bag of clear fluid to the pump via a plastic tube. The whimper of fear turns into a howl of agony as Strausser presses his thumb into the teen's arm and drags the nail along the soft inner skin of Danny's forearm.

Ohgodwhydoesithu—

Twenty-three

Danny curls up in his cell, hands clasped over his ears, eyes squeezed tightly shut. The guard in his cell flips through a magazine. Danny doesn't remember what happened yesterday. But it was bad. Everything hurts so much. He jerks and twitches uncontrollably at random points. The spasms are painful enough to make him cry.

His asthma is also acting up, and he can't breathe. There are bruises all over his lower back and around his wrists and ankles. The ones around his throat look like fingers. Strausser did something to him yesterday. Danny's lower back hurts, but he can still walk—when the spasms aren't hitting him—so it probably wasn't rape.

He hopes Strausser isn't one to sink that low.

Danny knows the man is.

Twenty-four

Danny lays under his cot, face pressed against the cool cement floor. His clothes are gone. The teen looks like he's sleeping, but he's not. He's…drifting. The only sign that he's alive is the rise and fall of his chest, shallow as it is.

He can't even wheeze through this asthma attack. He just can't breathe. It's a bad one. Danny can feel his heart hammering against his chest at an insane pace. His lungs are constricted. It's too hard to breathe. Danny tries hard not to panic, but it's hard. Everything is beginning to take on a grayish tint and he thinks he might finally die when the door opens.

It's probably a hallucination, but Danny smiles anyways. Major Neville pats his shoulder as he breathes in the medication in the inhaler. Neville stays until he falls into a deep sleep, cradling the teen gently against his chest.

Danny wishes his hallucination had stayed.

Twenty-five

Monroe visits him, and sneers. He calls Danny weak and pathetic. He says that a real man wouldn't have a growling stomach. The general says that Danny's less than a man, if he can't control his hunger. Danny raises his middle finger and glares defiantly back at the man who ordered his torture.

Monroe leaves. Strausser comes in. Danny is beaten unconscious for biting the sergeant as hard as he could.

The teen isn't going to put on one of his mother's dresses for Strausser. He's not going to bend over the table and spread his legs. He's not going to get down on his knees and be a good boy for Strausser.

Not even for an apple.

He's not that hungry.

Twenty-six

Danny feels the first, tiny flutter of hope in his heart in almost a month as he sees Charlie. He held on long enough. That should count for something. He curls against his sister, smiling. The injuries don't matter anymore.

"You came."

- o – o -

So, what did you think? Good? Bad? Is Danny actually badass even when he's being tortured? Drop a line and let me know!