Zacharias Smith (bloodyfantastic) wrote in lockewood, @ 2011-02-10 02:04:00 |
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Entry tags: | gellert grindelwald, zacharias smith |
Who: Zach Smith and Gellert Grindelwald
Where: In Gellert’s secret lair. What? Okay, fine, under the prison.
When: Thursday, Feb 10
What: Gellert is testing out his new Imperius Curse with his toy.
Rating: HIGH for torture and stuff.
Status: In progress - new tags added in from googledoc
He was asleep. There was no other word for it. He wasn’t in bed with the blankets up over his head, but he did have the impression that there was a blanket covering him and separating him from the world outside, even if he could feel and see and hear everything. Zach didn’t think about leaving, even if the chain was no longer tied around his wrist, even if the door was less than five steps away. Zach wasn’t even aware of the door, except to know that Gellert would come in through it when he was ready. When he wanted Zach to do things.
And it was so comforting, when Gellert came to visit. He always told Zach what to do, and obeying those orders felt more like second nature than breathing did. Zach didn’t think about how strange that was, about how he’d much rather be with Cedric or mocking the Weasleys who deserved it so much. Gellert wanted him to be here, to bathe and get dressed and do the things he always did, and so here he was, doing the things he had always done. Right now, that included sitting on his bed and staring straight ahead as he waited. Just waited. Waited until he needed to use the facilities. Waited for the door to open. Just waited. Because it was what Gellert wanted.
Gellert had started spending his lunch breaks down beneath the jail with Smith, a note left on his desk saying he’d gone home to eat in case Molly dropped by. He was pleased to see that Smith’s disappearance had gone mostly unnoticed by the villagers, as he had anticipated. A few questions were to be expected, of course, but there was no solidly founded suspicion and certainly no townsmen with pitchforks. Gellert could continue his research undisturbed.
He unraveled the wards that blocked the procedure facility from being found by laypeople and pushed open the door to the participant room, stepping in with a small smile already curling across his lips.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Smith,” he said, drawing up a chair and taking a seat across from Smith, crossing his legs knee-to-ankle and balancing a clipboard atop his thigh. “I hope your night went well. Did you get some sleep?” Gellert already knew the answer, of course. While the curse was still in effect, nothing Smith could do would surprise Gellert in the slightest.
There he was. The door opened and Gellert entered, but Zach didn’t move. Gellert hadn’t told him to move when he came in, only to do what he needed to do to be clean. And he was. He had done exactly what Gellert had told him to do, and so, as Gellert approached and pulled out a chair, Zach continued to wait for different instructions.
When he asked a question, Zach didn’t hesitate to answer. “Yes.” It was a simple question, it deserved a simple answer. Gellert had wanted him to sleep, so he had. Zach didn’t bother to think that the question was silly. There were no silly questions. Just questions, and then answers. That was how it worked.
“Excellent,” Gellert said, making a small tick mark on his clipboard. A quick glance toward the tray on the table was enough to confirm that Smith had eaten both the dinner and breakfast Gellert had left for him. All of this was to be expected; even under a curse of typical strength, Smith would not have been expected to be able to resist such simple orders.
It was time to delve deeper. There were uses to the Imperius that had been previously unexplored, or that were too sophisticated for the typical curse to manage. Gellert had been holding the spell over Zach long enough to have become moderately acquainted with his magical signature. That would only make him easier to manipulate.
Gellert flipped back the top sheet on his clipboard and scanned the list of tests he’d decided to run on Smith. He was perhaps a little unscientifically excited to see some of them in action, but of course there was no need to be choosy about what he did first. They had all the time in the world. Without speaking, he simply looked back up to catch Smith’s eye. Silently, using nothing more than a twist of his will, he made his demands known.
Zach had simply been looking at Gellert and waiting while the man worked in his papers. No thoughts, no desires, just the passing of time. And then pain. Atrocious pain gripped Zach so hard that he clutched at his chest, his eyes wide and mouth open as he tried to pull in a breath through the searing pain. Both of his hands clawed at his chest, and for once, he couldn’t sit idly by. Zach rolled over onto his knees as he tried to get away from whatever was causing this, but already his vision was dimming, narrowing as he struggled but failed to catch a breath and he collapsed on his bed.
Gellert watched Smith closely, ignoring the way his quill had set to making notes on the clipboard of its own accord. He had charmed it to measure Smith’s physiological responses. They were being recorded twenty-four hours a day, of course, but in this moment it was particularly important to ensure that whatever damage was being done to Smith’s physical form was only that which Gellert wished to be done. Tachycardia -- well, that was normal, as was the high blood pressure. Oxygen levels were dropping; Gellert would have to keep an eye on that, he didn’t want Smith passing out.
But most interesting was Smith’s behaviour. The way his eyes practically bulged out of his head, the way he seemed to be clambering to escape from something, as if he could outrun magic. It was almost laughable. No -- it was laughable. Gellert drew it out as long as he could, but he was grinning by the time he allowed his will to shift, allowing Smith’s lungs to reinflate to normal capacity.
Zach gasped in air, then coughed and hacked, his body obviously reacting to the perceived change in circumstances, trying to explain to itself why his lungs had been empty and could finally be filled again. His cough sounded like a bark, and his heart beat so hard that it hurt his neck. His head ached, throbbing with his pulse, his temples and his eyes threatening to burst to let the pressure out. Gasping for air even as his lungs returned to their normal state. His hands were shaking with shock, and sweat had broken out over every inch of his skin, an instinctive, basic terror at what had just happened to him. Zach rolled onto his back, to let more air in.
It was obvious, to Zach, that Gellert had been the cause, but that knowledge didn’t illicit any kind of emotional response to attack back, to demand to know why the man would want to put him through such a thing. Zach simply stared up at the ceiling and breathed.
The Imperius was all well and good for causing pain, Gellert thought, that much was good. Even on the most basic, physiological level, Smith’s brain waves could be altered to convince him that some function of his body had been lost. But one could not send a mere zombie out into the world.
Gellert had, of course, let Albus continue his typical schedule while under the Imperius, but it had become clear to Gellert that Albus as a subject was not necessarily wholly valid. There were too many dissimiliarities between Albus’s mind and that of anyone else for experiments done on Albus to easily generalise to the population. The whole purpose of the curse, though, was to allow people to go out into the world and behave normally, simply with the bounds of that normalcy being determined by the master of the curse.
So Gellert shifted his will just slightly, widening his grip on Smith’s mind, letting some of Smith’s own thoughts and personality pour in and fill the gaps left by Gellert’s retreat. How much of Smith’s own autonomy could Gellert give him, and still maintain control over the extent of Smith’s actions?
It was like waking up.
Sort of.
Like waking up but feeling like you were still asleep.
Sort of.
Like waking up in a dream, maybe. A dream where you knew it was a dream and knowing it for the dream it was didn’t pop you right back out. A dream where knowing it was a dream didn’t enable you to change it to suit your whims - something that Zach had been known to do on the very rare occasion that this sort of thing happened, even if it didn’t last very long.
Sort of.
But not really.
Gellert Grindelwald was sitting in a chair just under five feet away from where he lay on a cot that was far too stiff and which was lumpy in parts, as though springs underneath were trying to dig into his back. It wasn’t cold in here, but the air seemed cool, somewhat humid, and stagnant. He turned his head and took in the little loo area set up in the corner behind him. Was he in prison? What was he doing in prison? Zach sat up, frowning as he tried to piece that togeth-.... and a tray close by Grindelwald. Had he been feeding him? That didn’t seem likely. Dark grey walls, no difference between floor, walls and ceiling, ball of light hovering in the middle of the room and illuminating it. Something here was familiar, but he just couldn’t remember what.
And Grindelwald. He knew that man. … For something. From something. There was... … something, something he should be remembering, but--
Frowning and a little bit worried at the fact that he didn’t feel quite that worried about having bits of memory missing - even though he soon forgot all about that - Zach straightened up further, crossing his legs under him as he continued to take in the room with a sort of appreciative nod, while looking a little bit disappointed at the same time.
“I was sure they said you were gay,” Zach told the man, quite unable to help himself. It didn’t really occur to him to that he should be afraid of this man. Why should he be? He was just sitting there, staring at him. Which normally might have been a little unnerving, but Zach felt, somehow, that there was a purpose to this man’s presence. “You’d think you’d have better tastes in home décor.”
Gellert’s lips, at long last, curved upward into a smile. It worked. It bloody -- it worked perfectly. Gellert did not notice he’d moved until he was already standing up, abandoning his clipboard on his chair and closing the distance between Smith and himself, sitting down on the edge of the bed just next to him.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, leaning forward and resting his forearms on his knees, doing his best to resist the urge to simply press through Smith’s eyes and use Legilimency to find out for himself. (He was improving quickly with the skill, even Albus said so. Perhaps he could do it without fracturing Smith’s mind beyond repair. Perhaps, but it was not a risk Gellert could allow himself to take. He could not knowingly bring a confound into his experiment.)
Zach looked aside at Gellert who made himself comfortable on the bed next to him. Part of him told him he should probably shift awa-- He frowned. He had been about to do something, he was sure of it. He sat there, his forehead wrinkled as he tried to focus on what--
Compelled to answer Gellert’s question, Zach looked up at him, his earlier worries gone, as if they had never existed. “I don’t know,” he answered honestly, his expression inverting, gaze unfocused as he looked inside himself. “Fuzzy, like. Like... there... well my heart is racing, and I’m not sure why. And my throat’s scratchy, and I’ve a bit of a headache here.” Zach indicated the band across his head where it ached. “And. I know I’m forgetting something. But I don’t know what, and every time I think I--” He shook his head. “I don’t remember. I don’t know. Is there something I should be remembering?” Zach had turned to Gellert, who seemed to care, at least, as though perhaps he could tell him if this sort of thing were normal.
“Not at all,” Gellert said, and his tone was nothing if not reassuring. He took a glance at the screen floating abovehead, monitoring Smith’s vital signs. His heart rate was high, to be sure, but nothing that could not be explained by his subconscious’s anxiety over the situation at hand. Gellert reached out and rested a hand on Smith’s wrist, as if to comfort him. It was something he saw parents do to children often enough.
“It sounds to me like you’re simply experiencing a bit of déjà vu,” Gellert said, smiling. “That can happen, at times, but it is nothing to be worried about.” He shifted, his other hand coming into view. His wand had been vanished to its sheath and in its place Gellert held a long, slender blade, spelled razor-sharp and deadly. He turned Smith’s arm over, exposing the palm of his hand, and placed the handle of the knife in his grasp.
“You know what’s next,” Gellert said.
“Yeah.” It sounded a bit regretful, and though his heart was suddenly beating so hard in his chest that he was starting to feel nauseous, Zach accepted the dagger. He looked at it, frowning as he considered what he was going to do with it. After all, mission though he had, Zach felt that there was room for interpretation; he may have had a job to do, but it was his job to do. And he had to do it properly for Grindelwald. He had to do it as well as he possibly could.
His mind suddenly made up, Zach shifted his hold on the dagger so that the blade pointed back at himself, lifted his arm and promptly stabbed himself in the inner thigh. All but an inch of the blade pierced his skin. Zach screamed. The pain was awful, blinding, but he wasn’t done. He pulled the knife out part of the way and pulled the blade through flesh as he sliced across, cutting muscle clean through, warm blood gushing quite freely from the wound. Through it all, Zach screamed and shook, tears running down his face, pasty from sweat, but his knife hand never wavered from its course.