THE SITCH

If the ugly, numb, pins-and-needles tingling all over his body hadn't clued him in that whatever happened wasn't, in fact, a dream, it would have been the thick shackles connecting his arms with agony behind his back. That, and the unmistakably icy sting of cracked, neglected concrete under his right cheek. The sheer length of time it took for his body to respond to his brain becoming conscious pissed him off more than anything else. Now the battered alpha was aggravatingly sluggish, both mentally and physically; it only compounded in upon itself thanks to the chill settling in his bones. All things combined made the need to clear out the contents of his belly far more intense, and without control of himself, the man retched as soon as he stirred. 

A bad idea, considering the unpleasant sound of a foreign tongue graced his fried senses moments after. 

"He's awake," a male voice said, "tell the boss."

Russian. Matt only spoke two languages fluently in his lifetime, and that was one of them. A dreadful wrath, one not experienced since the war's end, gripped his heart as he tried to break free of his bonds—only to have them easily cut into his exposed skin despite his efforts. After a few moments of intentional pain, Mattias stopped his futile struggling with a greedy, scandalized gasp of air. Men laughed somewhere to his left—four, perhaps five? If not restrained as he was, he might have been able to take them.

Or so his busted ego thought, at any rate. With his defeat still thrumming shame through his core, Matt attempted to get onto his knees so he could force himself upright. Now that he was coming back to reality, a few extra details jumped out at him in particular. First off, he was wearing a tight pair of pants. They felt restricting and altogether too small for him, but it was adequate. Second, he's blindfolded so securely that his eyelids couldn't even attempt to open themselves. There was also a strange, faint echo of emptiness around them and a kind of dust-laden air that implied they weren't somewhere people frequented. The grime his body kicked up upon his movement made that abundantly clear. 

"Don't just tell your boss. Get him in here." 

Mattias surprised himself with that measured, unbothered, slurring comment. It made it sound like he wasn't ass-deep in Ruskies and life-threatening danger, but here he was, letting his instincts act up all the while. He didn't want to waste time here. Better he figured out what they wanted from him, even if thinking was growing harder to do by the second. An eerie quiet quickened his heart in his chest, but it wouldn't last long. The nasty scrape of a chair dragging across concrete made Matt turn his head away from the source of the sound. His head was pounding enough as it is; the last thing he needed was something worse than nails on a chalkboard. 

"What did you say?" the same voice that had spoken earlier responded in Russian, "I didn't catch that. Try again, but in a language not invented by fleas with no balls."

Russian insults sometimes made very little sense to him, but at least the sentiment behind them was always loud and clear. Knowing that intentionally provoking his captors was an absolutely shit idea, Mattias clamped his mouth shut and attempted to piece together the situation in his head. But his mind was foggy and a strange taste in the back of his mouth suggested he'd gotten drugged with something after all. 

But that didn't stop him from trying to sort his thoughts, anyway. Even as heavy footfalls approached, his mind whirled. Rogue actors? America and Russia weren't currently at war. No nations were. Not since the Accords signed into law and everyone put away their death machines and locked up their supe maniacs. How the fuck were these people even here right now, and—hold on, last night was coming back to him. It was hard to remember, but… 

That man.

It looked like him. Just… older, and with a sort of unhinged aura that flipped Matt's head up in unspeakable ways. 

Had he even been real, or was it some kind of supe ability that was meant to throw him off his game? His questions would remain unanswered as the footsteps halted, and he felt the back of a boot slam against his already purple and black jaw. Bastard's kick had effectively defeated any progress he'd made in getting up onto his knees. More laughter, some sneering, and a few Russian words he didn't quite recognize swam around inside his head while he tried to translate what he was hearing.

"What, nothing? Yes. That's what I thought. Fucking American pigs." 

Think, Matty. You've been through worse. You can get yourself out of this. Just have to be clever. It couldn't be that hard. Well, maybe it was at the moment, but he would never admit that aloud to anyone. 

"What do you want from me?" he asked in Russian. Though the words felt slow, clunky and unpracticed to his tongue.

"You speak like my grandfather." 

That's not a fucking answer. Somehow, Matt kept that thought to himself. "... Are you a traditionalist, or a reformist?"

There was a cacophony of disgusted, offended hisses at the blatantly political question. A sound that was music to his ears. Offensive enough to trick the Russians into speaking more freely about themselves, yet not enough to earn him another blow to the face. 

"What do you take us for, vaginas with ears? Bah! Traditionalist. It's the only way to go. Cram your supe ideals up your ass." 

Ignoring yet another strange Russian curse that definitely didn't translate well to English in his head, he tried to chew what little intel he had at the moment. Traditionalists meant men who preferred old world, human systems to the new. While that could be a myriad of things, at least it helped narrow down the pool of possibilities.

Something rustled and jangled as though someone wearing professional gear had shifted their position wildly. Eventually forcing himself upright using pure upper body strength in order to drag himself into a kneeling position, the jaded veteran felt a gloved hand clap his cheek with no small amount of condescending flare. 

"What was that, piggy? Speak up. I can't hear you."

He might be cool under pressure, but the faint, infuriating action of another alpha attempting to claim dominance sent him over the edge. Sharp teeth struck out blindly and embedded themselves into a bitter, foul-tasting material of what he assumed were gloves. A strange cry sounded before another hand gripped Matt's deeply fucked up jaw and squeezed so tightly he had to loosen his canines. Laughter, shouts of shock and more colorful curses flooded the air; but it was all untouched by the satisfaction he felt growing in his belly. The instinctual, primal kind that simply couldn't let that man's arrogance go unchallenged. 

Yet the shocked atmosphere soon turned to rage, and Matt steeled himself for another blow. Turned out to be a waste of time, though. The strike never came. 

"Enough! Didn't I tell you not to play with that one?" 

The room fell into a tense silence that was only broken by the scraping of more chairs against the ground and the rustling of men. 

"Forgive us," a voice said. 

"It's not my fault, this little whore—"

"Quiet."

Whoever was speaking, his booming alpha voice made Mattias cringe so hard his hackles subconsciously rose. It wasn't spoken with the same deep, indescribable intensity as the voice Matt had heard before he'd blacked out, but it was enough to make him square his shoulders and lift his jaw, regardless. 

"You," the man who'd entered and barked for silence switched to a broken, ugly-sounding form of English, "Mattias Kohler, yes? Man of many faces."

"... You've got the wrong man. I only have one."

"Shut up. There's no hiding from me. I have seen you once. Many years ago. When you were small."

"What do you want from me?" he asked again. This time, it had far more bite than the last. 

"We both know what we need from you. In denial."

Frustration welled inside him; ugly as it was, Matt had to bite back the urge to heave again. "The war is over. It's done. There's nothing else to need."

"We see about this, yes?" the man replied in even lazier English than before. 

It made Matt's stomach tighten; what else was there to keep fighting over? This made no goddamn sense. 

"Come, we have to get moving. I need your asses with me when Chekhov arrives. I don't trust these American-brained motherland sellouts."

"What about the pig?"

"Leave him with Ubiytsa. I don't care what happens, so long as you all stop hitting him and splattering that shit all over the floor! His blood is evil. Maksim, burn that glove before you catch it, too."

The man he'd bitten loosed a disgusted hiss between clenched teeth moments prior to what sounded like him spitting somewhere. Thankfully, it hadn't landed on Matt. If it had, the already straining to keep himself under control alpha would have lunged at him. It seemed Maksim—and the group of what he could only understand as guards—were taking their leave. Multiple heavy boots clattering against the echoing floors, easily drowned sounds of hushed exchanges. Soon enough, a bewildered Matt got abandoned to his own devices in a silence so fucking expansive he thought he might drown in it. 

He wasn't waiting for this Ubiytsa guy to make the first move, if he was even here at all. They wanted Matt alive. It's not like they'd kill him for seeing where the boundaries were. He needed to test the waters and see what his escape options were, and the only way to do that whilst blind was to feel around in the dark. Slightly shaking fingers flexed open and closed, followed by the limited turn of his aching wrists. There were multiple sets of shackles going up his arms, forcing them into an egregious, backwards and pulled straight position that had his shoulders shrieking for relief. However, with them confined like this, he thought he could at least use the extra weight as his de facto center of gravity. 

Cautiously, Matt shifted his body, bringing one of his legs up to bend tightly. Pangs of pain from last night's embarrassment thrummed through his body, yet he swallowed any unnecessary sounds that may have slipped. A deep-seated cringe then overtook his face whilst he pulled the muscles of his upper body tight. After some unsteady struggling, he got one foot on the ground. On one knee as though he were proposing to his mate, he attempted to get onto his feet properly; however, halfway through the motion, a thick, powerful and searingly hot hand grabbed him by the shoulder and forced him back down again. 

Unable to withhold the sharp cry as his other knee smashed back down against the unforgiving concrete, Matt's entire being reacted with venom. About to actually lunge this time, a familiar voice sent a fresh wave of nausea stabbing through his insides like an electric burst. 

"Stay."

Russian, but just as haunting and abyssal as it had been the night before when he heard it the first time. It made his heart practically halt in his chest, waiting solemnly on another sign like an unspoken prayer. No other sound came out of the imposing presence that held him where he was. Still, that renewed overwhelming sense of guilt lingered inside a devastation he thought he'd felt the last of decades ago. Cruel as it was, his fucked up sense of morality somehow pulled an uncertain whisper out from between ill-lucked lips. 

"... Cifer?"

Never in a million years would Matt have expected to sound so disgustingly pathetic, so utterly broken and defeated that it almost felt as though he were ripping an old wound open anew; but here he was. And it only made him feel sicker to his stomach as the seconds ticked by, furious with himself for his ugly display of weakness.

"Fuckin' who?" the other alpha replied, and despite the gruffness of his words, it was both utterly devoid of life and in easily recognizable, perfect English. Despite being so uncannily monotonous, there was the barest hint of the old, dying Chicago whine Matt knew of by heart. It was a drawl that he'd spent years listening to during restless nights. Whispered for hours against the back of his neck, warm and comforting, it was a gentle sort of innocent secret the two of them shared. All the while, if it got out, it would cause them no end of unjust trouble. But the words being spoken shattered that illusion into a broken husk of self loathing.

Matt interrupted his own disquiet thoughts. "... Nobody. Just a dead man I once knew."

Silence followed suit after and it did nothing to quell the tempest inside him. There was no mistaking it. This man, whoever he was, however he'd managed it, was wearing Cifer Calaway's skin and using his voice. Cifer was dead. He had to be. Matt knew that, deep inside the rot that had slowly replaced his insides over the years. And yet, that unforgettable heat radiating from the larger man's hand seemed to permeate throughout his entire body as though it was having its grand homecoming. 

He'd heard of supes with the ability to shapeshift their appearance, voice, and their mannerisms to become someone specific. But to mimic the basics of their ability, to copy the exact way their momentum—a supe's source of power and essentially their unique lifeblood—flowed through others? Matt didn't know if that was physically possible. All the same, he'd tested his options and the blossoming, wet and agonizing burn of his knee was all he had to show for it. No longer interested in carrying a conversation with an imposter that didn't even know the name of the man whose arrogance he wore, curiosities tossed to the wayside, Matt, locked into a compromising position and trapped with only himself as his company, finally had a second to reflect. 

It gave his inebriated, molasses-sodden brain time to realize just how fucked up he was. Face swelling harshly enough that he could feel every labored heartbeat in it, his nose had a considerably more difficult time just trying to breathe. The moldy, particle filled air wasn't doing him any favors, either. With his nose a mess, he couldn't smell the alpha securing him in place at all, even in its muted state. A shame, because if Mattias could just identify his scent, he might have been able to confirm whether it was Cifer after all. Anything off about him would be immediately obvious. His knee was definitely fucked after that brutal man handling, but that had been Matt's fault. He had zero right to complain.

His throat was so fucking parched it ended up feeling as though it's made of sandpaper, and every swallow was grinding him down to a pulp. Numb, yet not numb enough to ease the physical sting that reflected his cracked pride, Matt felt himself wavering. For a mercy, he was still too nauseous to feel the ravenous gnaw of his guts, but that wasn't necessarily a good thing. For the moment, one reality became abundantly clear; his life was getting bloody complicated from this moment forward, and the alpha resolved himself to fight tooth and nail to regain the calm peace he'd had stolen out from under him. 

He'd make sure of it.