Five Birthdays - Birthday One

[indigo_angels]

Face is taken and when the team get him back he is far from the man he used to be...

Warnings for reference to violence and non-con, but not explicit.

Written for this prompt over at A-Team Kink Meme:  So, um, I'd really like some good ol' Face!whump. Basically, I want long-term torture, where Face ends up being conditioned and the team has to help him through recovery. Stuff like he doesn't speak at all, he doesn't really recognize them, maybe comes into Hannibal's room at night and doesn't get why Hannibal is so mad when he figures out the implications, if you want to throw some non-con into the mix.

The torture could be off-screen; mainly I just want the hardcore comfort. Hannibal flipping out because he couldn't protect his lieutenant and he just wants him back, BA being generally angry, Murdock trying his best to help out and Face being confused and scared and not sure who he is through it all.

I'm partial to H/F, but pretty much anything, including gen, is good with me.

Birthday One

Three men stand on a hill before a roughly made stone cairn and look out over the dry Californian mountains. Nobody speaks. There’s nothing they can say.

 

They have hiked three hours in silence to get here, and will walk the three hours in silence back before each going their separate ways for the rest of the day. Maybe even the week, hell, maybe even forever because this great big empty hole of nothingness where Face used to be is just driving them further away from each other day by day.

 

Hannibal is the first to turn away from the cairn and start the trail back, not looking or caring to see if the others join him. He didn’t even want to come up here, before they’d only ever come up here together, all four of them, brushing up on their survival skills, bit of team bonding, four friends just enjoying some time together. What on earth is the point in coming up with one less?

 

But it was what Murdock wanted, needed BA insisted, and Hannibal felt so damn guilty already, guilty that his actions had already lost Murdock his best friends, the one person that seemed to anchor him to reality better than anyone, guilty that he hadn’t managed to protect Face in the first place, guilty that he’s not managed to find him again after he’d been taken...

 

Fingers curl in on themselves; cutting into his palms as he leaves behind a marker to a man that he cannot in all honesty believe is still alive. Four months Face has been missing, just disappeared off the edge of the world it seems. He was watching the warehouse they knew had been used as a staging post for the human trafficking ring they were trying to crack. BA was with him, had gone around the back of a the next warehouse along to take a leak, was only gone three minutes, when he got back, Face had disappeared. His phone was on the seat of the car, the car door was wide open, his damn coffee was still hot, but Face was gone.

 

Hannibal feels the sharp edge of despair of those first few days all over again. The promise he made to his missing lieutenant that he would not sleep until they had him back safe again, the way that promise had been broken with the help of one of BA’s syringes after five solid days of desperate, wakeful searching. The lost look that Murdock got in his eyes the second they told him that Face was missing, the look that is still there now. The guilt that BA felt, the way he smashed up his van with a crowbar, staving in every panel and every pane as Hannibal stood by and watched him, wishing he too had an outlet for his pain.

 

Four months of not knowing, of searching and hoping and screaming, of dead ends and disappointments. They have honestly raided more warehouses and cellars than Hannibal can remember, and every damn time it is the same, running his eyes over the huddled, abused bodies, looking into their sunken eyes and praying that one of them is Face, while also hoping that it’s not, that wherever they have taken him, his life has not been like this for the past months, that wherever he is he is not someone’s toy, there to simply provide an outlet for their deviance and sadism. But of course Hannibal cannot imagine for one minute that Face would give in like that, that he would let someone break his free will after all the years he has spent defending it – which is why he cannot help but believe that the kid is gone, that his beautiful, sweet, loving boy is dead, the life beaten out of him and his body thrown in a hole to rot all alone.

 

And so they reached today – Face’s birthday. Hannibal can’t help but shake his head in bitter irony, because, of course, it’s not even really the kid’s birthday, they can’t even give him that. This is what Murdock always called his ‘official’ birthday, the one that Murdock assigned to him when he realised he never celebrated the anniversary of being found on the church steps. Face had never seen the point in remembering the day that his parents decided they didn’t want him, so Murdock gave him another day to hold onto, the day that the team wanted to try and give him something he was missing. Face had been touched, Hannibal can still remember the look in his eyes, the way the blue started to shine as the tears filled up and he just remembers wishing that he had been the one who had thought of that. He could have done that for Face nine years ago, when the kid was still in his teens, given him all those happy birthday memories to look back on. But then he had berated himself for his thoughts and forced himself into just being happy that Face was happy now, because for a long, long time, that’s really all that had mattered to him.

 

 

It was BA’s idea to come up here today though. Hannibal hadn’t wanted to, as much as he found it harder with every passing day to think of Face as still being alive, coming up here, building him a cairn, remembering him, just makes it all the more certain that he isn’t coming back. And if Face doesn’t come back, then Hannibal just doesn’t know what he will do.   

Birthday Two