You've Got Another Thing Coming

Smack!

That strange sound... Smack! It had been going on for quite some time now, I realised. Smack! My head hurt. Smack! My cheeks hurt, too. Smack! Actually, a lot of things hurt.

Smack!

I found it quite difficult to focus on anything else but this peculiar noise, and for some reason the Spanish Inquisition popped into my mind’s eye.
Why, I still could not figure out. My brain was in that evolutionary state where it was just realising it existed. Smack!

As the amoebas began to creep out of the oceans my eyelids began to flutter. By the time the dinosaurs were roaming the earth I knew that I was actually alive, awake and pissed off.
Smack!
I had reached the lovely Stone Age when it dawned on me that someone was slapping my cheeks in order to make me open my eyes.
My brain took a giant leap into the Middle Ages, and my eyelids popped open and I found myself glaring into the small, beady eyes of Le Président.

“Bon!” he appraised, and smacked me again as an act of sheer pleasantry.

I shook my head slightly, and used my unwashed, hairy hands to rub my face. Well, I tried to. They’d been tied behind my back while I was still passed out, and my efforts only resulted in the rope tightening around my wrists.
As many times before, my mouth acted on its own accord:
“Wow, you guys are really into bondage.”

Smack-ack! Le Président made a fluent, double bitch-slap in such a speed it would’ve made Sound blush in embarrassment, and it would have all been very impressive had I not been the one receiving the painful – yet astonishing – gesture.
Also, it was quite impressive he’d understood what I’d said. It all came out quite muffled and slurred, but I suppose he was quite certain about the context of the words that usually escaped from captured spirits’ mouths.

“Lizzen, unbeliever,” growled Le Président. “We know you ‘ave informazion which could be of great value to our movement.”

I coughed very convincingly in surprise. “I do?”

In an instant Le Président was in my face, pointing a short, stubby finger at my left nostril. It looked like it could do a lot of damage there, too.

“Don’t play gamez wiz me!” he roared, causing speckles of saliva to shower my face. “I am talking about ze package ze wizard”, he cowered at this word, but refused to be deflated by such a small matter, “’as made you deliver to ze Queen!”

At the last word he most definitely cowered, his eyes glazing over slightly in true fear of what his mind’s eye showed him on its movie screen.
And then, he snapped out of it.

“So,” he barked. “Tell me what it eez!”

Smack! He slapped me again without giving me a chance to obey the orders so nicely bellowed at me.
A small drop of blood began to trickle down my eyebrow and obscured my vision. I blinked furiously to be rid of it, making pretty faces while at it which didn’t please our lovely Président. Another smack! gave birth to another trickle of blood, and I screamed in agony. Not so much because of the slaps, but more as a result of someone grabbing my hand behind my back and pulling my fingers in all the directions fingers aren’t supposed to point at.

“Parle!” Le Président yanked furiously at my fingers. “Speak, you filzee unbeliever!”

I broke under the pressure. “Nothing!” I screamed. “I don’t know anything!”

“Liar!” roared Le Président. To an onviewer, the scene must have looked rather hilarious. A small, fat man was bouncing about, shouting obscenities at a boy who was more than half his age and triples his size. He jumped around some more, roared a little louder and abandoned the torture of my fingers in favour of pulling on the hairs on my legs.

As a nice little interlude, I feel that it is now the moment to tell you that whenever under any pressures what so ever, I randomly start blabbing out nonsense. In this particular case, I decided to go with Fawlty Towers, which under any circumstances is full of nonsense.

“I’m from Barcelona!” I yelled, tears streaming down my face as Le Président tugged viciously at a large, red hair on my ankle. “I’m from Barcelona, I tell you! I know NOTHING!”

Le Président stopped tugging and stared at me. “You are from Barzelona?”

His voice suggested nothing more than a polite inquiry, but his tiny, rat-like eyes portrayed bewilderment.

I blinked, but that was only because another drop of blood had rolled into my eye. “Erh…” was my eloquent response.

“You never told me you were from Barzelona,” accused Le Président, his tone reproachful. “It could ‘ave saved you a lot of trouble.”

He got up from his knees and dusted his hands off. He then placed one of those hands on his hip and raised the other one in the manners of a scolding mother.

“We could ‘ave saved a lot of time as well,” he insisted and wagged his finger back and forth. “Now we need to go and find someone ‘ho eez a real culprit!”

I felt my jaw slacken as he brought his wiggling finger to the waistband of his pants and began to pull them down. I felt my eyes widen considerably at the amount of skin that was suddenly portrayed in a very unattractive way. I felt my mind rebel against any thought that consisted of what the man needed to do to me without his pants on.
Thankfully, however, he did not pull them down as far as to reveal anything that would be NC-17 rated, but instead hauled up a small pocket knife. Don’t ask me how he’d got it to stay where he’d put it, because, quite frankly, I was not in the mood to ask him at the time.

Le Président bounced his way around me and lowered the knife enough to start cutting at the ropes around my wrists. They burst with a ‘snap!’ that made my ears ring out in joy.

“As you are from Barzelona,” said Le Président now, “eet eez my wish you do not say anyzing about zis to your superiors.”

My jaw slackened further, and my eyes widened even more in incomprehension.
“Ex…Excuse me?” said I, quite oblivious to whatever it was he was getting at.

Le Président began to fidget around with his knife. Had I cared, I would have been concerned about him cutting off his own sausage-like fingers.

“Weeeell,” he began. “Zere eez no reason for you to bring up zis little incident with your employer, eez there?”

“Uhm,” I said again, basically on the verge of asking him which employer this might be, but he cut me to the chase.

“As well you know, Le Resistance works together wiz ze Barzelonian resistance in overthrowing ze monarch system of zis land. And, since ze Barzelonian resistance eez quite more powerful that our little group, we wish to ‘ave no…’ow do you say…beef wiz zem. And I am sure you would quite like to keep zis little incident to yourself as well, being as you were caught, non? It would not be good for your reputation.”

“Uhm…”

“I suppose I ‘ave made myself clear, oui?”

“Uhm…”

“Bon! Zen zis is not a problem anymore! Liam will show you to another room, a bit more to your liking. You may leave whenever you like. Zen all eez good.”

Le Président screwed up his ugly little beet-like face into what I suppose could only have been some sort of amiable smile. He then clapped his hands forcefully together and loudly hollered: “Liaaaaam!”

Suddenly the sound of heavy boots against stone floor echoed in the silence, and from the wooden door which now appeared in my visual field there emerged quite an interesting character.
Well, as a matter of fact, this interesting character had emerged before as well, but he was as strikingly beautiful then as now. I gasped.

My lovely warden clomped through the doorway at an impressive speed. He stopped before Le Président and saluted him in a very French way. That is to say, he glared at his superior and gave a curt nod.

“Yes?” he grumbled. Le Président glared back and extended an arm in my direction, pointing accusingly at my slumped form.

“Take ‘eem to a room and make sure ‘ee eez comfortable,” he ordered, and my warden, apparently named Liam, gave another curt nod.

His brown locks stood against all laws of reason and glistened in the dim light of the room, which I only now noticed was full of cigarette smoke, which was quite intensively emerging from Le Président.

“Come on, you,” said Liam and grabbed my unresisting arms. He hauled me to my feet, shoved a shoulder in my armpit and slung the arm across his shoulders. With a grunt he began to drag me off, me still quite unresisting but not exactly helpful either.
As we snailed our way past Le Président, said man took the cigarette from the corner of his mouth and exhaled the smoke somewhere around my naval regions.

“Remember what we said, boy. Not a word.”

I tried to nod, but found the gesture to be quite overpowering.

“Yah,” I agreed instead, making funny noises and putting even more of my extensive weight on my warden’s shoulders.

“Bon,” said Le Président again, and exhaled another plume of smoke. He then turned his eye-watering glare to MacGuffin. “Zen grab your little package along ze way. If eet ‘ad anything to do wiz zat wizard eet still can’t be any good.”

“Yah,” I repeated. MacGuffin was lying on a stool near the end of the door, and with tremendous effort I bent down and snatched it up.

Liam grunted, but I pressed MacGuffin close to my heart.

“I hate you,” I mumbled to it. “I hate you so much...”

My warden glanced at me from the sweaty corner of one eye, but said nothing and kept hauling me along. He dragged me through a maze of corridors made up of nothing but cold stone walls and cold stone floors and, you guessed it, cold stone ceilings.
However, after a while even I could notice the lightening colours which were, if not cheery and warm, at least a bit nicer than the oh-my-god-ten-thousands-of-people-have-died-so-that-you-could-eat-that-piece-of-fruit feeling that the dungeons had had.

Soon enough, even paintings and – hold on tight, kids – lamps were beginning to scatter around the walls; things were beginning to look homey.
Liam, my warden, pulled me to a stop outside another god-danged large wooden door.

“Is that the only kind of doors you guys have in this world?” I accused Liam as he pushed said door open using his vacant shoulder and our combined weight.

“As opposed to what other world?” asked my warden in his silky, velvety, cotton-like voice. His words dripped like honey and other runny, food-like substances on my scorched consciousness, and the corners of my lips hooked themselves around my ears.

“None,” I answered in a dream-like state, staring at him with large goo-goo eyes that would’ve made any unicorn jealous.

He saw it, but didn’t say anything. Instead he lifted me off his shoulder and held me at arm’s length, thoroughly examining me with his eyes. Then, he gave me a harsh shove. I tumbled backwards but stopped when the back of my legs came across something hard, which, as an alternative, caused my knees to bend and for me to fall like a brick.
I was all the same oh-so-surprised to find myself bouncing back, then falling back; then bouncing back, then falling back and somewhat remaining there.

“Nice bed, huh?”

I raised my head to see Liam standing in the doorway, leaning against its frame with a casual grin on his gorgeous face. His locks tumbled down over his brown eyes and he tossed them aside with a flick of the hand that suggested he had no idea how wonderfully good-looking he really was, and therefore made the gesture even more attractive.

“Yah,” I said, continuing with my eloquent-themed speech. I let my head fall back against the soft, soft bed and closed my eyes, trying not to picture my warden naked and...well – naked.
Heavy footsteps sounded, and when I opened my eyes Liam stood towering over me.

“You comfortable?” he asked, almost as articulate as myself.

“Yah,” I said, now a bit determined not to let him win over me in the ineloquent-contest we weren’t having.

“Good,” he said.

“Yah.”

“Mm.”

I nodded, through with words, and narrowed my eyes at him. He just grinned. There was a pause.

“So, there’s a bathroom to the left, there’s a closet to the right. Don’t mix them up and we won’t have to kick you out, okay?” Liam pointed, grinned and then did a little wavy-thing with his hands which was the testosterone way of mimicking a knuckle fight.

“Yah,” I nodded as best I could whilst still lying down.

“Good,” he said.

“Yah.”

“Mm,” he finished. “I’m going to leave now. Get some sleep and, uhm, perhaps a bath?”

I raised one tired eyebrow at him, and he took one deliberate step away from the bed.

“Right,” he said, now a bit nervous. “You want anything, just call. Bye!”

The dust barely had time to settle before he was out the door. Once again I closed my eyes and savoured the amazing softness of the bed. It had been days since I’d slept properly, and it felt like it had been years ago since I last slept in a bed. Truth to be told, though, it was perhaps a little more than twenty-four hours ago. It felt like so much longer, to me.

The bruises on my body hurt – actually, my whole body hurt, and picking out one specific part would just be near impossible – but the last thing on my mind wasn’t my less-hairy-than-before legs, but Rose and Cherokee. I was getting quite anxious for them to show their blonde faces and get me out of all this mess.