I: Stab
The police station isn’t very busy, probably having to do with the fact it’s late at night. A small number of officers unfortunate enough to be working the graveyard shift rush about the station, a coffee pot bubbles, and a young man sits awkwardly in a chair. He’s waiting to be called, but it feels like he’s been sitting for hours at this point.
He didn’t go to the police immediately. What was the point? They probably wouldn't've believed him. At least, that's what he thought, until he saw more bodies start to pile up on the news. Bodies of people just like him, who had ultimately failed their tests. His tormenter had claimed at least five victims. He was the first and only survivor.
“Dave, right?” The man in the chair raises his head in acknowledgement, looking towards the officer that called for him. “We’re ready for you. Coffee?” He thumbs at a room behind him while extending a styrofoam cup to Dave.
He points at some nasty looking, but clearly healing, wounds around his mouth. The hospital stitches were neat, but the damage that had been done was obvious. Dave always prayed it wouldn’t leave lasting scars. “I’m good, hot liquids irritate the uh… You know.” Dave swallows roughly when he stands up. “Which fuckin’ sucks, because let me tell you I would love some right now.”
“We have ice.” It’s casual, as if Dave isn’t about to spill the details to the cops on what exactly happened to him.
“That sounds great.”
It takes them a good ten minutes to get settled in the private room. Dave cradles a cup of iced coffee in his hands, taking small and slow sips.
“Let it be known for the record, I’m Detective English, interviewing David E. Strider on his encounter with the serial killer dubbed Jigsaw. He is currently the only surviving victim.” The Detective straightens out a few papers, pen at the ready. “Alright, Dave. Let’s get started. There’s no rush, take your time, alright? What do you remember?”
Dave hesitates for a few seconds. He holds the cup tighter, staring down at his warped reflection in the dark brown liquid. “Well, a month ago I woke up in a really dingy looking room.” He looks up at the man across from him. His sunglasses hide the way he can’t seem to focus on anything in particular. “It was really run down, kind of factory-esque with tarps hanging from the ceiling, and… I could taste my own blood.”
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He’s dazed and disoriented when he wakes. There’s blood and metal in Dave’s mouth, but he can’t will his jaw open to try and spit it up. He twitches as whatever kept him under slowly fades and the pain of whatever is keeping his mouth closed starts to set in.
It’s heavy, whatever it is. It’s heavy enough that it makes his head hurt with the pressure against his skull.
“Hello, Dave.” A TV monitor that he didn’t notice before crackles to life behind him. He turns to face it and immediately regrets the decision as fast motion makes the device’s hooks in his mouth shift slightly. A strange puppet on the screen with creepy-blue eyes and red-dotted cheeks laughs at Dave. The sound is an eerie, but almost childish, HEEHEE HOOHOO. “I’d like to play a game.” Whoever’s speaking through the puppet sounds like they’re smiling.
He tugs against the straps keeping his wrists pinned down to the arms of a chair and they’re loose enough that his arms are freed within seconds. Dave goes fiddling with the contraption on his head, lightly pressing and feeling along rusted metal as he tries to figure it out.
“Here’s what happens if you lose.” Dave’s fidgeting immediately stops when the screen changes to show him what the device looks like.
There’s large metal plates covering his mouth, pins in the front that probably coincide with the spikes digging into his flesh, and a large chunk of machinery in the side. It comprises of a gear, a tension-locked spring, and a stopwatch.
On the monitor, the trap is strapped to a mannequin, a loud ticking coming from the timer as the hand ticks to complete a full rotation. The noise continues for about three seconds until the hand strikes ‘sixty’ and the trap snaps open, completely disintegrating the material the head was made out of. The rapid motion and loud sound makes Dave flinch. “Think of it like a reverse bear trap.”
The puppet laughs again and if Dave wasn’t panicking before, he is now. He slaps his hand over where the timer is; It’s not ticking, he’s safe for now. Right? But he doesn’t know if it could be remotely activated or if-
His hand slides further back and he manages to grab ahold of what he thinks is a wire. It’s simple enough to put two and two together. If he pulls it then the trap primes and his time limit starts. He very gently follows it behind his head to find it connected to the chair he’s in.
“The only key to unlocking it rests within the stomach of your dead cellmate. You’ll only have sixty seconds once the device activates. Hurry up. Live or die. Tick Tock.” The feed cuts out just as Dave is graced with the information that he’s not alone.
In the corner of the room, far out of his reach from the chair, lies a girl he knows from rehab, a fellow addict. Dave and his needles and nose candy, Roxy and her alcohol. But she was more than just a fellow patient. They were best friends, she was like a sister to him; not that he fully understood what that meant. It didn't matter what that meant. He knew that he cared a lot about her... and there she was on the floor.
Dead.
His voice is a muffled and hoarse whimper when he tries to call out for her. “Rr..x?” He can’t even get her name to sound right in his mouth, and in exchange for his effort, he coughs painfully as the blood coating his tongue slips down the wrong pipe. The pain gets worse when the spikes punish him for jerking around, but Dave blocks it out so that he can focus.
He needs to focus.
A knife lays next to Roxy and reality sinks in. Dave takes a moment to think of his plan. No, he takes several moments to think of his plan. If he gets up then the timer will start and Roxy is far out of his reach; if he wants to do what the puppet said he needs to then he’ll have to be quick. Why should he listen to the puppet, though? What’s stopping him from just sitting in the chair forever without triggering the device on his head? He stares at Roxy. She’s still and lifeless, but she’s full of color. If she’s already dead then things shouldn’t matter.
Dave looks back to the television screen as if it’ll come on again to tell him more, but there’s nothing. He scans the room, finding pipes running along the walls and tarps everywhere. There’s also a camera in the corner, aimed straight at him with a little red light indicating it’s recording. There’s not much he can work with, there’s only what he knows.
The longer Dave sits, the shittier he feels, beginning to shake and sweat. It’s not just the room that’s dingy, it’s him too. When was the last time he’d indulged in his guilt-filled pleasures? Sure, he was going to rehab for his addiction but it wasn’t working in the slightest. He still filled his body with all of the toxic funtime substances he could get his hands on. He remembered getting his fix a good few hours before he went to pass out on his shitty bed. Dave couldn’t tell how long it’d been since then to now. Withdrawals could kick in anywhere from eight hours to a full day after the last dose.
Dave could only entertain himself with his thoughts for so long before he felt like he needed to vomit. He couldn’t, he couldn’t open his mouth so when he gagged, he leaned forward with the motion. Hunched over himself, blood leaks from a space between the maws of the bear trap, painting his thighs crimson.
He drops his head just an inch further to try to get comfortable- a soft click seems to echo through the empty room, his breath beginning to quicken as the ticking noise starts.
Sixty seconds. He had sixty seconds that were rapidly counting down all because of his stupid body crying at him to inject it with poison.
Dave falls out of the chair on weak legs, scrambling across the room as fast as he can to get to Roxy. His knees scrape open on rough concrete as he lunges for the knife laying next to her, his eyes watering.
“She’s dead”. Dave repeats the phrase like a mantra in his head. She's already dead.
He doesn’t see Roxy’s eyes open when the knife plunges into her abdomen. Gore splatters out from her wound and Dave jabs a few more times, digging as fast as he can. It's fine. She's dead.
When he eventually finds what he thinks are her intestines and stomach, he's disturbed to find them warm.
Why were they warm? Why was she warm?
“She’s dead”, she has to be.
He spends a good half of his time just sifting through blood and guts, but he stays as calm as he can keep his shaking body so that he doesn’t lose. He can’t lose. The image of the mannequin head replays in his mind in perfect timing with another gag rising up his throat. Dave’s arm comes up, bracing across the front piece of the device on his head as if it’ll help him keep the feeling down.
His still searching hand finally grabs onto something smooth and metallic under the sea of red and fleshy colors. He holds it up triumphantly in the light created by a single lamp in the room.
His victory is short lived as his ears helpfully tune back in to the ticking coming from the side of his head. He scrambles with the key, patting around the sides and back of his head to try and figure out where it goes.
Dave’s fingers are slick enough with Roxy’s blood that his first few attempts to grab it slide right off, leaving fingerpainted whorls of blood in his light-blond hair.
Finally, he grips it securely, and he desperately brings the key to meet it. The key misses, once, twice, five times, skittering across the blood-drenched surface. The key slots into place on what has to be his tenth attempt. He turns it, and the metal curved around his head that keeps the trap in place swings outward.
Immediately, Dave rips his face out of the rig, throwing it at the ground to watch it snap open with barely five seconds to spare.
He’s breathing heavily. Blood drips down his broken and cut lips to his chin.
Dave wants to scream. He doesn’t.
He heaves, he shakes. He finally vomits and the blood clinging to his mouth falls with the bile.
The same puppet he’d seen on the screen rolls into the room on a shitty little tricycle. It stands in the entrance of a hallway that had been obscured with the hanging tarps. It wasn’t like the room needed to be locked or anything if he only had a minute of walking around time before inevitable death.
“Congratulations. You are still alive.” It’s the same voice, and Dave watches in horror as the HEEHEE HOOHOO that comes out of the puppet’s chest reverberates around the room. He backs up against the nearest wall, slipping in the blood pooled around him.
“A lot of people are incredibly ungrateful to be alive… But not you, Dave.” He whimpers, cowering before the doll and hysterically trying to scoop Roxy’s guts back into her body. As if it’ll make what he did to her any better. “Not anymore.”
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“Okay…” The Detective is clearly disturbed by his graphic retelling and lets Dave soak in the moment for all but a few seconds. “Do you think he picked you because you were a drug addict, Mr. Strider?” It’s a harmless question.
Dave nods as he stares up at the ceiling. Behind his sunglasses, his eyes as wide as dinner plates and as lost as a hiker on a new trail. “He… He helped me. He saved me.”
English’s face warps uncomfortably.
When he gets home after giving his statement, Dave drops his jacket onto the back of his ratty couch. His apartment feels darker than usual, and he wonders for a moment if it’s paranoia brought on from recounting his tale of torment. Though, the further away the days got from the traumatic event, the less it affected him.
It had easily been a month since his abduction, a month of having gone clean. Normally, the shitty coffee table in front of his busted TV would have lines waiting for him on it. He quit cold turkey the second he got out of the trap. He survived a sick game, he couldn’t waste his second chance to live. He had gotten home and destroyed everything.
The institution he had been previously going to, Skaia Bound Clinic, couldn’t break his bad habits. Roxanne (Dave had insisted on calling her Mom), couldn’t help him fight the demons that left needles in his arms and his nose bleeding.
Dave ducks into his bedroom, turns on the bedside lamp, and moves to change out of his jeans when he sees movement out of the corner of his eye. At first he believes it to be the lamp's faulty bulb playing tricks on him, but then a figure starts to move closer from the edge of the room.
“Come the fuck on, man.” He outwardly complains. “Can’t do shit in Houston. A guy can’t even put on his pajama pants in peace without some peeping pervert lurking in his peripherals.”
“Hello, Dave.” It’s a harmless phrase, but Dave knows that tone. Even if it was scrambled through a voice modulator and came out of a puppet; a puppet that gave him more nightmares than any other aspect of his trial did. He never saw Roxy when he closed his eyes, he only saw a pristine white face with blue eyes and red swirly cheeks.
Dave’s gaze falls on the window at the other side of the room. If he wanted to, he could vault over his bed and make a run for it. Part of him didn’t want to though. He wasn’t frozen in place or anything, he could move if he wanted to. “Wow, the asshole that kidnaps me and nearly kills me also breaks into my apartment. This is great.” Dave’s being snooty, but in reality he’s curious.
“Actually, you left the door unlocked.” The man walks closer and Dave takes a step back in response. “I came to-”
“Take me away again?” Dave cuts the other off and puts his hands on his hips. “Great. Why don’t I just pack a fuckin’ bag, or will I not need it? Will everything I need be conveniently available in the nearest corpse’s intestines?”
The killer laughs at the sheer absurdity of his victim’s words. He pulls a hat off of his head, smoothing his own blond mop back. “No, no. Not unless you want to leave here with me. I couldn’t help but notice how much better you’re doing from before.”
Right, so apparently Dave was being stalked before he was launched into a sick game. “You mean with the drugs?” The words are a mumble.
“Yes, the drugs. You were a patient at Skaia Bound, no? How long were you there? How long did they try their best to help you and penultimately failed? How many times did you go straight home and get your fix?”
Each question could be answered the same way. He was a problem throughout his entire journey with the people of Skaia. “...Mom called me a lost soul.” He regretfully admits what the head lady at the institution had told him. Roxanne tried so hard and Dave never tried in return. “But I’m a month clean now.”
“Congratulations on sobriety.”
It doesn’t feel right for Dave to stand in his dim bedroom, receiving praises from a man that tried to kill him. Dave’s never really been one to see what’s wrong, though. “Thanks,” He deadpans. “So, was there a point to this?”
A hand goes up to frame the man’s scruffed chin, he’s clearly analyzing Dave from behind his sunglasses. The shorter blond does the same thing, he knows that vacant stare. “I have a proposition for you.” The statement’s terrifying. What would a proposition from a serial murderer look like?
“And that’d be..?” Dave lets his question trail off. He backs up when the other man tries to step closer again.
“Come work for me.” ‘Jigsaw’ drops his hand to hold it in front of him instead, as if he’s expecting a handshake. “I have an apprentice already, but I could use a second one. You seem promising. Call me Bro.” It’s stupider than Jigsaw, Dave voices the thought and gets another laugh for his efforts. “You’ve got quite the mouth on you.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“You’re avoiding my offer.”
Dave rolls his eyes, folding his pair of pajama pants up and walking past Bro to stow them away again.”It’s nearly midnight. Can’t accept deals with a psycho Peter Pan when it’s so late and I’m fucking tired.”
“There’s iced coffee in my truck. The drive is about an hour, so feel free to take a nap.” Bro’s trying too hard.
“Yeah, I’ll just get in the van where there’s candy and we’ll go find your missing dog.” Dave’s running out of options to stall. He can’t just admit that a part of him wants to follow Bro to wherever it’d be. He has to play hard to get. “Stranger danger, my daddy taught me all about that.”
“You’re an orphan.”
“Well fuck, if you’re just going to have something to say to counter literally everything I tell you then why don’t you just fucking grab me and drag me out of here if you want me to come with you so bad!”
He didn’t expect Bro to take him up on that, but before he knows it he’s thrown over the man’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Dave’s coat is plucked off the back of the couch and thrown over him as he slams a fist into the man’s shoulder blade. His fighting is all for naught, though, when he ends up in the passenger seat of a beat up Dodge. The door is locked on him instantly.
“Peter Pan took people on flights.” Dave leans back against the seat, resigning to his fate. He doesn’t want to clue the other in on how he’s somewhat excited. His life’s been mundane since sobriety, this was a chance to throw things away and start something fun. Something new. Something… Something Dave couldn’t quite wrap his head around. Normal people probably didn’t think like this. Was it lost souls, like him, who did?
Bro hands him a fresh cup of iced coffee. He must’ve stopped somewhere on the way to the apartment building. “Plane tickets are expensive and, like I said, only an hour away.”
They settle into silence once Dave’s got the cup pressed to his lips. It’s a little too late for him to ask if it’s drugged. About half-way into their ride, Dave takes Bro up on the offer of squeezing a nap in. His rest is light enough that everytime the truck stops and starts again at red lights he’s awake again. He just can’t sleep any deeper with a psychopath next to him. A psychopath who has kidnapped him twice. Even if Dave was asking for it the second time it was still technically kidnapping.
Dave eventually gives up on sleep and the silence starts to eat away at him to the point that he just can’t stop his lips from flapping. “Am I ever going to be able to go back and get my stuff? I kind of, you know, lived in and liked that apartment. I can’t take the city bus this far everyday, so I can only assume you’re planning that this’ll be permanent.”
Bro hums as he’s changing lanes to pull a hard left into a dark parking lot. The buildings inside all look run down and abandoned. “It was on the table.”
“You just knew I’d agree to this.”
“You haven’t agreed yet, actually, but I will take that as confirmation that you’ve decided to become my apprentice.” He shuts the car off, turning in his seat to look at Dave.
“Well...” Dave flounders just a little bit, waving his hands in front of his face to emphasize this internal struggle he’s facing. “I feel like I’m too okay with this.”
Bro undoes his seatbelt and reaches into his pocket to click a button. All of the car doors unlock and Dave scrambles out as fast as he can. The vehicle is a little higher off the ground than he expected, so he stumbles on the way out.
He keeps glancing at Bro as they’re walking towards one warehouse dubbed simply as the Galveston Butchery, the man hasn’t answered him or said a word since his revelation.
“Who’s to say that you’re not the right amount of ‘okay with this’?” Words finally grace Dave’s ears once they’re inside the dark and run-down factory. “You’ll react how you’ll react.”
“Did you really need to do such a dramatic pause?”
“I was thinking.” Bro leads him through a series of hallways and large open spaces that are stained with blood and have hooks coming down from the ceiling. Dave can guess exactly what went down to leave those dark puddles. Maybe he should’ve been paying more attention to his surroundings when he eventually ended up finding his way out of the building he’d woken up in a month ago.
“I stunned you into silence?” They eventually duck into a room with light, but not before Dave trips over a pipe sticking out of the wall next to the door. “Who does that! Who in their right mind when designing a building does that!” He’s too busy staring at the metal that offended him that he takes Bro’s hand right to the chest, the man stopping him from walking further inside.
“Let me turn the lights on.” Bro gropes around in the dark until he finds the light switch and Dave is greeted with the sight of what seems to be a security system. There’s monitors all hooked up to one laptop, but they’re all turned off.
“Oh great, creepy surveillance room.” Dave’s mindful of any more pipes in his way now that he can see. Wearing his sunglasses so late at night and in a pitch black building wasn’t doing him any favors.
Since there’s only one chair that gets claimed by Bro, Dave has to settle for sitting on the edge of the desk. He looks down at the monitors next to him when the laptop is opened, and a metric shit ton of different tabs fill each screen. He can’t get a good look at any specific one before Bro minimizes them all to go digging through files on an SD card.
“This is my workshop.” Bro tells him. “This is the main area of operations, and where-”
“Where you were watching me through the camera.” Dave clicks the pieces into place before Bro can finish his sentence.
The man looks Dave over as he pulls up the most recent video file. “Don’t interrupt me.”
Dave sees himself monitor. There’s something about watching from a third person perspective that has him sitting on the edge of the desk, unable to glue his eyes away. The first two minutes of the film he’s out like a light and then he’s aware and afraid, keyword being aware.
“With your trial, I was… impressed. You’re a quick thinker. You’re incredibly smart, aren’t you? Most people… panic.” Bro changes the feed to show a different, older clip. There’s some old man basically naked and trapped in a room full of barbed wire. Dave can immediately figure out the solution without being told all the details. You just have to walk through all the wire to reach safety on the other side of the room. The man on the screen does not think as rationally, instead thrashing and flailing until he gets stuck- an artery gets nicked and the man bleeds out.
“I panicked.” Dave admits, resting his hands in his lap. “I had a heavy metal rig stabbed into my mouth, and I- did it have to be Roxy?” He looks at the man who took him a month ago. “She… She was like my older sister.” He hopes the words mean more to Bro than they truly do to him. It had been Mom who compared how well they got along to being siblings.
“I knew about your little relationship. I thought it might throw in a little tension, a little hesitation to help it really set in how much you needed to push through. If it was some random person, well…” Bro tilts his head as he changes the video they’re watching back to Dave’s. “That’s not personal. It could be like cutting into a turkey.”
Dave’s eyes fall to his hands. They’re slightly scarred from pricking himself on needles and having little accidents in the kitchen; they are clean otherwise. “...She was dead, right? Like the tape said? Her blood, her body, it was warm.”
Bro is silent for a moment. He moves his shades down on his nose so that he can stare at Dave with bare, cold citrine eyes. “What would you like me to tell you?”
It’s a little mercy. He’s better off not knowing. “Okay. She was dead.”
The older man nods. “Roxy was dead when you disemboweled her in your fight to live.” He repeats Dave’s words as an affirmation, and the shorter blond believes him. The feed resumes and they get up to the part where Dave starts blindly patting at the device to figure it out. “Right here, this is where you surprised me. You didn’t flail, you didn’t scream, you got straight to work figuring out the situation you were in as I was explaining it to you. I can visibly see it in your eyes when you find out exactly how the trap works.”
Dave can see it too. In pools of red, there’s a flicker of something when he got his hand on the wire that kept the timer from starting.
“Even when you were graced with the sight of what it’d do to you, you stayed relatively calm enough. I’d almost guessed it was because you were tranquilized, but I know my brew doesn’t work like that. You should have been operating at full mental-capacity. You should’ve been scared out of your mind.” Bro removes his hand from the keyboard after pausing the video.
“I was! I was terrified.” Dave still is, clinging to the fabric of his coat as he sits uneasily on the corner of the desk. There’s something unsettling about the way they’re rewatching his torture, and there’s something further discomforting about the fact that Bro is the one who put him through it and he’s just right there. “How many times do you have to rewatch it and how many times do I have to tell you?”
“Enough until I see it.” Bro motions towards the screen. “I’m not seeing any-”
“Oh what the fuck.” A third voice cuts into the conversation and room, making Dave go perfectly still. The only thing that moves is his eyes so he can see the source of the noise. “Bro, you didn’t tell me you were bringing in a stray.”
“Dirk.” The mastermind greets his other apprentice, who looks like he could be the same man but ten years younger. “This is Dave.”
“I know that, dumbass.” Dirk steps into the light around Bro’s desk. Oh. Not as identical as Dave thought- more like a very impressive impersonation. He moves like Bro. He wears the same shades and styles the same shape and shade of hair. Dave wonders if he dyed it to match. Dirk opens his mouth again, and when he speaks, his intonation is eerily similar to Bro's own. The only differences between the two are height and Dirk’s grease-soaked tank top compared to Bro’s high-collared polo.
“We literally worked together on his bear trap. Our first junkie.” He roughly pokes at Dave, and though the smaller man shies away from the touch, Dirk follows him. “Druggie." Poke. “Crackhead.” Another jab, this time in a soft spot.
“Okay, I get it!” Dave slaps him away with a grumble.
“Do you?” Dirk’s tone sounds innocent, but Dave knows it’s not meant to be.
“Play nice.” Bro’s not even looking at them, too absorbed in finding a close up of Dave’s scared eyes. He makes the photo fill his entire screen and leans in to get a closer look.
Dirk shakes his head, rolls his eyes, and gets closer as well. He points directly at Dave’s blown pupils. “That’s fear, Bro. Your favorite.”
“No, it’s not.”
“It’s not an expression of fear or fear isn’t your favorite?”
“Both. Agony is my favorite and that’s arousal. They look similar.”
Dave very slowly turns towards the two. “What? No. I know arousal. Trust me, I know arousal.” He shoves himself closer to also get a look at the still taken from the gore he’d starred in. “That’s fear. I was like two seconds away from shitting my pants the whole time.”
Bro pointedly looks him up and down. “It’s not, maybe you don’t know yourself as well as you think.”
“And you do?”
Dirk laughs, closing the open tab so that he can get a look at the video. “We know basically everything about you, pipsqueak. We’d not be as clean with getting away with things if we weren’t thorough in our research.”
That can’t be true. Dave knows it can’t be true. It’s just bait. Dirk’s made it clear that he only has plans to antagonize him, so it’s bait. “Liar.”
“We’ve even been keeping tabs on how you were when you left the warehouse. I’ve got CCTV from your apartment building showing you didn’t leave your place for a week after your hospital visit. I didn’t realize the reason Bro wanted me to was so he could recruit you, though.” Dirk’s clearly disproving of his mentor’s idea. “You’re a loose cannon, you’re going to make mistakes that we can’t clean up after.”
“Just a rephrase of shit I’ve heard before. You’ve gotta try better than that to get under my skin, Dirk.”
“With how you are, I probably wouldn’t have to try at all if that was my goal.”
Dave’s expression contorts with initial confusion before the innuendo sets in. “You fucking-”
“Didn’t I tell you to play nice?” Bro leans back in his chair, interrupting their argument before it can go on any longer. “You’re starting to give me a headache. Dirk in one ear, Dave in the other.” He massages at the sides of his head after motioning at both of them. “Dirk, I’m going to send the video to you and I’d like you to edit it down, cut out all of the hesitation. I think we can keep the way he accidentally triggers the trap because it’s solid gold.”
Dirk nods, able to switch to ‘work mode’ immediately. “Yeah, I’ll have that ready for you by tomorrow.”
“What are you editing it for? Personal spank bank? Dirk clips all your twink snuff?” For a third time, Dave managed to pull a laugh out of Bro.
“No. How do you think we get enough money to fund all of this?” He picks up a pen and searches through a desk drawer for a notepad listing materials and costs. “Donors on the web.”
Dave’s no stranger to an odd money making method, though his were skewed more sexual as opposed to pure torture. He can’t deny the fact that some freaks will pay a lot to get their rocks off a certain way. Sometimes that certain way might be gore.
“We get an idea for a trap-” Dirk starts explaining as he takes the pen right out of his mentor’s hand, circling the first ten items in the list. He writes ‘reverse bear trap’ next to it in chicken scratch. “-then we do some sketching for a blueprint to build what we want, total up how much it’d cost. We make enough revenue off the videos of people dying, and I guess one living, to sit on a small fortune.” He’s clearly salty about the fact that Dave’s jaw didn’t get snapped open in the gorey fashion he hoped it would when creating the headgear.
“So this is all actually just a money-making scheme?” Dave attempts to draw conclusions.
“No.” It’s Bro who corrects his ideas. “It’s about helping people. The money comes second.
“Helping people.” Dave repeats, incredulous.
“Helping people.” Dirk echoes, monotone.
Dave turns his nose up the second the other apprentice opens his mouth. “You’re both fucking crazy… Sadists that want to help people. Unheard of… But, your method works.” His eyes fall on the ripped knees of his jeans. Dave toys with the fraying threads. “It did help me, I got better. I wasn’t getting better in rehab or even my initial attempts to stop myself. I was getting worse and it was either your trap was going to kill me or dope was.”
Bro raises an eyebrow, about to speak up when Dave continues.
“It- it saved me. Like, genuinely, you saved me.” Dave stares into open air until his attention is slowly drawn to Bro. The man is staring back at him, staring through him.
It’s Dirk who speaks, though. “Well I’ll be damned. What are you, a little groupie?”
Dave sneers. “I’m not the fanboy here. You’re the one with the same hairstyle and shitty triangle sunglasses.”
“They’re Kamina shades.”
“That doesn’t mean shit to me.”
Dirk ignores Dave, leaning over his mentor’s shoulder again. “Why’d you have to pick up a sassy one?”
“He’s interesting.”
“And malnourished- and twitchy- and got his rocks off almost dying.” Dirk taps at the screen with a pinky finger while Bro scrubs through the footage. He cuts out the first few minutes of Dave being unconscious before saving the file to a flash drive. He hands it to Dirk. “He’s just as interesting as he is crazy.”
“I’m not crazy!” Dave protests.
“Keep telling yourself that.”
“Play nice.” Bro repeats himself. “I have plans. Dirk, get to work. Dave, stay here.”