He Makes Me (Queen AU)

Chapter 34

Roger lifted his arms up from the chair, a strange, weightlessness to them as he realized his freedom. The blonde instinctively reached down, coming face-to-face with the brunette still cowering behind the palms of his hands. He froze, worried that his captor's hands would drop and reveal an evil scowl stretched across his face. However, after a few, long, passing seconds where time seemed to stop, and Tim remained as still as a statue, Roger dared to lean down and figure out how to undo the masterful knots.

The task wasn't easy, nor was it quick, but the blonde was able to loosen the restraints and stand up out of the chair. Suppressing his excitement, his heart beating fast, Roger slowly rose to his feet, wary of the chair and floorboards creaking beneath him. He held his breath as he tiptoed towards the door, waiting until he had stepped out into the hallway to make a break for it.

He ran as fast as he could, making a couple of wrong turns and hitting a few dead ends, but the drummer eventually found his way to the bathroom in the basement, where John had taken Brian. He stood breathless in the doorway, leaning against the threshold and laying sorrowful eyes on the guitarist seated in a pool of suds.

John had discarded his fur jacket, hanging it on one of the hooks on the wall normally meant for towels. Without the jacket, he wore nothing but the black stockings that covered his legs and the matching, short-sleeve bodysuit that appeared a size too small and hugged the nineteen-year-old in all the wrong places—emphasizing his groin and showcasing his protruding ribs. To watch him run the dirty cloth over Brian's body was grotesquely mesmerizing, but the sight compared little to the haggard shell of the man who once used to give Roger butterflies. Looking at him now, all the blonde felt in his stomach was a tight knot, twisting more and more the longer he stared into the dull hazel eyes that stared at the rippling surface masking his frail frame.

"Brian," Roger croaked, staggering into the room and falling to his knees beside the tub. John only looked at his guest for a brief second before returning to his work, submerging the washcloth in the tub of cooling water and slapping it on Brian's arm.

The guitarist slowly picked up his head and looked at the man to his left, revealing the bluish-purple ring wrapped around one of his bloodshot eyes, its pupil larger than the other. The blonde grimaced at the abnormal phenomenon, having only seen it depicted in textbooks before and never in real life.

"It's bad, I know," John blurted out, prying Roger's gaze away from Brian. He dipped the wet cloth back into the sudsy bath and continued, "I've seen Tim do a lot of things, but never have I seen him do something like this."

"It wasn't his idea," the blonde muttered, recalling their conversation before the start of the horror show. "He was just doing what he was told."

"Who told you that?"

"Tim did."

"And you believed him?"

It was at that point that the guitarist mustered enough strength to pick his arm up out of the water, the one John wasn't attending to, and wrapped his hand around the clawfoot tub's edge—his fingers bony and clinging shakily to the porcelain. The blonde unconsciously wrapped his own hand around Brian's, giving him a slight, reassuring squeeze as he answered, "Of course I did."

The nineteen-year-old laughed. "Rog, if there's one thing I've learned about Tim over the years, it's that that man will say anything to get you to feel like he's on your side, but I can assure you, you're only going to get yourself fucked believing what he says." He tried again to wipe away the crimson streaks staining the guitarist's arm, but they proved more stubborn than expected.

"I just don't think it's all him, though." The blonde shook his head in disbelief. "I mean, you saw what his nan did, and you heard what she said...how she was going to do what Tim never could."

His remark stirred a visible sense of unease in the teenager, but John refused to entertain the idea that the man who'd held him captive for years wasn't responsible for all the pain he'd caused him and the others; that there was someone else to blame—especially his grandmother. Sure, the woman was annoying and critiqued just about everything about them, but Tim tortured them. He lured them in, stripped them of their identities, and forced new ones upon them. He coerced them into doing unspeakable things, degrading themselves for the chance to stay alive; to one day get out of here, though the likelihood of that withered with each day that passed by.

"She's just old, Roger," John offered. "She doesn't know what she's talking about half the time, nor does she know what she's doing."

"It didn't seem that way to me," the drummer mumbled, vividly recalling the violent smacks she delivered to Brian's torso with her cane.

The two fell into a contemplative, disagreeing silence that consumed the entire room—save the slosh of the water as John resoaked the rag he'd worn thin scrubbing at the guitarist's bloodied skin. He hadn't even attempted to get it out of his hair yet, the matted, wavy strands daunting.

When the nineteen-year-old had gotten all that he could off Brian's arm, he sat back and heaved a sigh. "He usually has Freddie do this," he muttered, crossing his arms over the tub's edge opposite the one Roger's and Brian's hands lay intertwined and resting his chin atop his knuckles. "I just hate it when they fight. We get left with all the work while Freddie gets to roam around London feeling sorry for himself."

"Why does he get to leave and we don't?" Roger asked, bearing his naivete to the two projects who'd witnessed and experienced more than Freddie ever would.

"Wanna guess?" The two lovers stared at John blankly, anticipating the answer the teenager withheld from them. When he realized neither of them were in the mood for games, he sat up with his hand in a fist by his cheek and pressed his tongue into the side of his mouth, moving the two in sync. In that instant, it became clear where Tim's proclivity to Freddie originated from, and while Brian's face soured at the realization, Roger raised an intrigued eyebrow.

"Yeah," the nineteen-year-old said, grabbing onto the side of the tub and using it to lift himself up off the ground.

With the flick of his chafed wrist, he commanded Roger to the other side of the bath. Brian was reluctant to let go of the blonde's hand as he stood up—his fingers digging harshly into the drummer's hand—and, even though he assured him he wasn't going far, the guitarist's nails drew crimson lines across his skin as Roger pulled away and swapped places with John.

"We do it too, you know," the nineteen-year-old grumbled, kneeling back down beside the tub and reaching over the guitarist to grab the rag he'd hung over the side. "But it never works out for us the way it works out for him. I don't know if it's because he's better at it than we are or because Tim's in love with him, but—"

"No," Brian interjected, his voice scratchy and his throat like sandpaper.

"No?" John scoffed. "What the hell would you know?"

The curly-haired student took in a painful breath that wracked his poor body with a fit of terrible coughs. He twisted his torso and clung to the edge of the tub, bending over it and spitting up a glob of blood that squelched upon landing on the floor beside Roger. The blonde hissed in disgust, shooting up from the ground with a hand to his chest.

Brian tipped his head back, a sickly paleness to his face as he lifted a shaky index finger out from the tub, pointed it at Roger, and rasped, "You."

"Me?" he replied.

The guitarist coughed once more, resting his forehead against the porcelain edge of the bath in between his hands and choking out, "It's you. He's in love with you."

John's wide eyes wandered up to meet Roger's, which doubled in size. "Is he serious?" the teenager asked.

"Yes," Brian answered before Roger could stammer out a lame excuse for a response, straining to turn his head over his shoulder to look at John. "That's why the two of us are here."