Chapter Text
Ral had known, theoretically, that something was…off about the Rakdos club. That they recruited freshman without an ounce of common sense and that they tended to be enthusiastic about the creative use of baseball bats. What he hadn’t expected was getting kidnapped in the middle of a late-night study session.
They weren’t even quiet about it. Ral could hear them coming up the library stairs from a mile away, clanking and jingling with all their chain-metal jewelry. He turned up the volume on his iPod and kept working at one of the weird, alchemical problems Mizzet assigned his students sometimes. It was only mostly punishment work, because as far as Ral could tell this was one part of a larger equation that probably had something to do with Mizzet’s current research into air pressure dynamics. If he was feeling suicidal, he could probably steal a copy of the problems Maree and Crix were working on to try and piece the whole thing together.
Ral was still thinking about this interesting plan (and procrastinating work on his own problem) when someone very tall and leathery tapped his shoulder. He looked up with a scolding already on his lips, but never let it be said that the Rakdos were subtle. The tap on his shoulder was instantly followed by a punch to the face, and searing retorts went out the window after that.
“Fuck your mother with a screwdriver!” There had definitely been brass knuckles attached to that punch; Ral could feel the cold imprint of metal under the throbbing bruises. “What the fuck do you fucking want?”
There were five Rakdos thugs standing in the door between the study room and the rest of the library, all of them copiously clad in cheap black leather and decorative chrome spikes. At least Ral hoped they were decorative. The one who’d hit him stepped up and hauled Ral to his feet, poking his long pale nose too close to an eye. “You coming quietly, Izzet bitch? Or you want some more convincing first?”
All five of them growled in sync, and Ral managed to raise on bruised eyebrow. “Am I invited to a party?” He said, mock-surprised. “Did I miss my engraved—“ He was going to say invitation, but it came out more like, “Invi-tation,” because Thug #1 slammed a knee into his gut before he could get out the last word. “Seriously though,” Ral gasped, fumbling his way past the knee-jerk snark reaction and into something more useful. “Kidnapping a student from the library?”
Two of the thugs behind him looked at each other and shrugged. “You were here. We came to get you.”
“No more talking!” Thug 1 hauled him up by the collar of his shirt and shoved him out into the hallway. “Zarek, you try to run and you’ll regret it.”
“No doubt,” Ral muttered to himself, already looking for an exit.
It shouldn’t be so easy, Ral though. It shouldn’t be possible for the librarian to just stare at her desk as he was marched past her. There was always the possibility of him running out of here screaming for help, but honestly, that wasn’t Ral’s style. The bruise on his face should have been enough to get someone to call the Azorius, right?
But the thugs took him past the history building and into an ill-lit street towards the dorms, and no one said a G-d damn thing. Not even Ral. A dangerous curiosity was brewing in the back of his mind, wondering who would be ballsy enough to pull this off. Wondering why they would want to. Briefly he considered what Jace had said a few weeks ago, about making himself a target, but he discarded it just as quickly. From what little he knew of the guilds, one couldn’t just kidnap another without serious repercussions. And Mizzet may be a pain in the ass, but he wouldn’t take kindly to some Rakdos cronies pulling him away from alchemical work.
They took him down a set of stairs, down to the basement of a dorm he didn’t recognize. Hadn’t the Rakdos been banned from club “activities” on campus turf? The door was locked—not with the electronic passes that Ral had long since created his own master key to, but with a black iron key that looked like something out of Downton Abbey. Ral waited for them to open the door with his arms crossed, tapping one foot impatiently. At the darkness that yawned out, though, the tiny part of Ral’s head that retained an ounce of common sense pinged out a warning. Of course, the moment he hesitated, thug #2 shoved him forward. Ral huffed and swaggered inside, pretending that it was entirely of his own volition.
The basement was just as dark and creepy as he’d expected, and somehow worse lit than the maintenance tunnels Ral had ‘explored’ with Jace a few weeks ago. Orange light bulbs flickered damply every few feet, shining off of stainless steel chains and other pointy things.
“Is there an entry fee to the Funhouse? Because I think I left my wallet back at the library.” Ral stifled a flinch, expecting thug #1 to leave another bruise on the undamaged side of his face. But the goon only clapped a brass-knuckled hand on Ral’s shoulder, grinning in the ghastly orange light.
“Entrance fee’s already paid, shock man. You’ve got the best seat in the house.”
“Great,” Ral muttered under his breath, and then they were there.
There had probably been a gym or something at one point—a big, low-ceilinged room covered in bouncy rubber flooring and mirror along two of the walls. Despite the sheer number of people here (at least twenty) the room practically echoed with extra space. It wasn’t much, as far as theaters went, but Ral thought it probably didn’t have to be to impress this crowd. They couldn’t possibly be students, at least not most of them. That amount of metal hanging off of your face would be recognizable, surely. And the only thing these people had in common was the twisted glee on every shiny, sweaty face he saw.
“This may or may not be a problem. Schrödinger’s problem, you could say. Possibly a matter of quantum mechanics—“
“Ral Zarek.” The cold voice rang out sharply against the metallic muttering of the crowd. Ral didn’t recognize the woman who stepped forward, but that might have been because of the clownish face paint she was wearing, all reds and blacks and sickly whites. “Our newest rival. Welcome to the circus.”
“Are we supposed to be rivals?” Ral asked. “Because if so, I’m definitely ahead of you on that curve. I don’t even know who you are.”
The face paint looked even uglier when she scowled like that. Someone should let her know. “My name is Exava, guildmage of Lord Rakdos. Do you know why you’re here, little mage?”
“Lightning mage yes, ‘little’ not so much,” Ral said with his arms crossed. He tapped his foot to show his impatience with Exava’s speech-writing skills. “And I’ve got some things to get back to if you don’t mind—“
The whip came out of nowhere, lashing across his shoulder with a hiss and a rattle of chain links. Ral yelped before he could think about it, a spontaneous reaction to being hit with a fucking chain whip. It’d torn the sleeve of his shirt, leaving a sharp, bloody line on his skin.
“What the fuck is this?”
“There’s no reason for this, Zarek, I want you to know.” Exava sounded stupid-smug, but she was also pretty chill standing there in her demon outfit, and Ral had a black eye, so who was really winning here? “This isn’t for revenge or some grand plan of my Lord’s. This is just for fun.”
Ral cursed again and flung lightning at her. He had gotten better since that night in the tunnels—though he hadn’t yet found a ‘safe’ place to practice. Where safe meant he didn’t have to pay for whatever blew up. So this time, instead of a jagged streak as wide as he was, this lightning was smaller, more precise. A snap-flash of light and a crack of thunder that had the Rakdos goons scrambling to the edges of the room.
But Exava didn’t move. She just stood there, one hand on her hip, and tapped her high-heeled boots on the padded, rubber floor. “Come on, Zarek,” she scoffed. “Surely you can do better than that.” This time, when the whip lashed out towards him, Ral dropped to the floor to avoid the whistling chain. Exava laughed, like he’d done exactly what she wanted, and a second long chain cut across his hands, snagging on skin and leaving bruises deep as any punch.
Ral was getting tired of this game. He gritted his teeth, and got up. The problem wasn’t that he didn’t believe the Rakdos capable of this—the problem wasn’t even that these were RU students, that these were people he might recognize in a classroom or passing in the hall. The problem was that Ral had always known places—and people—like this existed a hair’s breath away from civilized life. He was a gay Jewish man growing up in the twenty-first century, alright? He didn’t need to be convinced that these people existed. He just didn’t want to have to face them on his own.