rareslash | "Static" - Pink Floyd: The Wall

Title: Static
Author: theratman
Fandom: Pink Floyd - The Wall
Rating: R (for sexual themes)
Pairing: Pink/Schoolmaster
Warnings: Mention of physical and sexual abuse and underage rape.
Note: I wrote this before "A Flea's War", so it takes place before that. Movie-wise, this takes place directly before the bathroom scene.
About: Pink recalls the Schoolmaster's abuse, and finds a way out of his self-made prison - or so he thinks.

S T A T I C
“Let me hear you say ‘HALLELUIAH!’” a heavy-set TV preacher said enthusiastically, and the audience echoed him obediently. “Let me hear you say ‘AMEN!’”
“AMEN!!” the audience roared.
Pink stared at the fuzzy screen, glassy-eyed. The small moving pictures were hardly penetrating his brain despite the way he was intently staring into the glass; the sound of the excited preacher belting out religious jargon and the audience falling all over themselves for him seemed to reach his ears more slowly than it should, as if he was under water. Really, he ought to get up out of this chair and go wash the filth off his wasted-thin body and go out into the real world, remember what the sun was like, what it was like to see stars and grass and people and what it felt like the breathe something other than stale air and cigarette smoke. He knew this, too. He’d known it for a long time, but he really didn’t care much anymore. He didn’t feel much of anything, really.
Staring blankly at the figures on the screen, watching the artificial glow in their eyes from the over-bright stage lights, he suddenly noticed something cool and wet touching against his lip. Slowly, as if in a dream, he brought his fingers up to his face, touching against liquid that clung to his skin when he made contact with it. Looking down, he found his fingertips glazed with blood - it looked strangely black in the poor light, like ink. He stared, confused, but then he realized his nose was bleeding again - it had been happening a lot lately. He sighed and wiped the blood off onto his knuckles, but it continued to drip regardless, dropping onto the fabric of the chair. He tilted his head back onto the back edge of the chair and let his mind drift, stirred only by the taste of blood at the back of his throat as it ran down from his sinuses and dripped steadily into his mouth. The taste seemed at once familiar, uncannily so, and he gulped it down instinctively, sitting up. He stared at the television, but he didn’t see the little people anymore. Instead he saw himself as a child, and someone else - it was something he hadn’t thought about it years but now seemed as vivid as the day it had happened, and the blood in his mouth seemed the thicken until it choked him, but he could do nothing, and he stared into the abyss of the TV screen as memories seeped into the hollows of his mind.
CRACK! He gasps in a breath at the sharp sting of pain, flaring white-hot over the constancy of bony fingers digging into the scruff of his neck. The paddle comes again - he can hear the whistle of air through the holes in the wood before another hollow SMACK! echoes into his eardrums. It was harder that time, more intentionally cruel. His bones ache as the vibrations from the blow rock through his hips and backside. The Schoolmaster’s claw-like fingers grip tightly at the nape of his neck, and as they dig into his flesh like talons he wonders if he isn’t in the clutches of a skeleton.
The paddle comes down again, but this time on his lower back, cracking into the bones of his spine. The pain is so intense that he blacks out for a moment, spindly legs turning to liquid beneath him, but the Schoolmaster's hold on his collar keeps him from falling. His vision clears even as tears form at the edges of his eyes, and he finds his mouth if filling with blood - he’s bitten his tongue. Blood and saliva drip from his lips onto the scuffed floor as he sucks in a breath, choking on the salty liquid, too terrified to fight back, and he whimpers despite himself, shame and fear and anger racking his frame harder than the Schoolmaster’s blows.
“What’s the matter, laddie?” the Schoolmaster’s voice taunts. “Am I bein’ too hard on ya?” Cruel laughter, and then the hand on his neck comes down around his waist and slides between his legs, while the other is behind him, tugging down his pants.
Pink shivered at the memory, squeezing his eyes shut, letting the thoughts dissolve from his mind just as the blood diluted in his saliva. The television was still babbling mindlessly in the background… it sounded muted and dream-like. He opened his eyes and stared down at the white-gray ashes of his cigarette, really only to keep himself from looking somewhere else. Even after all this time it still had that affect on him. He’d never gotten away, had he? Not even now, with blood dripping into the back of his throat and the tightness between his legs and the shame making his face burn just like when he was a child.
He glanced absently to the side, an saw the circular bloodstains that had dribbled onto the chair and absorbed, looking purplish in the washed-out light. The blood clogging his sinuses had almost dried up, and he could smell it’s salty tang with each breath, as if he was breathing ocean air. It’s all just a joke, really, and he should laugh, but he didn’t feel like laughing right now, and besides he had never been one to do something just because he was supposed to. Wasn’t that what got him into trouble in the first place?
He stared up at the ceiling and the leaping shadows that painted it, a smile edging at his mouth, oddly childlike but with the faintest hint of something more sinister. He could change all that… change everything. And none of them would ever be able to hurt him again. None of them could touch him, no matter what they did. Smiling, he flicked off the TV and went into the bathroom. He picked up the razor…