Chapter Text
This must be what Will Smith’s character felt like at the start of Men In Black. What the hell were you doing here? There were a mix of genders in the room, but the one thing everyone seemed to have in common was confidence coming off of them in waves and that they didn’t look like you. They didn’t look like each other either, but they all looked more likely to have walked off of a modelling set than out of a military base.
You weren’t trained in psyops, but this seemed like it might be something in that department. Why else did so many of these candidates ooze beauty and authority? You shouldn’t bloody be here. The application had been secretive, a form slid over a desk from your superior officer who got it from his who got it from his in a chain with no obvious end. Someone had picked you out for this, and you were starting to think that wasn’t a good thing.
Were the people here higher up the chain than you or at the same level? You try to summon confidence, you’re not exactly some green private at their first training exercise. You’re special fucking forces. Yeah the monsters in the SAS or the SBS are out there slaughtering the bad guys, but they wouldn’t be doing shit without the Signal Regiment. You had to go through 25 weeks of hell to make it in. Just because you’re comms, doesn’t mean you didn’t have to prove conduct after capture or jump out of a damn aeroplane to pass training. And you had already served a year in infantry beforehand.
So you get over yourself and wait for further instructions. You have just as much right to be here as any of them.
The first tests go ahead. Fitness (you don’t fall last in the pack for performance, but you’re lower than the middle), gun handling (solidly middle of the pack), comms (you come first). It’s all suspiciously standard stuff. And then you are all put into an actual scenario.
You go into a room. It reeks of blood and sex and there are 3 people, one unconscious. The woman on the floor has a thick collar around her neck and is in scant lingerie that has very clearly been torn for access. There are bruises littering her body, rope marks embedded into her skin. The two conscious people are a man and a woman. She is screaming at the group to shoot him.
He’s told to get on his knees as the bulk of the group assess him as the bigger threat. You ignore them and go to gently check on the woman on the floor along with another candidate, trusting that the rest will subdue both current threats.
“These marks are pretty consistent with BSDM, not prolonged abuse. And the collar has an emergency quick release they’d be able to operate themselves if they had to” the other candidate says.
You immediately get your own gun trained to the other woman when you glance up and see her totally free from any restraint and in close range to one of the other candidates, a protest coming from one of the men who has went to comfort her.
“Put your gun down, you’re scaring her” he hisses.
“Until we have further information on what is happening here, all suspects should be treated as hostile and questioned.”
You don’t know if you got it right, but it seems wildly irresponsible to just decide that the big man must be the bad guy but she is definitely innocent. Mostly it’s just a strange scenario you’ve been put in, but in the field there can’t be trust for strangers. It’s not a courthouse, everyone is assumed hostile until there is proof to the contrary.
It isn’t resolved, you are all just told the exercise is over. One by one candidates are called into an office until it’s only you left. You’re absently wondering if you want to make ramen for dinner tonight when you are called in. The sinking feeling that you are in over your head hits you full force. You know one of the two people in this room.
Captain John Price, SAS. You’ve spoken with him before (well you’ve rattled off intel to him through a radio before) and you are well aware he is not to be fucked with.
“What did you think of the exercise then?” he asks, both him and the woman sitting behind the desk openly staring at you like predators with their eyes on a tasty morsel.
“I’m not sure what was being tested sir. I reacted as my training encouraged sir.”
“At ease, soldier. A real answer” the woman says and you squash back a reaction to the American accent.
Your shoulders loosen off. It’s not like you applied for whatever this is, so it isn’t any great loss if they’re about to kick you out. You’ve got ramen to get to, another quiet night at home alone to either enjoy or feel bitterly lonely about. It’s a toss up these days which mood will strike when the lack of warmth starts to bite.
“Most of your candidates need to be sent back to basic. They worked on baseless assumptions rather than taking control of the scene and figuring out what had happened once any danger was subdued. That woman could have killed two of them and taken a third hostage in seconds.”
“I agree” the woman says with a smug little smile, “British forces aren’t what they used to be.”
Price laughs.
“Your yanks would have done far worse. You made the right call. The woman on the floor was in a consensual relationship with the man, the marks were received willingly. But since there’d be no way of knowing, both of the threats needed to be removed. Questioning would have sorted out the truth.”
It was a weird fucking exercise to use. What were they testing with that kind of scenario? Implicit gender bias? But then why the kinky angle when they could have removed the casualty entirely and it served the same purpose? The whole thing was starting to make your skin itch as a folder was put on the table in front of you. You caught a nod from the woman and opened it, feeling like you were about to throw up.
“What is this?”
“Insurance. You break NDA and it’s not a court that’s going to crucify you” Price said, almost cheerily as you looked at photos of yourself.
One of them was taken of you sleeping in bed. The next the camera turned to have you in the background in bed while Price took a selfie barely inches from you, smiling for the camera as if he had any right to be there. More photos. Most of you, but some of loved ones. There is a flash of an image in your head, your last moment being the panic of waking up with a wire around your neck. You wouldn’t have broken NDA, but the overkill makes you unbearably curious. How bad is what they are recruiting for if they have to kill anyone who leaks it?
“I understand sir.”
The woman tilted her head as if you had said something interesting. Did the others react badly you wonder? The thing about being special forces signal regiment was that the lengths that the military would go to didn’t surprise you anymore. They created monsters to fight monsters and hid them away in the dark while they paraded out their nice, proper soldiers for the public. Good family men in uniform, advocates for mental health, veterans who were revered as heroes. The special forces were not those men. Captain John Price was certainly not one of those men.
Did you sometimes find it hard to sleep at night? Of course, you helped those monsters even when the line between good and evil was so thoroughly crossed that you wanted to scream at the world and never stop. But without them? Without them everybody would know exactly how cruel people could be because there would be nothing stopping them.
“This is the Kennel” the woman said as a screen behind her came to life.
The schematics were insane the more you drank them in. Underground bunker, recreational facilities and what seemed to be apartments. You would think it would be some rich person’s doomsday bunker if not for the layers of security. The apartments were locked down tight, there were guard posts and an ungodly amount of surveillance. Nobody was getting out of there if these people didn’t want them to.
You had seen plenty of prisons from high end to metal cages in caves. It was your job to get intel, to guide people through rescue missions or escapes. But this was something else.
“You want to build a luxury secure facility?” you asked, feeling the furrow in your brow and the incessant itching of your skin.
The woman clicked a button and the screen changed. Holy shit, they didn’t want to build it because it had already been built. Where the fuck was this? This was big and it must have costs billions, how on earth had you never heard of it? It wasn’t exactly some dingy black site.
“We need them, but this job twists people. Some of them can still keep it under control at home, some just need to stay immediately after a deployment to calm down. There are 6 full time residents right now. Got 5 part timers and 5 who visit when they need. Not all on our side of things.”
“There are tangos in there?”
“Officially nobody is in there, the Kennel doesn’t exist. Unofficially? It’s Switzerland. A rabid dog will bite whoever you point it to.”
You wanted to be outraged, but was this really so different from all the other foul things you knew happened in the background? A luxury blacksite holding the “good” guys and the “bad” guys alike who couldn’t be trusted out in public but who were needed to unleash upon the enemy. This was so fucked up but you imagined that the military did 5 equally as fucked up things before breakfast.
“What is this job exactly?”
Price crossed his arms and rocked back on his heels, staring you down and making you feel tiny in that chair.
“Sometimes the best place you can be to keep the world safe is on your back.”
“Excuse me?”
He was not implying what you thought he was surely. It was just unfortunate phrasing.
“Just an expression, I imagine only a few of them would want you on your back. Think at least half would enjoy you on your knees.”
You held his stare, determined to wait him out. He was fucking with you. This was some bizarre test and you had no idea how you were supposed to respond.
“He’s asking you to play bitch for his dogs soldier. They get out of hand when they can’t rut” the woman said as if that cleared things up.
“I didn’t figure out anything about the whole BDSM thing or whatever it was during that exercise. It was the other guy. I don’t do any of that stuff.”
They ignored you.
“It’s a month-long contract to see if it improves their behaviour. After that you are free to do whatever you want with a shiny promotion and enough money that you can retire to Hawaii with a glowing record and military honours if you’d prefer” the woman started.
“All you have to do is take whatever they want to give you. No safewords, you can’t stop it once you start” Price finished.
“No.”
“Not even going to consider the offer?” Price asked, almost eager.
“I’m not considering an offer that actively puts me in an unsafe situation with no way to get out.”
“Told you Kate.”
You wanted to be out of this fucking office already. You thought about what previous attempts might have looked like. Sex workers who were thrown in with monsters and torn to shreds. Maybe ones who begged to leave but got assassinated the moment they got home and started talking. Because this wasn’t sex work, it was a military operation. A civilian was never going to survive that situation, not with the kind of monsters you imagined the Kennel held.
“You know why the soldier who knew all about BDSM failed?” Price asked, closer than you remembered him being. “He said yes. Agreed to the terms. I’ve got no time for someone who can’t take care of themselves and is going to get eaten alive within the first 24 hours because they were too eager to please to say no. They try break you? You safeword and I come in and break them.”
There was something in the back of your mind somewhere that found the offer grotesquely appealing. You thought it unlikely they would take you once you told them you were a virgin. It just sort of happened, you didn’t know how to meet people and you were now at an age where the pressure felt insurmountable. Did you tell that to someone on a first date? Did you not tell them and they go too hard and hurt you? What if you couldn’t even do it properly?
This would be work. This would be a military operation that allowed assets to be used rather than put down if it was successful. You’d be getting used, but maybe you wouldn’t be lonely.
It was the negotiations that did you in. The warm hand of Price on your shoulder while he explained aftercare procedure. Some of them would do it themselves, but some they’d probably need to drag off of you and then Price himself would take over. If he wasn’t available for any reason, Kate would.
They framed it like it was a heroic pursuit. These people were broken, they needed someone to start patching up the cracks. Your virginity it transpired was an asset given that they knew just the person who would look after you for your first session. Someone in the Kennel had a sizable virginity kink and you were assured it was one of the part-timers who wasn’t prone to extreme violence the way the residents were. You’d get an info pack with details the day before.
The final nail in the coffin that had you signing the dotted line was Price (deliberately you realised quickly once you got a moment to breathe) mentioning Soap. You knew him. Not in person, but you had talked him through diffusing a bomb before. He had flirted up a storm and his warmth over that radio even when he was seconds from dying at any given point had stuck with you for weeks. It was only a month. You just had to do this for a month.
October 1st you would lose your virginity in a bunker that didn’t exist to a soldier you didn’t know, one who needed you to stop them from fully becoming a monster. Fuck.