Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/11631261.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      F/M, M/M
  Fandom:
      Final_Fantasy_XII
  Character:
      Vaan_Ratsbane, Penelo, Migelo, Non-Important_OCs
  Additional Tags:
      Explicit_Rape, explicit_non-con, Prostitution, Knives_used_during_sex,
      Not_a_Happy_Story
  Stats:
      Published: 2017-07-27 Words: 3518
****** Life in a Conquered City ******
by BloodStainsBlue
Summary
     “I don’t like this. I feel uncomfortable. I want to leave, I don’t
     want their food or their money.”
Notes
See the end of the work for notes
It started shortly after the war ended. The king was dead without a signed
treaty—provinces and people were wordlessly traded off to the undisputable
victor of the long conflict.
            First the soldiers came marching in. Vaan and Penelo were both
fifteen when the first armored boots touched the desert soil. Neither fully
understood what was going on, although Penelo seemed to understand a little bit
more. The adults seemed just as confused, but also had a lot more to say about
the whole ordeal.
            Some people seemed excited. Most of what people knew about Archades
was lavish cities with buildings as tall as the royal palace being a common
sight, personal airships zooming between them while people shopped in colorful
clothes made of silk. Perhaps, they argued, the Archadeans would be bringing
their obviously superior economic system over with their soldiers, helping the
people of Dalmasca better than the old ways and kings ever could.
            On the other hand, there were the angry people. People who figured
there was no way everyonecould be living that lavishly in Archades, that surely
there was an oppressed class and that now, here, theywould become the oppressed
class in their own cities.
            Everyone lived within a stirred mixture of excitement and suspense.
What would these soldiers be like? Soldiers who’d been able to take down the
Dalmascan army and put the once proud city of Nabudis under the ground. Would
they be proud and noble? Would they just be normal men like their own soldiers?
Some of the adults who were left after the plague and the war two years later
mused about their own sons who’d been sent off to war—surely Archadean soliders
were the same—men who’d been taken up the state, boys who had a short way to go
to manhood. Or, some now childless, siblingless people spat, they must be
monsters, monsters who could kill children who’d had swords forced into their
hands.
            “They can’t possibly be as bad as our own guys,” Vaan would say to
the other children, the wound still fresh from watching his brother die,
catatonic from the shock of getting stabbed in the gut by his trusted captain.
            It was a rare, rainy day when the first Archadean soldiers came
into the city. They were a different branch than the ones who’d been fighting
in Nabudis and in their own palace—this was a special group of soldiers, given
power when Archades set their sights on territories outside of their own. These
soldiers had a specific duty—keep the peoples of conquered areas in line.
            They came in with full-bodied armor and new weapons. Women scoffed
as they peeked out of their windows, rolling their eyes when metal backs were
turned towards them. “Who could they possibly need to defend themselves
against? Women and children with no combat training, men who’ve returned from
war broken and dumb with no fighting spirit whatsoever?”  
            They began posturing early. They snarled at people who’d ventured
out of their homes from behind their helmets, pointed swords at shopkeepers
from behind their stalls and prodded at the sizeable orphan community with
pudgy fingers.
            Vaan and Penelo were the eldest of the children who’d been left
behind, and the only ones who spoke Standard. When the Archadeans addressed the
other children, they simply shook their heads and ran away. “Such disrespectful
little rats!” the soldiers would sneer, and chase them with spears just to goad
tears from their eyes.
            The highest-ranking official who’d come in was an old military
general, in his forties. He addressed himself as Aldebrand and looked at the
children with a leering, cocky smile when he lifted up his helmet. He held four
gil out in his massive bear paws and said, “Show us around the city? You’ll
each get two.”
            The fifteen year olds led them in a circle around the city. They
pointed out the shops, who owned them, how many of them spoke standard and how
many only spoke languages that were spoken in Dalmasca.
            They pointed out what areas were residential, and who generally
lived where. The soldiers looked veryinterested in that information. They asked
where Vaan and Penelo lived. “In our old house, where Mommy and Daddy used to
raise us. All of the orphans live with us, too!” Penelo answered.
            They led the soldiers through the bazaar, which was much quieter
than usual. Usually deafening with voices speaking in various languages,
steamers on and cooking up meat that was brought over fresh from various
trading partners, all of them various desert dwelling and nomadic tribes—at
this time of year it was Naak meat from the Garif that was being sold from most
of the booths.
            By the time they got to their final destination, the now empty
palace, the sun was beginning to sink below the horizon. The gate that hid the
palace from the common people was still a strong fixture in the city, despite
the palace having been empty since that final battle that decided the war.
“We’re going to eat some bread. Come with us,” the captain offered, while
another soldier, Powle, Vaan would later learn, used the butt of his sword to
break the giant lock and force the gate open.
            “We can’t go in there!” Penelo answered, and the Aldebrand shook
his head.
            “You’re with us. You can do anything we’re doing. We won’t go
inside. Promise.”
            “Let us go home!” It was Vaan who began the shouting, wrapping his
hand around Penelo’s skinny wrist and pulling her back.
            “If you leave, you won’t get your two gil.” That made them stop.
“Eat with us, and you can have your gil.”
            The two children let themselves be led into the front courtyard, to
the palace fountain which had been off and stagnant since the war had started.
The water was blood red, smelling vaguely of rot.
            The third soldier who’d been with them, Voyce, sat down on the
fountain edge and untied a large pack from around his waist. “Do you two eat a
lot of bread?” Aldebrand asked, and Vaan nodded his head. “Fresh-baked?” he
asked. This time, they each shook their heads. “Do you two make money?”
            “I dance sometimes,” Penelo answered, her eyes downcast.
            “Oh? And what about you?” he asked Vaan.
            “Odd jobs for Migelo.”
            “Oh, the owner of that sundries shop you pointed out before. What
kind of odd jobs?”
            “Moving cargo, setting up shop, picking up deliveries.” Vaan looked
proud of his makeshift ‘job’.
            “I want to watch her dance,” Voyce said. “If she dances, you can
both have butter on your bread!” he offered.
            Neither of them knew that word at first. They spend a minute trying
to translate it before Powle simply scooped some butter onto his finger,
showing the children before wiping it onto his water pouch. “What do you say?
Dance for butter?”
            “Go on. There’s no harm in this—you do it every day,” Vaan
whispered to Penelo, gently elbowing her side.
            “I don’t like this. I feel uncomfortable. I want to leave, I don’t
want their food or their money.”
            “Please, Penelo.” Vaan looked at Penelo with large, round eyes, and
a pout. Voyce and Powle whispered to each other at that, but Vaan didn’t
notice.
            “Okay, fine. But you owe me,” Penelo hissed.
            She pulled away from Vaan and stood up, moving to stand in the
soldier’s line of sight. It wasn’t much, nothing that her or Vaan or any of the
other Rabanastreans would have balked at, but the three men looked highly
interested. “Look at the way she moves her hips.” “The Dalmascans seem to wear
no clothes at all.” “This could be the best assignment we’ve ever been on,”The
three men whispered among themselves in Archadean while Penelo danced.
            She finished moving to the song that she was moving to in her head,
and the three men clapped and handed each of them a piece of buttered bread.
“Good girl. You’ve earned this, both of you.” Penelo looked ashamed of herself,
and so Vaan handed her half of his bread, but he had a large smile on his face.
            They silently ate for a couple of minutes, the two Dalmascans
wolfing down their bread in record time. “Wow, you two must have been hungry,”
Aldebrand laughed, and looked back at his two men. “We’ll give you the rest of
the bread we have on us if you do us one more favor,” he offered.
            Vaan was going to accept, but Penelo shook her head quickly. “We
need to be getting back, soon. The other orphans will worry about us. We’d
rather just take the gil and go.”
            “Shame,” Aldebrand said, standing up and bringing his hands over to
his waist. At first it seemed that he was reaching for the pouch that was tied
to him, but it quickly became apparent that he wasn’t reaching for the gil that
he’d tucked away for the two Dalmascans but was instead removing both the pouch
and the sword hilt from his person. “I’m taking the girl. You two can have the
boy.”
            They tried to bolt, but neither of them got too far. Unlike the
Archadean soldiers, theydidn’t know what was coming.
            Voyce and Powle grabbed Vaan by the biceps and dragged him to one
side of the courtyard, while Penelo was gripped by her long hair, dragged
kicking and screaming to the opposite side by Aldebrand.
            Vaan was turned so he couldn’t face her, forced onto his knees. He
looked up at the two soldiers, already towering over him when he was standing
at full height, but now he was barely a speck to them. He wasn’t a crier, but
even so he felt tears of fear pricking at the corner of his eyes, quickly
turning to humiliation and shame. “Why are you doing this? What do you want?”
he asked, but was shut up with a harsh slap to his face. The metal dug into his
cheek, leaving a deep, messy cut on his tanned flesh.
            “Shut up! This will be quick and painless if you keep quiet!”
            “Well, lesspainful, more like,” the other one laughed.
            “Luckily for us, this one looks kind of like a girl! Makes it go by
faster!”
            Vaan’s squirming intensified, Voyce pulling away while Powle knelt
down to his level, forcing Vaan’s hands behind his back and twisting them at a
sharp, uncomfortable, pulling angle.
            Voyce stood in front of him and maneuvered his lower half out of
his armor as much as he dared. “Open your mouth,” Powle ordered, and Vaan shook
his head, turning his mouth to a thin slit and looking up at the night sky,
anywhere but at the man standing before him.
            “He said, open!” Voyce shouted, smacking Vaan’s cheek with his
length. Vaan shook his head again, whimpering and saying, “Mm-mm!” It was
overpowering, the smell of metal, blood, and sweat that was emanating from the
man before him. Voyce brought his hand up and pinched Vaan’s nose, forcibly
cutting off his air. “Have to breathe at some point, little rat!” he chuckled,
like this was some silly joke that he and Powle were sharing at Vaan’s expense.
            Vaan’s lungs were burning in his chest and his vision was framed in
black before he finally gave in, opening his mouth and gasping in for air. His
nose was immediately released, but Voyce had immediately filled his mouth up
with his cock, causing Vaan to choke and gag around him.
            Voyce’s hands traveled around, gripping Vaan’s hair tight as he
began to thrust his hips in and out of his lips. Vaan gagged on every inward
push, tears falling freely while spit overflowed down the corners of his lips
and his chin.
            He didn’t notice that one of his arms had been freed, didn’t notice
until he felt his pants get shoved down to right below the curve of his ass. He
groaned in rejection, but that didn’t stop Powle behind him from spreading his
cheek with two of his beefy fingers, positioning himself and shoving himself
in.
            Vaan screamed around the organ in his mouth, but it didn’t slow
down, and neither did the intrusion behind him. “Fuck, he’s tight… surprised.
Guess he won’t be anymore, huh?” Powle grumbled, not waiting for Vaan to adjust
before he was rocking in and out.
            Vaan felt like he was being sawed in half, ripped apart from the
inside, and there was nothing he could do but try to stay upright on his knees.
He wouldn’t collapse, he kept telling himself that, repeated it over and over
in his head like he was praying.
            It felt like hours but was more like five minutes when Voyce was
pulling out, spilling his seed on Vaan’s face while Powle painted his insides
with it. He was pulled off of each of them and thrown to the floor like a
ragdoll, violently coughing and gagging. The two men redressed themselves, made
sure they looked presentable, and dropped the sack of bread and butter down to
the floor. “Thanks kid. Play your cards right, and you could eat like this
every night, you know,” one of them, Vaan was unsure which, said to him.
            They left, and Vaan lied on the ground in silence for a few
minutes.
            Before he pulled his pants back up, he reached down, brought his
fingers over to his abused hole. He touched it and hissed in pain, slowly
bringing his fingers up to his face, squinting to see them in the bare light of
the moon. Blood, tinted pink with the semen that had been spilled into him. He
rushed over to the fountain and threw up into the water.
            Penelo was already there, pale and sweating profusely. Her bottoms
had been ripped, open, leaving her exposed, no doubt what had happened to her.
“He gave me ten gil,” Penelo whispered.
            “I got bread and butter,” Vaan answered back, surprised at how
raspy and broken his throat sounded.
            “We’ll give it to the kids,” Penelo said, convinced. Vaan couldn’t
argue with her. “I could never eat that disgusting bread… but the kids deserve
it.” Vaan could only nod.
                                      XxX
            The walk back was slow and terrifying. They stood close to each
other and used the other as support as they walked. The children ate the bread
they gave them and asked minimal questions. Some of the older ones, still
children but not babies, seemed to know what had happened, but knew better than
to ask. Vaan and Penelo both resolved not to talk about it.
                                      XxX
            The next day their water had been shut off. Vaan and Penelo went to
the fountain that was still running, in the center of town, to wash up. There
were many other people there. It appeared everyone had lost their water who
wasn’t a shop owner.
            The gossip of the night had been bleak. Apparently Vaan and Penelo
hadn’t been the only ones—mostly women, but some men, most of them younger and
prettier. Soldiers had broken into homes, raped women in front of their
husbands and in the middle of the streets. That explained to Vaan and Penelo
how some of the children knew, although they had apparently stayed away from
women who had children in the house with them.
            There was also a notice that read that all people, unless they had
a small child living in the house with them, or ran a shop and spoke Standard,
were to be moved out of their homes and into the warehouses underground. “But
what if The Plague comes back!? We’ll be living so close to the rats!” one
woman exclaimed. She’d been violently rubbing at her skin for the past hour,
her arms red and raw.
            “I don’t think they’d care too much if that happened. Then they’ll
just lock the doors and keep it contained,” someone else answered. Her daughter
was sitting next to her, mute and crying.
                                      XxX
            Migelo offered up his warehouses for Vaan, Penelo, and the other
orphans to sleep in. “It’s gonna be free range for everyone else down there,
but you’llhave a plan!” Migelo said excitedly. He’d handed Vaan a key to his
stores and opened it up.
            “So, you’re going to get to keep it?” Vaan asked excitedly, or, as
excitedly as he could manage. His voice was still rubbed raw, and he’d since
accumulated a harsh bruise on his collarbone. It had been a week since that
first night, and he’d been pursued four times, each time by a different
soldier. For Penelo, it had been worse.
            “Yes, luckily for me! I was worried—you know, they wanted to kick
out all non-hume shop owners, too, but so many of the Standard speaking ones
are Bangaa and Seeqs—I guess they had to choose which they hated more, people
they couldn’t understand or people who looked different!” Vaan chuckled with
Migelo and shook his head.
            “And luckily for you, they should leave you alone when you’re down
here. They only get that way at night—“
            “Yeah, I know,” Vaan said, looking sheepish for cutting Migelo off.
“Sorry.”
            “No problem, dear boy. Anyways, I doubt that they’ll be coming down
here for anyone. Just… stay down here once it starts getting dark.”
            “Some people won’t be able to. Some people work at night, up there.
Some people who they target. And some people won’t leave their houses that
easily.”
            “They’ll probably try and scare them down here. The sexually
starved ones will work as sheepdogs.”
            “Leading us to the slaughter,” Vaan mused.
                                      XxX
            His name was Ywain.
            Vaan and Penelo noticed that they’d lived larger in the past week
than they ever had before or since. The Archadeans were vicious in their taking
but they always seemed to immediately feel as sick as their victims did,
throwing down some form of payment to whoever they’d taken before they left.
            “If one of us keeps doing this, maybe we can feed the orphans even
better than we were before!” Vaan suggested.
            “And by one of us, you mean you, right?” Penelo asked with a small
glare.
            “Of course! If you get knocked up, that means more mouths to feed
and lessfor everybody. The opposite of what we want!”
            “Yeah, but do you want to get sick! That happens sometimes, you
know! Women at the fountain talk about diseases that target people who are too
easy.”
            The solution was then pretty easy to come to. Vaan would find
someone to sleep with regularly, one who he could coax gifts out of regularly.
“And it’s not like I don’t know what to expect now! It’ll be fine!”
            His name was Ywain. He was a captain of the Archadean army and a
man who Vaan would be terrified of if he knew better. Vaan barely reached his
chest, couldn’t wrap his arms around him and feel his fingers touch.
            More than that, he was rough. Violent. Possessive. But possessive
was good. It quickly became common knowledge that there was a little blonde
boy, pretty like a girl who belonged to Ywain. Soldiers didn’t ogle and pinch
him in the daytime and they didn’t jump him at night.
            They’d met the same way Vaan had met all of the Archadeans he
knew—a hand over his mouth, dragged behind an empty bazaar stall. Forced onto
his knees, and then his back. Ywain held a knife over his throat, and though it
made Vaan’s heart beat faster, it seemed to do the same to Ywain, although the
reason was distinctly different. Vaan grabbed his wrist, dragged the knife way
from his neck and down to his bare chest. “You can mark me,” Vaan whispered,
and moaned like he wanted it. “I’ll come to you every night.”
            “Why?” Ywain asked, dragging the knife over his right pectoral.
            Vaan hissed and whispered, “I have about twelve mouths to feed
along with my own. You don’t need to give me everything. But a little bit
helps.”
            Ywain spilled himself inside of him and they developed a system
that worked.
                                      XxX
            Ywain left after three months, and Vaan was never able to find
another who would play his game. In the daytime, he propositioned not only
Archadeans, but Dalmascans and traders from the outside tribes as well. Penelo
cried for him, and Migelo shook his head in disgust when he came into work with
his hair mussed up and his joints sore, but the orphans hadn’t eaten so well
since they’d lost their parents.
            At night, it was just a matter of playing helpless enough, crying
enough when they forced him down, and making them feel guilty enough that they
could set a coin down next to him when they were all done.
            In another year, he’d added pickpocketing to his repertoire, and
Vaan Ratsbane had managed to gain himself quite a reputation in the capital
city of Rabnastre. One could almost call it prosperous. Such was life in a
conquered city.
End Notes
     I've been reading "Woman in Berlin" lately, and this is very loosely
     based. I'm sorry I wrote this.
     I hope you enjoyed, as much as one could enjoy this. Love ya'll! x
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