(no subject)

[stuck_mynock]

The hospital is a mirror image of every ruined world Atton has walked upon.

Flashing electrics. Crumbling pillars. Shattered glass. Craters. The many numbered dead.

They are standing in one great, rotting, hungry mob. Their tongues are squirming about in lipless mouths, something thick and clear running in long trickles down their chins.

“You can never escape. This is your punishment.”

They are closing in on him, with swinging chains and blasters and knives. Atton chokes, doubles over. He can’t breathe, his vision is blurring, the dead are closing in. Jeering and taunting and mocking and howling and screaming and sobbing, crying thick, red tears ...

(So loud. Why won’t they stop?)

... The process is slow. Methodical. Rough in a calculated, brutal manner.

Chains about his wrists to a hook overhead. Shirt torn away. Hosed down with icy water.

“You’re filthy, Atton. You need to be cleansed.”

They are laughing at him. Loud, long, gleeful, applauding, pounding their feet against the ground in an endless drumbeat. Approaching with their weapons as the hose runs dry.

“Atton Rand. You have been found guilty of fraud, inciting bar-brawling, tax evasion, smuggling contraband, thieving, desertion twice over, gambling, negligence leading to the destruction of no less than six worlds, brawling in the street, selling illegal wares, torture, mass murder of many hundreds of people and treason against the Republic.”

A blindfold is set over his eyes.

“Your sentence is thus: For each sentient you have wronged you will receive one strike, unarmed or with an item of your punisher's choosing. Having made some small step on the road to being cleansed, you will be granted the honour of a poor man’s burial. It is more than you deserve.”

(More than he deserves. Atton couldn't agree more.)

The hours that follow blur together. One long struggle not to scream as the chains and belts and fists come down and the wronged whisper in his ear, ending in failure. Some try for pain, some for humiliation, and eventually their hands and weapons are coming up bloody. The seeming eternity drags on from stoic silence to winces, hissing, growling to screams mingled with low requests for an end.




He survives. The constant assault stops. A thin rag is draped about his shoulders as they unchain him, haul him away, and Atton realises with a low and dizzying wrench of his gut that they’re going to give him the burial they promised.

(Trapped. Trapped underground with nowhere to move. Slowly crushed down. Bones cracking. No air to breathe. Waiting for death.)

The coffin is too small, too small by far, and as it closes in smaller and smaller Atton gasps for the breath to struggle and free himself.

The breath never comes.

A dead man digs his shovel into the soil.
“Let’s begin.”