You Must (Not) Let Go

Part 3

Content Warning! This one might get a little intense. (If I write it right)

Something was picking roughly at the back of her head, sharp and uncomfortable. Her body felt like a dead weight, her limbs lying limp and useless off the edge of a hard surface, her head throbbing. A heavy weight was between her shoulder blades, pressing the air out of her lungs, making it difficult to breathe. The fog in her head cleared a little and she was able to separate the sensation out as a coarse hand poking and prodding low on her head, just below her skull, accompanied by something sharp being scraped forcefully against her skin. She winced at the harsh treatment and struggled in vain to raise a hand to put a stop to it.

The scraping stopped while she still fought with her limbs and she felt the point of something metallic digging into the flesh around the implant port at the base of her skull. Then not just digging but cutting, gouging into her. Alarm rang sharply in her mind, mixing with the unbelievable pain and providing her with the strength to raise her arm, grasp the coarse hand and make the pain go away.

Her hand was casually batted away. There was a low grumbling above her and she struggled to break free. She was grabbed roughly by the hair and had her head thumped into the hard surface, in the same offhanded way one might thump a holoprojector that wasn’t working. Then something sharp was jabbed into her spine, a needle or a thin knife, and her limbs dropped dead and lifeless to the ground. She whimpered, the only sound she could make, her breathing shallow and painful, wondering if she’d pissed herself already. Her assailant poked at the back of her head with whatever tool they were using, increasing the pressure until tears leaked out of her eyes. Finally satisfied that she was incapable of retaliation, they got back to work. Crude metal was pushed clumsily into the flesh around her port, bruising and pinching her until it found a good grip on the delicate machinery implanted just beneath her skull. A blade was inserted rapidly around the edges of the port, mangling her flesh, not unlike a baker loosening a cake from a tin. Then the pulling began. Sera tensed, breathing rapidly through her nose, the smell of stale sweat and her own blood pricking the air, uncertain if she was trying to scream or push her attacker away from her. The pain was excruciating, the sensation of the gossamer fine wires interfacing between the implant and her lower brain and spinal cord being slowly torn out of her was unlike anything she’d ever felt. She scrabbled for the Force but it kept eluding her grasp in the pain and fog of her mind. Then there was a pop and her forehead smacked into the hard surface as the port came free.

She cried out as loudly as she could, only a pathetic mewling noise making it out of her numb lips. Blood ran down her neck freely, her assailant not bothering to staunch the flow. She wondered what they were going to do with her next when the hand began pawing at her face, prodding and inspecting her flesh. Heart racing, Sera jerked her head away only for it to be caught in an iron grip. A dirty finger came into view and her left eyelid was prised open. Sera watched in horror as the finger tapped against her artificial eyeball, every instinct and pain sensor recoiling at the too-close touch. She tried to blink. The thumb digging into the top of her eye socket stopped her. She tried to pull away but couldn’t muster the strength. Cold metal, a pair of tongs, bumped into her eye. Then was forced into her eye socket, catching the skin of her eyelid and dragging it into the space around her eye. Sera screamed, or tried to. Her assailant pulled, the skin around her eye impeding their progress. They cut her eyelid off, turning Sera’s vision red. Her eye began flashing error messages as it was extracted from her skull. Her heart pounded in her chest, sending spurts of blood from her wounds. They pulled and pulled, stretching her optic nerve, her vision becoming more and more distorted. There was some fumbling, the grip on her head loosened, and the vision from her left eye went dark as a large pair of scissors snipped through her optic nerve.

Sera wept, staring in shock as her eye was deposited on a shallow tray next to her implant port, its brown iris staring back at her. She didn’t think that she’d ever quite appreciated the level of craft that had gone into its construction. It was unnervingly lifelike.

“What are you doing? You’ve ruined it!”

Blood was pouring from her empty socket. She was going to go into shock if she couldn’t slow her racing heart.

“Sir, you said retrieve all…”

“Urgh! Use your brains, you witless oaf! Obviously I was going to use this one for my personal use, which I can’t now that you’ve mangled it!”

She had to calm down. She had to not panic but it was difficult when she was in agony and bleeding and she couldn’t move and she needed to close her eye to stop the blood but there was no more eye to close.

“How much tranquilizer did you use? It looks like you’ve damaged its brain.”

“Sir, it fought back. I had to…”

“I don’t care. Throw it in one of the cells. It’s useless now!”

Fighting through the pain and whatever she’d been drugged with, she finally caught the barest wisp of the Force. She tugged on it gingerly, threading it around her wounds, drawing in as much of her own blood as she could, stopping its flow. Her grip was tenuous and she could feel fresh blood trickling down her face and neck.

“Go suck on an exhaust pipe, you limp-dicked, shit-fucking streak of piss.”

Presumably, the “Sir” was gone. The heavy weight was lifted from her back, letting precious oxygen flow into her lungs. There was an odd buzzing sound. The lights overhead flickered, then flared, sharp and bright. A thunderous boom like death ripped through the air, shaking everything, the walls, the floor, the ceiling.

“Fucking kids with their fucking gun.” There was the click of an intercom, followed by some swearing and irritated slapping at a control panel, then another click. “Stupid, fucking bullshit. Nothing fucking works here any more. Janta, Daleth! You can come get the other one.”

Sera focussed on maintaining control over her blood flow as she was dragged outside into the scorching heat and across a long stretch of gravel into another building. Coordination was slowly returning to her limbs and she was just about able to protect her head as she was thrown into a small cell and a heavy door was locked behind her. She bounced off a duracrete wall and collapsed on top of something warm and sticky with blood.

Every inch of her felt bruised. Her bare legs and feet were starting to complain about being dragged over sharp gravel and her stomach was revolting against whatever the hell she’d been injected with to keep her docile. And her head… Well, her head was still attached to her shoulders, so that was a positive. Grappling to maintain the delicate balance between keeping what was left of her blood on the inside, she cautiously tilted her head up to inspect her surroundings. Light from a single glow panel in the ceiling reflected harshly off the rotten and peeling paint covering the walls and floors. A smell of blood, human waste and mould pervaded the tiny space with the hint of something else underneath it that Sera couldn’t quite place. She didn’t think she’d ever seen such a bleak place. Taris Undercity maybe, although that wasn’t quite so… institutional.

The body beneath her groaned, blood pulsing out of open wounds weakly. It was her adversary from the bad guy ship this morning. Or earlier.

“Fucking hell!” His leg was missing and there was a gaping hole in his torso where his kidneys and liver should be. Sera whipped her t-shirt off and stuffed it into the hole to stop the bleeding, wrapping her hand over the stump of his leg at the same time.

“It’s okay. We’re both going to get out of this.” She pushed what she could of the Force into him, wishing she were a better healer than the very crude field medic that she was. A fresh stream of blood ran down her face as her grip on her own condition slipped and she swayed, lightheaded. She tucked her head into her shoulder to apply pressure to her eye socket and continued until the ashen colour left the young man’s cheeks.

He coughed wetly. “Where the hell are we?”

“Some kinda military base.” She gingerly drew her head away from her against her shoulder. The clot seemed to be holding. “Fucking funny kinda military base though.”

“Dumb bitch,” he said casually. “We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t interfered with our heist.”

“Yeah, well, we can debate that after we get out of here.” She pulled her hand away from his stump. She was going to have to figure out a way to dress it with what little they had with them.

“How.”

“What?” Maybe she could use part of his pants. They didn’t look too dirty and she was running out of clothes herself. Too bad his boot doesn’t use laces.

“How’re we going to get out of here? We’re both thoroughly incapacitated in the middle of an unknown base filled to the brim with heavily armed men and we have no way of knowing where my ship is. How the fuck are we supposed to get out of that, huh?”

Sera’s held felt light and not from her injuries this time. “We’ll think of something.” The day wasn’t supposed to go like this. I should be at home with Bastila. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

He rolled onto his side, turning his back on her. “Right. You tell me when you come up with this magic plan of yours.”

~~~

There was a grating in the ceiling, Sera realized, through which you could see up to the storey above. If you paid attention, which was difficult, occasionally you would notice the undersole of a boot tread across the upper part of the grating. Sera reflexively glanced at her wrist, making a disgusted noise at herself when her eye saw only bare skin. How long had it been? Bastila must be pretty fucking worried by now. And I left her with no ship, unless T3 managed to get it home. Fuck, I’m thirsty. They hadn’t been bothered in the time since they’d been thrown in here, which was great, fucking stellar if their previous taste of their host’s hospitality was anything to go by. But it also meant that their captors might not be interested in feeding them. Which was less great. Seriously, how fucking long has it been?

“Nobody’s coming for us,” her roommate said, breaking the silence. “You might as well give up.”

“Shush, I’m trying to count.” She could hear a fairly regular drip somewhere nearby, as well as what might have been the roar of a sea. That’s what I was smelling! Not that she could smell much with her nose gunked up with blood and snot. Small miracle in a place like this…

Her roommate harrumphed and turned back to face the wall. There was barely enough room for him to stretch out on the floor and the cramped quarters meant the Sera was hunched up in one corner to avoid the foetid puddle of foul-smelling water in the center of the floor. She guessed that there was meant to be a drainage grate under that puddle but that it had clogged up or collapsed over the years. Everything felt damp. Hot and damp, sweat stinging her eye and… not-eye, running down her body and stinging the abrasions on her legs.

She pressed her bare back against the cool duracrete, not wanting to get the open wound on the back of her neck too close to the grody walls but welcoming the relief from the hot day. Or night. So she sat in her bra and her comfy, day-off shorts, tapping and counting.

Sera tilted her head and listened, her neck feeling hot, swollen and stiff. It sounded like her calculations had been correct. She unbent awkwardly from the floor her limbs feeling heavy and numb beneath her and took up position under the ceiling grate, straddling the gross puddle.

She took a deep breath, waiting for the footsteps to get closer, ready to project her voice upwards. “Hey, you with the face! Can we get some water down here? It’s fucking hot!”

For a moment there was no response and Sera wondered if the guard had moved on. Then a stream of hot piss cascaded down on her head through the grate. Sera flinched out of the way and there was a rough female laugh from above.

Sera spat the foul liquid out of her mouth. “Yeah, fuck you too, buddy.”

The voice laughed harder and stomped off. Sera shook what she could out of her hair, being careful not to get any on her companion.

“Good job, idiot.”

“I am trying to get home to my loved ones!” Sera snapped.

“You just don’t get it. All you civilians are the same, thinking life is like the holos but it’s not. We are going to die here,” he said, enunciating each word clearly, his colour not looking good. “And there’s nothing you can do to change that.”

Sera couldn’t think of a snappy comeback to that. Her head was aching, more than aching actually, and she was starting to realize that the tingly feeling across her skin hadn’t fully left her even after she’d gotten off the hard floor. She flexed her fingers, noting the ever so slight numbness in them. Was it merely due to her injuries or was this a permanent feature of her life now? Her stomach clenched and her head swam. How was she going to get any sleep when it was taking every shred of concentration she had to not keel over? What if she sprang a leak in her sleep and bled out while she was unconscious? As if to prove her point, a large, bloody blob fell from her eye and splashed onto the dirty floor beneath her.

Her ears pricked up at the sound of footsteps. The second guard was making their rounds. She peered up through the grating, catching sight of her target as they passed overheard munching on something.

“Hey!” She heard her roommate groan behind her. “How long is it going to be until we get and service? It’s been fucking hours! What kind of establishment is this anyway?” She took a deep breath, channeling her beloved. “I’d like to speak to your manager!”

There was a scoff and the sound of a fly being opened.

“No, no! The other guard did that! Do something different!” She banged impatiently on the door. “Come on! We haven’t got all day! Hurry the fuck up!”

There was a harsh laugh and they strode off in a different direction from the one in which they had been heading. Sera listened intently. They went down some stairs, metallic, slightly old by the sound of it. Not too far from their cell either. A locked gate was opened and then closed behind them. Echoing steps down a narrow corridor. No click of a keypad or inserted keycard, so either a biometric lock or a card scanner on their door. Then the door swung open and the guard, large, red-faced and sweating, filled the frame. The first blow glanced off the edge of her shoulder. The second caught her temple. She fought back as well as she was able but soon she was on the floor, huddled into a foetal position while the guard rained savage blows down onto her bruised and broken body. She wrapped her arms around her head and waited for the guard to tire and lose interest, whimpering with each blow.

“Courtesy of the Sith Empire,” he said, making her flinch. Then he spat on her and walked out the cell, laughing as he slammed the door shut behind him.

Sera pulled herself inward where she lay on the filthy floor, hugging herself as she sobbed into the noxious puddle of rotting fluids in the center of the room. Her companion ignored her, obviously thinking that she’d brought this on herself with her stupidity. The smell of fresh blood hit her nose and she felt warmth flowing out of her wounds. A tendril of panic shot through her and she refocused her mental energies on her own body, lying frozen and tense until she could feel the scabs over her injuries reforming, sealing her precious fluids in her body where they belonged. She took stock of her body, noting that she’d been successful in blocking or redirecting the worst of the guard’s attacks. And only the worst. Ow! This was a dumb plan! She winced as she unfolded from around her prize, kept safe from harm in the crook of her stomach.

She took a generous bite of the guard’s sandwich and gagged. It was filled with some kind of heavily processed meat product slathered in a fruity sauce that was both sharp and overly sweet at the same time. She choked down her bite and poked her roommate in the shoulder.

“Here.” She held out the rest of the sandwich to him.

He looked shocked. “How…?”

“That was all he had on him. No keycard or anything like that, so the doors probably have handprint sensors unless the passcode is built into their uniforms.” She turned her head and held a thumb to one nostril, blowing sharply to expel a blood clot from her nose. “Uh, no weapon either, unfortunately.” Could she push the door open, run at full speed to wherever they kept their ships and get both of them to safety without getting blown to fucking bits first? She swayed precariously. Maybe after some rest…

Her companion barked out a laugh, making her jump. “You’d make a good officer pulling stupid shit like that. We had a lieutenant like you when we got captured by the Mandalorians.”

“Oh. Um…”

“They eviscerated him and strung up his corpse by his entrails,” he said, far too calmly by Sera’s standards, hungrily devouring the sandwich.

“Uh… Thanks?” She squinted at him. “Aren’t you a little young to have fought in the Mandalorian Wars?” He looked younger than Bastila, although she admittedly wasn’t the best at guessing people’s ages.

“I lied about my age when I signed up. The Jedi Revan gave a big, fancy speech and everyone was hyped and not checking too hard. And then I got shot to pieces.” He spat to indicate his opinion of that.

“Uh huh.” Sera felt her stomach twisting itself into a tight knot of guilt. She heard that odd buzzing again from the glow panel above, the air charged with static and a sense of doom hanging heavily over her head. The light flickered and dimmed. Then a sense-shattering boom split the air, shaking the cell and causing crumbling duracrete and flakes of paint to dislodge from the walls and ceiling.

“That doesn’t sound healthy,” her roommate said, ignoring her frozen silence as he patted the resulting dust and debris off himself, groaning when he disturbed the t-shirt lodged in the hole in his torso.

Sera jerked out of her horrified reverie. “Has the wound broken open again? Have you started bleeding?” She ever so carefully examined her makeshift bandage. The skin around the wound was hot and discoloured but didn’t seem to be bleeding. The blood-soaked t-shirt needed to be changed for something cleaner, really, really needed to be changed in a place like this, but they didn’t have anything to swap it out for and Sera didn’t want to disturb the wound more than was necessary.

“I’m fine.” His face was contorted in pain and he was breathing hard. “Leave it to those fucking Sith to ruin my day. As if they haven’t done enough as it is.”

“Mm.” Sera kept her head down, pretending to be engrossed in what she was doing.

“Didn’t think there’d be any of them left in this part of space. Stupid Hulo must have really fucked up his route.”

That must have been one of the ones HK-- “Those guys friends of yours?”

He laughed again, then groaned, clutching his stomach. “I just work with them. I don’t care how many of them your droid shot in the face. If we ever get out of here, I’ll just find a new crew.” Sweat rolled down his face and he twisted restlessly. “Although, that doesn’t seem likely at this point.”

Sera held a hand to his head. He felt hot but she couldn’t tell if it was because he had a fever or simply because it was fucking hot down in their little, damp cell. He didn’t feel much hotter than herself but that didn’t mean anything either.

“Maybe you should get some rest,” she said, pushing another tendril of the Force into the young man, pushing the heat out of his body.

“Yeah, sure.” His face crumpled and Sera found her hand gripped with a surprising amount of force. “You’ll stay here, right? You won’t let anything happen to me?”

She rested a comforting hand on his shoulder, calling on every mental power she had to mask the dread and foreboding rattling around in her gut. “It’s okay. Nothing’s going to happen to you while I’m here.” She swallowed. “Everything will be better after some rest.”

~~~

It wasn’t. Her patient only managed a few hours rest before waking up in need of assistance to relieve himself. Sera helped him up, surreptitiously doing what she could to nudge his failing kidneys along. He introduced himself as Wes Dasai.

“Feels rude for you not to know,” he said, grunting and sweating as she helped him onto his side. “Since you’re taking my pants off.”

She found that quite amusing and stored it away to tell Bastila later. It was a relief to have something to laugh about, even something fairly innocuous. Her few hours had been spent in a state of tense exhaustion, wanting to nod off but fearful what would happen if she did. She had gotten up once to test the door, just in case, and had spent the rest of the time with her ass on the cold, hard concrete next to Wes, worrying that he was going to start dying in his sleep and she would be helpless to stop it.

While she sat, tired and feverish, she had time to work out a scheme to harvest the condensation clinging to the walls and, now that her roommate was awake, she could test it out. They discussed their options and Sera set to running Wes’s remaining sock over the mouldy walls, soaking up as much moisture as she could. Sucking brackish water out of a stale sock was… an experience but they both agreed that it was better than using their underwear.

Wes had an uncle he didn’t talk to. His parents had died in a speeder accident when he was a kid and his mother’s brother, a metal worker on an industrial planet, had taken him in.

“He was pretty fucking pissed when I signed up, threatening to kick me out if I went through with it but we made up after that and we would call back and forth when we could. He took me out for ice cream the first leave I got.”

That had changed as the war progressed and Wes lost his leg and exposure to chemical weapons ruined his kidneys. He’d been fitted with standard military replacements, low-cost prosthetics that were heavy and needed long-term maintenance but got the job done, and got stuck back into the business of war until a substance problem with one of his medications had gotten him kicked out in the end. He skirted around it but Sera suspected that he’d… followed Revan into war more than once.

“What about you?”

“Huh?” Sera’s knees had crept up and up closer to her chest as his story had gone on and was huddled tightly into herself by now, thinking about the millions of taxpayers’ credits it must have cost to be able to convince everybody that a broken and burnt human being barely had a scratch on her.

“You got anyone waiting for you?”

“Oh, I’ve, uh…” She instinctively reached in her pocket, only to find it empty. Naturally. “Fuck, I actually thought for a second that they would…” She gestured vaguely at her head. “And would still leave my wallet behind.” Her heart broke just a little bit more. She’d kept the holograph of her, Bastila and Helena in there. It had been taken on their last vacation together before Helena’s health had started to fail. “Um. To answer your question, I have… my girlfriend’s waiting for me. At home. I left her and I should have been back by now…”

Sera trailed off. I’m so fucking stupid. If I had only kept my temper. If I only weren’t… But she couldn’t change that, couldn’t snap her fingers and magically change herself into something she wasn’t. Erase everything that she’d done.

“I should never have said any of those things to her.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll be home soon and you can make it up to her then.” Wes didn’t even bother to sound convincing.

She sniffed. “And I left her at home without a ship or any way to get around and I took the droids and all of your equipment with me…”

Wes patted her on the shoulder. “You’re going to make up with your girlfriend and I’m going to… I’m going to find my uncle and catch up with him and everything’s going to be okay.”

She reflexively reached up to rub the tears from her eyes and jerked her hand away in horror when her fingers encountered a slimy discharge. She recoiled, flicking her fingers urgently away from her to get rid of the substance, get rid of the sensation of it clinging to her skin.

Wes had urged her to get some sleep after that, promising that he’d wake her if his condition changed. She slept fitfully, plagued by the usual dreams of vague horror and death that haunted her nights, intermingled with new visions of violence, of limbs getting blown off, of a man’s jaw rotting off his face as he screamed and writhed. In the end, the heat woke her, dragging her back to the world of the conscious exhausted and on edge. Wes was on his back with his eyes closed and an odd sound coming out of his open mouth. Sera’s heart stopped, thinking that he was drowning in his own fluids as he slept. Then she realized that he was just snoring. She flopped back against the wall, bringing her hand up to run over her face before remembering why that was a bad idea and knitted her fingers together tightly in frustration. She let her head rest against the wall and closed her eyes. Eye. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t bring herself to even try, but she could just sit and do nothing. Rest as best as she could and give her body the time and energy it needed to knit itself back together.

She took a deep breath of the disgusting air and let it out slowly. Her head felt like an over-inflated balloon. Or a giant, disgusting pimple, ready to pop. Her body and face were hot and damp and she couldn’t tell if she was sweating or if she had weird gunk oozing out of her head and over the rest of her body. Had the infection reached her brain yet? It had to have by now, right? Her brain hurt, a dull, oppressive thud interspersed with sharp spikes of pain shattering her concentration. She reached into her dwindling reserves of energy, difficult in the heat and the exhaustion and the pain, and turned her focus inward, moving her body’s resources around to aid in the healing process. She focused as long as she could until fatigue ripped her body’s control from her grasp, leaving her numb and spent, too tired to even move.

Sera squinted up at the overly bright glow panel. Was it flickering again or was she starting to see things? The sporadic firing of the base’s cannon had continued while they sat and stewed, scaring the piss out of Sera every time it went off and threatened to bring the fucking ceiling down on their heads. She’d lost track of the time, one of the earth-shattering firings disturbing the drip she’d been using as a timepiece. She also stopped keeping track of the guards passing overhead, frightened that they would remember their “guests” languishing just a floor below and decide to use them for entertainment. She stared at the flickering light, not moving, not even thinking, feeling time slipping through her fingers while Wes snored and grumbled in his sleep, his skin mottled and discoloured, his breathing irregular.

In the end, her parched throat pushed her wearily to her feet and she harvested what she could of the moisture from the walls. There was nobody else to do it anyway. She sucked her portion of the collected water thirstily out of the sock and set the rest aside for Wes. She looked over the walls, wondering if she could harvest enough to slake their thirst and rinse out Wes’s injuries. Maybe if she reduced her portion and tried wiping down the less filthy parts of the ceiling and floor?

The boom caught her off guard. The glow panel flickered and flared impossibly bright, then the light fitting within the unit gave a loud pop and the cell plunged into darkness.

Sera waited. Maybe this was just a temporary thing? She reached up awkwardly, banged the glow panel. Nothing. Maybe the whole base’s power had gone out? She rattled the cell door. Nope. Unless the doors had been rigged to remain locked even in the event of a major power failure, in which case they were fucked either way.

“Shit…”

“Sera?” A hand gripped her ankle and she had to force herself to not jump out of her skin like a tiny baby. “What the hell happened?”

That’s a good question. “Power surge knocked our lights out, I think?”

The hand tightened convulsively, almost painfully. “Fuck, this is it, isn’t it? They’re going to leave us to die in the dark.”

Sera tried to pull her ankle back to no avail. “I’m sure maintenance will come and fix the panel, even if they just throw us into a different cell to do it.”

But they didn’t and Sera had to admit that it did indeed seem as if they were being left in the dark to rot. If she thought it had been bad before, the concept of time seemed to slip and distort even further. She could no longer tell the difference between a minute and an hour. The border between the sleeping and the waking world seemed to dissolve and she was sometimes left wondering if something had happened or if she had merely dreamed it. Wes’s condition worsened, although it was difficult to tell in what way and how she might counter it without being able to see him. She still harvested the condensation off the walls and fed it to him as she had before but her sense of balance seemed to be off and it became difficult not to step on him as she did so. The minuscule scraps of moisture that she was able to collect helped, but the guard’s shitty meat sandwich, the weird, gross ration bar thing that she’d found on the Hawk, every meal that she had ever eaten felt like something that had happened to another person centuries ago. It finally dawned on her that that shitty sandwich was going to be the last meal either of them ever ate.

“This is all my fault.” The words came out shocked and hollow.

“What? No,” Wes said weakly, interrupted by a wet, hacking cough. “We were trying to steal your ship and you would probably have been sold into slavery anyway. I don’t blame you for trying to stop us.”

Sera shook her head, forgetting that Wes couldn’t see her. “No, no, you don’t understand. I mean all of it! Why we’re here, why these fuckers are here, it’s all my fault!” And she told him. Everything. Who she was. How the Jedi had taken her from her flagship, kept her alive, turned her into something else. Let her loose on the galaxy after they were done with her. The cell became more and more quiet as she let out all that she’d been keeping inside, her account of her sins bouncing off the mouldy walls.

“...And everyone seems to expect me to just go on and I ca--”

Pain exploded on the side of her head, knocking her to the floor. She had enough time to register it as a punch when another caught her in the chest. Coughing weakly, she brought her hands up to fend off her attacker without hurting him, trying to use her legs to lever his bulk off of her. A scream was ripped from her throat when a fist collided with her ruined eye, shooting bolts of agony through her. Wes’s hands found her neck and started to squeeze, cutting off her air. She kicked him viciously, grabbing his wrists and doing her best to get him to release his hold. He grunted but didn’t let go. Her lungs burning from the lack of oxygen, she punched him in the stomach. And again, not stopping until Wes let out a pained cry and she felt blood pouring over her fist. His grip around her throat loosened and he fell down on top of her, crying and whimpering.

“Oh, shit! Fuck! Wes!” Sera scrabbled blindly to find where she’d hit him. She shoved a hand into the wound on his torso, trying to stem the flow of blood. “Stay with me, Wes! It’s all gonna be okay!”

He sobbed. “Don’t let me die. Fuck. Please don’t let me die!”

“I won’t. You just have to hold on!”

She carefully eased him onto his back, keeping the hand inside him as stable as possible while she felt around fruitlessly for the fallen t-shirt. Wes trembled and shivered, crying and moaning piteously as he bled out, writhing in agony. Giving up her search, she cradled the young man’s head tenderly, doing what she could to make him comfortable.

“It’s gonna be okay, I promise,” she pleaded, pushing every scrap of energy into him that she had, making her hands shake and head throb. “You just have to hold on a little bit longer and I promise I’ll fix all of this.”

His tremors slowed as his skin grew cooler and his cries weakened, then stopped as he lost consciousness. Sera held him helplessly as she felt his mental processes breaking down, his being unravelling as his brain failed and stopped.

She felt a tear rolling down her cheek. She sniffed and wiped it away on her shoulder. Sera felt around Wes’s neck for his ID tags, carefully eased them over his head and slipped them around her own neck. She couldn’t bring him back, couldn’t undo what she’d done but she wouldn’t let herself forget it. A choked sob escaped her and she broke down crying, hugging Wes’s lifeless body to herself. She smacked her head in frustration. This wasn’t supposed to happen! We were both supposed to get out of here safe and sound! I shouldn’t have said anything! Why couldn’t I keep my big, fat mouth shut? Her crying turned into uncontrollable sobs and howls of grief. Her whole body shook, her lungs and throat aching, snot and tears pouring unhindered down her face. The sobs turned into hiccups and she collapsed weakly over the body, completely spent.

She didn't know how long she lay there clutching the body of her victim and sniffling. It began to dawn on her that she was trembling for a reason other than grief or guilt. She shivered and shook, body seemingly unable to decide if she was too hot or too cold. It became impossible to think straight, impossible to maintain any kind of control over her body or her mind. Everything ached and throbbed, everything dissolved into a nightmarish slurry. It seemed to continue for an eternity until a blazing beam of light shone directly into her sensitive cornea. She squawked incoherently and threw a filthy arm over her face. After a moment, the cell door was pushed open and the cruel beam over light flicked over the room, accompanied by some disgruntled mutterings. Sera moaned as she was roughly forced aside by a booted foot. The intruder fiddled with the glow panel, swearing and grumbling in the dark. Then the light swung back down to the floor and a hand reached for Wes’s body. Sera cried out and clawed at the intruder, trying to protect her roommate, but she was slapped away and thrown to the ground. She blinked deliriously at the bright rectangle of the open door as Wes was dragged away, unable to even contemplate the opportunity right in front of her. The soldier returned, nudging her forcefully and sighing.

“Looks like the compost heap for you.”

She cried and squirmed as she was seizing by the arms and dragged out of the cell, up the stairs and out of the building into blistering daylight. Moving her legs weakly, she was somewhat able to keep pace with her captor, only catching her bare feet on the sharp, uneven gravel half of the time. The crack of the base’s gun made her flinch, almost pulling her from the soldier’s grasp but he grunted and grabbed her even more tightly as they marched away from the bulk of the clustered buildings. She felt the gun charging up for another shot, felt the electrical charge pricking the back of her neck. She pulled away from the soldier suddenly, slapping a hand into his chest and pushing with the scraps of energy that she could find within her. The guard swore as she was ripped from his grip. She caught a look of shock and confusion on his reddened face before she tripped and tumbled over jagged rock into a shallow ditch. The gun fired, its boom transforming into a thunderous roar, light flashing over the top of her tiny hole. The ground bounced up like a sheet that had been shaken out, then crashed down, raining rocky dirt down on top of her. Then everything was still.

~~~

It was night. An animal snuffled noisily nearby, smelling fresh blood and meat. A heavy rock dislodged from the pile of rubble and crashed into the ground behind it, sending it scrabbling away to safety.

There was the sound of enthusiastic boots crunching against rock and gravel. “Yeah! You run, you motherfucker!” The enthusiastic voice whooped and threw rocks after the retreating animal.

“Ghost!” a more serious voice yelled. “Stop playing around and focus on what we came for!”

The enthusiastic voice acquiesced and focused, “focusing” seeming to consist of rummaging through rubble and tossing rocks aside.

“Hey, Leader! I found a fresh one!”

A second set of boots wandered over and they both inspected the first’s find.

“Looks good. Tie it up with the rest and let’s finish up here.”

Another rock was dislodged from the pile and tumbled to the ground. The second set of boots approached to investigate, bending to dig through the rocks and the dirt. She winced as a calloused hand brushed gravel away from her face and there was a quiet gasp.

“Meat Head! I’m going to need your suit!” the serious voice said. “The King’s going to be interested in this.”

****

Part 3 done!

I'm going to have to check through this quite carefully because I noticed some pretty stupid mistakes in Part 2 when I was checking through it just now. Hopefully I can catch them all.

I wasn't joking about having no idea about what I'm going to do in Part 4, by the way...