#haskell haveter

[jaws-and-canines]

Somehow, the gentle touches and muttered praises of the Special, careful slice after delicate cut, made him weep more than agony alone ever could.

[Image ID: Iverson, with dark messy hair, bloodied leather gloves and white shirt, and Haskell, sitting down, shirtless and bruised on the throat and arms. Iverson is stood over him, using a yellow-handled scalpel to make cuts on his chest. Haskell stares to one side, limp, clearly exhausted, whilst Iverson looks directly at the reader with a smile. ID end.]

[jaws-and-canines]

They’re Laughing At Me

A Count The Days story. Set right after Scarring, Like an Artist. Following a week of sensory deprivation, Haskell finds himself weakened and overwhelmed, and at the hands of Officer Munroe. Contains alcohol, shoulder dislocation, beating including around the head, teeth gore, mentions of sensory deprivation.

---

Part of me wants to go back under. If it wasn’t for my mind eating at me, I’d welcome the silence. Everything is far, far too loud for me as Munroe lets himself into the room. I’m still where Iverson left me, bleeding through the trousers I put back on with numb fingers. Munroe squats down to get at my level, and laughs as I flinch. He takes his penlight from his key chain and turns it on, shining it in my face with a nasty laugh.

“Please don't do that,” I mumble, holding my hands up to shield the light. Munroe takes the penlight and flicks it over my face again. I hiss, shrinking back.

He laughs, stands up, and turns the overhead lights on. “Ouch!” I cry, my eyes starting to stream. “Turn them off!”

“Shut up,” he says, and kicks me in between my legs. 

I curl up, foetal on the floor. “Wasn’t it enough?” I say to him, from where I’m lying on the floor. “Wasn’t the… darkness enough?” I spit the word darkness with as much disgust as I can muster. A week of sensory deprivation, smothered by my own thoughts. My sluggish brain can’t put together a way to describe it yet.

“No,” he says. “Sit the fuck up.”

I press a palm to the floor, and try to sit up, a hand still on my thigh where the edge of the heel of his boot re-opened the cuts and I can feel fresh blood starting to well up again. I manage to get myself up to a sitting position with a grunt.

I’m weakened and I know it. This is going to be bad. This is going to be really bad, I realise. I put a hand to my face as I stand up slowly, and feel that my cheeks are damp. I’m already dazed, I’m already weak, and I’m already fucking tearful.

Much to my detriment, Munroe notices too.

"Stop crying," he yells. "Stop fucking crying! Crocodile tears," he yells in my face. I start to bawl. "You want something to cry about? I'll give you something!" he snarls. I find myself being thrown to his men like a sack of potatoes. In this state, active resistance is beyond me, I know that. No matter how much I try to go limp to passively resist them, they hold me up. A seemingly endless sea of black uniforms and blue shirts. There’s only three or four but I’m dizzy and dehydrated. They blur into one singular mass. 

Munroe pulls my hands back behind my head as I squirm uselessly, and knots them together with blue nylon rope. The position is already a little uncomfortable, pulling at old scars, but I know what comes next.

The rope gets thrown over one of the hooks on the ceiling and the other end is passed to Fives. Munroe stands in front of me, arms folded. "No, no, no," I plead with him, shaking my head. "You'll ruin my shoulders, please."

“I don’t care,” he says, and gestures to Fives. Fives plants his feet- and he pulls.

I’m pulled off my feet with a pained gasp that turns into a screech of pain. 

Fives takes a step back, and the nylon rope is tied off, quivering with my instinctual struggles to try to find purchase that’s just not there anymore, trying desperately to relieve the weight on my shoulders. “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts,” I cry.

Munroe shrugs. "Cry about it, Haveter. Cry those salty crocodile tears.” He takes out his knife from where it’s sheathed next to his holster and bends down, grabbing me by the ankle. “The Major specifically asked me to do this to you. So don’t you think for a moment I’m the bad guy here. I’m not.”

He cuts me across the back of the heel, slipping his knife into the cut and pulling down. Tearing a small strip of skin on the sole of my foot off, leaving a red and raw ragged mess beneath. “Oh, God,” I moan, shaking. I try to kick him with my free leg, but the effort means tensing up my shoulders. There’s a sharp crack from my right shoulder and I daren’t push them further. “Please, no, no.”

The knife goes in again. This time he cuts a huge strip off, peeling it away like paring skin from an apple. Keeps on going until most of the bottom of my foot is a bloody mess. I screw up my face.

I cry out as he grabs for my other ankle to do the same to my other foot. I feel my blood drying sticky as I slip in and out of the moment, gasping quietly to myself.

He steps in front of me. “Look at it, yeah?” He holds the knife up in front of my face, slick with my own blood. “I’m not the bad guy here.”

I kick him in the stomach with as much strength as I can muster.

Munroe steps back, shock on his face, but my small victory comes at a huge price. As I swing back from the momentum, my shoulder quite unceremoniously pops out of its socket. I feel it go. Munroe responds to the kick with a vicious slap a moment after my shoulder slips out.

I just howl, screwing my face up, hot tears spilling down my cheeks, shuddering with my shoulder out of its socket. "Oh, God, please!" I howl at Munroe. "My shoulder, my shoulder, my shoulder!"

“What?” he asks, incredulously.

I can’t put two words together. I just scream, still swaying from the momentum of the kick.

He shrugs. “You did that to yourself.”

I wail and wail, coughing and spluttering, gasping in pain as my shoulder burns. It fucking burns. He just wipes his knife on my shirt and puts it away. “Cut him down, Fives, come on,” he mutters.

Fives steps over, unsheathes his knife, and simply cuts a single loop of rope. My hands come apart, and I fall to the floor with a thud and another wail of pain. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, tell Jack I’m sorry,” I sob, seeing Munroe draw his baton. I try to crawl away from him, on my hands and knees. Every little movement hurts something, either my shoulder, which I feel clicking around, or my feet, which sting like all hell. “Please…” I mumble. “Please, I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t listen. I go further back. “Tell Jacob I’m sorry,” I sob. “Tell him I didn’t mean it.”

“He’s fucking dead,” says Munroe, right before he brings the baton down across my fingers. And then they all descend. Fives and the other two, batons in hand, all at once. 

The first hit glances into my head. Then the second. “No, no! You’re going to kill me!” I scream, but it’s not like any of the officers are listening. They’re going for the jaw, because of course they are. From the left, a smack with a baton. Something shatters in my mouth and I spit blood down my front. I retch, and spit out another load of blood along with the tip of one of my teeth. The shard of enamel is bitter and hard.

From the right this time. He goes for the ribs, a kick with hobnailed boots. It slams me into the wall, and he follows up with a kick between my shoulders. I gasp as the nerves in my back seize. I can’t breathe, I realise, staring in fear at the scuffed-up wall. He kicks me again in the back, again, again. 

Munroe plants his foot on my head. I cry out as the treads of his boot scrape my bruised cheek. “Please!” I sob. “Stop!” 

“Shut up,” he says, and swings a kick into my stomach. I curl up into a ball, sobbing, gasping, curled around the bitter ache in my chest. Like a child, sprawled on the tarmac of the playground. I start coughing again. 

I roll back onto my back, coughing and spluttering as my lungs fight against me. I turn onto my side and start hacking up the blood I’ve inhaled. More shards of enamel fall out of my mouth. Fuck, they’ve broken one of my teeth. They’re going to fucking kill me. They’re going to kill me.

Oh, God, they’re going to kill me.

Munroe kicks me in the face. “This is what you fucking get, Haskell!” 

I howl. The words just aren’t there. He does it again. My whole jaw shifts. Again, one last time.

“Woah, woah!” says Fives, and drags Munroe off me. I’m spared. I catch my breath with a gasp, rolling away to the other side of the concrete room and trying to get up. My mouth is full of blood. It’s literally dribbling down my chin.

This time when I start retching, crawling around on my hands and knees, it’s not just enamel and blood I bring up. It’s teeth. Into the palm of my hand.

Teeth. 

I stare at them in my hand. Teeth. Multiple.

Someone swings another baton hit at me. I slam backwards into the doorframe, cracking my head on the metal, but I don’t react. Dead weight, I slump down to the floor, staring into space.

Teeth.

They knocked out my fucking teeth.

Munroe grabs me by the back of the shirt. “You need to learn some goddamn humility,” he hisses. It continues. And now they avoid my head. Now they avoid it. 

A kick to my back, a baton to my hip. I just lie there, on my side, staring at the mess on the floor. My teeth. Every single jolt makes me inhale, with the horrendous realisation that part of my mouth is a mess of emptiness, torn flesh and broken enamel.

By the time Munroe orders his men to stop, I’m crying. Silently. Just lying there, on my side, tears rolling down my face. Not a sound.

He grabs me by the jaw. It hurts so much I just sob and I can’t pull away. “Did that hurt? Did that hurt?”

I nod, slowly, whimpering as he presses his fingers against my jaw.

“I bet you’re fucking hungry and thirsty and tired as well. I’m not fucking done with you.”

“Please,” I croak. “You’re going to kill me.” The words come out messy, blood pooling in my mouth from the missing teeth.

“Do you want something to drink?” he asks. It’s not a nice question, not really.

I look at him, dazed.

“Do you fucking want something to drink?” he snarls, gripping my jaw even tighter. I nod, eyes wide.

“Hold him,” says Munroe. “Down on the floor.” I’m already on the floor. They take an arm each. 

Munroe kneels on my legs, sitting astride me, fumbling with a bottle. It occurs to me a moment too late, as the smell of alcohol hits me, that he didn’t mean water. “Before you start-” he begins.

“Hey- hey- no-” I slur, spitting blood down my chin as I try to get the words out past missing teeth. “No!”  

But he advances anyways. “Before you start, this wasn’t my idea either,” he says, and with a hand on the back of my head, forces the lip of the bottle into my mouth, and tips the bottle. “So you can thank Iverson for this.”

The alcohol burns. The glass bottle comes away from my lips, and Munroe just presses a hand over my mouth and pinches my nose. I can feel it ripping away at the gaping mess they left when they knocked out my teeth. 

I scream, arching my back, twisting one way and the other, trying to spit it out. But the hand on my mouth is firm, and I choke it down before I run out of air. Only then does he let me breathe. 

Only for a moment. I see it coming. “No, no-” The bottle meets my lips again. I try to fight it, slamming my head against the floor in the process, but the alcohol swills into my mouth. Again, the hand, and I scream and I cry through Munroe’s palm as the alcohol sears my fucking mouth raw until I manage to swallow it.  

“Please, not again,” I croak as the hand comes away from my mouth. “Please. I’ll drown.”

“Not a bad way to go,” says Munroe.

The bottle meets my lips once again. I try to go with it this time, drinking as much as I can, swallowing it even as it burns and I can feel my stomach roll with nausea, tears streaming down bruised and grazed cheeks.

The alcohol smothers me like the darkness’ unkind sister. I find myself under their knives once again. I don’t really have the wherewithal to put together what’s going on- passed from one set of hands to another, from one cruel-edged knife to another, as I stumble around in my afraid stupor, trying to stay on my feet. 

I stare at my own blood on my hands, on my feet, my bloody footprints across the floor. My teeth are on the floor. And then it’s onto the next pair of hands, who takes it upon himself to pull off my clothes and inspect my back. Perhaps he re-opens old wounds, or he makes his own new ones. I don’t know. I don’t remember.

The same happens with my trousers. I flail around on the floor as they try to pin me down to look at my thighs, bruised and bleeding from a fresh whipping. I wail and cry for someone to come and save me.

Nobody will. They’re laughing at me.

Out comes the saltwater. I knew I was never going to get away without it. 

Munroe takes a particularly unkind view to me at this point, soaking a rough rag in it, and scouring my back down with it. Then my front, then my neck and face, all the while as I writhe and make incoherent pleas for him to leave me alone, my mouth full of blood and inflammation, and me, drunk out of my mind on whatever coarse alcohol they poured down my throat. And then, the final act of cruelty. I find myself staring at my own reflection- such that it barely is, I don’t recognise him- in a bowl of saltwater so thickly brined there’s a skin on top of salt.

And then I’m plunged under. Held down with a hand on the back of my head. I choke on it, because of course I do, too drunk to understand not to breathe in. They bring me back up to kneeling with saltwater streaming from my nose and mouth, tinged with blood, reddened eyes, and coughing so hard I can barely breathe. It stings. My eyes stream, my mouth bleeds, but all I can do is just lie there. 

No way out, no way to get away, I just shut down, retreating deep into myself, exhausted and in pain.  Munroe squats down to look me in the black eyes. “The fuck are you mumbling about?” “I... I want...” I struggle to put two words together. “I want ‘t go home... I want... I want my mother,” I sniffle. “But... she doesn’t want me!” 

Munroe laughs in my face as I bawl weakly into the concrete.

They discard me on the floor after that. They leave, and they’re laughing still.

They’re laughing.

[jaws-and-canines]

Pleading With The Dead

A Count The Days AU - Ten Years Under A Different Hand. Continues from here. Contains starvation and hunger references, passive suicidal ideation, mouth stitched shut trope and associated nastiness, mentions of a character wetting themselves, death mentions.

---

Of all the classes he took, of all the training he has had, Haskell has spent more than enough time faced with the same facts. A human being survives, on average, three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food. He is acutely aware that he is on a schedule here.

He isn’t sure how long it has been, at all, and he tries to do the maths and fails miserably. It’s been maybe a week, total, since the trial. He shudders, remembering it. 

He starts to pace the empty basement, back and forth, back and forth. Using one corner as a makeshift toilet, using the opposite corner to sit and weep over his situation. What else is there to do, he thinks. What else can he do but weep? He sleeps without dreaming for the first few days- long, blank stretches of fifteen hours at a time, then an unimaginably long stretch staring into the darkness. He tries not to think about that night when he killed Jacob. He fails. He tries not to think about how it felt to be crawling around on the floor licking up the blood of the man he used to call his friend, the blood that he shed. He fails. The stitches in his face seem to be so hot to the touch he thinks he is boiling alive, from the inside out.

When the hunger fades, he knows he’s hit ketosis- and he knows it’s a brief plateau in a steep decline. It is, as far as he can work out, about two weeks since his last meal. A clingfilm-wrapped sandwich, which he didn’t manage to keep down, utterly wracked with anxiety over his imminent trial. He remembers at the time being terrified they’d hang him.

Oh, how he wishes they had, now. The survival part of his brain takes over- scrapes a thick, fresh layer of sawdust over the urine-soaked far corner of the room, and sits him in the opposite, mainly motionless, conserving his energy. 

His fever peaks up, and along come the fever dreams. Jacob, always Jacob, always calmly asking the same thing. “Why did you do this?”

Haskell falls apart a little. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know- he doesn’t want to know. It’s simpler to simply turn the tables than to look at himself. So he reasons Jacob provoked him. 

The dead man’s figure rising from his dreams is still calm. ”Why did you do this?” Haskell is not. “I’m asking you the same fucking thing!” he screams. In his dreams he shouts and he screams and he still remains a prisoner of consciousness. “I’m asking you the same fucking thing, Jacob, why did you do this to me?” he howls.

The dream dissolves without an answer. The hunger returns, ravenous.

Mere comes to give him water. He isn’t gentle. It hurts. Haskell’s hands come up, tense, to try to brush Mere off. They are, like his uncomfortable squirming as the metal straw cuts into inflamed flesh, ignored. “I’ll ask you again before it gets really unpleasant for you,” says Mere, cleaning off the metal straw from where he’s forced it between the infected weeping of the stitches. “Will you come upstairs?”

Haskell barely has to consider. He has the same response- the same defiant gesture, deliberately obscene. 

Mere leaves without a word. He doesn't ask the question again when he visits next. Just the same silent, almost clinical look on his face, the same lukewarm water through a metal straw. Haskell nearly starts to cry- though he never really stops, save for when there are simply no more tears left- when Mere re-opens the freshly-scabbed wounds in the process.

---

Over the next couple of days- or at least, between Mere’s visits, which he has no real way of knowing how far apart they are- he realises he is wasting away in the most visceral sense. He goes from sitting down, to slumped over, to lain down in the sawdust, too weak to move.

There comes a time where he can barely even lift his head. He isn’t quite sure how long passes- though he suspects it isn’t nearly as long as it feels- but the featureless room spins and his head pounds and he can’t even sit up, shivering and sweating with a fever that feels like it’ll break him before it breaks.

And with the fever, come the fever dreams. This time, he can’t escape the basement even in his sleep. Once again, there is Jacob Kay, standing over him. Dead. “Why did you do this?” asks Kay. He’s still not angry. Even with a smashed in-skull, bloodied, the arc of his head caved-in.

“You did this,” screams Haskell, face to the dreamed sawdust. His voice breaks. “You did this to me! This is your fucking fault!”

No answer.

Haskell wakes with a painful twitch, and stares into the heavy darkness, before sinking right back into a dreamless sleep, slumped on the sawdust, soaked in his own sweat. As he drifts off, he becomes acutely aware that he has wet himself, too tired to even get up to go. He remembers gasping in horror through a clenched jaw right before sleep takes him.

When he wakes his filthy trousers have only barely dried off. He reaches a hand down to feel the fabric, and when he realises he is still damp, he just lies there still, staring into the darkness, watching the swimming of his own tears play across his vision. His cheeks burn with shame and if he had the strength, he knows he would bawl his eyes out over it. All he can smell is bitter ammonia.

He finds himself wishing for Mere to return. To rescue him. To let him change clothes, at least. Somehow, the damp trousers are a million times worse in his starved brain than the lack of food. He stopped actually feeling the gnawing hunger a little while ago and it hasn’t returned. He doesn’t think that’s a good sign, but at least it feels better.

Asleep, again. The same dream- the same dead man standing over him. “Why did you do this?”

“You did, you did!” screams Haskell, tasting blood. “This is your fault! Make it stop!” Jacob just stares at him, as best as he can with one eye-socket caved inwards and an eye that is crimson-red and barely holding on. “Please!” weeps Haskell. “Please, please, make it stop!” Jacob just stands there, motionless.

Haskell cries at the feet of the dead man until Mere shakes him from fitful sleep. Haskell rolls onto his back as best as he can, and just lies there, staring at the Special, staring into his heavyset face and eyes devoid of pity. 

“So you are alive, then,” he muses. “This basement reeks and you’ve been lying on the floor for almost two weeks now, in sawdust soaked with your own urine. Do you have no shame or do you really wish to behave like an animal?” Haskell shakes his head, almost imperceptibly. Fuck, he thinks, feeling his cheeks burn again. 

Mere notices. “Isn’t this embarrassing for you, now? Isn’t it?”

Haskell squirms uncomfortably again, but nods all the same. Again the movement is barely visible, but Mere sees it.

Mere stoops down to Haskell’s level. “Within half an hour, I can have a Special Division doctor here to sort you out. I can have you cleaned up, get you clean clothes, and a clean bed. All you have to do, Haskell, and this is all I’m asking of you now, and we can work from there, is you let my housekeeper shave your head, and you don’t fight her. That’s it. Are you really going to let yourself die over that?”

Haskell considers for a moment, eyes full of tears, and then ever-so-slightly, shakes his head.

“No? You want to come upstairs? You agree to no screaming, no shoving, no punching, no whatever?” Mere spits the last word like it tastes bad.

Haskell squirms in the sawdust, trying to sit up. The tears   in his eyes spill down his cheeks. He knows that it’s not as simple as Mere is portraying it- that letting him have an inch will become a mile, and that mile will become a lifetime of austere silent servitude under the threat of humiliation and pain, stripped of all honour and status. But he has no choice now. He has no choice. 

Because Mere is right. 

He’s not going to let himself die when the solution is right fucking there. And surely most things are less humiliating than starving to death in a ruined, urine-stained and crumpled suit.

Mere is right. And that’s what hurts the most.

Haskell sniffs back the tears and nods.  

Mere considers for a moment, and with a slight expression of disgust, picks Haskell up as if he weighs nothing at all, slinging him over his shoulder, and climbs the stairs out of the basement without a word. 

[jaws-and-canines]

"It's everywhere. It's just fucking everywhere. I can’t do this. It's not possible."

[image ID in alt text - excerpt from the diary of Scott Nelson below the cut]

They interviewed him under caution for the first time. Of course, the topic of the blood on his face came up. It wasn't his. He wouldn't tell them how it got there. The official line was that they had to prone him to restrain him. He came in with his hands in front of him. You don't do that to someone who was resisting to such a degree they had to be proned to get the handcuffs on. You just don't. So that wasn't true, but I wasn't going to cause a fuss about it. Clearly, something out of the norm had gone down but with that man, I don't think that's unusual.

The scene was a mess when Forensics came in. The blood had stained the floor so it was plain to see where it had been and had sat, but someone had- or at least we thought- wiped it up. Not very well, but they had. But there were no bloodstained rags or cloths to be found.

It isn't my place to speculate but it doesn't really take a genius to put two and two together. There never was any cloth or rag to wipe up the blood. He had never been proned to get the cuffs on. He hadn't even resisted arrest beyond a few shocked tears. Hell, he looked almost relieved to have been caught.

The truth is slightly more repulsive. In the few hours between the Special Division arriving on the scene and them calling for Provost backup, they tortured the poor bastard in a way that wouldn't leave any permanent mark. But it left marks, alright- the deceased's blood. All over him, and worse. He threw up whilst he was in police custody and he brought up pure fucking blood. It scared me utterly shitless. I thought we were going to have to call an ambulance and send out for an escort. But he wasn't too bothered. Somehow, he knew it wasn't his and refused examination by a doctor.

I had them examine him anyways. I decided to err on the side of caution in case he'd managed to smuggle in some kind of poison and had decided to commit suicide over standing trial. There was no poison to be found. No GI bleed, nothing. The doctor decided, in all his wisdom, that he was malingering. I showed him the wastepaper basket full of blood and that changed his mind a little. Ingestion of someone else's blood, he said. Still malingering, apparently. I disagreed in a professional capacity and dismissed the physician.

There's one explanation that connects all these dots, then. They had him on his hands and knees licking up the deceased's blood. Of course, the Special Division knew exactly what they were doing. They always do. He'd planned to dispose of the body, wipe down the floors and bleach it. The blood being gone gave the appearance that he'd actually started to go through with it.

Planning to conceal the crime might have put him at the high end of medium culpability. Maybe seventeen or eighteen years for the minimum term. Actually attempting to conceal the crime tipped him over to high culpability. Fifteen years tariff became twenty-five years. When it came to sentencing, he didn't even deny it. He just took it in silence. What else could he do? Admit to being coerced into something so degrading? He wouldn't and he didn't.

Like I said, the Special Division knew exactly what they were doing.

-From the diary of Scott Nelson

[jaws-and-canines]

I held Your Hand

A Count The Days story fromThe Point AU - contains detailed depictions of medical care, references to death and a car accident, as well as some themes of ableism.

Because I’ve started this AU in the middle of the arc rather than at the start- a little context is probably needed. In every major trauma situation, thousands of variables go in to the outcome. A driver wearing his seatbelt, will have a much better outcome than a driver who wasn’t. This AU asks the question- on the night that Haskell’s escape came to an end in the accident, what if things played out differently? What if, instead of him being spared the most grevious harm by his seatbelt, he had struck his head on the dashboard of the car with enough force to break his neck, but also his skull? What if he had started to bleed into his brain? What if, despite the best efforts of the medical staff, he was destined to need round-the-clock care, destined for The Point- the Department’s secure long-term care facility? --- Despite having worked just a few floors down for several years at the start of her training, despite her knowing the Neurosciences matron who welcomed her warmly onto the ward, and passing one of her old colleagues, now a consultant in Orthapedics on her way to Haskell’s room, Ayla still feels out of place here. The orderlies that the Department sent from the Point saw her coming and left the room. She thinks, maybe, she would have rather they stayed- not to protect her from her ex-husband, because paralysed from below the armpits, he poses little threat to her unless she steps within arm’s reach- but more to break the tension in the room.

The room itself is bathed in a soft light, filtering through the closed blue curtains.  On a metal table by the head of his bed, the humidifier sits, its blue tubing coiled up around the drip stand, alongside the pump for his feeding tube. Almost every flat surface in the room is taken up with one thing or another- pink sponges for mouth care, blue sponges and tracheostomy dressings piled up beside the blue tracheostomy emergency case with his name written on the side in white paint pen, suction equipment, purple syringes for his NG tube. 

The wheelchair sits in the corner of the room. Partly why she came down today was because it had arrived a few days ago, and she wanted to see it for herself. It’s a tilt-in-place, able to be reclined at an angle, so that Haskell will be able to sit in it without slipping out. There’s a backrest with raised ridges that will sit at either side of his torso, keeping him straight upright, pressure relieving cushions so he will be able to sit in it without the need to be turned like he is when he is in bed, and a headrest. He struggles to keep his own head up otherwise. The most noticeable thing though, she thinks, are the wheels- large, self-propelled, with a power assist system to compensate for his uneven strength. The aim is, then, that he can wheel himself around independently- what little he can do for himself, they will make him, just so he retains the ability to.

Of all the things in the room, that is what makes her pause- not because she’s never seen it before, nothing in the room is unfamiliar to her- but because she remembers Haskell as he was before all of this started, and over the past few years she sees less and less of the man she married and more and more of the man she left. And now he’s changed as well, to something entirely different, yet somehow exactly the same.

She supposes that the cognitive impairment might actually be his saving grace. He can’t really grasp what has happened to him without the ability to connect the events. Right now, at least, he seems unbothered. She’s sure that changes- from what little she’s seen of his records, he’s prone to episodes of severe frustration and agitation, lashing out at staff members and those around him, breaking equipment, throwing things, pulling at his lines and tubes. The chair and computer on wheels right inside the door is usually occupied by a minder- an orderly or someone else able to intervene if necessary.

But for now, all is quiet. He’s dressed in green trousers and a green pyjama shirt, done up with poppers. His hair is combed, someone has shaved his face, and his catheter bag is draining a pale yellow instead of the cloudy amber she has seen previously. He looks like he’s put on weight, his cheeks starting to fill out a little, his body putting the fat into the areas that wasted into nothingness when he was in the coma. He looks as well as he could in the situation. 

With the head of the bed up to sit him up, he is focused on one thing and one thing only, the bowl of milk pudding on the overbed table in front of him. The occupational therapists have given him a set of adapted cutlery- velcroed to his hand, allowing it to stay put, even with his weak grasp, and requiring a much lower dexterity to use.

But still, he seems to struggle a little. He lifts the spoon to his mouth with a trembling hand and puts it in his mouth. He chews it slowly, and then swallows with a look of intense concentration. He goes to take another spoonful, and notices Ayla standing in the doorway. “Go away,” he says, looking at her out of the side of his eye.

 “I thought I’d come and talk to you,” she says. “See how you’re getting on.” The last time she came to see him, he was too unwell to speak. Now, he’s well enough to have the one-way valve on his tracheostomy all through the day. The valve lets him talk, and even with the dysphasia the accident caused him, forgetting words and phrases, speaking only in short sentences and trailing off midway when he loses his train of thought, he retains his utterly foul manner of speech.

And he comes straight out with it, looking at Ayla with a sort of disgust on his face. “Fucking go away,” he says. “I’m eating. Piss off.”

Ayla thinks the staff must be utterly thrilled to have to deal with his foul vocabulary all day now, instead of in small increments under the supervision of speech and language therapists and respiratory physiotherapists. She’s inclined to think he’s gotten worse with it- frustrated, and unable to express it in any other way, she supposes.

“I’ll come back when you’re done eating,” she says.

Haskell throws a hand out towards her. “Don’t!” he exclaims.

She realises if she does as he says, he’ll tell her to come back later ad infinitum. “I’ll stay, then,” she says, and crosses the threshold into the room. Haskell rolls his eyes at her, then goes back to scraping at the bowl in front of him, trying to get the pudding onto his spoon. “What do you want?” he asks her, pausing for a moment.

“I just came to visit you, Haskell,” she says, and walks over towards him. “I’m glad you’re doing better,” she says, giving him a hug in the same way you’d hug a relative at Christmas.

“I’m eating!” he snarls. “Don’t touch me!” He pauses. She doesn’t relent. He takes a deep breath. “Get off me!” he shrieks as he exhales. The cry is distorted a little, warped by the strange timbre the speaking valve gives to his voice. She eases back from the hug, still rubbing his shoulder. He scowls at her. “Don’t you fucking touch me, you fucking weirdo,” he snaps.

She sits in the chair beside the bed. “Do you know who I am, Haskell?” “I told you, I’m eating.”

She repeats the question. “Who am I, Haskell?”

“My ex-wife. Go away, please,” he sighs, and points to the bowl of milk pudding with his spoon. “Or help me eat. Don’t care. I just want to have my dessert without this… this shit.”

“Alright,” she says, and shuffles the chair towards his bed. She picks up the bowl and takes the normal spoon from the tray, putting a spoonful of the pudding to his lips.

“No, you stupid fucking woman, not like that,” he says angrily, and grabs at the spoon she’s holding. His grab knocks it from her grasp and it falls onto the table with a rattle, the pudding falling down onto his trousers. He ignores the mess he’s created and the crushed look on Ayla’s face. “You hold the bowl closer to me and I use my spoon.”

“Alright, then,” she says, and leans over to make sure the spoon’s velcro is done up properly. As she touches his hand, she’s reminded of why she’s here, and turns back to look at his utterly confused face, an expression she never really saw on her husband. 

“What is wrong with you?” he exclaims angrily as her hand lingers on his.

“We were married, do you remember that?”

“Yes. But I don’t mind.” He shrugs, but only with his hands.

There’s a pause as Ayla chews over what she’s going to say in her mind. “I thought you were going to die, Haskell,” she says, trying to think how to put her grief into words he’ll understand. “And I like you, and so I didn’t want you to die, but you didn’t and I’m very happy about that. So will you let me have just a moment with you without you swearing and shouting at me?”

“Okay. But after that, you have to help me. It’s only fair.”

“Alright. Alright.” She reaches a hand out to cup his cheek, a thumb trailing over the edge of the NG tube plaster, fixing it in place, and down to the green clip, the bridle cord coming out from his other nostril, to where they’ve looped it around a bone at the back of his nose and clipped it back to the tube. “Did you keep pulling it out?” “Never touched it,” he lies, oblivious to the blatantly obvious securement system. “I didn’t touch it.”

She shakes her head. “Don’t pull things out,” she scolds. “I never fucking touched it!” he exclaims. “Look!” He grabs at it and yanks. Tears rush to his eyes as the bridle tugs at the bone at the back of his nose. He waits a second before exclaiming in pain, not certain that Ayla has gotten the idea. “Ouch! See, I never touched it!”

Ayla senses that it’s not worth arguing- even before the accident, Haskell was a nightmare to persuade to change his mind. With the brain injury in the mix, she suspects that the task would now be impossible, and distressing for both of them. So she leaves the topic alone. “Are you feeling better?” she asks.

“Better than what?” he asks, giving his NG tube another exploratory tug, an expression of discomfort flickering across his face as he does so. “No. This sucks.” “Last time I saw you, you weren’t as awake as you are now,” she says. “You couldn’t talk to me, and you were only following me with your eyes, that’s the only way I knew you were awake at all.” She seems a little upset at the memory, but smiles at him, putting a hand on his. “When it happened… when the accident happened, I got the call and I came up here at two in the morning. I called your mother as I was driving down, and I told her you were probably going to die. She refused to come down.”

“My mother is a bitch,” says Haskell plainly.

“Normally I say you shouldn’t call her that,” says Ayla. “But now I’d be inclined to agree. And you had… you have nobody else. And I didn’t-” She chokes up, tears welling up in her eyes.

“Why are you crying?” asks Haskell. He wipes his nose on the back of his hand with a sniff- not because he is crying but because his nose is running, and the tissues seem impossibly far from him, set at the other edge of his over-bed table.

Ayla sniffs back her tears. “I didn’t want you to die alone and scared and confused, surrounded by police and prison officers, and doctors and nurses, so I held your hand.” She swallows sharply. “And I kept doing it. I held your hand in the critical care unit as they were draining the blood off of your brain. I held your hand whilst they tried and failed to take you off the ventilator. I know it’s normal, but you were biting at the tube with just this look of... horror in your eyes.”

“Don’t remember it.”

“Even after they did the tracheostomy you still had that horrified look. I don’t think you really understood what was going on... and you just looked so scared. And I didn’t want you to die scared. So I kept holding your hand, whenever I was there with you, I held your hand. And now look at you. You’re…” She pauses again, and wipes her eyes. “You’re doing alright.”

Haskell shrugs it off again. “I said I don’t remember it.” 

“I didn’t want you to die alone, Haskell.” “Okay.” Then, with a pause. “That’s nice of you.” Another pause. He gestures to the bowl on his table, as if he was not actually listening to what she was saying, and just waiting for it to be appropriate for him to ask again. “Can I have my pudding now?”

“Yes,” she says, shaking her head and trying to hide the tears. She isn’t quite sure why she’s crying in the first place. She picks up the bowl and holds it up a little, towards his mouth. He takes another spoonful and slowly but surely brings it to his mouth. She knows, logically she knows full well he can’t help it, that it’s not his fault the way he talks to her now, and that she’s just projecting the way he used to be onto the way he is now. But, really, truly, she can’t help but feel like he simply doesn’t care.

[jaws-and-canines]

With Disgrace

A Count The Days story. As part of his sentence from the Court Martial for Conduct Unbecoming, and prior to being tried as a civilian for the murder of Jacob Kay, Haskell is formally expelled from the Department. Contains mentions of death.

---

Here I am, in uniform, for the last time, being escorted down the corridor to the one event I would give anything to skim over in my fall from grace. Anything else- save if I were to hang, I suppose, and the thought makes my face twitch- would be more bearable.

The Rangers are there to take me out- two of them, uniformed, sharp sabres glinting under the fluorescents. I squint at their uniforms until I work out they’re both Warrant Officers. That’s a deliberate snide on Davies’ behalf, rubbing in that I no longer hold the authority I used to, and they both seem to know it. As it stands, I was the head of the Chairman-General’s Corps. There is nobody there who I was subordinate to, so they default to the unit I was in prior to that, the Rangers.

There’s Nelson coming up behind me and the two Prison Service officers either side of me. Nelson is carrying my sword under his on his hip. I thought, somehow, that this would be more momentous than this. It’s not. 

Davies is waiting just at the end of the corridor, where the windows, high and small, are open, and I can hear the wind howling in. Through a heavy iron-bar gate and an equally imposing door, there is Nation Square. There is the parade of the Chairman-General’s Corps assembled, waiting for us, waiting for me. Waiting to see my shame laid out for them and my status and honour ripped from me and thrown to the wolves for the sake of justice. It’s not justice. I did fuck all to deserve this.

Prison, yes. I can understand that. I don’t agree, I don’t- but I can understand how the idea of retributive justice makes people happy, and even though it seems unfair to punish me for an accident of all things, a man did die. Jacob did die. There has to be something to balance the scales. If only to soothe hurt feelings. This enforced shame, this humiliation, however, I can’t reconcile in my head just yet. It doesn’t seem fair to me. I didn’t fucking mean to kill him. It just happened.

“Sort your face out, Haveter, and sort your collar out,” says Davies, gesturing to me as we walk closer to him. I stop, and try to force the look of disdain, of put-upon suffering off my face. Davies carries on. “Why is the top button undone? You should know fucking better.”

“It makes me feel like I’m choking,” I say simply. I’m sure the undertone is evident- if there’s one thing Davies could do, it’s pattern recognition. I’m sure he pieced together the undone top buttons and looser ties that all began the day when it was made clear to me that being hanged was a distinct possibility- and I could no longer tolerate something touching my throat.

He tuts and gestures for me to do it up regardless. He doesn’t care, and he’s right. but I thought I might get away with it given they’re just going to rip all of this apart anyways. But, no. I button up the uniform right to the top- ignoring the slight edge of panic that seeps into my head- and straighten out the pins on the edges of my collar. 

It’ll all be gone soon. It pains me. It utterly pains me. I straighten out the coat and button it up, and by instinct feel, checking my sword is the right way around- it’s not there, I have to remind myself, and flex my hand to try to hide the movement I made. I realise I’m shaking and clench my fist to hide that as well.

Nelson wordlessly passes my sword over to Davies. Davies hooks it behind his. I look at it, a little forlorn. I know it’s like me- fate already sealed, blunted for the Court Martial, and now filed so it will snap when it is broken. Our fates are both decided now- blunted, to be broken in the name of justice. The irony is not lost on me.

“Let’s not prolong this,” says Davies, and then the keys rattling and scraping in the locks set my teeth on edge, more than I already am. Then I’m pressed outside by the two escorting officers, one on each side of me- had I lingered on the threshold, I am sure it would have turned from a gentle but stern push to a drag.

Through the courtyard of death and bloodshed. Out into the parade ground of the more psychological sort of suffering- in front of the eyes of the assembled Corps. My heart twinges. Thankfully, for now, I don’t have to see their faces as I’m led towards the front of the parade, my back to them.

Davies stands in front of me, warming up his hands by rubbing them together before reading off the sentence from a piece of official letterhead paper I didn’t even notice he was carrying. “Haskell Irvin Haveter, by a unanimous guilty verdict of a lawfully assembled Court Martial of the Department of State Affairs, you are hereby to be Displaced with Disgrace from our ranks,” he says to me.

I say nothing. It’s not my place to speak. The escorting officers have swords for a reason- if I say a word, I will be struck by one of them across the back of my legs. From training, and other misadventures, I know a sabre to the calf really fucking hurts. I’d rather not add injury to insult. I’d rather not have the Corps at my back see that happen to me.

Davies chooses, as the commanding officer has the right to in the Displacement proceedings, to take a moment to address me. I knew he probably would, and I wish he would not. “I would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed in you. You had potential, Haskell. You had real potential. And I’m sorry it’s going to go to waste now, I really am.”

Dead face, I tell myself. No expressions. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I can’t let any of this show. “You’ve got a long road ahead of yourself now, Haskell. This isn’t the end, not really. It’s not going to be easy but you’re going to make something of yourself despite all this. It may not be as much as it could have once been. But something is better than nothing, if you’re going to be sensible,” he says, and nods towards Nation House. “They’ll tear you apart in there if you aren’t sensible.” The brief image of me being torn to shreds surfaces in my mind, and then back again, as I look at Davies with dead eyes. “I don’t want to see you hanged for this. Because then that really will be the end for you.”

He puts his hand out towards my uniform. I do not flinch. The corps patches come first. He uses the edge of his wedding ring to get the first stitch to break. Then they come easily. His expression is something halfway between anger and uncomfortable pity. The gold stitching on the scales of Justice, the white of the feather pens crossed at her feet- into the rain between the cobblestones. The filthy water seeps in. No longer gold, no longer white. Just meaningless fabric at my feet.

He takes my medals in one hand, and tears them from my chest. I keep looking at him- face as still as I can make it, as if I’m not even here. Long ago, I was paraded in front of my fellow comrades-in-arms with a missing eye and flayed skin, as some sick sort of warning. I suppose now is no different- all the people out here, if they do what I’ve done, they will become like me. Wretched. That same blank expression did not break then and it will not break now.

Even as he casts my medals to the floor and rips off my awards patches like it is nothing, even as I hear stitches snap and give way and my coat tear and with it my honour and pride. The Wounded ribbon catches in the wind. A deep sort of crimson-purple. It turns over once, twice, and then flutters away. I touch my hand to the bottom of my scar, almost as if that too might be blown away by the wind, and then have to remind myself to keep my hands at my sides.

He stops with a hand on my shoulder and I can feel that almost imperceptible trembling in my core through his touch- and then he rips off my epaulettes. Quickly. One, two, gone. I realise I have been holding my breath and inhale shakily through my nose, keeping that dead expression.

Davies knows that beneath the porcelain face I am falling apart. I am crumbling. He decides to try to soothe things, but as he always did, he drives the knife in to the hilt in the process. “You were a good man. I still maintain you can be one again,” he says to me. I almost shatter entirely. I don’t.

My face just twitches.

He takes my sword from the loop on his belt, holding it flat-side-up to me so that I can see the seals on it, I can see my name engraved onto it. “By my authority, Haskell Irvin Haveter, I declare you Displaced, stripped of all honour and accolade, for your actions of conduct unbecoming.” 

He brings the sword up, one hand on the hilt, the other on the blade-end. He brings it down, a forceful arc. Not slow in reality, but slow in my mind with the sense that this is it; this is the end of it all.

I close my eyes as my reputation, my life’s pride and work, every achievement I ever made, shatters into three pieces over my head and falls to the ground with a clatter, broken. One moment it’s there, over my head, the next there’s shattered pieces of it on the ground.

Dead eyes, dead face, that’s all I let myself think. I can’t let this show. I can’t let this show.

I’m turned to face the parade with a hand under each of my arms. Dead eyes, dead face, dead man. That’s all I am. The coat is pulled from me. I close my eyes again as the jacket is taken from me as well, and I’m left to shiver in a white shirt that could be a civilian’s if you didn’t look twice, and green khaki trousers that do nothing to stop the wind from cutting into my skin. 

A hand- I don’t look to see who, because that would let the tears welling up in my eyes spill out- comes along with a field knife and cuts the tiny red tabs at the corner of my shirt collar. The last indication on my clothing that could be remotely mistaken for showing status. They roll up my sleeves. The barely scabbed-over cut from the ceremony of the court martial along my arm smarts in the cold air. 

My achievements, my life’s work, my sacrifice and my pain are all scattered in little pieces of metal and brightly-coloured fabric all over the cobbles. I’m left with nothing but an oozing cut across my arm, a creased white shirt and the aura of a migraine playing across the right edge of my field of vision. The bitter wind carries on screaming across the parade ground. As it always has, as it always will.

And then comes the walk. Through the ranks of soldiers stood out on parade and back towards Nation house. Hands on swords- mine broken and abandoned behind me- and hands on my arms, preventing me from making a break for it. As if I would. As if that would be at all well advised. As if I’m not practically leaden at this point. But still, the porcelain face serves me well.

For once, for once in my life, I wish they’d hood me. As much of a humiliation it is to be led somewhere as a cowering figure with a black canvas hood over your head, this is worse- to have to fix your gaze on nothing in particular as the wind tries to claw tears from your eyes- to have to walk over your own achievements on your way back into the courthouse where you have been tried, and you have been found guilty, and you will once again be judged.

We pass between the wrought-iron and limestone fencing that separates the parade ground from the miserable courtyard where the blood that the law demands is spilt has stained the concrete of the cobbles a few shades darker. Many die here- whether stood before the firing squad or on their knees with a round to the back of their head. I will not be of that number.

The only thing that awaits me, disgraced as I am now, in the realms of state-sanctioned death is the hangman.  The number that I could still well be a part of here is the cohort who are deemed to need a physical reminder of what they have done carved into their fucking back with a flogging. And they are brutal enough, that whilst better than death, the difference is only marginal in my mind.

I can’t help but stare at the chips of ricochets - or echoes of bullets that found their targets and tore right through- taken out of the wall at the far side of the courtyard. That little reminder seeps through- I am dead eyes, dead face, and, perhaps most importantly, if I don’t play my cards right, a dead fucking man. There are two dead if you count Jacob. Again, that little involuntary twitch of my face, the only expression I’ve let slip through my mask all through this. I put my hand to my face briefly to try to smooth it out. The migraine aura remains, shimmering a white-yellow at the edge of my visual field.

Two dead men. One on the corner of a hearth, broken skull- another soon to be before the judge, soon to be before the hangman, soon to be before the noose. I am, still, dead eyes, dead face, and a dead fucking man.

[jaws-and-canines]

[Image ID: A blonde, caucasian man in a white shirt in the style of a religious icon, one bloodstained hand up in the gesture of peace, a gold-on-purple halo entwined with a running noose behind his head. There is a notable scar around his right eye, the top end of it hidden beneath a fringe, the bottom end towards his mouth. He has a fine beard and mustache. His expression is pained, tears down his face, and two trails of fresh blood drip from his nose. End ID.]

[jaws-and-canines]

Regret

“It was never my grief to feel, but I felt it all the same. As much as I tried to push it away, rationalise it as a just punishment, I couldn’t help but feel a sort of grief for the life they took away from me- and then always, I would have to remind myself of the selfishness of that self-pity. It is not my grief to feel.”

[Image ID: Haskell Haveter, praying the rosary. He is wearing a blue and yellow Escape List uniform, jumper rolled up to his elbow. His hands are interlinked, holding the rosary, and the scars from the accident are visible on his arms and face. He is looking into the middle-distance with an expression of quiet pain. End ID.]

[jaws-and-canines]

"Do you think you conducted yourself in an appropriate manner?"

"No, sir, I do not."

"How fucking drunk were you?"

At the 7th annual Albion First conference, Haveter took to the stage drunk, in full dress uniform, and gave a speech generally regarded as one of his best, advocating for violence from European soldiers to be met with greater punishment.

However, not everyone was happy to hear of this, much less his commanding officer, General Alistair Davies. Following the speech, Haskell was detained by the Military Police, and Davies had him confined until he sobered up, to prevent him from disgracing himself further. Haskell was charged with Conduct Unbecoming for giving the speech without permission and whilst drunk and in uniform, which he conceded to and received minimal punishment.

Later, this Conduct Unbecoming charge would be used by the Court Martial as basis to discharge him when he faced a second count of the same for his conduct on the night of Jacob Kay’s murder.

Don't you see what they did to me? What they will do to you? What they will do to your wives? Your children? I can defend myself, I can stand up for myself. Imagine what they will do to the defenseless among us.

There is no honour amongst these people. And yet we allow them to take. I say no more. I say no more, enough- one son, one daughter coming home in a wooden box should have been enough and yet my colleagues in the Council here- they lack the spine to say no. They lack the spine to draw the line which the European filth are drenching with the blood of our children, our parents and our friends.

And yet we are told to hold back, we are told we must treat the war criminals with better regard than they treat us- so they can live out their natural lives on the taxpayer pound, in comfort better than the most vulnerable among us often do. Enough, I say, of this madness. Our people come first. You come first. And I will stand for that until I die- the prospect of a comfortable life behind bars does not deter these utter degenerates.

This is not enough.

I would beat their presidents to death on the steps of their capitol buildings with my own two hands if it meant no more death. I would cripple their men, sterilise their women, raise their children as our own- if it meant they would inflict no more death upon us. Like must pay like. But there is no use in expounding such things, however truthful, if I do nothing.

So today I will do something. The Council will not sit in session again until they table a motion to stop this madness. Because I say we put our people first, as we should. I say that simply calling these atrocities awful is not and has never been enough.

I say deeds, not words. I say- no more.

- CGen. Haskell Haveter, at the 7th annual Albion First conference

[jaws-and-canines]

Oh, I’ve Really Done It Now

A Count The Days story. Comes after Glass In A Rainbow. Haskell is brought back to the Southglade Major Trauma Center after a major car accident puts an abrupt stop to his time on the run. Contains mentions of suicidal ideation, medical whump, references to a car accident. 

---

I come back around with a headache so bad I think that maybe I’ve cracked my skull open on the tarmac. There’s a vague memory of the way they picked me up, the tense ambulance ride- and Angelo, holding my hand. There’s nobody holding my hand now. I don’t know where I am.

“Oh, God, Oh, God, oh, oh,” I mumble, and then I scream, sobbing, crying for someone to hold me because I don’t know where I am and I can’t feel my legs. Everything fucking hurts and yet, I can’t feel my legs. Fuck where I am. I can’t feel my legs. The thought that I’ve broken my fucking neck flickers across my mind. 

I try to sit up and fail to even lift my head. "I can't feel my legs," I howl, afraid that my instincts are correct, a sickening feeling forming in the pit of my stomach. "Am I dead?" I sob, in a voice that barely sounds like my own. “Tell me I’m dead. I’m dead. Tell me I’m-”

“Haveter, you’re not dead.” Nelson’s harsh accent cuts through the fog around me. Everything’s too fucking bright in the little white room and I can’t fucking move. He puts a hand on my shoulder as I try and fail miserably to sit up. "Don't try and move. Do you know where you are?"

I lift one hand. It’s wrapped up in a cast. I lift the other. Splinted, but they’ve cuffed me to the bed’s siding all the same. I groan. My head is pounding but all I can think about is what the Specials are going to do to me for this. They’re going to dissect me like warm fucking bread for this. A fugitive, a coward and a traitor to their ethos is not a good thing to be viewed as. 

I really thought I could make it to Dover. I’m not making it anywhere any time soon.

The thought dawns on me that Nelson is armed. In my desperation I can think of only one relatively painless way out of this. I’ll be damned but I don’t care. "Fucking kill me, Nelson," I breathe. “Please.” His tone of voice doesn’t change. "I'm sorry, Haskell," he says. "I really am. You’re in Resus at Southglade. You’ve been in an accident. Do you know what happened?" "Put your pistol in my mouth and pull the trigger," I say, looking at him out of the corner of my eye. "Kill me. I'm begging you to fucking kill me before the Specials get here. Fuck, please."

"You know I can't do that," he says. “Even if I would, the staff here wouldn’t let me.”

My heart seems to break in my chest. I’m fucking terrified and I don’t really know why. “Okay,” I whimper, my face crumpling. “I don’t want the Specials to hurt me, Scott, I don’t.” I sniff, letting the tears stream down my face. I dissolve into silent sobbing. Fucking pathetic. I was once a damn good soldier and now what? I’m a snivelling mess who can’t feel his own fucking legs. "It's not fair," I say weakly, and then drop my voice to a low whisper. “They’re here, aren’t they?”

He nods slowly, and tips his head towards just outside the cubicle. “Life isn't fair," he says. “I’m sorry, lad, but it’s the truth.”

In comes Isaac Noble in his teal scrubs. Part of me screams a sort of grief that if I die, it’ll be under the care of the man who my wife left me for, but the other breathes a sigh of relief. He is the best of the best. He’s fucking huge. I can only see him from where I’m lying flat on my back, immobilised, because he damn near grazes the ceiling. He throws the curtains shut behind him, so it’s just me, him and Nelson in the tiny cubicle and leans over to silence the monitors. I just stare at him with my one unfocused eye. It doesn’t look like it’s good news.

“I’m afraid something showed up on the head MRI. Haskell, we’re going to have to move quickly, alright?” He talks quietly but clearly. “You’re bleeding into your brain.”

Blood in my brain doesn’t really seem to make sense at that moment. Ironically, the headache stifles my ability to think. I furrow my brow. The glass in my face shifts and blood dribbles down my grazed-raw cheeks. “I’m… I’m what?” 

“You’re bleeding into your brain.” He pauses. “Slowly, but it is happening. We need to fix that before it becomes a problem. There’s only so much space in your skull. So we need to put a hole in your skull, find what’s bleeding and patch it up.” He stoops down to my level. “There’s risk in it, of course, but if we do nothing, you will die. So we’re going to do it. Alright?”

I know the answer already but I ask anyway. “Do I have a choice?” I say. I know the State has taken my right to object to this away from me. If they can, they’ll try to put me together again just to tear me apart. 

Isaac’s expression softens and he shakes his head. “I’m sorry.” 

I cry so hard that this time, I am actually sick. Someone wipes my mouth for me. That’s what sticks with me. I don’t really process anything else. This is not the way I want to die, I keep thinking as they start running the drugs to put me under. This is not the way I want to die. Oh, I’ve really done it now, I think. This is not the way I want to die. And then I’m gone.

[jaws-and-canines]

One Friday Night

A Count The Days story. Contains canon-typical violence, from Iverson’s POV.

---

It’s Friday. I can allow myself a little indulgence. Beside me I have a white cloth I’m using to clean as I work, and a glass of red wine.  

The wine is not the indulgence here. I usually drink after my evening meal. The indulgence is my little swan, my little pet project, and the way he whimpers under my knife, zip tied to the leg of my desk, occasionally muttering a particularly uncharitable comment towards me or hissing in overblown pain. Haskell is generally considered a risk. But he’s not a risk to me, not like this. Despite the precautions his lengthy records would suggest I take, I know him better.

I know I’m flaunting my power in the face of regulations somewhat, but I know I can get away with it. Who's going to stop me? Scott, maybe, if he wasn’t too scared. But he is, I muse, and wipe my bloodied knife clean. Haskell sighs a sigh of relief as I stop for the moment.

On a normal person, I prefer to work on the back. On him, however, there is nowhere on the back left to work. Craters and valleys and peaks of tight scarring and dips that dull and shine the skin. There is nothing more you can do to scar tissue save for cutting it off, stripping it like paint. That is not something you do to someone you want to keep alive. That is something to do to someone you are setting up to die slowly and painfully from an infection. Besides, I want those scars to stay right where they are. They’re important, they teach a lesson. They’re beautiful. They continue to hurt him each and every day. That in itself is beautiful.

In lieu of the back being free, then, I work on the back of his thigh. There’s blood soaking into the edge of his boxers, the only item of clothing he has on, staining the stitching. It was easier to convince him to strip than it would have been to bear the complaints had I gotten the rest of the clothing dirty. Just light cuts, as close together as I can get them. I’ve had a little too much wine to be doing anything particularly complex. I’m being nice.

He seems unaware that I’m being kind. He twists like an eel thrashing on the deck of a trawler, whining a complaint at me. “Stop that, stop that, stop!” he whines, as if he thinks it would make a difference. His voice breaks as I keep on with what I’m doing, feathering gentle cut after gentle cut. We both know, we both know in certainty, that I won’t listen to him.

I’m not inclined to. Especially not if he insists on whining and making demands like that. He is a man and he can plead like a man if he wants me to listen. 

“I can’t feel my hands,” he mumbles. I ignore him. He’s not in enough pain to be talking like that. He’s just being ridiculous.

The zip ties cut into the fleshy part of his palm, just below his thumb as he pulls against them. Not out of a desire to escape but by virtue of how he is positioned, lying down, face down, arms out almost straight above his head. He pulls against the zip ties to try to get comfortable against the pressure on his shoulders. 

“I can’t feel my hands!” he snaps again. I realise I’m going to have to agknowledge it.

I have one gloved hand- disposable, of course, I try to avoid having to wash my leather gloves- and one ungloved. It’s a particularly cold day so the scars on my knuckles and on the pads of my fingers are particularly angry. The blade of the knife reflects the odd glimpse of my scars as I wipe it down with the cloth. “You can’t feel your hands?” I ask, and lean over to pinch him in the middle of one of his nail beds. He jolts away, a white mark coming up on his nail. I tut. “Yes you can. Don’t lie to me.”

“I have pins and needles in my hands, then,” he says to me, disdainful. “It’s barely a difference!” The whine comes back into his voice, petulant, impolite.

“Don’t talk to me like that.” I keep a finger on the top edge of my knife, keeping the blade perfectly parallel to his skin, and split it as easily as I could split an overripe fruit, the red flesh parting in two beneath a steel blade, deep crimson juices spilling out over the rind. The two are not too different- on the verge of rottenness, but still capable of being sweet. 

“Sorry,” he says, almost under his breath. His voice breaks as he swallows sharply. “Please loosen my hands.” A moment of hesitation passes before I pick up my knife again and slip it into the side of the zip tie, working it just a degree looser, before returning to my work. He doesn’t thank me.

I slice another fine cut up his thigh. He jerks away with a hiss through his teeth that turns into a whine. I think that’s part of what endears him to me.  With the next cut he twitches again. The man who had an eye cut out with a smile on his face, the man who dragged himself for miles to return home, packing his own empty eye socket with boiled gauze to try to dampen a raging infection. That very same man shudders as I rest the knife on his skin, and whimpers as I pull the knife through his flesh again.

I shush him, running my ungloved hand through his hair. “You’re doing just fine,” I say quietly. “No need for the dramatics.” That’s all it is. A pointless little show in the hopes of garnering pity. 

I put the knife down and take a sip from the wine glass, licking it from my lips, watching the blood well up as he just lies there, resting his head on his arm. “I’m not being dramatic,” he mutters. “You’re just hurting me.” He can take so much worse than this, and he knows that I know that. When I push him past the dramatics, he toughens up, slipping into anger, and then into determination to hold out, and then all the way into the delirium of agony. 

When I pick up the knife again, I cut a little too deep. Not entirely accidentally. The flash of white I see under the skin makes me pull away and wipe my knife on the white cloth I have next to me. “Ouch, that stings!” he exclaims.

“Oh, shush,” I say. I stop, and look at the blood welling up to cover the whiteness of the fat I’ve exposed. 

I take a sip from my wine glass with my ungloved hand. He twists around, watching me intently as I drink. Again I catch a glimpse of the fatty layer that I’ve cut down to as the skin twists with his motion. 

His eyes settle on the glass. “You want a little?” I ask, offering up the wine glass to him.

His eyes brighten a little right before the cynicism reappears. “No,” he snaps. “You can’t make me okay with this by… buying me off.” He is, in fact, very easy to negotiate with. All it takes is a give to whatever you take. He’d fight and scream and kick all the way to the bitter end if he didn’t think he was getting something out of this- and right now, on a behavioural contract, locked up for twenty-three hours, seven days a week, he’s getting company and a distraction all rolled up into one package for the price of a little pain. 

“Don’t be crude, I don’t engage in bribery.” I smile at him. He knows I’m not being entirely truthful but neither is he. I take a sip. He watches me again. “It’s a very good bottle,” I say to him, turning the label around to show it to him. Blue eyes flick over the label. Blue is an overstatement, really. Pavement grey is more apt. I watch him read the label, left to right, from one side to another. His right eye doesn’t track with the left, following a marginally smaller arc. 

“Don’t deny yourself the good things in life. You’ll get yourself nowhere.” I offer the wine glass up to him again. 

The sharp undertone of sarcasm comes back with a vengeance. “It’s a little difficult to hold a glass with no free hands.”

“I’ll help you,” I say to him, swilling the wine around in the glass. People say wine looks like blood. They’re wrong- it’s a couple shades darker, just minutely, and much less viscous. “Just imagine this is one of those Friday lunchtimes, hm?”

He crumples a little. I see it on his face, the way his eyebrows curve in, an almost-wince with tears shining in his eyes. He swallows, and nods, turning himself onto his side with a wince. “Fine,” he says hoarsely. And then, hastily, adds the second phrase, forcing the vulnerability out of his voice. “But only so you’ll stop bothering me about it.”

I put a hand on the back of his head, and put the glass to his lips. He takes the first sip of his own accord and I tip the glass back as he drinks. I watch as the red wine stains his lips, as the tears in his eyes break free and drip down his cheeks, at the way he struggles to trust me, pushing against my hand on the back of his head, panting for air through his nose between gulps.

“Oh, darling,” I say to him, and let him down the whole glass. He looks almost defeated when I put the empty glass back at my side, and rests his head on the floor. The wine stains chewed lips. I lean over with the cloth I’ve been using to wipe his blood on and wipe the corner of his mouth. There are salt-stains tracing down to tears beaded on the angle of his jaw. I drift the cloth up, and turning it over to find a clean spot, I wipe his tears, one side, and then the other, tracing down his scar. “It’s so tough, isn’t it? It’s so hard.”

I echo the same phrase occasionally. Sometimes, out of his mind with the help of chemicals or in the depths of agony, he’ll start pleading with me- I want to go home, I just want to go home, I want to go home- and I adore it when I have to break his heart every time by reminding him what he’s done. 

This time, sober and still with it, he just grimaces at me with wine on his teeth, and turns away to lie back down on the floor. I pick up my knife, wipe down the bloodied skin with the white cloth so I can see what I am doing, and start again.

[jaws-and-canines]

You Belong To Me

A Count The Days story. Continued from here. Content warning for nonsexual non-consensual touch, stress positions, iverson is a creepy bastard (like, really creepy in this one), blood and dehumanisation.

---

He uses his watch to keep time. I’m eventually too exhausted to scream, my shoulders so taut and tingling and burning that any gasp or shudder or weak attempt to find purchase on the chair that’s just out of reach makes it hard to breathe like someone is crushing my fucking ribcage.

Iverson looks up from his watch. “Seven minutes,” he says. “Let’s go to ten and then I’ll let you down. Or you can ask nicely now. You want to ask nicely now?” “Iverson...” I mumble. I’m turning gently from the leftover momentum of my panic, my trembling arms being slowly twisted up and torn by the rope and wire, the blood drying against my skin. “You want to ask nicely?” He strokes me under the chin like I’m a dog. “Fuck... off,” I manage to croak out. There’s blood all over my front as well, from where a gasp or a scream or perhaps the occasional tug from Iverson has made the wire around my neck cut and snag.  Iverson tuts, running a finger along my ribs. “This doesn’t have to be like this, you know?” he says. “I don’t ask for much, I don’t.” “I’m sorry,” I groan, but it comes out more like m’ sor-uh, a slurred mess through a tense jaw. “Ah, ah, ah, no,” he says, and gives my bottom lip a squeeze. “I don’t want to hear that. I’ll gag you- or worse- if I hear that again. Eight minutes. You could be sat with me right now. You could be in my arms, in the armchair in my room, and we could be having afternoon tea whilst I used this fishing wire to cut pretty patterns into your arms.” He walks behind me, running his hands along all the scars on my back. “And you could quietly whimper as I did it, and I’d tell you just how good you are, and then when I’ve had my fill, when I was done, I’d bandage them up nice and tight and you could share a slice of toast with me. I’d butter the crusts. You could have the crusts.” And then he kicks me in the kidneys. My breath squeezes from my lungs, and I gasp. When I catch my breath, I suddenly find my strength again and shriek, the momentum of the kick making my arms strain as I sway back and forth. “But because you don’t behave this, this is where you end up.” He laughs as a sequence of pained exhales tear from between my lips like I’ve just run a marathon.

He leaves me in silence for another minute or so and I let my head drop, feeling my shoulders slowly tear apart inside themselves, thread of muscle after thread burning and tearing and ripping. The kick continues to make me swing from side to side. I groan. Iverson just keeps fucking touching my scars, running his hands through the gouges left by the whip, running his hands along my stark and trembling ribs, through my bloody hair, over my shaking arms. He just keeps brushing his hands so gently over me, hesitating over wounds and bruises and scrapes and I am so, so glad I can’t see his expression. “Ten minutes,” he says, quietly, into my ear, and abruptly, cuts me down. I crumple into his arms, my arms twitching, and I groan as he sets me down on the floor and starts unwinding the wire and rope from my arms, peeling it from nasty-looking cuts and snags. Carefully picks it away from torn skin and rope burn. Rubs my aching muscles as I just lie there in his lap, utterly dumbfounded. He finishes off with my shaking arms then moves onto my neck, unwinding the outermost layers of rope and wire. He pauses as he reaches the first bit that’s snagged into my skin, and sits me up, a hand around my waist as he teases it away from my blood-slick neck. I hiss through my teeth. “Mmm, mm, I know,” he says, putting his head to my shoulder as he pulls the last little bit of wire out of the gouge it’s torn from my skin. “I think I’ll just use the rope when we redo the knots later, hmm? If you’re good for me, that is.” A single tear breaks free from my tired eyes and he laughs. He puts a hand on the back of my head and leans forwards. A thumb on my cheekbone. He’s so close to my face. I don’t like it. I don’t like it. I don’t like it. I close my eyes. He licks the tear from my face.

Licks it. From my fucking face. I squirm, wanting to get away from him, anything, anything, but he just holds my head to his chest, resting his chin on my head. “Don’t do that,” I spit, furious and almost afraid. “Don’t, don’t, don’t.” “Now, now,” he laughs. “I do what I want. You don’t get a say in it. Don’t you understand that?” He leans his head down to my neck, and again I feel his tongue run along the wounds from the fishing wire. It’s warm and it’s damp and he leans right in and I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. I just scream. He tuts as he sits back up, my blood on his lips. “Shh, shh. You belong to me. Your blood, your tears, your hair and your beautiful little face. It all belongs to me. So I get to do whatever I want.”  “This isn’t okay! This isn’t okay!” I say to him, aghast. “And you know what? I don’t care what you think. Disgusting little man you are, thinking you have any sway in this. Making demands of me like that.” He licks the corner of his mouth, wipes my blood on his knuckles then leans in with two fingers, covering his fingertips in fresh crimson from the cuts on my neck. “Here,” he says, and shoves them into my mouth. I retch and gag and he uses his other hand to tuck my cheeks between my teeth so I can’t bite down. “Come on, Haskell, come on, this is good for you. A little bit of humility. Lick the blood off my fingers, please. I don’t want your blood on my fingers right now. I’m asking nicely.” I look at him, eyes wide and terrified, but I do as he asks, trembling. He lets go of my mouth and I look at him, agape, ashen and damn well disgusted at him. And myself for not being able to fight back.  “What?” he asks. “You’re sulking?” “No... no, I’m not sulking. Don’t do that to me, don’t.” I shake my head. “Whatever that was, don’t fucking... don’t fucking do it, don’t.” He holds up a hand. “Consequences, Haskell, there are always conseqences. When you forget I fucking own you, I will remind you of that. When you forget that you do as I ask, I will remind you of that. When you forget you don’t get a say in these things, I will remind you. I’m not an unfair man. I just have standards. Eventually you’ll live up to them and there’ll be no need for all this... nastiness.”

He picks up the soup bowl from earlier from the floor, turning on the tap behind him. Each workroom has a tap and a drain in it, so they can be easily rinsed out, and he lets the tap run for a little before rinsing out the bowl, filling it and turning off the tap. “We’ll start on the bruises next. You’ve lost a bit of blood and I don’t want you passing out before I’m done working on you,” he says, and brings the bowl to my chapped and bloody lips. “Drink.”

I drink.

[jaws-and-canines]

In His Own Head

A Count The Days story. Content warning for dehumanisation, sensory deprivation and psychological abuse.

---

Iverson stands directly in front of the inclined table, looking at his work. The thing in front of him is quiet, for now at least. Underneath the blindfold and the muzzle and the ear defenders, the thing trembles. You can barely call something like this a man, Iverson thinks with a smile. Something that snarled and bit and screamed and kicked. Something that whined and whined after he was strapped down through the metal bit of the muzzle for hours until he whined himself hoarse and then the hoarse whimpers became silence.

That's barely a man anymore, barely worthy of calling a human, thinks Iverson, and wonders what's going on in that barely-man's little skull. Probably all sorts of hell. Because Iverson's thing, quivering on the table is Haskell Haveter. And Haveter is a guilty man with a heavy conscience.

Oh, it's so, so heavy. He bottles it up, just keeps distracted to hide it. But when he has nowhere to run but his own mind, that's all going to come flooding out. And Haveter will have plenty of time to feel it all. The thought of the utter torment that awaits Haveter, stuck in the confines of his own head, makes Iverson a little giddy.

Iverson leans forwards from the metal chair in front of the table. He wants to smooth his hands over the ridges and curves of Haveter's skull but knows it's a delicate process. Any touch, any sensory input, his little swan needs to earn. Earn back after that little episode he had. So Iverson settles for looking, a wry smile on his face.

The plan, thinks Iverson, watching the sun catch on Haveter’s salt-stained cheeks, watching the rise and fall of his chest occasionally hitch in panic, the plan is to simply let him sit with his own mind for a while. Give him nutrition through the line the medical team so kindly put in for Iverson. Just water, salts and sugars, nothing substantial. Then after a long while of nothing, Iverson is going to take off the blindfold and the ear defenders and the muzzle and he's going to look into those teary blue eyes. And he's going to ask ever so gently, for Haveter to beg to be hurt. If Haveter refuses, it's another long while of just him in his own head until Iverson asks again. And again, and again, and again until the man's psyche finally gives way and he begs for Iverson to make him hurt instead of being left in dark nothingness.

But Iverson suspects it won't take long. And Haveter will beg for Iverson to hurt him. He will learn his lesson, and Iverson can move on to the next stage of his plan. The thought alone brings a smile to his face.

But for now, it's a waiting game. He checks the straps pinning his beautiful little swan to the table. Haveter’s shirt is crumpled, his trousers dirty at the knees. They didn't let him clean himself up after his little episode. No, he didn't deserve that. Careful not to touch or jog him, Iverson paces around him, just inspecting the straps from a distance. Makes sure the blindfold is tight and the ear defenders are on properly.

Then, Iverson leaves. Locks the door. Leaves Haveter to his demons. After a few hours of silence, the whining starts again. Tears drip from underneath the blindfold and run onto the leather muzzle. Drip, drip, drip onto the floor. But he can't hear that. He can't hear anything at all.

[jaws-and-canines]

To Count To Sixty

A Count The Days Story. Haskell Haveter recieves sixty lashes as part of the sentence he recieved for the murder of Jacob Kay. Content warning for blood, physical institutional abuse (?), minor tongue trauma and minor religion mentions.

---

If I’m honest, I could take guilt. Guilt I was raised with, hell, it’s the fucking basis of Catholicism if I’m going to be brutally honest. I was raised to look guilt in the eye and tell it no thank you, I will repent. Shame I was not. Shame is the thing that will eat a man up without him ever showing it. That’ll make him keep his eyes to the floor and his head down and his cheeks burning with just how fucking wretched he knows he is. I can’t seem to even make myself look up to meet the eyes gathered in Nation Square. Not the Major waiting with the whip, not Nelson, not Angelo, not Davies with that quiet disgusted pity all over his face.

Nelson tugs at the collar of my shirt. “Haveter,” he mutters. “Get that off, Major Elliott is waiting.”

I look up, coming out of my stupor of self-pity. That’s what it is, really, just plain old self pity. “Sorry,” I mumble, and fumble with the buttons, shrugging it off. It’s a briskly cold day today. I put a hand on my shoulder for a moment, pressing my hand against my back, knowing that it’s never going to be the same unbroken skin again. I will forever be marked by this. I close my eyes for a moment, sniff, and steel myself. I hand Nelson the blue Northwall shirt, and this time, when I see Elliott with that bronze-inlaid handled whip, I stare him directly in the fucking eye. Do your fucking worst, I think as if he can hear. Do your worst.

I hold out my wrists for Nelson to tie me. The sisal is damn rough, and I know it’s going to give me rope burn- that’s the point. You can’t hide something on your hands so easily. Everyone will see, and everyone will know and that’s the point of this all. That’s the point of the television cameras I am trying to ignore. Nelson and Angelo between them stand me between the two posts and tie my arms to the metal loops between them. The strain on my shoulders isn’t quite uncomfortable but I have a nasty feeling it might well get that way. Angelo chains my ankles together and hooks that chain over a metal loop laid between the cobbles. In fact, all of this can be taken down and stored, so the square is sometimes empty. Nobody ever goes in here anyways, because even if all the chains and metal and wood aren’t here, there’s always a heaviness in the air. People swear it’s haunted. Angelo takes off my shoes. I wince a little because the cobbles are fucking freezing, but I say nothing. There’s no point.

I glance behind me, watch the ceremonial part of this all. Elliott offers Davies the whip, stooping down on one knee and holding it up. Davies turns his back on Elliott and on me. Elliott turns to Nelson, and the same action is repeated. He steps towards the crowd of officers, and then his Commanding Officer steps forwards and orders him, quite loudly, to do justice where justice is due. I turn back to the ground in front of me, staring at the cobbles, and wait.

Just wait. And there it is, like a red-hot spear of pain across my shoulders. I wince, swallow back the tears that have sprung to my eyes, and feel it fade and sting in the cold air. I can feel my own blood welling up, and it’s hot against my cold skin. And then the second. Another painful pause. The next lands with a resounding crack in the otherwise silent square. It stings, making my cheeks burn, but it's not bad, not yet.

Fourth, cracking along the opposite direction to the others. It starts to sting quite a lot then, the cold tugging along the weal I can feel blossoming on my back. A fifth falls, and by now, I know it's bruising and bleeding. My back feels hot and I can feel my own blood drying on the bare skin. I scrunch my eyes shut.

Another pause. God, he knows what he's doing. Patient enough to wait- a sixth, I clench my fists, then regret that as it pulls the wounds on my back open a little and the cold air rushes in. Seven, an ungodly long stretch of time, eight. I screw my eyes shut and try to will the tears that are brimming away. Hurry up. I wish he’d just hurry up. My back is fucking burning.

Nine. It smacks up over my shoulders and leaves a deep and dribbling cut like paint on paper, dripping down my front. Ten. This time I jerk against the ropes around my wrists, inhaling sharply. Eleven, a pause with blood dribbling down my back, that’s all I can fucking feel, my blood, my back, my burning back and it hurts, it hurts so much, twelve, and this time the first of the open wounds is crossed by a fresh one, the two spears of bright-hot fire crossing each other and somehow intensifying in the middle. I stare at the floor, mouth agape, trying to resist the urge to gasp in pain.

Thirteen, pause, fourteen. I shake my head, clenching my jaw, biting my tongue. Each lash knocks the breath out of me anew and I'm dripping blood and sweat down my back, trembling. Fifteen, pause, sixteen and it just gets worse. My hair is stuck to my face with a feverish sheen of sweat.

The tears start to drip down my face even though I'm doing everything I can to hold them back. I’m not crying. My eyes are watering from the incomprehensible agony he is turning my back into. Seventeen splits a fresh wound across my back, raking up across my shoulders, and I'm back to silently gasping and trembling. I lose count, just reeling between each blow. Each time, a pause between the last lash and the next, each time, a crack that echoes through the silent square, followed by me jerking forwards, throwing my weight against the ropes, the chains at my feet rattling with each twitch. They'll stop at thirty and wash my back down. I just have to get there and it’ll be okay.

I’ll be okay, I think, and then another blow rains down on my tender back. I grunt audibly this time, letting my head roll back. There’s ringing in my ears, nothing makes sense, nothing makes sense anymore and I just don’t understand and I feel the next one hit, my head snaps back, an explosion of metal in my mouth, it burns, it burns, it burns, like a white phosphorus light and I burn and I just don’t understand-

I’m woken up by water splashing on my face. I open my eyes to find the technician I’ve seen before, whose name utterly escapes me standing over me, looking at me with detached concern in his eyes. “It’s okay,” he says to Elliott, speaking over my head as I’m slumped against the ropes holding me up. My whole body burns hot and cold but my back is beyond agony. “Just the pain.”

I try to make some snarky comment about pain but all that comes out of my mouth is a groan and a dribble of blood. I’ve bitten my tongue and that’s why I can taste metal. Oh, how embarrasing. The technician stoops down to the tin bucket of water beside him with a hand on his knee and takes a little in the tin dish that’s floating in it. “Here,” he says, and holds the dish to my chapped and bloody lips, letting me drink. It’s cold. It’s good.

“How many?” I say hoarsely, as he puts the dish back in the bucket.

“Twenty-five. We stopped because you passed out.”

I shake my head sadly, and go back to staring at the cobblestones. I try to count the last five. One, and I inhale sharply. Two, a shudder, letting the blood in my mouth drip down my chin, three, I take with a slump forwards, four, clench my jaw, and five rains down and I gasp a sigh of relief.

And then it’s over. For now.

Except it’s not because when they throw the other bucket of freezing cold water over my back, it stings. One the initial shock of the cold wears off, I feel it, abruptly and it builds. It stings and then it burns and I realise, I realise it’s saltwater. Someone rubs it in with a heavy gloved hand I can barely feel through the burning agony on my back into the gashes and I hiss through my teeth. My stomach turns as the burning and stinging builds.

They leave me there for a few minutes, shivering and dripping bloody saltwater down my back, trousers, into the cobbles at my feet. The ground is so cold that my feet are numb and my leg bones ache.

And then it starts again. The first blow almost startles me, and then I realise just how much worse it is.

It’s worse this time, now that the nerves in my back have calmed down a little, and everything is angry and irritated by the saltwater, it’s a hundred times worse.  A few more blows, I lose count, a pained whimper tears out of my bleeding mouth. It's loud enough to be audible, and just as I feel the disdain in the air, another stroke lands and tears another gouge out of ruined flesh. 

This time, I just scream. Out loud, throwing my head back, a hoarse, reedy cry of sheer desperation. Another, and I howl again, gasping for air that just won't come in the freezing morning frost. Another. I slump forwards, limp, sobbing, coughing up broken pleas. Another. Please, please, please, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Another fucking blow right across my back, and I scream again, into the cobblestones that simply reflect my hoarse cries back at me. Please, I hear myself begging, barely audible, please. The whip cracks across my shoulders again, and this time, I scream the plea. "Oh, God, stop!" I howl. He doesn't. There’s a mumur of cruel laughter from around me. Again, again, and I start to cry like a child, rocking back and forth with each stroke, arching my back against the crack of the whip on angry, inflamed flesh. It just keeps fucking going and I barely feel human anymore, just some fucking mess of blood and pain, living from stroke to stroke that each time makes me quiver and shake. I half sob and half scream my through my tears. And then then three fall in quick sucession, one, two, three. I screw up my face, waiting for the next, but that never comes. I hear them dismiss Elliott, and dismiss the soliders behind me.

"Oh, God, oh, God, oh my God," I sob, an almost animal moan. There are people around me all of a sudden and I’m unchained, untied, someone presses a coat onto me, pressing it against my ruined back- oh God, I realise, it’s my uniform coat. It’s mine with all the patches torn off. I bleed onto it. They take me by the arms and I take one step, two steps, towards Nation House again, three, and then I just crumple, legs giving way, smacking down onto the cobbles. I hear my head smacking into the ground and then I’m gone again, unconcious in a pile of bloody clothes and pale clammy skin on the floor. The news cameras keep rolling. They were always rolling. They never stopped.

[jaws-and-canines]

Ask For It

A Count The Days story. Continued from here. Content warning for dehumanisation, sensory deprivation, psychological manipulation, Iverson being creepy.

---

Iverson walks into the room like a ghost, running his gloved hand along the edge of the table, looking at his work. Strapped to it, occasionally groaning, occasionally letting his head fall a little to one side, although they made sure he could never actually press his head to the table, Haveter looks very much worse for wear. The blindfold is damp, and his cheeks are stained with salt. That same salt rings the edge of the muzzle, where endless tears have fallen and have dried, and his shirt is crumpled and marked where the straps have rubbed against it. Probably his skin as well, and the muzzle will have done some damage to his mouth- nothing that can’t be treated, really. Iverson is expecting there to be sores and bruises from this whole thing, accounted for them, and in fact, is rather looking forward to using them to his advantage.

Iverson leans forwards and presses a hand to Haveter’s forehead like he’s checking for a fever. Haveter groans in a way that almost is feverish, desperately trying to lean into the touch. Iverson laughs out loud, and lets his hand fall away, something that’s met with a whine tinged with despair. “Oh, my,” he says with a knowing smile. He pulls up the chair that sits in the centre of the room and sits down beside Haveter. “I think it’s time, don’t you?” He looks behind him as if he has an audience. “I think it’s time.”

He puts a thumb on the bottom of the blindfold, pulls it up, revealing Haveter’s left eye- the real one, that constricts almost to a pin-point as the light suddenly floods in, the eye that is scrunched shut with a little groan, then blinks back open, once, twice, butterfly-light, brimming with tears.

Iverson smiles and pulls the blindfold off all the way. Takes off the ear defenders, slips his hands behind Haveter’s head and undoes the straps on the muzzle. Eases it out of his mouth. Haveter groans as metal scrapes across his gums and the inside of his mouth that it has rubbed raw over the week. The metal bit of the muzzle comes out of his mouth slick with blood. Iverson sets it aside. “Hello again,” he says.

Haveter briefly forgets how to speak. Opens his mouth, licks cracked lips and grimaces as he touches a sore in the corner of his mouth with his tongue. Swallows sharply, tries again. "Oh my God," he says simply.

"You've had some time to think, haven't you? How is that for you? I shouldn't imagine it's that pleasant in that little head of yours. Think you can do another week?"

Haveter just shakes his head, sniffing back tears. "I can't, I can't, not this, anything but this."

"You'd rather do something different?"

He nods. "Please, anything."

Iverson smiles. "Beg me to hurt you," he says.

"I- what? I can't, I can't, oh, fuck," says Haveter, and his face crumples. He bursts into tears. "Please, no."

"Beg me to hurt you," restates Iverson calmly, freeing Haveter’s hands. "If you want it so badly, tell me. Tell me that you'd rather feel pain than nothing at all."

"I, I, I… I can’t," he sniffs, and puts his hands over his face. "I can't, I can't, I can't! Oh God, okay, okay." He takes a deep breath to steady himself, then looks up at Iverson. "Please, please don't leave me alone like that, please… hurt me instead."

"Tell me what you want me to do to you."

A fresh wave of tears spills down Haveter’s cheeks. "I can't, I can't, please no, anything, anything, just anything," he pleads, holding onto Iverson's sleeve. "Something bloody will do, blood is fine, blood will do, please. Anything at all. Anything but this."

Iverson brushes his hand away. "I can't do all the work here. You want this, don't you? You want this instead of another week so you are going to tell me what you want me to do to you." 

"I can't think of anything, I can't, I can't, please," breathes Haveter, pressing his hands to his face again. "Anything, not this, anything, please, I-I-I don't know! I don't know, I don’t know!" He groans, pressing the heels of his palms into his cheeks.

Iverson reaches for the blindfold and ear defenders again and Haveter shrieks. "Wait no, no, no," he sobs. "No, wait, the knife, the knife, the knife," he says, and howls, balling his fists up in his shirt collar and tugging at it in anguish. "The knife, please use the knife, please use the knife."

Iverson puts his hands back in his lap, smiling at the utter despair in front of him. "Tell me where you want me to use the knife. Use your words. Where do you want me to start?"

"I-I-I- on my back, my back, my back," Haveter stammers, coughing on his own tears. "Use the knife on my back, please, please!"

"Good boy," says Iverson, smiling. "That's what I wanted to hear. Since you begged so nicely for me, let's see what I can do for you." Iverson undoes the last of the straps and helps Haveter to his feet, sitting him on the metal chair, letting him lean on the back. Undoes his shirt and drops it to the floor to use it to mop up later. It needs to be washed anyways.

He rubs his hands over Haveter’s stark spine, then up to his shoulders, his aching shoulders, and digs his fingers in. Haveter exclaims in pain then gasps in relief as Iverson starts to pull the tension out of his scarred and tight joints, rubbing circles with his fingertips over the waxy scars. He suspects there'll be bruises and pressure sores that'll take time to heal and provide other opportunities to offer Haveter painful relief. Iverson thinks the pained confusion on the man's face is adorable.

With his other hand, Iverson flicks out his knife, a little yellow craft knife, and digs the point in between two raised ridges of scarring. Haveter tenses up a little, clearing his throat. Iverson chuckles, feeling him shift beneath his hands. "This is what you wanted. Don't be scared, you want this, don't you? This is what you asked for."

He tugs the blade down, paring open a cut down Haveter’s back. Haveter gasps in pain, gripping onto the back of the chair, but then relaxes into the sensation. Settles into the rythmn of it all. The warm buzz spreading under his skin, the cold of the blood drying on his back, the pain of the point of Iverson's knife. He closes his eyes and lets it consume him, feeling everything he possibly can as Iverson works.

His hands are free. He could fight if he wanted to. He doesn’t. Just rides the sensation of Iverson cutting into his back like a wave, exhaling at each crest of pain, chasing the heavy fog out of his head, inhaling shakily in the lull of the warm buzz that follows. 

And he thinks to himself yes, yes. This is what I want. This is what I want and it's good.

[jaws-and-canines]

Scarring, Like An Artist

A Count The Days story. This continues from here. Content warning for threats, unsexual forced nudity (though its not particularly focal), whips, blood and psychological manipulation.

---

The good doesn’t last. I’m given a little something to eat, something to drink, a medic checks me, not mentioning the fresh cuts on my back, and finds the beginnings of pressure sores, explaining to Iverson that they’ll also need to be dressed. Iverson responds with a smile that by the time he’s done with me this time, it’ll be a lot more than a few cuts and sores that need dressing.

I find myself stripped naked by rough hands and thrown on the floor of a different concrete room. It’s almost dark in here, the bulb barely bright enough to illuminate. Iverson finishes musing over his tools, spread put on the floor, picks up the whip and pins my hands down above my head and presses them to the wall, leaning in. Runs his hand along my thigh. Just a little too far up for comfort. 

He steps back, letting the tail of the whip trail on the floor in front of me. "Beg me to use this," he says. "Or I'll assume you don't want anything from me and leave you here in the dark."

"Oh, fuck," I say weakly.

"Beg me, Haskell. Use your words."

"Please," I say. I'm not begging for the whip. I'm begging for mercy. "No, no, please."

"Ask for it!" he yells, and I startle, curling up into a ball with my hands over my head. "Ask for it!" He's still yelling. My ears hurt, my head hurts, I hurt, my heart hurts-

"I'm going to count to three and then I'm going to leave." He isn't yelling anymore. I think I'm having a heart attack. The fear is like stepping on a shrapnel mine and I can’t handle it. "One-"

"Please whip me!" I sob, grabbing onto his trouser leg. I think my heart might just fucking stop, and I'm conjured right back to my trial where I thought the exact same thing. "Oh, God, please, please just do it!"

"Good boy," he says calmly. "Good boy." Swings the whip up. Cracks it down on my thigh, pinning me down against the wall.

I scream, out of shock and horror as the whip splits skin, dribbling blood down my leg, and then try desperately to collect myself. It doesn't work. "You're going to scar me," I sob, choking on my own tears.

"And?" asks Iverson. The whip comes down again. I bite my tongue to stifle another desperate howl. "You deserve a permanent reminder of what I'm teaching you today." Again. Again. Again. Each time I twitch with a pained gasp, the whip smacks across my skin, carving out a crosshatch on my inner thigh.

I try to stare into space, try to push away from my own body, but Iverson slaps me across the face between lashes. I groan, spitting blood down my bare chest. "Please, please, please," I say. "You're going to scar me, you're going to scar me!"

"That's the point," he says. "Next time you forget your manners, I will carve a reminder into your hands. Be thankful I didn't decide to do that this time." He pauses, rubbing my head affectionately. "And you asked, didn't you? You asked so, so nicely."

The whip comes down over, over over, the same crosshatch covering the insides and outsides of both of my thighs, even the unbroken skin slick with blood.

"You'll thank me," he says. "These scars will look so, so good. You'll thank me."