#ratstail | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thedreadvampy · 4 years

Text

this one IS finished (I wrote it in August 2013) and honestly? holds tf up good job 2013 Ruth

(2013 Ruth was evidently very into a) trauma and b) Bertie not being as dead as initially suspected)

TAKE NO PRISONERS GIVE NO QUARTER

The rage hasn't left him since he heard about Bertie. It's amazing what three simple letters can do to a man whose whole self rests on one person. MIA. Theoretically, that's inconclusive, but in reality, that just means there isn't enough left to find, let alone bury. MIA is a pretty common ending to a young man's story, down here in the tunnels.

The whole tunnel came down on Bertie and the rest of the scouting party, the cracked walls giving up the ghost under the combined pressure of shellling and laser fire. Crushed Lenny and Tommy alike, erasing their differences in one bloody mess, good old boys from Blighty and moonbleached Lenny bastards all rendered down to crushed mess together, There was only one survivor to report back, and was is the operative term. It's hard to get back into active service when you're jam from the waist down, and the poor blighter never even made it far enough to be invalided out to one of the giant Medsats in orbit up above.

So Bertie's gone, and in fairness, Tim never was very stable when left to his own devices, as strings of explosive accidents and charred lab wreckages can attest.

There was shock, at first. The dull numbness of denial, no no no NO no NO it can't be he isn't he didn't no body no proof he'll be found he'll be invalided out he'll be fine he is was will be fine he isn't gone because he CAN'T be gone. But denial's hard to cling to when you've seen death like the boys in the tunnels have seen, you know a tunnelfall is not something you walk away from. Or even crawl away from. Nowhere to run, with tonnes upon tonnes of lunar rock crashing down from above, tasting your own fate in the smoke and dust that are the forerunners of the boulders...a hellish death, a messy death, above all a certain death. If you aren't crushed you'll suffocate or die of your wounds, out in the deadland where nobody's going to hear your cries. Hells, Tim and Bertie did it often enough, that grim tunnels game you have to play, sitting by the crackling radio, rustling and banging your things around, talking, singing, anything to block out the hopeless, plaintive calls from the nearest collapsed tunnel, where hidden charges and weakened structures and exposure to fire mean you'll most likely die yourself before you can help any one of the poor bastards.

So Bertie's...

Bertie's...

For hours, days, he couldn't even bear to think the end of that sentence, and he understands now as never before why the tunnels are filled with euphemisms, those coy lies that partially cover this unbearable truths lurking behind them.

Gone.

Bought it.

Kicked the bucket.

Pushing up daisies.

MIA.

Bertie's...Bertie's dead.

His mind revolted, twisted and writhed away from considering the existence of a world with a Bertie-shaped lack, the world he now existed in where days and nights were cold and alone and silent and only filled by his cold hands and his cold eyes and his cold heart and his raging fire thoughts with nobody to guide them. There were, at that point, others around him, comrades, others in his dugout, but they no longer existed to him They meant nothing. They weren't Bertie. They weren't his. They were man-shaped shadows, who drifted in and out of his awareness to offer orders or platitudes. They weren't part of his silent cotton-wool world. Tim was...is...an ice cold, glass-sharp shard in the centre of soft, soundless, excruciating nothing.

He has yet to be aware of crying over Bertie, though sometimes he finds the salt wetness on his face to be tears, not blood, sometimes he realises with a shock that the hopeless sob he hears is his own. But thus far he has never sat down to cry, never let himself mourn. For days after the news came, it wasn't real, nothing was real, he just shut off. He stared, blank-eyed, into the middle distance, and performed his duties with silent, mechanical efficiency. His comrades muttered, as the days spread into weeks, talked about "mental", "headcase", "shell-shock," and though he heard them, they no more penetrated Tim's dead-eyed daze than anything else happening around him. But there was one, a soft-spoken Welshman by the name Griffiths (bought it at Sinus Roris a few days later), who hit the nail on the head. Looking at the detached, unreacting figure of Tim as he sat slowly dissassembling his lasgun, Griffiths said quietly, "I reckon that's what it looks like when a man gets his heart broke beyond repair".

That, Tim heard, and almost, almost cried. Almost let it fall loose, all of it, weeks of pent-up tears, crippling fear, total bereavement. Almost shed every tear he had, for the times that were and the comfort that used to be, for his Bertie and for his own heart, that he'd barely known was there until it shattered, and for the snuffing of the one and only true light in these dank, dismal tunnels. He almost cried, but he didn't. If he let the feelings in, he was sure they would destroy him; comprehension of his loss loomed poised, a tsunami waiting to break over him.

He didn't cry. The emotions stayed safely dammed back. His face stayed empty. His heart stayed closed.

And he could have stayed that way forever, floating through life in the dazed, unfocused stupefaction of unbearable grief, but for one thing. Bertie had...had died pushing the lines forward, and the Moonies were working day and night, it seemed, to push back. And they pushed hard.

They came in the dead of night, trampling across the fallen rock under which was buried the dead of both sides. Tim was on watch that night, he saw the tiny will-o-the-wisp reflection of lights in their eyes, the firelight gleaming off polished buttons. He saw the soldiers who'd mowed down his Bertie (he wasn't there, didn't see how Bertie died, but in the fevered darkness behind his lids, he sees Bertie dying in that godforsaken tunnel night after night in infinite ways, sees him shot down or crushed or lying moaning in the dark, slowly ebbing away a few pathetic tunnels away from Tim's unknowing form), saw them in the flesh now, saw them coming from the wreckage which still buried the only person who'd been real to him, imagined their boots pounding the rubble above Bertie's ruined body. The tension which had been holding him together for every unimaginably long day since the tunnelfall snapped, and the pain crashed thunderous into his head in a flood of images and memory and raw uncurtailed loss, in curly hair and a dimpled smile and pale grey eyes clouded over lying alone dying alone in a stew of viscera and agony and bone and blood and smoke, mingling contamination, blood mixed with his enemies, crushed into moonwhite corpses, a world apart, a world alone, a world where Tim has no control, where Bertie isn't, where Tim...

And without knowing anything, unexpectedly, Tim found the wave didn't swamp him. Didn't crush him, didn't smash him, didn't destroy him. He rode it. His agony and his loss gave him strength, made him unstoppable. Grief surged in his veins, and he surged with it, eyes alive and merciless. He laid red flowers on Bertie's grave. By the time the rest of the platoon scrambled out of the dugout, sleep-fogged and panicking, the battle was all but over, and Tim was gone in a trail of broken corpses.

He is legend. He is death. The monster of the war. His shadow stalks the tunnels, makes Lenny wake up cold and sweating and reaching for his laser in the dark.

Sometimes he surfaces to find himself slick with gore, panting. Sometimes, the flash and scream of his homemade grenades blast him into a moment's lucidity. Sometimes, surrounded by the dead, he awakes to find himself laughing and crying all at once. Always, he surveys his work with grim satisfaction, but his work is not done, will never be done. The fury which drives him will not be sated, because no matter how many he kills, how many of Bertie's murderers fall before him, there will still be more of the moonbleached fuckers out there, and there will still be no Bertie. No amount of blood is blood enough to repay the loss of Bertie. The tunnels can drown in blood for all he cares, as long as there's a Lenny left on the moon he cannot rest, will not rest.

Lips drawn back, baring bloody teeth in a deathshead grin, skin afire with reflected explosions, hair in bloody ratstails whipping the air, eyes wide and redrimmed and merciless, face soot-streaked and bloody, he runs and he destroys. You can only ride the wave as long as you keep moving. Stop, and the pain grabs you, breaks you, drowns and dashes you, you'll never catch it again.

You know this part. Tim in the tunnels, dancing to the sonorous song of gunfire and grenades, hauling on the lasgun's trigger, a wild onlaught of blood and fire, laughing a chillingly humourless laugh, shout-singing the words that make the Kaiser's men piss themselves and run, take no prisoners, give no quarter. The lucky shot, the sudden blackness that damps the fire in his burning mind. Tim wakes before the Moon Kaiser, unarmed, pained, held by guards.

He isn't like other men, that's what the Kaiser failed to take into account. He's a machine fuelled by love and blood, he runs on the pain-fire that consumes him, he won't stop, can't stop. He doesn't see the world like men do, not any more. Many men would tremble, many men would abase themselves in fear, but Tim is not many men. Many men would be surprised to see the decapitated head of a comrade come alive and wink at them, but Tim's not lived in the real world since the tunnel fell, why would it surprise him? He can't stop, and what the Kaiser forgets, looking upon the animalistic form of the monster of the tunnels, is that Tim is not stupid. He never was, was always smarter than his peers, but now he runs with the liquid fire of revenge, the fire which burnt away fear and hesitation, the fire which burnt down to its white-hot razor-sharp bones one of the Academy's greatest intellects.

The laser fires.

The moon blows up.

White hot victory sears his eyes to black holes.

Not one Lenny is left on the Moon.

For the first time since the tunnelfall, perhaps the last, Tim wears a true, unmitigated smile. His face bloody and bruised, cheekbone fractured, teeth loose in his salt-tasting mouth, lips and beard streaked with blood, burned-out holes where once he had eyes, body a mass of melting pain, Tim spreads wide hands blistered and nailless and torn, and smiles beautifically, his sacred fiery charge at last fulfilled.

Later, there is more pain, and more blood, and metal screaming and grinding bone and screeching glass and merciless, half-familiar voices around him.

Later still, head screaming from the searing, unwelcome clarity of his new brass-rivet vision, he throws away the tenth cup of tea thrust into his hands by the genially smiling wooden man, and goes walking among the wreckage of the Moon. His unfamiliar optics pick out the scorched shell of a British Medsat, palely lit by Earthlight. It's near death, battered, burned, uprooted from its umbilical attachments to the lunar surface. The airlock judders open to let Tim in, red cross shattered and blackened on the pitted and charred surface of the outer door, inside door's glass spiderwebbed with cracks but still gamely holding out against the vacuum of space.

Tim's footfalls are loud in the echoingly abandoned corridors. He passes the dead, nurses and doctors lying where they fell as the satellite buckled and split, some crushed under their equipment, some lying where they bled out, some left bloody marks as they dragged themselves into wards. Behind the airlocked ward doors, surely the dying still moan, soundproofed out of Tim's life. Emergency lights flicker on and off, alternately bright, antiseptic whiteness and total darkness, casting failing, dancing shadows on the crazed, cracked, bloodied floor. The light hurts Tim's head, and he covers his optics with a bandage to spare his tortured brain, navigating the corridors with cracked fingertips and echoing footsteps. Chooses a door at random, steps into the ward. The room is silent, but for a few gasping, cracked, airless breaths. Tim is reminded of the moanings in the tunnels all those eternal weeks ago, the dead men in tunnelfalls who just won't die. He takes another shuffling step, shuffles around when he encounters an unmoving body with his foot, explores the ward in dazed blindness, smelling sickness and death and blood, hearing hopelessness, seeing nothing.

There's a dry cough to his left, and to his right a rattling, juddering last breath, and Tim stops, drawn up short, because that breath sounds his name in impossible, familiar tones, and then is gone.

His heart stops. He rips the bandage from his eyes, flooding his vision with white flickering emergency lights, with blood and the dying, and with the nightmare.

Tim lets out a howl, wordless and meaningless and bottomless, like a wounded animal, like a dying man, like Lucifer falling. Knees and strength give out all at once. Strings cut, he lands on his knees, sprawled across the bed, rocking and shuddering, fists clenched, the unearthly despair sound still tearing out of him from the bottom of his irreparably stained soul.

Under his desperately shaking body, the fresh corpse cools slowly, bereft of the machines that were holding him together, orphaned of their care by the blast which must have blown out both main and auxiliary life support. The dead man has bandaged stumps where once he had long, strong legs, his broad chest has been crushed and crumpled on one side, his smiling, dimpled face now gaunt and etched with unimaginable pain (and now, oh god, waxy and cold and white and bloody-lipped), there's a gaping absence where once there was a laughing grey eye, blonde curls have been shaved away to allow for the livid line of stitches across his scalp, but there is no mistake, could never be a mistake. And broken as he was, he was alive, was awake, was even speaking, and then Tim took his revenge, and now...

And now the wave has broken over Tim a second time, and this time there's no riding it, no using the anger and hatred which fills his every fibre. Because there's no using that white hot fire of revenge when Bertie's killer still lives, will always live, now cannot die.

And now, now he cries, an explosion of tears and pain and keening, hopeless, echoing up from the bottom of the world, thin body wracked, shaking like every world ending at once as he pulls sobs up through every part of him, breathing raw and short and ragged, nothing left but despair and endless, futile pain and rage. Hands tear at his hair and face as if by sheer effort of will he could tear himself apart, kill himself with as much violence and brutality as he killed the Kaiser and his army, but it's hopeless, he can't be killed, he can't forget, he can't escape, it will never be over, he will live forever and he will live with this forever.

Later, Gunpowder Tim leaves the Medsat in its death throes, mechanical eyes unreadable, walks away from the hospital satellite he crippled, returns to the Aurora and the cold, mechanical distraction of her guns, the crew of once-people as hateful as himself. Leaves what was left of his humanity behind in its charnelhouse corridors with the body of his friend/love/victim. Leaves Tim-That-Was to die next to Bertie's body.

Behind him, the Medsat shudders and flares suddenly white in a soundless, soon-snuffed explosion, a funeral pyre for Tim and Bertie. Gunpowder Tim doesn't look back.

#the Mechanisms #gunpowder tim #gunpowder tim blows up the moon #tim x bertie #mechs fic

105 notes · View notes