Whumpril #14, Alt Prompt #1: Reluctant Whumper
Yes, he agrees, yes, he’ll do it. He’ll hurt Darrow for them. Yes, he’ll force him to look into another friend’s eyes and believe he’s been betrayed once more, yes, yes, yes.
The agreement makes him feel as though his stomach lining has been replaced with those long legged, pincered bugs that infest every star system the Domain has so much as a toe in.
Yes, he knows how to hurt him.
That much is true at least. He’s a medtech and a surgeon. He knows where to cut and where to apply pressure. How to make him twitch and convulse involuntarily, how to make him bow his back and scream.
I’m sorry, Chris.
He knows how to hurt him in the right ways to keep him fighting. Darrow thrives on trauma. Being knocked down just makes him stubbornly drag himself back up, grit and dirt and blood and pain not the right weapons at all for a man like Christopher Darrow. He can keep him on the edge of consciousness, spitting and swearing and refusing to give so much as an inch. Darrow must know that as long as the Domain hierarchy are occupied with him they’re ignoring the others too, and David knows him well enough to know he’ll willingly suffer for that.
He knows how to hurt him enough to buy the occasional flinch, enough to keep his observers happy. Enough to make this appear genuine. Even as every noise that escape’s Chris’ stubborn throat flays him just as surely.
He knows how to hurt his body enough to keep them away from his mind. Knows to say, “Tell them what they want to know,” when he wants Darrow to clamp his lips to white and refuse to say anything. Knows to whisper, “Just give me something or it’ll be me here next,” as he brushes Chris’ matted fringe from his sweaty forehead when he needs to take some information, however useless to a briefing if he’s to be able to keep Darrow’s body out of the hands of the Domain’s interrogators.
Sometimes he half thinks Darrow knows what he’s doing, half thinks Darrow is playing the game and dancing along with him: eking pointless, useless information out to buy time to stall, to plan. Even when he sees pure wordless hatred in Darrow’s eyes - could be for him, could be for the situation or the Domain as a whole. It is, after all, that hatred which has kept him fighting all this time. Anyone without that fire to burn would have given up this crusade long ago. Harder to explain away is the hurt. Lee’s actions still a scar too raw for Darrow, only half lucid, to understand why it is David who is digging into him.
He doesn’t want to, it goes against every single thing he believe in, but he knows how to do this. He believes it is healing more than harming - at the least protecting the parts of Darrow that cannot be brought back.
“We won’t need your services after today,” says the young crewman as he escorts David through the cruiser to want is laughingly called the infirmary.
“Oh, no? Why not?” David is hardly listening, thinking instead about what he can do today that will elicit an obvious response whilst not being permanent. He’s running out of unmarked skin on Darrow’s body.
“Commander Fenric docked this morning. He’s already requested that his interrogation teams take over.”
David’s heart stops in his chest. It’s all he can do to keep his feet moving, his face impassive. The boy is watching him closely. They do not, after all, completely trust him yet.
“I’ll have to ensure I get anything useful today then. I can’t imagine he’ll be much use after the commander’s sadists have had their way with him.” His voice is icy, disapproving, but it seems to keep the crewman happy.
He opens the door and David steps into the room. Darrow is already laid out on the table, eyes closed and breathing steadily - determined, falsely, even breaths. He’s restrained. The tools are laid out in neat rows beside him. David already knows how this day will end.
Yes, he’d agreed. Yes, I’ll hurt him. Please let me hurt him.
Because I know I am willing to die if I accidentally kill him.
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TW: discussion of something approximating suicidal tendencies but with the usual crack programming of this blog
“Ah, High General Windu”, says Fox, pleasantly. “So we meet again.”
High General Windu raises an unimpressed eyebrow at him, Fox thinks, though it’s getting hard to tell with all the blood rushing to his head. “If I let you go, will you try to throw yourself out of another window?”
Fox makes a vague shrugging motion - or tries to, anyways. It’s hard to tell where any of his limbs are going, hanging upside down in the air as he is. “I am willing to discuss terms.” A bridge will do just fine.
Impossibly, the High General’s eyebrows climb even further up his forehead. “A compromise, then, esteemed Commander.” And so, he righths Fox the head way up in the air, but leaves him floating just above the ground, at which point several painted shells come skidding around the corner followed by billowing robes and screeches.
“WHAT”, says Kote, calmly, “THE BANTHA-KARKED, FORCE-LOVING KRIFF, FOX.”
“You’ll short out your helmet mic”, Fox advises him, sagely. Fondly, he thinks back to decimating his own on only his second time in the newly-christened official Coruscant Guard Scream Closet. He’d just received the comm about the Zillo Beast being transported to 000, and made sure to take his bucket off thereafter to improve the quality of his closet time.
High General Windu’s face does something complicated between sympathy and constipation.
Because the Galaxy doesn’t hate Fox enough already and Cody wasn’t enough on his own, Wolffe elbows his way through their batch to plant himself in front of him, shoulders squared and shaking with repressed rage. “If you try that again, dickhead”, he begins, in a low growl that quite frankly sounds more cringe that intimidating, “I’m going to resurrect you and then kill you again.”
“Ah, Wolffe”, Plo Koon says, in his deep, shivery timbre, “Remember our conversations about effective conflict resolution and communication of needs?”
Wolffe’s eyes narrow at Fox, because all non-Guard are sweet summer children who walk around buckets off on 000 like absolute lunatics. Fox prays they never have to find out why that’s a bad idea. “I feel”, his ori’vod presses out between clenched teeth, “that if you make me watch you throw yourself out of another window, I’m going to jump after you and strangle you on the way down, you little bitch.”
“That’s fair”, says Fox, and watches High General Kenobi bury his face in his hands. Wolffe twitches in place and makes an aborted groaning noise, the hypocrite.
“Excuse me, High Marshall Commander Fox, but I fail to see what’s so dire about this situation that the Jedi High Council and your brothers cannot help you solve”, says Windu, the only sane one left on this Force-forsaken bloated corpse of a planet. Behind the gaggle of Jedi and ori’vode already gathered in front of Fox, the rest of them come veering around the corner in a commotion that’s quite frankly embarrassing. High General Yoda is mounted on Skywalker’s back like he’s a race-Eopie, which is Fox’ only consolation.
He got up this morning at 0300, bleary-eyed and with a pounding headache as always, and all was right in the world. And then Fox got called into the Jedi High Council’s chambers and was ceremoniously informed that in the wake of Chancellor Palpatine’s unfortunate demise (hah), and through the emergency state of the Senate, as well as several invented promotions foisted on Fox to make the delegation of any and all paperwork less shady, he was now next in the chain of command and-
Well, Fox is the acting Chancellor, in short.
Haha, he had said, and been meet with several seconds of silence, until it got both awkward and exceedingly painful. Wait, he’d said. You’re kriffing serious.
Kriffing serious, we are, had said High General Yoda, and thus Fox launched himself out the first best window with a maniacal cackle of, you’ll have to catch me first!
And catch him, High General Windu sure did.
“The will of the Force this is”, Yoda interrupts Fox’ train of thought. He scans him thoughtfully from beneath his wizened brow, and hems to himself. “Shake things up, this will. Determine the fate of the Galaxy, this shall. A feeling, I have, that a good Chancellor you will make. A better one, hmmm.”
“That’d be high praise, if not for the fact that a dead lemming would make for a better Chancellor than the last one”, says Fox, drawing and indignant gasp from Skywalker. He doesn’t bother with either that or the green goblin’s cackle, lost in the deep sense of resignation that settles over his shoulders like a suffocating blanket.
“Alright, then, get me Thorn on the comm. As my first act in office, I’m firing all the Jedi. No offense, but you’re kind of a disaster. Then, someone get me to the Chancellor’s office, I’m calling Dooku to let him know the war’s off. And please get me Judicial, they’ll be up all night working on my datafolders - I’m having the Senate arrested.”
“Who - is - arresting - “, Bly pants, hands on his knees from where he’s just come sprinting around the corner with his Jedi.
Underneath his bucket, Fox smiles a smile that’s all teeth. “The Senate”, he says, sweetly, wondering if he’s just imagined the shiver that’s gone through the room. “I’m suing the Senate, and taking them all into temporary custody for abuse of sentient rights.”
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