#writhing flesh and bone and sinew and nervous tissue and

[abtl]

So yeah I only just heard about the concept of "wetware" and knowing that people are actually working on this kind of technology while I'm nerding and fixating on ULTRAKILL all day hits me with a very peculiar mix of feelings that I can't quite put my finger on at the moment.

[winterwhumper]

Whumptober Day 11: Stitches

“How are you liking your new arm?” Kazimir asks while The Soldier completes another efficiency calibration task using the new metal arm, his wide eyes unable to hide his own fascination at the capabilities of this thing. “Hmm?”

“I...it feels weird. Really weird but...but good,” he adds quickly.

Kaz smiles in that shark-like way he always does when he’s about to enjoy something. Techs move around them absently, working on notes and machinery checks while The Soldier finishes each request. “You’re getting quite adept with it. It becomes you.”

The Soldier’s fascinated expression is soon taken over by one that’s much more nervous. He flexes the metal hand, continuing to press the solid thumb to each finger tip in turn but now his eyes are on Kaz rather than the task. He knows that look on Kaz’s face and it’s never, ever good.

“I think it’s time to put it to a real test,” Kaz suggests lightly, as though making plans for a day off work. The bustling techs eye the two of them with mild interest. “Let’s see what you can do with something more...intricate, Hmm?”

Kaz moves over to the tool draw and takes his time looking into it, sometimes pulling out an implement to examine it more closely, sliding pale, slender fingers along blades until he appears to find something he likes and the moment he returns, The Soldier is tense and staring at him.

“S-Sir?” The Soldier’s eyes take in the jagged bladed scissors with a look of horror. Kaz’s smile grows again.

“Give me your hand.” Kaz’s voice doesn’t make it an order but his piercing, gleeful eyes do. The Soldier clenches his jaw and lifts up the metal hand. Kaz slowly shakes his head. “The other one.”

The Soldier swallows, lowering the metal hand. His eyes dart around as though to find a way out of obeying but they both know there isn’t one. Eventually, The Soldier lifts his flesh hand and offers it towards Kaz, trembling and twitching. The fingers that wrap around The Soldier’s wrist are cold and delicate and he tries not to enjoy the momentarily gentle touch of light fingertips against his palm as Kaz carefully looks over his hand, shifting each finger with his own. Especially when that touch very quickly becomes a vice as Kaz grips his hand steady while bringing the scissors up and, with surprising strength, cuts completely through one of his fingers.

“Don’t fight,” Kaz orders strictly this time when The Soldier tries to struggle his arm back to himself with a piercing, panicking yell. “I’m not done.”

The Soldier grits his teeth and fights the urge to tug his hand away but he can’t stop it from trembling harder. Kaz doesn’t seem to mind that, he’s still able to go to work with each finger, cutting through them with awful wet chomping sounds and the sickening snapping when he hacks through each slim bone. The Soldier screams and begs but it goes ignored. By the last finger, it’s taking more effort for the scissors to chew their way through all of the bone and sinew but then finally it falls to the floor with the lightest thump. The Soldier’s eyes are starting to roll and he’s falling slack against Kaz.

“There, it’s all over now, it’s done.” It’s not much of a reassurance but the gentle pressure of Kaz’s hands rubbing into the small of The Soldier’s back keep him grounded and present. “You still with me? Good.”

The Soldier is sobbing when his hand is released and he stares brokenly at his mauled, shaking, fingerless palm. The blood running from each torn stump forms veins as it streaks down his arm, dripping from his elbow. The techs have ceased their work to watch the display in front of them, some looking disturbed, others looking more interested.

“I hope you know how to sew,” Kaz comments, fetching a suture kit and placing it within The Soldier’s reach. “You should pick them up if you intend to be able to use them again.”

The techs get to watch The Soldier sink to the ground and gather up his severed fingers like a dropped packet of cigarettes.

The convenient thing about the metal arm is that it doesn’t tremble, no matter how shaky or stressed The Soldier may be, the arm will remain steady through anything. And he’s going to need it.

“You know how to do this, right Buck?”

“‘Course, Stevie. I’ve done this a bunch of times. Now hold still.” It’s a lie, Bucky has never actually done this before but he’s seen it done and that’s got to count for something.

The Soldier holds up a finger to the light and sets it against what he thinks is the right stump. He hisses as he pushes the curved needle through the edge of ripped flesh and slowly starts to reattach the fingers to his hand.

“Isn’t he going to pass out from blood loss while he’s doing that?” One tech pipes up.

“Then he needs to fix this quickly,” Kaz offers simply and no one else speaks.

“Shit, that hurts,” Steve groans.

“Goddamnit, Steve. If you didn’t try to fight everybody that looks at you funny, I wouldn’t be needing to do this, would I?” Bucky snaps but then hears the sniffling sound of Steve failing to hide his pain. His face softens. “Just a little more, buddy. I’m gonna have you good as new, just you watch.”

“Just-just go easy,” Steve grits. “Please.”

“Goin’ as easy as I can,” The Soldier mutters to himself as he works. “Not much longer, I promise.”

He can’t move any of the attached fingers and he can’t feel them but the bleeding stops surprisingly soon once they’re secured. He leaves his pinky until last and he was right to assume it would be the most fiddly but he gets that attached with focus. Kaz nods his approval, wraps the hand in bandages and orders a tech to return The Soldier to his cell.

“It hurts more now than it did yesterday!”

“That’s because it’s healing, Stevie.”

“You sure it ain’t infected?”

“Lemme look at it,” Bucky requests. He looks closely at the sutured cut, uses his fingers to very gingerly press around the area to check for any weeping or infection. “Nah, it’s just a little swollen and sore. It’s healing great.”

When the sensation does return to The Soldiers fingers, it leaves him writhing around on the floor of his cell, screaming with agony and fighting the urge to rip them back off again because he’s certain that would hurt less. They don’t become infected despite having been picked up from a dirty cement floor and attached without being sterilised. The Soldier doesn’t know how that’s possible but he’s too wrapped in the pain to really question it.

“Hey Buck, check it out. It’s turning into one helluva scar.”

Steve shows off the area where smooth skin becomes thick and uneven in the form of a strip of scar tissue, maybe a couple of inches long.

“It sure is,” Bucky muses. “I’d say it looks pretty darn badass, Stevie.”

It’s mere days to go from a floor scattered with severed fingers to a fully functioning, completely whole hand again. All that remains are some wonky looking rings of scar tissue across the base of each finger but The Soldier thinks that even they will fade enough to become unnoticeable.

The more bizarre and unbelievable things he’s able to survive, able to fully recover from, the more terrified he becomes. Because it always becomes more, one step farther. This time they take his fingers, next time they could take the whole arm or maybe his leg. The more he survives, the more he just realises that this will never stop. It will never end.

[the-elf-mahat]

A Broken World

(( Prompted by @firebiter‘s post here! CW below the cut for blood and implied torture. Also a small caveat about Mahat’s backstory, which we’re touching on here: it’s lorebendy. However, you’re welcome to consider her delusional if you don’t want to push canon; I tend to leave it an open question just how sane she actually is. ))

Something was wrong. Mahat awoke from deep sleep with her ears twitching, a strange pressure building in the air. The hour was so early it was nearly very late, and the distressed howls of dogs and other creatures could be heard echoing even through the thick stone walls of their Ironforge home. She slipped out of bed to dress quickly and soundlessly in the dark, before making her way outside. There were others about, dwarves in dressing gowns looking haggard and complaining to their neighbors about the noise. A few were heading to the city gates. Mahat joined them, eager curiosity mingling with a dull sense of dread in her stomach.

Outside, the air was crisp and frigid, the sky black with scattered stars beginning to fade before the dawn. But instead of gentle moonlight illuminating the mountainside all around them, the white snow was tinged a sickly green, reflected from the monstrous body looming above.

It was a broken planet. Its shattered silhouette and swirling storms of felfire seemed to take up half the sky, like a doom-laden promise.

Mahat and the others gaped upwards, stunned and awed into silence, until someone began to scream. Another followed suit, and in short order chaos had broken out, as some panicked and others tried to comfort the panicking, some tried to rush back inside only to collide with those who were pushing outside to see the terror for themselves. Mahat barely noticed the impending riot, darting away from the clamor and crowd, feeling her way along the mountain until she reached a secluded crevasse and curled up inside. She moved by instinct and memory, every other sense useless to her as reality seemed to warp and twist in her mind. Her breath grew faster and her eye was locked wide open, fixed on the sick wrongness above. From the shadowed places in her head, she heard their voices call out.

D'ye remember?

Do you remember, little one…?

Where have we seen that before…?

Three worlds, three moments layered on top of each other, Mahat's body and senses experiencing wild vertigo as she saw through three sets of eyes, heard through three sets of ears, felt three different hearts racing. And there was so much pain…

In one world (the real world, she told herself, and hoped desperately it was true) she was whole, frightened but safe for the moment, shivering on a mountainside. Alone. Not alone.

In another she was dying, slick blood flowing from the ritual symbols and web-like patterns carved deep into every part of her skin. Green flames blazed from the shackles at her wrists and ankles, holding her down to the stone altar, melting and searing her flesh. Rough, strange voices chanted in an unholy tongue somewhere in the shadows beyond her sight, but above her she could see cold stars.

In another world she wished for death. A man with cruel eyes and a kind smile, a sorcerer, promised her oblivion soon, soon, he had finally found a use for her outside the close, dark room where he kept her and played with her brain and broke her body (it was justice, he said, they all said, she had done such terrible things).

“I want you to introduce me to someone,” he teased, close and warm as a lover, “They've been whispering to me in my dreams, speaking of power, a way to burn the filth and weakness and disgusting hypocrisy out of our world.” She heard the words now, she had heard the words then, but she hadn't understood them—she'd been out of her wits with fear and pain by then, barely more than an animal. Now she comprehended fully. Now her stomach clenched as he murmured, “You'll help me, little thief. You'll call them here. How could any god or demon resist a soul as fascinatingly twisted as yours?” His fingers rested on her collarbone above her heart, and he smiled. “You are the perfect--”

SACRIFICE.

The coarse chanting grew louder and faster, and she writhed against the felfire restraints. A gnarled green hand hovered over her flesh, sealing her gaping wounds into twisted ropes of hardened gray scar tissue. The pain did not lessen. In fact it sunk deeper, past skin into muscle and sinew, past these into bone, somehow, and then further still, until her nervous system blazed like a star and she thought she might only be pain that had imagined it was once a woman. The chanting was practically a howl now, one mad sound from dozens of throats, and she could no longer see the stars, only green flames rising higher. A void opened before her mind and began to draw her in, eating her memories piece by piece, gnawing on her fears and hopes, slavering as it devoured every drop of her self.

WHO AM I?

He ripped her from her body and reshaped her, made a coalescing orb of dark magic from her essence. But she could still feel the raw edges of her sanity bleeding, still watch as he burned the husk of her body, until it was a charred ruin that a simple brush of his foot crumbled into gray ash. She screamed without a voice, wept without eyes, for the release of a death she had begged for and been denied. The soul was immortal, she had been taught. No rest for the wicked. Not even in their tombs.

There was a ritual, incantations, surges of crackling power and a night wind tearing at the sorcerer’s robes as he used her torment to craft a gateway. She saw a tall, pale man in armor, winged and horned, step through. She saw the sorcerer bow before him. Then she was elsewhere, her mind torn across galaxies or realities, images fragmenting and scattering before her like light from a prism. A vast, broken planet, tendrils of verdant green fire reaching out to corrupt and consume everything they touched. A dry tawny planet, a place called home, shattering apart and beginning to burn. A little world, mostly blue, lit by two moons, where something was calling her.

All around her was seething void, seeking to tear her apart and swallow her into nothing. But somehow, she was caught by that small blue world, anchored and drawn in by a force beyond her understanding. It was like an unnatural absence, a place where something once was and now was not but must be. A vacuum pulling her inexorably, a taut string connecting two moments across time and space that when plucked, sounded a chord of multiversal harmony.

Mahat opened her eye, vision now singular and clear. She unclenched her jaw and forced her hands open from the tight fists they'd been curled into. She took a deep breath, and looked up.

The broken planet was still there. And there were still screams in the distance. They saw it too.

“Aye, I… remember,” she murmured to herself in hoarse disbelief. “I saw it… in th' dark places b'tween. I saw it—we was there. I en't crazy.”

A bleak chuckle sounded from the corner of her mind. “Congratubloodylations, enjoy tha' feelin' while y'kin. Cuz th' whole world's abou' ta go fuckin' mad.”