#deliberator is DEADA

[wogot3]

varying degrees of doodles in riddling nonsense and polyamorousity (???) and one(1) child

[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.

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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.