Challenge: Heat
This one is for kangeiko, who inspired it with a line here. No spoilers beyond season 3's Hourglass.
Death, all poetry aside, is not an undiscovered country, or any other metaphor, or a figure dressed in black. Death is coldness, ice being pumped through your veins. You’re not afraid of hell; your own beliefs have changed too much and found an altogether different focus a long time ago. But you have always loved the sun. That is why you kept ending up in Italy and California throughout your life, despite having the entire world to choose from. When you pictured your death, you imagined it as a quick flare of sensation; a bullet, perhaps, or a knife. Or even hands strangling the life out of you, competent, large hands you’ve seen at work quite often. Not this. Not the sterility of poison administered by the state.
Resurrection, on the other hand, is a figure dressed in black, leaning over you while the breath you draw cuts into you with the sharpness of knives. He’s right, you should have gotten the reference. But your mind still feels frozen, and you can’t sense anything that isn’t cold, including the air of the morgue. You might not be dead anymore, but there is no life here.
“I orchestratred this because, and only because, I need you,” he hisses into your ear, and for a moment, you wonder when he finally realized this, but then memory catches up with you again, and with it the awareness of what he has done. You don’t bother to reply. You try to move, though, and find you can’t. The adrenaline, if that is what he injected you with, isn’t enough. Most of your body still believes the lie of death, or maybe it is no lie at all, and this is a bizarre hallucination caused by lack of oxygen to the brain, coming to you in your last moments.
He pulls you upwards, out of the body bag they put you in, and prompts your back against the wall. Then he starts to do what the both of you were trained to in cases of hypothermia, rubbing life into your cold flesh. He’s wearing gloves, but you still can feel the warmth in the fingers massaging your shaking limbs. You’re not feeling particularly grateful. In fact, you’re quite certain that what you’re starting to feel is anger, as consuming as the need for air that caused you to breathe again.
It’s not that he killed you; it’s not even that he used the pettiness of the state as his instrument, instead of doing it himself. Or that he resurrected you at his convenience, though this is humiliating, and if you ever get out of here, you will find a way to re-establish certain hierarchies. No, it’s the fact that he did it for her. Never mind each and every one you killed, because he certainly doesn’t; he put you through this because twenty five years ago, you had sex with his wife.
Your silent fury gives you focus and steadies you; the cold vanishes a bit as you feel the blood circling through your veins again. As if sensing the anger radiating from you, he stops with the massage, looking at you, and your eyes lock.
Life is heat.
Death, all poetry aside, is not an undiscovered country, or any other metaphor, or a figure dressed in black. Death is coldness, ice being pumped through your veins. You’re not afraid of hell; your own beliefs have changed too much and found an altogether different focus a long time ago. But you have always loved the sun. That is why you kept ending up in Italy and California throughout your life, despite having the entire world to choose from. When you pictured your death, you imagined it as a quick flare of sensation; a bullet, perhaps, or a knife. Or even hands strangling the life out of you, competent, large hands you’ve seen at work quite often. Not this. Not the sterility of poison administered by the state.
Resurrection, on the other hand, is a figure dressed in black, leaning over you while the breath you draw cuts into you with the sharpness of knives. He’s right, you should have gotten the reference. But your mind still feels frozen, and you can’t sense anything that isn’t cold, including the air of the morgue. You might not be dead anymore, but there is no life here.
“I orchestratred this because, and only because, I need you,” he hisses into your ear, and for a moment, you wonder when he finally realized this, but then memory catches up with you again, and with it the awareness of what he has done. You don’t bother to reply. You try to move, though, and find you can’t. The adrenaline, if that is what he injected you with, isn’t enough. Most of your body still believes the lie of death, or maybe it is no lie at all, and this is a bizarre hallucination caused by lack of oxygen to the brain, coming to you in your last moments.
He pulls you upwards, out of the body bag they put you in, and prompts your back against the wall. Then he starts to do what the both of you were trained to in cases of hypothermia, rubbing life into your cold flesh. He’s wearing gloves, but you still can feel the warmth in the fingers massaging your shaking limbs. You’re not feeling particularly grateful. In fact, you’re quite certain that what you’re starting to feel is anger, as consuming as the need for air that caused you to breathe again.
It’s not that he killed you; it’s not even that he used the pettiness of the state as his instrument, instead of doing it himself. Or that he resurrected you at his convenience, though this is humiliating, and if you ever get out of here, you will find a way to re-establish certain hierarchies. No, it’s the fact that he did it for her. Never mind each and every one you killed, because he certainly doesn’t; he put you through this because twenty five years ago, you had sex with his wife.
Your silent fury gives you focus and steadies you; the cold vanishes a bit as you feel the blood circling through your veins again. As if sensing the anger radiating from you, he stops with the massage, looking at you, and your eyes lock.
Life is heat.