(fic) goodbye, amygdala
Goodbye, Amygdala | radishface
Watchmen → Adrian (and Eddie, Rorschach, Dan, Bubastis)
Penance is a carnivore; guilt is his maker.
A/N, X-posted. From the kinkmeme prompt asking for horror with somebody other than Daniel or Rorschach: Adrian gets eaten, piece by piece.
*
When Adrian wakes up in the morning, he's missing his pinky fingers.
His throat seizes, makes a garbled sound that might be incredulity; then skepticism, a clearer grunt.
Neither becomes him, he realizes, and so he clenches his teeth and vows not to make another sound.
Adrian turns his hand back and forth, winking the sleep out of his eyes. There's no mark of any sort to indicate that it was severed; there's no mark at all. No tell-tale pucker of skin folding in upon itself. The skin is smooth and unmarred on the edge of his hand, and the knuckle glides into the fat of his palm innocuously. Nothing wrong. It's as if he were born this way. Skin like a babe's, pinky area tabula rasa.
He gets up, brushes his teeth and tries not to look too closely in the mirror. Showers, too. The water feels normal-- everything is normal, he tells himself, and proceeds normally with his morning routine. Time doesn't slow or speed and his apartment makes the same sounds it always does, the content humming of the refrigerator and the hollow whine of the pipes in the walls the same as usual.
But before he leaves for work, he gives in.
Adrian opens all his cabinet doors. Unhooks his suits from the racks to see if he's missed anything on the closet walls. Peers into the refrigerator and when he doesn't find anything, fishes out a bottle of Perrier and twists the top off with two fingers and a thumb, taking a measured sip. The bubbles fizzle on his tongue in so many reminders of the ephemeral.
He puts on his coat and gloves and gets ready to head to the office, but stops in the kitchen one last time and looks down his kitchen drain. Lips pursed, he teeths off his right glove and reaches his hand down into the garbage disposal.
Just the grimy, sandy feel of blades and the too-soft squish of decaying food. A harsh exhale of breath escapes his lips. Disappointment?
No, no. It's more like the deep-seated, punch-drunk haze of something he hasn't felt since--
He soaps and rinses his hand and wipes it gently on the cloth next to the sink, moving slowly, dishtowel dipping conscientiously into the webs between his four digits and scraping over his five knuckles so he won't wet his gloves when he puts them on.
*
The sepia-toned tittering of high school girls accompanies him down the hallway.
"oh, he's--"
"so handsome! I'd really like to--"
"he's got everbody just wrapped--"
"--just wrapped around--"
Four broken hearts later and he, he never meant for it all to happen the way it did--
*
It's not long before other parts of him start disappearing, bits and pieces at a time: his ring fingers, his thumb.
He's left with his index finger and his middle finger by the end of the second week. He breaks apart a toothbrush and rubber bands the bristly head to his index finger and cleans his mouth that way. His hand has shrunk in upon itself, pinky knuckles gone and they're beginning to look crustacean. He looks into the mirror at the beginning of the third week and flashes twin V signs to himself, the smile on his face symbolic, too.
Tells Denise that he'll be working from home these next few weeks. Calls his CFO and tells him to push the launch of the Elysian Dreams fragrance a month early so they can start capitalizing on the cash flow immediately and to direct the revenue stream to finance the genetics department's latest research on limb regeneration, reason being opportunity in the markets and so on.
Things continue to operate like clockwork without him there, and in a way, Adrian knows it will be all right, even if the worst comes.
Nonetheless, he contacts the graphics imaging team at Carnegie Mellon and asks them how long it will be before the holograph prototypes are ready, and could they please send him what they've been working on so far?
By the time Adrian gets the graphics engine up and running so he can broadcast his full presence to his employees via teleconference, his hands have already left him, the emptiness eating up his arms. He's already reprogrammed the computers in his apartment to respond to his voice commands and is busily thinking of ways to circumvent all limitations should they arise. Attaching electronodes to his head (courtesy of PyraMed Products), Adrian begins work on a visual lettering system that will let him project his voice through a speaker simply by moving his eyes. Starts working on another system that is wired to his routines, so that when he crosses the threshold to the bathroom between six and seven AM the shower will turn on and the soap will mist onto him, and so on.
Sleep is fitful these days and when Adrian looks into the mirror, his eyes are rimmed and bloodshot and sinking into the dark circles of his skin. He woke up one day and looked and thought that his eyes would be the next thing to go, disappearing into whatever undefined depths lay behind his head. The thought of it made him motionless, hips sinking against the cool granite of his sink counter as he leaned in and in vanity, memorized every line of his irises, every flicker of his pupils, nausea tiding back and forth in his gut.
He's become very adept with his feet these days. Adrian feeds himself with his toes, curling around the spoons and the forks and he's not going to abandon propriety just yet. He rediscovers the flexibility that accompanied his youth, how he can bend his head down and his feet up until he's feeding himself in a fetal position, back muscles straining with the effort. He savors every twist and turn of his body, every limb, while he still can.
The apartment is filled with many reflective surfaces. The surface of his table, the mirrors and windows that are everywhere; Adrian is never alone. Sometimes in weakness, he closes his eyes.
At night, he kicks the blankets apart on his bed and lays himself down, twisting and squirming to get himself under like he used to. Closes his eyes with a weary sigh and thinks indulgently for a moment, just for a moment, that if Bubastis were here, this would make this so much easier to bear. That she could just lip the covers over his chest, crawl up and paw around for a bit before she settled against him, breath warm and humid against his chest--
Sleep comes suddenly and without warning, as if he has no right to those kinds of thoughts anymore.
*
His vision is spinning as if he's just been hit on the back of the head.
"Hah! Just look at you."
Adrian turns around and the world spins with him. It's hard to balance himself without his arms (they are missing here, too) and his feet seem to be rooted into the ground.
Somebody walks up behind him in thundering and shattering steps, the impact of dropped bodies and broken glass in every footfall. A laugh, the husky voice moist with blood and two fingers reach and grab his chin and turn his face from one side to the other.
"Just like your favorites, Ozy." Eddie's voice is almost kind. "One of those armless Greek statues." A hand rakes down his torso and settles on his stomach, and Adrian tenses away.
"Oh, what are you whining about--" And Eddie presses himself in like he's falling,
like he's been dropped
and the shards of glass are between them and breaking the barriers of their skin, pushing deep into Adrian's ribs, thick fluid leaking between the both of them as Eddie laughs and laughs, bitter and ringing. There's other sounds, too: Adrian's hoarse chokes and gasps as the blood fills his lungs and the pain rides him through and through, the tinkering of shattered glass snowing down upon them. His face is slick with blood and sweat, riddled sharp with diamond shards.
"You know," and Eddie's voice is just a tidal roar in his periphery. "I didn't think you'd have it in you."
A rough hand over his chest pushes and pushes until it's finally through, and then Eddie's fist is curled warm and hard around Adrian's heart, Adrian's heart which pulses wildly and erratically in Eddie's grasp.
Eddie pushes again, jousting Adrian's ribs against his spine and cracking through the skin of his back. His entire body protests and keens with pain, his heart a dull thud outside his chest and in Eddie's hand and Eddie's voice is in his ears, "even after everything, you still had it in you. Well,"
"Guess you don't, now."
*
When Adrian wakes up, there is a hole in his chest where his heart should be.
His body is held together by the thick strings of oblique muscles and the skin that folds around all the missing spaces. It all looks seamless, flawless, like he was born this way.
Adrian sits up and feels the air drift through him. He tries to stand up but he can't, he can't, they've taken those, too. One foot, reduced to the big toe and the soles and the other is just a stump protruding from his ankle. Adrian can't balance and with one last sigh, falls to the ground.
The distant hum of the refrigerator, the distant ticking of the clock; progression of time and space evermore. He lies there curled in a disdainful heap, wondering at this heat prickling behind his eyes, if it's from inhaling the dust that resides underneath his bed, if it's from the scrub of the carpet against his eyelashes, too close.
Eventually, Adrian rolls himself onto one side and then onto his stomach, pushing himself up with his forehead. He bites at the edge of the coverlet to hoist himself up the rest of the way and claws across the alpaca carpets and mahogany hardwood like a lame jackal. His knees slip on the marble that tiles his bathroom floor, already slick with the steam of a shower gone on for thirty five minutes.
*
"Good evening, gentlemen."
He makes one last appearance at the company's quarterly earnings roundtable. With his good eye flickering across his visual keyboard (the other one has spiraled somewhere into netherspace and what remains is a great tunnel in his face that continues to eat away at his head, little flecks of cartilage and bone revealing themselves occasionally only to be sucked over by skin), he announces that they might have overextended their operations in merchandising (turns out the world wasn't ready for Elysian Dreams just yet) and that they'll be focusing their efforts on rebranding the V! line of cosmetics to reflect McKinsey's latest report on the resurgence of conservative preferences among women. His sigh is too deep when he finishes speaking, and the investors could read something into it, but otherwise the meeting goes without a hitch, and NYSE:VDT only fluctuates a few points the next morning.
He calls Denise and tells her that he'll be retiring and could she get started on handling all the paperwork?
The financial community is abuzz with the news of who will be Adrian's successor, but all media inquiries should be directed to Brunswick Communications, please. Rumors range from pancreatic cancer to an assassination attempt to Veidt finally taking the vacation he deserves. Adrian laughs at this one, with what's left of his throat.
There's a knock on his door one night. Adrian is a half-collapsed, shriveled thing over the kitchen table; he hasn't been answering phone calls unless they're urgent business, and hasn't been answering the door at all. Food lies strewn on the table, clumsily arranged, the random pattern of deadening biology. He's been trying to eat but there's no point in it anymore-- not when there's a gaping spot where his stomach should be, when there's no gastronomical system to support such a human endeavor.
He supposes that he might qualify as inhuman, these days.
"Adrian?"
And if he had a heart, it would skip a beat.
He hadn't been expecting this. People have come and knocked on his door and he's pretended to be on vacation: Bermuda. Sao Paolo. Cannes. The notes and newspapers pile up under his door and once a while Adrian rolls over to the foyer to crawl and clear them away, if only to make room for more.
"It's me, Sam-- er. Dan. Dreiberg, that is. Ah--" embarrassed laughter, and hasty knocking follows to cover it up. Adrian wonders if Laurie is with him.
"Adrian?"
A few seconds pass. He can hear a sigh outside, the faintest indication of resignation. "I guess he really did leave the country."
Adrian indulges himself one last time; whispers goodbye to the sound of fading foosteps. A note has been slipped under his door, but Adrian crawls away before he can be tempted to read it.
*
Rorschach comes for his legs that night, hacking away with a cleaver, both their blood butterfly-splatters all over his mask until Adrian can't tell what's ink and what's not, until Adrian is just as short and then shorter. Daniel stands there afterwards, just looking at him with those sad eyes, and Adrian's torso withers and shrinks under that gaze until there's nothing left but the faint peeling of skin, curling and paper-crisp.
Bubastis, then, licking his face until it's rubbed raw, sandpaper-tongue on the pulse of his muscles and Adrian bears the affection quietly and without a sound. What remains of him the next morning is all abstract, puddling skin and one quivering blue eye, staring endlessly at the ceiling.
*
It's Eddie who visits him the last night, smoke and brawn clouding up the viscous spaces in Adrian's skull.
He rummages around the pink-grey of his brains, climbing in and out of the fat, nerveless worms as easily and brutally as he must have once traipsed through jungles and marsh-terrain. of Vietnam. Eddie is in costume, fittingly; Kevlar armor and cigars cluttering and fuming, a bloodied, tattered bathrobe trailing behind him like the kill of the day.
"Hello, beautiful," Eddie says, patting it with a gloved hand, palming at its softness, its unresponsiveness. "You proud of yourself, Ozy? After all, this is smartest brain in the world."
Adrian's thoughts pulse wildly, all waves and pressure but Eddie just laughs like the storm hasn't come yet. "Oh, you don't think so? Just some overactive marketing people?"
Beat, thrum, hum. Dendrites flash and potassium channels open and close; Eddie is awash in a tide of neurotransmitters but he doesn't even blink-- just waves the miasma out of his eyes and leans a little closer.
"No, it's not professional jealousy." Blood beating through, leaking out and through the cracks. Eddie stubs his cigar into Adrian's frontal cortex and the mighty grey lump shivers in distress.
"What's that? Can't hear you." His fingers scramble in, fold around the mush of his thalamus, all rice pudding and just as useless. "Maybe I should take a deeper look. Maybe I should--"
Goodbye, hippocampus. Goodbye, amygdala. Goodbye--
*
Watchmen → Adrian (and Eddie, Rorschach, Dan, Bubastis)
Penance is a carnivore; guilt is his maker.
A/N, X-posted. From the kinkmeme prompt asking for horror with somebody other than Daniel or Rorschach: Adrian gets eaten, piece by piece.
*
When Adrian wakes up in the morning, he's missing his pinky fingers.
His throat seizes, makes a garbled sound that might be incredulity; then skepticism, a clearer grunt.
Neither becomes him, he realizes, and so he clenches his teeth and vows not to make another sound.
Adrian turns his hand back and forth, winking the sleep out of his eyes. There's no mark of any sort to indicate that it was severed; there's no mark at all. No tell-tale pucker of skin folding in upon itself. The skin is smooth and unmarred on the edge of his hand, and the knuckle glides into the fat of his palm innocuously. Nothing wrong. It's as if he were born this way. Skin like a babe's, pinky area tabula rasa.
He gets up, brushes his teeth and tries not to look too closely in the mirror. Showers, too. The water feels normal-- everything is normal, he tells himself, and proceeds normally with his morning routine. Time doesn't slow or speed and his apartment makes the same sounds it always does, the content humming of the refrigerator and the hollow whine of the pipes in the walls the same as usual.
But before he leaves for work, he gives in.
Adrian opens all his cabinet doors. Unhooks his suits from the racks to see if he's missed anything on the closet walls. Peers into the refrigerator and when he doesn't find anything, fishes out a bottle of Perrier and twists the top off with two fingers and a thumb, taking a measured sip. The bubbles fizzle on his tongue in so many reminders of the ephemeral.
He puts on his coat and gloves and gets ready to head to the office, but stops in the kitchen one last time and looks down his kitchen drain. Lips pursed, he teeths off his right glove and reaches his hand down into the garbage disposal.
Just the grimy, sandy feel of blades and the too-soft squish of decaying food. A harsh exhale of breath escapes his lips. Disappointment?
No, no. It's more like the deep-seated, punch-drunk haze of something he hasn't felt since--
He soaps and rinses his hand and wipes it gently on the cloth next to the sink, moving slowly, dishtowel dipping conscientiously into the webs between his four digits and scraping over his five knuckles so he won't wet his gloves when he puts them on.
*
The sepia-toned tittering of high school girls accompanies him down the hallway.
"oh, he's--"
"so handsome! I'd really like to--"
"he's got everbody just wrapped--"
"--just wrapped around--"
Four broken hearts later and he, he never meant for it all to happen the way it did--
*
It's not long before other parts of him start disappearing, bits and pieces at a time: his ring fingers, his thumb.
He's left with his index finger and his middle finger by the end of the second week. He breaks apart a toothbrush and rubber bands the bristly head to his index finger and cleans his mouth that way. His hand has shrunk in upon itself, pinky knuckles gone and they're beginning to look crustacean. He looks into the mirror at the beginning of the third week and flashes twin V signs to himself, the smile on his face symbolic, too.
Tells Denise that he'll be working from home these next few weeks. Calls his CFO and tells him to push the launch of the Elysian Dreams fragrance a month early so they can start capitalizing on the cash flow immediately and to direct the revenue stream to finance the genetics department's latest research on limb regeneration, reason being opportunity in the markets and so on.
Things continue to operate like clockwork without him there, and in a way, Adrian knows it will be all right, even if the worst comes.
Nonetheless, he contacts the graphics imaging team at Carnegie Mellon and asks them how long it will be before the holograph prototypes are ready, and could they please send him what they've been working on so far?
By the time Adrian gets the graphics engine up and running so he can broadcast his full presence to his employees via teleconference, his hands have already left him, the emptiness eating up his arms. He's already reprogrammed the computers in his apartment to respond to his voice commands and is busily thinking of ways to circumvent all limitations should they arise. Attaching electronodes to his head (courtesy of PyraMed Products), Adrian begins work on a visual lettering system that will let him project his voice through a speaker simply by moving his eyes. Starts working on another system that is wired to his routines, so that when he crosses the threshold to the bathroom between six and seven AM the shower will turn on and the soap will mist onto him, and so on.
Sleep is fitful these days and when Adrian looks into the mirror, his eyes are rimmed and bloodshot and sinking into the dark circles of his skin. He woke up one day and looked and thought that his eyes would be the next thing to go, disappearing into whatever undefined depths lay behind his head. The thought of it made him motionless, hips sinking against the cool granite of his sink counter as he leaned in and in vanity, memorized every line of his irises, every flicker of his pupils, nausea tiding back and forth in his gut.
He's become very adept with his feet these days. Adrian feeds himself with his toes, curling around the spoons and the forks and he's not going to abandon propriety just yet. He rediscovers the flexibility that accompanied his youth, how he can bend his head down and his feet up until he's feeding himself in a fetal position, back muscles straining with the effort. He savors every twist and turn of his body, every limb, while he still can.
The apartment is filled with many reflective surfaces. The surface of his table, the mirrors and windows that are everywhere; Adrian is never alone. Sometimes in weakness, he closes his eyes.
At night, he kicks the blankets apart on his bed and lays himself down, twisting and squirming to get himself under like he used to. Closes his eyes with a weary sigh and thinks indulgently for a moment, just for a moment, that if Bubastis were here, this would make this so much easier to bear. That she could just lip the covers over his chest, crawl up and paw around for a bit before she settled against him, breath warm and humid against his chest--
Sleep comes suddenly and without warning, as if he has no right to those kinds of thoughts anymore.
*
His vision is spinning as if he's just been hit on the back of the head.
"Hah! Just look at you."
Adrian turns around and the world spins with him. It's hard to balance himself without his arms (they are missing here, too) and his feet seem to be rooted into the ground.
Somebody walks up behind him in thundering and shattering steps, the impact of dropped bodies and broken glass in every footfall. A laugh, the husky voice moist with blood and two fingers reach and grab his chin and turn his face from one side to the other.
"Just like your favorites, Ozy." Eddie's voice is almost kind. "One of those armless Greek statues." A hand rakes down his torso and settles on his stomach, and Adrian tenses away.
"Oh, what are you whining about--" And Eddie presses himself in like he's falling,
like he's been dropped
and the shards of glass are between them and breaking the barriers of their skin, pushing deep into Adrian's ribs, thick fluid leaking between the both of them as Eddie laughs and laughs, bitter and ringing. There's other sounds, too: Adrian's hoarse chokes and gasps as the blood fills his lungs and the pain rides him through and through, the tinkering of shattered glass snowing down upon them. His face is slick with blood and sweat, riddled sharp with diamond shards.
"You know," and Eddie's voice is just a tidal roar in his periphery. "I didn't think you'd have it in you."
A rough hand over his chest pushes and pushes until it's finally through, and then Eddie's fist is curled warm and hard around Adrian's heart, Adrian's heart which pulses wildly and erratically in Eddie's grasp.
Eddie pushes again, jousting Adrian's ribs against his spine and cracking through the skin of his back. His entire body protests and keens with pain, his heart a dull thud outside his chest and in Eddie's hand and Eddie's voice is in his ears, "even after everything, you still had it in you. Well,"
"Guess you don't, now."
*
When Adrian wakes up, there is a hole in his chest where his heart should be.
His body is held together by the thick strings of oblique muscles and the skin that folds around all the missing spaces. It all looks seamless, flawless, like he was born this way.
Adrian sits up and feels the air drift through him. He tries to stand up but he can't, he can't, they've taken those, too. One foot, reduced to the big toe and the soles and the other is just a stump protruding from his ankle. Adrian can't balance and with one last sigh, falls to the ground.
The distant hum of the refrigerator, the distant ticking of the clock; progression of time and space evermore. He lies there curled in a disdainful heap, wondering at this heat prickling behind his eyes, if it's from inhaling the dust that resides underneath his bed, if it's from the scrub of the carpet against his eyelashes, too close.
Eventually, Adrian rolls himself onto one side and then onto his stomach, pushing himself up with his forehead. He bites at the edge of the coverlet to hoist himself up the rest of the way and claws across the alpaca carpets and mahogany hardwood like a lame jackal. His knees slip on the marble that tiles his bathroom floor, already slick with the steam of a shower gone on for thirty five minutes.
*
"Good evening, gentlemen."
He makes one last appearance at the company's quarterly earnings roundtable. With his good eye flickering across his visual keyboard (the other one has spiraled somewhere into netherspace and what remains is a great tunnel in his face that continues to eat away at his head, little flecks of cartilage and bone revealing themselves occasionally only to be sucked over by skin), he announces that they might have overextended their operations in merchandising (turns out the world wasn't ready for Elysian Dreams just yet) and that they'll be focusing their efforts on rebranding the V! line of cosmetics to reflect McKinsey's latest report on the resurgence of conservative preferences among women. His sigh is too deep when he finishes speaking, and the investors could read something into it, but otherwise the meeting goes without a hitch, and NYSE:VDT only fluctuates a few points the next morning.
He calls Denise and tells her that he'll be retiring and could she get started on handling all the paperwork?
The financial community is abuzz with the news of who will be Adrian's successor, but all media inquiries should be directed to Brunswick Communications, please. Rumors range from pancreatic cancer to an assassination attempt to Veidt finally taking the vacation he deserves. Adrian laughs at this one, with what's left of his throat.
There's a knock on his door one night. Adrian is a half-collapsed, shriveled thing over the kitchen table; he hasn't been answering phone calls unless they're urgent business, and hasn't been answering the door at all. Food lies strewn on the table, clumsily arranged, the random pattern of deadening biology. He's been trying to eat but there's no point in it anymore-- not when there's a gaping spot where his stomach should be, when there's no gastronomical system to support such a human endeavor.
He supposes that he might qualify as inhuman, these days.
"Adrian?"
And if he had a heart, it would skip a beat.
He hadn't been expecting this. People have come and knocked on his door and he's pretended to be on vacation: Bermuda. Sao Paolo. Cannes. The notes and newspapers pile up under his door and once a while Adrian rolls over to the foyer to crawl and clear them away, if only to make room for more.
"It's me, Sam-- er. Dan. Dreiberg, that is. Ah--" embarrassed laughter, and hasty knocking follows to cover it up. Adrian wonders if Laurie is with him.
"Adrian?"
A few seconds pass. He can hear a sigh outside, the faintest indication of resignation. "I guess he really did leave the country."
Adrian indulges himself one last time; whispers goodbye to the sound of fading foosteps. A note has been slipped under his door, but Adrian crawls away before he can be tempted to read it.
*
Rorschach comes for his legs that night, hacking away with a cleaver, both their blood butterfly-splatters all over his mask until Adrian can't tell what's ink and what's not, until Adrian is just as short and then shorter. Daniel stands there afterwards, just looking at him with those sad eyes, and Adrian's torso withers and shrinks under that gaze until there's nothing left but the faint peeling of skin, curling and paper-crisp.
Bubastis, then, licking his face until it's rubbed raw, sandpaper-tongue on the pulse of his muscles and Adrian bears the affection quietly and without a sound. What remains of him the next morning is all abstract, puddling skin and one quivering blue eye, staring endlessly at the ceiling.
*
It's Eddie who visits him the last night, smoke and brawn clouding up the viscous spaces in Adrian's skull.
He rummages around the pink-grey of his brains, climbing in and out of the fat, nerveless worms as easily and brutally as he must have once traipsed through jungles and marsh-terrain. of Vietnam. Eddie is in costume, fittingly; Kevlar armor and cigars cluttering and fuming, a bloodied, tattered bathrobe trailing behind him like the kill of the day.
"Hello, beautiful," Eddie says, patting it with a gloved hand, palming at its softness, its unresponsiveness. "You proud of yourself, Ozy? After all, this is smartest brain in the world."
Adrian's thoughts pulse wildly, all waves and pressure but Eddie just laughs like the storm hasn't come yet. "Oh, you don't think so? Just some overactive marketing people?"
Beat, thrum, hum. Dendrites flash and potassium channels open and close; Eddie is awash in a tide of neurotransmitters but he doesn't even blink-- just waves the miasma out of his eyes and leans a little closer.
"No, it's not professional jealousy." Blood beating through, leaking out and through the cracks. Eddie stubs his cigar into Adrian's frontal cortex and the mighty grey lump shivers in distress.
"What's that? Can't hear you." His fingers scramble in, fold around the mush of his thalamus, all rice pudding and just as useless. "Maybe I should take a deeper look. Maybe I should--"
Goodbye, hippocampus. Goodbye, amygdala. Goodbye--
*