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year 5, quarter 3
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Post by Gladiolus Amicitia on Apr 2, 2023 17:50:38 GMT -6
"Ten days..." he repeated in a toneless whisper, staring at nothing on the underside of the bunk above him. Ten days he'd left Iggy to fend for himself in a den of wolves. Ten days he'd been lying there, dying, his subconscious nudging him towards the dark. Wouldn't have been so bad, would it? a poisonous little voice whispered to him from somewhere in the back of his skull. The same one that tried whispering to him in a frigid lightless pit. The one that came to him after every failed escape. The one he'd ignored, silenced, again and again... Except for this time. This time he'd been weak enough to let it talk, and when he realized that the residue of sickness ebbed away in the wake of an overwhelming sense of shame.
The King's Shield, rotting away on a fetid mattress in a dank cell, thinking about how much easier it would be to give up while his friend got his face smashed in just for the chance to save his life. What a protector he was. What a warrior.
It was a few more slow measured breaths before Gladio spoke. The rattle in his lungs was gone, but the air itself felt heavy.
"They'll make you fight again," he said, under no impression that Ignis was unaware of that fact. If they kept this up they'd both be dead sooner than later, and there was no escape from Gorgon's walls even in death. They couldn't keep reacting. The maw of Gorgon was built to chew them up that way. They needed to act...
But every time Gladio had tried, he ended up with broken bones and a sentence in the hole, trying not to listen to the insidious little voice that burrowed in through the back of his skull.
"I tried to get out," he admitted, "Before you were here, I tried... So many god damn times... but you can't climb the walls or dig under them or run anywhere. They have trucks that go in and out but they search them. We'd never pass for guards, even if we had uniforms."
He lifted a leaden hand and scrubbed it down his face, skin clammy with sweat.
"We have to get out of here, Iggy... But I've been out of ideas for a long time."
Post by Gladiolus Amicitia on Jan 20, 2023 12:51:45 GMT -6
Every step he took had him sinking up to his knees in black volcanic sand. His chest burned with exertion but when he tried to gulp for air he got more ash than oxygen. The hazy figure in the smoke ahead of him left no footprints. The more he tried to follow, the more the sand swallowed him up.
To his chest now, still trying to wade forward, the pressure crushing his lungs. Wheezing. He heard his name. Something bitter ran down the back of his throat and as he coughed weakly he looked up into a blurry face in the dark. His eyes did not want to focus, and his mind was slow in grasping the details of his present reality. He was falling apart from the inside and he couldn't do anything to stop it. So this was what it was like.
Distantly, he thought that dying was taking a lot longer than he ever imagined it would. He was supposed to go out quick and bloody in defense of the King. Like a real Shield. Like his old man did.
What a god damn disgrace.
"I'm supposed to die on my feet," he rasped to himself and to the dark and to the blurry face hovering in front of him with a bottle. Whatever was inside smelled harsh and acrid and medicinal. The next time it tipped the bitter drink into his mouth he didn't cough quite so much.
He could follow it down all the way into his stomach. Minutes passed. The antidote followed the path laid by the poison. The rope around his guts started to uncoil slowly. The tension bled out of his muscles. His eyes began to focus again. The face in front of him sharpened in his vision, smears of blood and all. Reality clicked into place. Blood and swelling. Fresh. Did they corner him? Ambush him?
"Iggy?" he said through the clearing fog in his head. He tried to sit up, grabbing at the frame of the bunk. He could move his arms again but they felt unbearably weak. Nothing in the tank, not even fumes. He gave up, fell back into place.
Post by Gladiolus Amicitia on Jan 1, 2023 13:13:17 GMT -6
He stared up at the bottom of the bunk above, and through it into nothing. He clenched his jaw so tight he envisioned his teeth cracking like stones beneath a pickaxe. It wasn't the sting of the needle. He hardly noticed it as Ignis tried to stitch him back together. From the wound his blood turned to shard of broken glass, cutting jagged lines through his veins as they flowed through him. He shivered no matter how much he fought to keep still.
"Not dead yet," he said through his teeth, scraping up crumbs of bravado. Not dead yet, but in the back of his mind he swore he could hear a clock ticking.
It was the last coherent thing he'd say for some time. The world spun around him. Days and nights slipped away from him. One morning his father appeared, kicking the leg of the bunk and telling him he needed to quit being lazy and get up. There was work to do. He'd been neglecting his training. Gladio sat up by inches, turned and vomited over the side of the bed and slumped back against the sweat-soaked mattress.
Noct woke him up in the night to tell him that Iris had gone missing. Iris grabbed him by the wrist and tried to drag him out of the room because the Nifs were attacking. It was Noct's wedding and everyone had ridden in on giant dogs that breathed fire and left a trail of blooming flowers wherever they stepped.
Gladio shivered. He opened his eyes and stared blankly at the bottom of the bunk above him. He took wheezing breaths through his mouth. Someone had tied rope around all of his internal organs and cinched it so tightly it ached. There was a vague notion floating around in his skull like pond scum. A fight. He was supposed to fight somebody. His arms and his legs were fixed to the bunk with thousand ton weights.
He asked his dad for a hand up, but the old man didn't answer him.
Post by Gladiolus Amicitia on Jul 5, 2022 21:26:28 GMT -6
Gladio went quiet. He grit his teeth, jaw muscles tense against another outburst of anger. He knew Ignis was right, but maintaining silence allowed the rage in him to begin to die, and to go without it seemed the worse prospect. Other things, colder and darker things, would take its place. He felt a tremor in one of his legs. He reached back in his memory, groping for some lesson his father taught him once about breath and how to control it and how controlling it controlled the rest of the body. Pain and exhaustion. How many years since Clarus had drawn his last breath? Gladio looked down and watched Ignis's fingers prod at the puncture in his side and watched the blood leak out from it and run down his flank until it soaked into the waistband of his pants. All of this impassively, like he'd been flipping through channels and found this on the television. What was the lesson?
He shook his head once. Blinked hard. The world came back into focus. Breathe. A sharp sting ran down through the stab wound as Ignis pressed the rag against it and Gladio grunted and began to ease himself down onto the bunk. Pull of flesh, tensing of muscle, and the sting burned bright as a star. Halfway down his legs gave out and he slumped onto the thin mattress. The bedframe squealed. He felt the energy drain out of him suddenly like the receding tide before a tsunami and he knew that if he tried to stand up again it would be hard going if it was any going at all. He moved by degrees to lay on his side, slow and tense and strangling every sound of suffering in his throat before it could escape his mouth.
When Ignis questioned him on what he felt Gladio was a long time answering and it wasn't because of the fogginess in his mind. The shambling corpse of his pride held his tongue. Every admission of pain was an admission of weakness. He looked up at Ignis from his place on the bunk. Feeble light shining through the cell door. The halo of it behind Ignis' head cast his face in shadow and Gladio had to squint to make out his features.
"Side feels like it's on fire," Gladio said through his teeth. "Everything else... God damn it's colder than Shiva's tits in here..."
There was a stutter in his breath. Unspoken profanity. His head swam. He thought that it probably wasn't too late for Ignis to ingratiate himself to the Warden. Insurance against whatever came next. They'd throw Gladio to the dogs but that didn't matter anymore.
No, that wasn't right. Breathe. Nihilism was a luxury he couldn't afford right now. Somebody had to watch Iggy's back.
Post by Gladiolus Amicitia on Jun 5, 2022 0:29:45 GMT -6
Blood oozed between Gladio's fingers. His legs threatened to buckle but any further sign of weakness and he knew he was a dead man. The air grew thick as the crowd pressed in, and the second Ignis grabbed his sleeve Gladio started staggering for the doors. His feet slid in the muddy slush. Someone closed in on him and he swung blindly with a back elbow that connected with soft meat. The sharp exhale of air was lost in the din of shouting and the wet sounds of footsteps in the yard.
He muttered a long string of profanity under his breath. Anger was a rung on the ladder and he clung to it to keep from falling into the dark below. A pair of guards entered into the throng of shouting voices and grabbing hands as he and Ignis shoved through the crowd and crossed the threshold back into the prison leaving muddy tracks on the cracked cement floor. Gladio hissed a breath between his teeth. Adrenaline kept him upright but the wound in his side burned with every exertion. Sweat beaded on his forehead, the back of his neck. Shouts rang out behind them, cut off by the dull meaty thuds of batons on bodies. A guard's whistle shrieked.
They trudged the familiar path back to the cell and Gladio pushed himself every step of the way. The burn deepened, spread outward through his body, and while nothing felt right about getting stabbed in the guts something felt different this time. This time unlike all the other times marked by the collection of ugly little scars on his body and in his head. He felt eyes on him like bugs on his skin and he didn't say a word. If he did he might give voice to the pain of his injury and he didn't want to give Rurik's goons the satisfaction of reporting it. The sounds of the yard faded into the background and the ambience of the prison prevailed. Someone's cough rattled off the stone walls. The loud screech and clatter of a metal door closing. He heard the steady tap tap tap like the drip of a leaky pipe and it was only when their cell was in sight that Gladio realized it was the sound of the blood trail he was leaving behind them.
"That was stupid," he said as they made it back to the cell. There was no real safety there or anywhere, but it was the only place they could go. There was no infirmary. Not one that would treat a prisoner, anyway. Gladio stopped beside the bunks and allowed himself now to lean against the frame. "Shoulda... ngh... Shoulda seen that coming."
He glanced back over his shoulder, looking out the door into the hall, but no one lurked there waiting for them. His vision started to go fuzzy at the edges and despite the fire in the wound the rest of him felt cold. Stupid, goddamn stupid. Should have seen it sooner. Should have reacted sooner, moved faster. Should've... He grasped for that anger, gripped it with everything he had left. It was something to keep him upright.
"DAMMIT!" he shouted, swinging his forearm into the bunk frame. The impact reverberated through the metal and through the bones of his arm. He looked down, his other hand still pressed into the wound and coated in blood. If he sat down would he be able to stand up again? He looked up at Ignis and saw only the myriad ways his stupid mistake would cost them. Another week, maybe two, and the ring would come calling again...
Post by Gladiolus Amicitia on Jan 22, 2022 14:51:53 GMT -6
The exhausting feeling of inevitability settled on Gladio's shoulders.
"Is what it is," Gladio muttered to Ignis. He turned to face the oncoming storm. His right foot slid backwards by inches and he held his hands at stomach height, popping his knuckles in the dimming murmur of the yard. A reflexive stance. The basilisk junkie squirmed in the mud.
"New friend, huh?" one of the pushers asked with an aggressive upward jut of his chin.
"Junkies aren't my business," Gladio said. His voice was cold as stone. The basilisk junkie grabbed at Gladio's pantleg in a desperate scramble for footing and Gladio kicked him off. The junkie made a pathetic sound and fell back into the mud.
The pusher flashed a rotten toothy grin but Gladio wasn't watching his face. The evasion of eye contact wasn't out of fear or deference. In the scope of his vision he watched hands for a twitch of fingers, like the curl of them around the handle of a makeshift blade. He watched the position of their feet, the shift in weight. He watched for a tell in the angle of the shoulders. He watched for the shadow of more bodies in his periphery. He watched for these things at all times and in all places.
Exhaustion lived in the deepest core of his being.
The pusher's silent partner took a step off to the side and Gladio reflexively took a matching step. The air was thick with tension that Gladio hardly noticed. Its presence was expected. He couldn't remember what its absence felt like. The silence stretched on until Gladio broke it.
"We done here?"
The pushers considered long enough for it to be uncomfortable. Their decision was silent, and they turned and trudged back to their compatriots with wet tramping steps, the mud sucking at the soles of their shoes. Gladio didn't like it. He ran his tongue over his teeth and tried to decipher their motives and couldn't. He turned back to Iggy, ignoring the existence of the shuddering junkie in the mud.
"Let's go."
A loose crowd of inmates stood between them and the prison doors. A pair of guards looked down on the grimy masses from their towers. Another patrolled between the fences with a working dog whose breed Gladio couldn't identify. Gladio led a weaving path through the open spaces in the crowd. He watched hands and feet, stances and shoulders. An electric current ran up and down the length of his spine. His fingers itched and a fist closed itself around his guts.
The door was fifteen feet away.
Somewhere in the back of the crowd a man lifted his head and set his shoulders and the moment Gladio saw him, the moment he recognized one of Rurik's stooges, was a moment too late to stop the makeshift blade. He made a grab for the man's wrist. The blade sunk into his flank up to the tape wrapping that made its grip. The energy of the crowd shifted instantly. Gladio threw a headbutt, cracked skulls with the knifeman. Both of them stumbled backwards in opposite directions. Gladio pressed his hands hard against the hole in his side as the fire began to course through him.
Post by Gladiolus Amicitia on Oct 17, 2021 23:35:41 GMT -6
He'd managed to avoid the subject until now. It hadn't been intentional, and he hadn't realized that he'd been stepping around it like he was barefoot on a floor covered in broken glass until Ignis said the name. Basilisk, like foil between his teeth. Gladio looked past the pushers, to a distant point of nothing hovering in front of the far wall, tangled in the barbed wire, and he summoned the Basilisk up from the pit he'd left it in.
"It's a drug," Gladio muttered, his voice low and flat. His jaw was stiff. He didn't want to elaborate further but his silence would invite questions that he didn't want asked. Even if they weren't asked out loud. "They make it in here. There's a crew of prisoners working for the guards. I heard there's some deal with the same people on the outside who are in on the fights."
The tangle of underworld politics was beyond him. He didn't even know what country he was in, just that none of the condemned behind Gorgon's walls knew the names Lucis or Niflheim. It didn't take a genius to figure out that Warden Demichev's corruption informed the swing of every guard's baton, that Basilisk flowed through the veins of the prison because he willed it. That was all Gladio needed to know. Absently, he cracked his knuckles. He could feel the empty eyes of the pushers still on him, like prickles of electricity dancing up and down his spine. Faintly, the ghost of something burning in the crook of his elbow.
"Sometimes they dose people up for a fight. Fresh meat, the ones who don't want to step in the ring. A shot of it and they're foaming at the mouth trying to claw the other guy's eyes out." He added bitterly, "It sells."
Then it wore off, and the condemned were consumed by fire and ice and the rabid jaws of need until the need bled out of them in a cold dark pit...
...or it didn't, and they fed it, or died.
Gladio sneezed again and wiped his sleeve across his nose. The smear of mucus froze on the surface. A dozen yards away, one of Gorgon's walking dead shuffled up through the slush towards the pushers. Even among the damned masses he was a pathetic figure. Tremors in every movement. Fingernails gnawed to bloody stubs. Gaunt and pale with a face spotted by open sores. Gladio's stomach twisted up in disgust. He turned away from the scene, nudging Ignis to do the same, and began to walk.
"I'm good for it, you know I'm good for it, I just need a little more..." the hollow voice pleaded.
It was worth giving the pushers their space, if only to get away from the sight and the sound of the pathetic and desperate begging. Maybe Gladio couldn't spare Ignis from Rurik's boot on his neck, but he could shield him from that fate.
But the voice in the back of his head, the weary one that spoke up after the third or fourth failed escape attempt, the one that muttered to him in The Hole and at night in the brief respite between the screams of Gorgon's victims. That one wondered - if he couldn't do the former, what made him think he could do the latter?
"Please, come on man, come on--"
The hollow voice grew frantic, then angry, and the sounds of a scuffle cut off whatever pleading words he had stuck in his throat and turned them into wordless, guttural noise. Rustling of fabric and the wet sounds of footsteps preceded the sharp crack of fist to face. The dry snap made Gladio think of a broken jaw, even though he hadn't seen the strike.
He looked over his shoulder in time to see the junkie stumbling backwards, landing at his and Ignis' feet, with two of the pushers calmly closing the distance.
Post by Gladiolus Amicitia on Oct 2, 2021 18:55:18 GMT -6
Ravatogh. Gladio remembered the blistering heat of the place, the lava flows. Down the mountain, out onto the road... He remembered the outpost, too. If the thought hard enough he could pick out the hard cover of the recipe book in Noct's hand. Was he remembering, or just creating the image of it in his mind because he'd been too focused on seeing Noct safely to the royal tomb to notice details like that?
He made an agreeable noise in the back of his throat and listened as Iggy continued.
Gladio let the back of his head rest against the wall and closed his eyes. He willed his mind to conjure taste and smell and texture from Ignis' descriptions. To transform the flavorless chew between his teeth into the sweet crunch of peppers, the tender flake of seafood. He ached for the taste of spices, for vegetables, for food that hadn't been left to rot or go stale. For something that would give him strength instead of simply keep him alive.
It felt like the memory was hovering just at the edge of his mind, enough for him to know it was there but not enough for him to taste the chili on the tip of his tongue.
He opened his eyes and stared down at his teeth marks in the brick of assembled proteins and carbohydrates. When we get out of here, he wanted to say, but he didn't have it in him to give voice to the words. The image of the four of them sat around a campfire seemed so remote. A thing that was but wouldn't be again.
He shook his head at himself. Don't be a crybaby. There was no use in being morose about it. Iggy was here, that meant they had to get out. So there would be a when we get out. Because there had to be. Because it didn't matter that Gladio hadn't been able to dig or fight his way out of Gorgon yet.
"There's no probably about it," Gladio said. "Right about now I could eat a behemoth and ask for seconds."
DAY 23
It had been two weeks since the last snowfall and the yard had gone grey-brown as the tracks of the prisoners tramped down the white crust of snow into a muddy slush. Gladio walked in step with Ignis, sweeping his eyes over the assembled groups and the odd straggler like a radar. He guided his friend here or there with a nudge of his shoulder or hand. They steered clear of Rurik's goons. There was nothing to be gained in starting anything with them when they'd bring trouble to the pair all on their own.
"...Another week. Maybe two." Gladio speculated as to when he'd next be pressganged into fighting again. His knee healed up about as well as it could have. He could walk on it. Maybe run, if he had to, but it would forever be an exploitable weakness. One solid kick and whatever pieces of him his body stitched back together would come apart again. Maybe worse. Maybe to never heal again.
A chill wind blew through the yard. There was a dampness in the air that made Gladio's joints ache and suggested the absent snow was on its way back. He stopped in his tracks and sneezed into the crook of his arm. Ahead, a huddle of four of Gorgon's basilisk pushers muttered conspiratorially amongst themselves and eyed Gladio with their soulless zombie-stares.
Post by Gladiolus Amicitia on Oct 2, 2021 15:11:42 GMT -6
DAY 10
Time passed in long days and longer nights. Gladio stomached the pain in his knee enough to hide the severity of his limp when they were out in the yard. In their cell he did everything he could to ease the fire in the joint; stretching, massaging his knuckles through the stabilizing muscles, binding it with strips of old bloody hand wraps for lack of any other material. Nothing helped.
It took the guards a week to pay Gladio his owed fight purse. He assumed they wouldn't. It wouldn't have been the first time the authorities of Gorgon didn't hold to their word, because honor wasn't currency behind the prison walls. It was evening when Zarubin showed up and threw Gladio's winnings onto the floor before slamming the steel door behind him. He never uttered so much as one sarcastic "Big Guy".
On the floor sat a heap of grey fabric and a brick of processed condensed nutrition sealed in mylar. Gladio picked up the blanket, shook the bugs out of it and threw it onto one of the bunks. He tore open the packaging of the nutrient bar.
"No point saving this for later," he muttered. It only afforded the other inmates the opportunity to steal it.
He broke the bar roughly in half. It was dense, dirt-colored, with an entirely artificial texture and smell. Gladio couldn't tell by the stamp on the packaging because he didn't know what year it was in this place, but he assumed it was long expired. An emergency ration from some long ago war kept boxed up in a cellar.
He handed Ignis the slightly larger piece, then limped over to the wall and leaned against the spot below the small square of barred window. He took a bite of the emergency bar and it tasted like compacted cardboard. He chewed it for a long while. In Gorgon, it might as well have been a delicacy.
After a few bites he said, "Hey, Iggy... Tell me what you'd make if you had a kitchen right now. Fully stocked. Describe it to me."
Post by Gladiolus Amicitia on Oct 2, 2021 13:30:54 GMT -6
"I fought already?" Gladio mumbled. There was something casual about his confusion, like his misplaced memories were no more important than a misplaced sock. He had existed in this space before, grasping in the dark for memories that never formed in the first place. He'd learned not to worry about it anymore. It was life in this place, like the perpetual cold and the moldy bread. His head throbbed, but as Ignis positioned himself to help Gladio to his feet, something in his shoulder lit up in a flare of pain. He inhaled sharply between his teeth and stifled another groan. It was hard to inventory his injuries. Ache flowed into burn flowed into piercing agony until the whole of him hurt.
He bent his good leg and pushed up, rising from the floor by inches and leaning on Ignis like a crutch. His bones were cement. The nausea hit him again, harder now, and he wobbled before collapsing into a seated position on the lower bunk. The metal squealed under his weight.
"We were in the yard..." Earlier in the day, hours before the fight. "...Then I woke up here."
Gladio scrubbed a hand down his face, over the swelling around his eyes, over the misshapen wreckage of his nose, over the sticky rivers of sweat and congealing blood. He wiped his palm on his thigh, and it was only then that he took a good look at Ignis and the series of fresh wounds marring his face.
He'd fought so Iggy wouldn't have to. He fought to offer his friend some measure of protection from the animals in this place and he couldn't manage that much. Failure settled like a stone in the pit of his stomach.
