Re: Shifting colors.mirror_brightlySeptember 24 2009, 01:44:25 UTC
There's something sweet, naieve, crisp in Kirk's wheezing laughter. Nero's fingertips drummed against the handle of the comb and the sound tumbled away. He pulled the comb back, settled it between his teeth, bit gentle against the soft wood, and lifted the jar away from the fuchsia light. It was dark in his hands, between his and Kirk's legs, and it drew in the light as he twisted the lid free. The metal squealed and he cast it aside with a clatter. His grin was less hollow as he pulled the comb away, snaking fingers around the grip.
“Saeih' walks to the academy, always keeping under the sun. He calls it swift wings, and laughs and shouts to Ael. He does this every day,” Nero continued as he craned his head down, watched the needles of the comb vanish into the void of the jar. The liquid was thick. It fell in heavy drops, but he can't hear them as he looks back up at Kirk. His words came automatic, then, as he continued to speak and leaned almost to press his face against Kirk's neck. “Every day he he dreams and calls to the sky. He wants to fly, he says, to see what others will never know.”
The first puncture was slow. Hevam skin parted like paper, like leaves, and the depth he reached drew a slow bubble of red as he pressed in. Liquid iron in yellow light is grey, little but an echo of the sharp void of grief. He pauses as he reaches the ceremonial depth. The pain is proper, apologetic, and ushers a tightness in the muscle. Nero cannot hear Kirk, cannot see him as he pulls the needles out, pressing them in again at a sweeping angle.
“He is brilliant, strong, and he is a quick man...” There was nothing, only the gentle crack of skin and the blaring silence of the black.
Re: Shifting colors.kirktasticSeptember 24 2009, 02:04:14 UTC
Every word is patterned into his neck by the heated breath of the Romulan against him. It was intimate, heavily so, but not in any sexual way. Each word paints a vivid picture in his mind, all swirling colors that form into painting. Each word is a different color, a different texture, a different shade until he can see it in his mind.
The pain was distinct. Not each individual tine, no, but each puncture is felt by itself. Bright, unique, repeating. Nero kept speaking, constantly speaking, building the picture in his mind, surrounding him with it and winding through it all was the brilliance of a single crimson thread.
...shut the fuck up. Don't want to hear this... what are you doing...
The thoughts melded together in one long strand, listening to this constant rambling. Yet his mind could not stop thinking, even for an instant, about the pointy-thing against his neck. Repeating, over and over. He could smell metal and blood... what is Nero doing... what is he doing?
Re: Shifting colors.mirror_brightlySeptember 24 2009, 03:06:12 UTC
Saeih' fell from his hands and mouth easily, tumbling words laced with recent memory, and Nero slipped the comb into the void again. It came back, bright and black, and his thumb on Kirk's chin stretched. It swept away the creepy grey slide of blood, wiping the skin clean. The line on Kirk's neck was Kirk's own, convoluted and warped, the interior smooth and graceful, the exterior pointed and harsh. It was as foriegn and tasteless as his blood, as the smell of mingled iron and Etrevon heat. An apology phrased in the platitudes of another world. He gripped Kirk's head again and tilted his neck upward, craning his eyes and face into the loudness of the light. It was shouting at him and he dug closer, slower, just to make certain the hevam heard his story.
“Veyn has a clean wit, and doesn't like to drink with us. He stares and hums and works while we whisper of the buildings and the fool down the lane,” Nero continued, sweeping Veyn across the human's neck with casual grace. The black is guiding him, tracing symmetry into iron skin. He shifted, keeping the lines in the shade, away from the cruel grip of fuchsia-the light couldn't understand grief, it never would. Klivam color refracted off foreign grates. Whispering in the darkness. The Narada swallowed it, but left his words. It listened.
Veyn stretched across the hevam's throat. Bhaon and his family, his son and infant daughter who loved Ael as though they owned him, spanned the right side of Kirk's neck. He pulled the human's face down and drew a considering line over his cheekbones, a clinical stretch through his hair. Blonde was not a remorseful color, too light and binding. It was happy in the light, gold and orange like Hobus. He would have to remove it.
“Ayel,” Nero called over his shoulder, into the space beyond the lines. A hand settled on his shoulder and Nero took the comb in mouth again, holding his hand free. The weight of his knife was familiar and welcome, whispering grievances against his skin as its handle prickled heavy cold across his palm. The blade split through the bindings that held Kirk against the crates. They parted like his skin and the human slid off onto the ground, into the unforgiving fuchsia.
Re: Shifting colors.kirktasticSeptember 24 2009, 03:31:26 UTC
Words. Constant constant words. They never stopped, telling him inane details of people, all with Romulan names. Characters in a story but no damn story that makes sense. Don't even know how to tell a story. Beginning, middle, end. Fucking can't even do that much right. Kirk told himself, because cracking jokes in his head is better then breaking in his spirit.
The pain keeps spreading, and where it burns hot, it leaves behind embers. Dull, constant lines of embers left behind to constantly burn and nag and remind him of where the pointy-thing has been. It flared out like wings on either side of his adam's apple, spreading up and down, curving inward.
He had only a split second to look up - fucking agony where he pulled the skin on his neck - before he was falling. Gravity gave up its hold and turned and spun until he met cold unforgiving floor. His chest felt it, the right side of his face, and where his broken hand smacked into it. Oh, that felt it the most. Kirk choked down a cry, but he could not move. His fingers were dead to the cold or swollen beyond movement. His head turned just a little, sweeping over a flopped arm and seeing bruised, bloodless lines left behind by the cording holding him up.
His gaze went further upwards and he saw it. The ends of several more of those combs sticking out over the edge of a crate and a jar. A strange looking glass jar of something thick and dark and oily. The chemical reek of whatever it was on his neck, the stench of his own blood...
It hit him. It slammed into him with the force of a sledgehammer. He understood. He wanted to remain ignorant.
He was being tattooed. His neck... Nero had spread a tattoo across his neck. A tattoo of an unknown design, speaking unknown, alien words, painting an unknown painting. Not scars, something far more visible. Ink. Dark ink, all over his neck...
A sound fell from his lips that came from deep in his chest, and his eyes closed. Couldn't fight because he couldn't feel his body.
Re: Shifting colors.mirror_brightlySeptember 24 2009, 04:13:35 UTC
Nero's motions halted and he leaned close to Kirk, his ear drifting over the human's shoulder as he watched him. After several seconds his brow furrowed and he pushed the man onto his back, splaying his arms out, limp and lifeless across the floor. The air wheezed from the human, stripes of blue and black, but it wasn't the same. Nero parted his lips and hissed, the knife in his hand fell away and he drew the comb out, gripping it tight.
“Again,” he demanded, but Kirk didn't speak.
That sound, so full of hopelessness and terror, horrific nausea, black, and green, and choked with the smell of crackling pyres. That was the sound. The sound of grievance, the hollow uttering of defeat, painful and shaming. It tumbled across the floor and the Narada let him have it, savor it. It wrapped through the air, and melted against his skin. He wanted more. He pressed down on the human's ribs, pushing the breath from him in curls. It was a wheeze, nothing more. His scowl settled and he lifted the comb again. If Kirk wouldn't produce it willingly, he would draw it out of him.
“Eihva is beautiful, she is hard and smart,” Nero began as he knelt on either side of Kirk's ribs. His fingers wound tight through the blonde's hair, fixed his skull in absolute position. The comb hesitated, dripped black across Kirk's forehead. The dot slid back, and Nero ignored it as he punctured the skin behind Kirk's cheek. The lines here were more delicate, but no less dark, no less marring. They would change Kirk's face, remind him of the gentle hands and harsh teeth of death. He would be forced to remember a world he never knew. “Eihva is the only deep core driller I have known, she works with skill and speed. She sings sometimes as she clears the engines, and as she works the drill. Her voice protects her from Klivam hands and prisoner's knives, but she is not weak. The cold is harsh and she loses fingers, toes, her skin is marred but not her work. Never her work. She wants to see chi'Rihan again badly, to see the fire-falls.”
Re: Shifting colors.kirktasticSeptember 24 2009, 04:27:37 UTC
It hurts here, even more then his neck. The flesh on his face is far more sensitive, not used to pain in such tiny, delicate motions. Used to pain in the slug of a fist, crumpling and bright and sudden, but this is a pain that doesn't die. It's a slow burning fire, banked and settled and staying. The comb bites into bone when it finds his cheekbones.
A tattoo on his face. On his face. His mind could not even fathom the full scale of such a thing. Nero had him helpless on the floor and he wasn't even bound, but he could not dick all to stop him from writing poetry or blasphemy on his face then he could fly--
Eihva.
A name they had mentioned before. "Eihva is beautiful..."
"It was Eihva's birthing day today, she had shift off. She survived the prisons, she was strong."
Nero had said that, hissing and low in his ears. "You killed my crew."
Eihva was dead. A story. The tattoo. Something was coming together in his mind. Something terrifying and horrible and alien. "What-" Oh god, it hurt to talk. His throat was raw and it made the bloody skin of his neck twist and pull. "What do they mean?" He rasped out, eyes opening and focusing on the face directly above his. His voice was only a whisper now. "Tattoos." Needed to know. Didn't want to know. Had to know.
Re: Shifting colors.mirror_brightlySeptember 24 2009, 17:52:13 UTC
Nero savored that sound, the sheer redness of it, the way it warped around the lines, slid around them like wind through branches, air through vents. It wasn't what he wanted, but Kirk gave it to him freely. What he was given was almost as beautiful as what he could take. His hand stilled, the needles hovering just a hair's span from Kirk's cheek. Nero leaned in close. Kirk could not see his smile and neither could he. He could hear it though, just like the soft whispering black that wrapped up Kirk's cheek.
“They are a story, James,” Nero explained. His words were slow, leaden, and laced with the same flavor as the truths he'd related. “The only story that matters.” He pulled back and started marking in silence as he considered Eihva. He recalled the feel of her flesh, the cold creep of her blood across his shins. The green of it, blaring in the dark and the white, glistening and cracking like ice on metal. The cold crawl of her skin....and the feel of her arm around his neck. The gentle amber light of midmorning became the humid span of the Narada, creeping and gold. Somewhere in the colored lights he remembered her frown, her doubt of Spock, and the way he eclipsed her. He looked down at Kirk, eclipsed by him now, and his expression tightened hard.
“We paint the tales of the dead onto our skin,” Nero repeated. The words were soundless, hollow, told through generations on generations. They were meaningless, solid, lifeless. “Paint their names, so that when the marks fade...so too can the time of grieving.” He took a shallow breath and traced the line with his thumb, wiping the sheen of blood away. He couldn't sully Eihva's song with worthless words. “But our grief does not fade, so we burn our marks deep...so that we will never forget.”
The room was cold and Nero looked away from Kirk, stared off at the shadows. The new marks across his skin still burned, he could hear their names where they intersected his family. Behind him, there was the gentle hum of Eihva's song. The clang and exultation of Veyn echoed deep in a ship that no longer existed. Laughter erupted from Baohn and the shrill call of his wife followed. What caught his attention, finally, was Ayel's indignant call for aid as the children accosted him outside of Baohn's home.
The halfhearted shout of rekkhai felt so solid, so bright and orange, that Nero craned his head. For just the briefest moment, the motion painted over the Romulan at his back. His periphery caught sight of short hair and a wry smile, a loose shirt, well worn and half ragged-as soon as he narrowed his vision, halted to view it, it vanished into the glare of the lights and Nero was left in the present. Left in a small room with bad air and garish lights. He could almost smell the bite of the blood, the fumes of the pigment, and the rank stench of Klingons as he turned away from Ayel and looked back at Kirk.
His attention snagged on the line across Kirk's face and he slid his finger across it again. He stared at his hand, it was cold. But not green. His expression evened and fell away from his face, tumbling to the floor as he dipped the comb again and fisted his fingers tighter in Kirk's hair. His touch was less reverent, less forgiving of flesh, as he continued.
“Tha'liij is afraid of thunder,” Nero exhaled as he twisted Kirk's head and outlined his other cheek, pouring symmetry and silence into the skin.
Re: Shifting colors.kirktasticSeptember 24 2009, 18:44:26 UTC
He had been right.
How long did he laid there, sprawled at angles on the floor of an alien, enemy ship that seemed as in desire to inflict pain as its master did? Tiny thoughts trickled into his brain as his body tried to pretend the pain was all so far away. He wondered if the ship was male like its master or female like the Enterprise. His mind decided that the ship had to be male, because his mind could not define Nero's ship as anything but the giant tentacle monster that had take up the view screen what felt like forever ago. Male because obviously that ship was compensating for something.
He didn't want to know. He didn't want to know the story of each person branding into his skin, telling their tale in hollow words like a granite carved monument. Didn't want to know that this person had owned a horse and had a son. Didn't want to know about their favorite drink. Didn't want to know about their home on the edge of a city he had never heard of. The pain in his hair was a distant thing. Everything felt distant, like this was happening to someone else. They had mentioned that during the classes about torture. They said it was a blessing. They lied.
It was terrifying.
Kirk stared up into bright lights, barely blinking as the comb came close to his eye. That hurt, made him freeze, made the voice inside his head scream. Those unforgiving points right beside his eye, the tender flesh of his eye, searing. The mimicry of tenderness as Nero's thumb repetitively brushed away the mixture of blood and ink.
The tingling started in his toes.
It was about the same time the first tear finally fell from his eyes, burning the wounds from the comb.
The tingling stopped being tingling and started to turn into pain. Crawling up along his nerves, making his legs twitch in spasms as life started to return to the limp limbs. Kirk missed entirely when Nero stopped working the comb into his flesh, far too consumed with the fire that was screaming through every part of him as circulation started to realize it could return. He had no idea when the cry wrenched from him that he could no longer hold inside, every tiny movement impossible to stop and adding fuel to the fire. It all hurt far more then his fingers being broken, hurt even more then the tattoos being pressed into his skin. Or maybe they just added heat.
Forgot where he was, who he was, and was eaten alive by fire.
Re: Shifting colors.kirk_georgeSeptember 24 2009, 21:32:07 UTC
George screamed at the Romulans, a babble of English and Romulan, screaming they were killing Jim, attempting to divert their attentions to himself, straining against the bonds, helplessly. His son, had to protect him, to take this for himself on himself, heedless of the pain it cost him, his body, his throat, it didn't matter.
"If you kill him, you'll never get your information."
Re: Shifting colors.mirror_brightlySeptember 24 2009, 22:01:08 UTC
Nero scowled as he stared at Kirk, the line on his cheek finished and Tha'liij written out in whorls of black and blood. The human arched against him, twisting with strength he shouldn't have, involuntary and sparking. He was short circuiting, humming beneath him, and Nero sneered as he rose and stared down at the thrashing man. Kirk couldn't hear him, not through the spark under his skin.
“I don't want to kill him,” Nero admitted evenly, a low current beneath the clashing staccato of Kirk's cries and George's half-babbled Rihannsu. “Not yet.”
His attention was torn from Kirk, forced into an impatient, keening halt against his skull. He cast his glance at the hevam still leashed to the table. He could smell the fetid bite of burning iron and his eyes narrowed. He stepped off the sparking Kirk, away from his live limbs that crawled against the floor, slid to nowhere and back again.
“But if you supply my information,” Nero continued as he crossed to George's side. “I will not object.”
Re: Shifting colors.mirror_brightlySeptember 24 2009, 22:12:17 UTC
The liquid caught the side of Nero's neck and the Romulan fixed his heavy vision on the human, his hand rising to swipe the spit with slow, calculated resolve. It was dark, the space between George and he, and Nero could hear Kirk's live thrashing at his back. A slow smile splintered across his face and Nero's eyes drifted away, fixing on the weeping wounds that covered the hevam's torso. He lifted his hand, casually glancing at the liquid, before letting the appendage fall against the most colorful of the cuts.
Re: Shifting colors.kirk_georgeSeptember 24 2009, 22:15:04 UTC
George barely managed to hold the scream back between his teeth, as he smiled at hte spot he'd managed to hit the romulan with the spit. "The code...is go fuck yourself, sideways."
Re: Shifting colors.mirror_brightlySeptember 24 2009, 22:24:11 UTC
Nero hummed against his teeth, a rattling breath held in harmony by bone. His fingers against George's torso tensed, pulling at the injured flesh in slowly increasing increments.
"You are beginning to bore me." The words were even and dangerous, sliding from him like an order. The tips of his fingers were starting to prickle and hum--had they left the coolant on him? Hm, all the same.
Re: Shifting colors.kirktasticSeptember 25 2009, 00:24:31 UTC
There was no end. No beginning. Just a pain that ached through every part of him, pins and needles stabbing into meat over and over and over until he curled up into a fetus. Just let out a whimper he couldn't help, bubbling over his lips in guilty poison.
The reek of blood was choking, and the pain at his neck increased. Had to make the fire die so he could think again.
So he concentrated on one thing. ...A pair of dark eyes, framed in brown hair, glaring at him.
“Saeih' walks to the academy, always keeping under the sun. He calls it swift wings, and laughs and shouts to Ael. He does this every day,” Nero continued as he craned his head down, watched the needles of the comb vanish into the void of the jar. The liquid was thick. It fell in heavy drops, but he can't hear them as he looks back up at Kirk. His words came automatic, then, as he continued to speak and leaned almost to press his face against Kirk's neck. “Every day he he dreams and calls to the sky. He wants to fly, he says, to see what others will never know.”
The first puncture was slow. Hevam skin parted like paper, like leaves, and the depth he reached drew a slow bubble of red as he pressed in. Liquid iron in yellow light is grey, little but an echo of the sharp void of grief. He pauses as he reaches the ceremonial depth. The pain is proper, apologetic, and ushers a tightness in the muscle. Nero cannot hear Kirk, cannot see him as he pulls the needles out, pressing them in again at a sweeping angle.
“He is brilliant, strong, and he is a quick man...” There was nothing, only the gentle crack of skin and the blaring silence of the black.
Reply
The pain was distinct. Not each individual tine, no, but each puncture is felt by itself. Bright, unique, repeating. Nero kept speaking, constantly speaking, building the picture in his mind, surrounding him with it and winding through it all was the brilliance of a single crimson thread.
...shut the fuck up. Don't want to hear this... what are you doing...
The thoughts melded together in one long strand, listening to this constant rambling. Yet his mind could not stop thinking, even for an instant, about the pointy-thing against his neck. Repeating, over and over. He could smell metal and blood... what is Nero doing... what is he doing?
Reply
“Veyn has a clean wit, and doesn't like to drink with us. He stares and hums and works while we whisper of the buildings and the fool down the lane,” Nero continued, sweeping Veyn across the human's neck with casual grace. The black is guiding him, tracing symmetry into iron skin. He shifted, keeping the lines in the shade, away from the cruel grip of fuchsia-the light couldn't understand grief, it never would. Klivam color refracted off foreign grates. Whispering in the darkness. The Narada swallowed it, but left his words. It listened.
Veyn stretched across the hevam's throat. Bhaon and his family, his son and infant daughter who loved Ael as though they owned him, spanned the right side of Kirk's neck. He pulled the human's face down and drew a considering line over his cheekbones, a clinical stretch through his hair. Blonde was not a remorseful color, too light and binding. It was happy in the light, gold and orange like Hobus. He would have to remove it.
“Ayel,” Nero called over his shoulder, into the space beyond the lines. A hand settled on his shoulder and Nero took the comb in mouth again, holding his hand free. The weight of his knife was familiar and welcome, whispering grievances against his skin as its handle prickled heavy cold across his palm. The blade split through the bindings that held Kirk against the crates. They parted like his skin and the human slid off onto the ground, into the unforgiving fuchsia.
Reply
The pain keeps spreading, and where it burns hot, it leaves behind embers. Dull, constant lines of embers left behind to constantly burn and nag and remind him of where the pointy-thing has been. It flared out like wings on either side of his adam's apple, spreading up and down, curving inward.
He had only a split second to look up - fucking agony where he pulled the skin on his neck - before he was falling. Gravity gave up its hold and turned and spun until he met cold unforgiving floor. His chest felt it, the right side of his face, and where his broken hand smacked into it. Oh, that felt it the most. Kirk choked down a cry, but he could not move. His fingers were dead to the cold or swollen beyond movement. His head turned just a little, sweeping over a flopped arm and seeing bruised, bloodless lines left behind by the cording holding him up.
His gaze went further upwards and he saw it. The ends of several more of those combs sticking out over the edge of a crate and a jar. A strange looking glass jar of something thick and dark and oily. The chemical reek of whatever it was on his neck, the stench of his own blood...
It hit him. It slammed into him with the force of a sledgehammer. He understood. He wanted to remain ignorant.
He was being tattooed. His neck... Nero had spread a tattoo across his neck. A tattoo of an unknown design, speaking unknown, alien words, painting an unknown painting. Not scars, something far more visible. Ink. Dark ink, all over his neck...
A sound fell from his lips that came from deep in his chest, and his eyes closed. Couldn't fight because he couldn't feel his body.
Reply
“Again,” he demanded, but Kirk didn't speak.
That sound, so full of hopelessness and terror, horrific nausea, black, and green, and choked with the smell of crackling pyres. That was the sound. The sound of grievance, the hollow uttering of defeat, painful and shaming. It tumbled across the floor and the Narada let him have it, savor it. It wrapped through the air, and melted against his skin. He wanted more. He pressed down on the human's ribs, pushing the breath from him in curls. It was a wheeze, nothing more. His scowl settled and he lifted the comb again. If Kirk wouldn't produce it willingly, he would draw it out of him.
“Eihva is beautiful, she is hard and smart,” Nero began as he knelt on either side of Kirk's ribs. His fingers wound tight through the blonde's hair, fixed his skull in absolute position. The comb hesitated, dripped black across Kirk's forehead. The dot slid back, and Nero ignored it as he punctured the skin behind Kirk's cheek. The lines here were more delicate, but no less dark, no less marring. They would change Kirk's face, remind him of the gentle hands and harsh teeth of death. He would be forced to remember a world he never knew. “Eihva is the only deep core driller I have known, she works with skill and speed. She sings sometimes as she clears the engines, and as she works the drill. Her voice protects her from Klivam hands and prisoner's knives, but she is not weak. The cold is harsh and she loses fingers, toes, her skin is marred but not her work. Never her work. She wants to see chi'Rihan again badly, to see the fire-falls.”
Reply
A tattoo on his face. On his face. His mind could not even fathom the full scale of such a thing. Nero had him helpless on the floor and he wasn't even bound, but he could not dick all to stop him from writing poetry or blasphemy on his face then he could fly--
Eihva.
A name they had mentioned before. "Eihva is beautiful..."
"It was Eihva's birthing day today, she had shift off. She survived the prisons, she was strong."
Nero had said that, hissing and low in his ears. "You killed my crew."
Eihva was dead. A story. The tattoo. Something was coming together in his mind. Something terrifying and horrible and alien. "What-" Oh god, it hurt to talk. His throat was raw and it made the bloody skin of his neck twist and pull. "What do they mean?" He rasped out, eyes opening and focusing on the face directly above his. His voice was only a whisper now. "Tattoos." Needed to know. Didn't want to know. Had to know.
He didn't want to be right.
Reply
“They are a story, James,” Nero explained. His words were slow, leaden, and laced with the same flavor as the truths he'd related. “The only story that matters.” He pulled back and started marking in silence as he considered Eihva. He recalled the feel of her flesh, the cold creep of her blood across his shins. The green of it, blaring in the dark and the white, glistening and cracking like ice on metal. The cold crawl of her skin....and the feel of her arm around his neck. The gentle amber light of midmorning became the humid span of the Narada, creeping and gold. Somewhere in the colored lights he remembered her frown, her doubt of Spock, and the way he eclipsed her. He looked down at Kirk, eclipsed by him now, and his expression tightened hard.
“We paint the tales of the dead onto our skin,” Nero repeated. The words were soundless, hollow, told through generations on generations. They were meaningless, solid, lifeless. “Paint their names, so that when the marks fade...so too can the time of grieving.” He took a shallow breath and traced the line with his thumb, wiping the sheen of blood away. He couldn't sully Eihva's song with worthless words. “But our grief does not fade, so we burn our marks deep...so that we will never forget.”
The room was cold and Nero looked away from Kirk, stared off at the shadows. The new marks across his skin still burned, he could hear their names where they intersected his family. Behind him, there was the gentle hum of Eihva's song. The clang and exultation of Veyn echoed deep in a ship that no longer existed. Laughter erupted from Baohn and the shrill call of his wife followed. What caught his attention, finally, was Ayel's indignant call for aid as the children accosted him outside of Baohn's home.
The halfhearted shout of rekkhai felt so solid, so bright and orange, that Nero craned his head. For just the briefest moment, the motion painted over the Romulan at his back. His periphery caught sight of short hair and a wry smile, a loose shirt, well worn and half ragged-as soon as he narrowed his vision, halted to view it, it vanished into the glare of the lights and Nero was left in the present. Left in a small room with bad air and garish lights. He could almost smell the bite of the blood, the fumes of the pigment, and the rank stench of Klingons as he turned away from Ayel and looked back at Kirk.
His attention snagged on the line across Kirk's face and he slid his finger across it again. He stared at his hand, it was cold. But not green. His expression evened and fell away from his face, tumbling to the floor as he dipped the comb again and fisted his fingers tighter in Kirk's hair. His touch was less reverent, less forgiving of flesh, as he continued.
“Tha'liij is afraid of thunder,” Nero exhaled as he twisted Kirk's head and outlined his other cheek, pouring symmetry and silence into the skin.
Reply
How long did he laid there, sprawled at angles on the floor of an alien, enemy ship that seemed as in desire to inflict pain as its master did? Tiny thoughts trickled into his brain as his body tried to pretend the pain was all so far away. He wondered if the ship was male like its master or female like the Enterprise. His mind decided that the ship had to be male, because his mind could not define Nero's ship as anything but the giant tentacle monster that had take up the view screen what felt like forever ago. Male because obviously that ship was compensating for something.
He didn't want to know. He didn't want to know the story of each person branding into his skin, telling their tale in hollow words like a granite carved monument. Didn't want to know that this person had owned a horse and had a son. Didn't want to know about their favorite drink. Didn't want to know about their home on the edge of a city he had never heard of. The pain in his hair was a distant thing. Everything felt distant, like this was happening to someone else. They had mentioned that during the classes about torture. They said it was a blessing. They lied.
It was terrifying.
Kirk stared up into bright lights, barely blinking as the comb came close to his eye. That hurt, made him freeze, made the voice inside his head scream. Those unforgiving points right beside his eye, the tender flesh of his eye, searing. The mimicry of tenderness as Nero's thumb repetitively brushed away the mixture of blood and ink.
The tingling started in his toes.
It was about the same time the first tear finally fell from his eyes, burning the wounds from the comb.
The tingling stopped being tingling and started to turn into pain. Crawling up along his nerves, making his legs twitch in spasms as life started to return to the limp limbs. Kirk missed entirely when Nero stopped working the comb into his flesh, far too consumed with the fire that was screaming through every part of him as circulation started to realize it could return. He had no idea when the cry wrenched from him that he could no longer hold inside, every tiny movement impossible to stop and adding fuel to the fire. It all hurt far more then his fingers being broken, hurt even more then the tattoos being pressed into his skin. Or maybe they just added heat.
Forgot where he was, who he was, and was eaten alive by fire.
Reply
"If you kill him, you'll never get your information."
Reply
“I don't want to kill him,” Nero admitted evenly, a low current beneath the clashing staccato of Kirk's cries and George's half-babbled Rihannsu. “Not yet.”
His attention was torn from Kirk, forced into an impatient, keening halt against his skull. He cast his glance at the hevam still leashed to the table. He could smell the fetid bite of burning iron and his eyes narrowed. He stepped off the sparking Kirk, away from his live limbs that crawled against the floor, slid to nowhere and back again.
“But if you supply my information,” Nero continued as he crossed to George's side. “I will not object.”
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
"You are beginning to bore me." The words were even and dangerous, sliding from him like an order. The tips of his fingers were starting to prickle and hum--had they left the coolant on him? Hm, all the same.
Reply
Reply
The reek of blood was choking, and the pain at his neck increased. Had to make the fire die so he could think again.
So he concentrated on one thing. ...A pair of dark eyes, framed in brown hair, glaring at him.
Reply
Leave a comment