Memories Shared ‘Verse: 40k, dead!Ariadne
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“No, Interrogator.” Ariadne’s lips move without her assent, and it isn’t her voice that issues from her throat. “But it is the truth. Do you want me to lie to you, Interrogator?”
She sees herself through his eyes, and she could weep. She is strong and whole and calm, straight-backed in uniform with her hair swept neatly back. An image she saw in the mirror every day for decades. She misses that reflection so badly.
“I do not believe you, heretic.” Her reflection’s voice has the quality of a recording - not quite hers, but not unfamiliar either. “I know,” Ariadne says. She has no control, she is a passenger behind these eyes that feel like hers but are not. “But there is nothing else I can give you.”
She watches herself reach for the pliers, and she knows what comes next. Instinct wants to pull in a deep breath, to grit her teeth against the pain. But she doesn’t have that agency. Her muscles do not tense up, her breath remains even. This is not her body.
But when the pain starts, it feels completely real.
~
Ariadne lies awake, alone for hours. Her damaged body shivers incessantly, a staccato rhythm of pain against the unforgiving treadplate. Her thoughts circle endlessly, trapped in a loop of horror and fear.
How many days has it been so far? How many days out of the months that she knows this lasts? How long before the torture steps up to serious?
She’s given up on trying to move. Sometimes she gets up and paces, painfully and falteringly, but she has no say in when it happens. She treasures those moments. The paralysis is suffocating.
She is going to lose her mind. She knows it with bitter, chilling certainty. Tacitus lost his, and he was a Navigator. She is going to lose her mind, and it will change nothing.
~
Her reflection no longer looks like her. The lines are the same, but she is learning a terror of this woman who brings only pain.
The irony is not lost on her, but it doesn’t make it any easier.
“I taught myself,” she repeats for the hundredth time. “I bought books wherever I could find them - the Merry Lancer, Mortis station…” The words are so familiar. She can recite them by heart. When she speaks she can almost believe that they really are her words. So long as she doesn’t try to deviate from the script.
~
“Please Interrogator,” Ariadne sobs through split and swollen lips. “Please, please, I’m not hiding anything!”
The desperation in her voice is hers, real and raw. She already knows, already knows, that it won’t change a damn thing, but she cannot help but beg.
“Please-!” Her voice pitches upwards and cracks as the Interrogator takes hold of a shattered hand, fingers probing across the burns to find a length of unbroken bone long enough to take hold of and snap. “Don’t - please - no - aaaAAAAHHH!”
~
She whimpers to herself in the darkness and mumbles. Refrains that she only heard before in snatches - still water, cool and dark and clear - and shreds of hollow comfort. “It’s okay,” she whispers brokenly, “it’s okay, I’m here, I’m here.”
Sometimes she hears the words in his voice, and forgets that they are not meant for her.
Sometimes she hears them in hers, and forgets that she doesn’t choose what she says.
~
Ariadne coughs weakly, mouth full of blood. She looks up at the Interrogator and loathes her. “- fuck you -” she whispers. No - she thinks - no, no don’t say that.
“What did you just say?” the Interrogator asks, voice cold with too-familiar anger. No, Ariadne pleads inside her head. Please, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that -! Her lips peel back from her teeth. “You heard me,” her voice says. “Say it again,” the Interrogator growls. Don’t, Ariadne begs, don’t, don’t. But she remembers this exchange, dimly. She knows the script. “Fuck. You.” she says.
And her world shatters into more pain.
~
Ariadne flinches as the Interrogator paces around her. Shudders chase across her torn skin, sending stabbing pains through her muscles. Tears run down her cheeks.
“Look at me,” the Interrogator orders. She looks up without hesitation, whimpering.
“Please…” her voice trembles, “Please, Interrogator…” The words come without thought, but the desperation is real. She hopes against hope for mercy but she knows that she hopes in vain. She would do anything to make this stop but it won’t, it won’t, it won’t.
~
Sometimes the world breaks apart, while Ariadne shakes and sweats through the sickening grip of nightmare, or fever, or sheer agony.
She sees scenes, in fragments, that could never have existed aboard the Void Eye. Sees people from Tacitus’ life, or from his imagination. It is like watching an incomprehensible holoflick.
But at least it distracts from the agony.
There is nothing else but the agony.
~
The whip comes down again on her already-shredded flesh and she screams, and screams, and does not stop screaming. Her struggles are weak and futile.
A boot presses down on her back and she convulses.
“-- anything --” she promises, with her shredded, almost-soundless voice. “-- anything -- please -- anything - !”
~
They drag her, they hurt her, they leave her in the darkness. They hurt her, they chuck her around, they hurt her. They whip her, they burn her, they cut her, they break her, they whip her again.
Pain and pain and pain and she cannot believe that she still finds words sometimes to try and plead because there are no words in her head but her mouth still moves.
She would scream all the time, all the hours, even the quiet, dark alone hours, if she only had the energy.
She would scream forever, is screaming forever inside her skull, but there is no sound.
