The Ordeal
One night they had played him the video of his own funeral. A strange, oddly tasteless experience that, seeing your own last rites, watching the pain of others as though it were a tv show, something to see and turn off, not real, not affecting him, or those he loved... Except, except, for the drawn face of his best friend. The ravaged face of his mother. The bewildered grief on the faces of those he had once known, and would probably never //Never say never,// see again. Perhaps it was the best way after all. If no one knew he was alive he might as well be dead.He snorted faintly. They'd really gone all out for him. Provided him with everything an anthropologist and Guide might need, except his freedom, except people to observe, except his Sentinel...
//Still,// he comforted himself, //it could be worse. Jim could be here too. Better this way. At least he's safe.// He blinked away tears, seeing again in his mind's eye the end of the tape they had shown him. Jim sitting beside a smooth grey stone, head tilted back to rest on the marker, staring at the sun as though it held answers. Sitting there in his new/old uniform, lips moving silently. They'd offered him a lip reader, but he didn't need one - the words were, after all, already engraved on his heart.
He breathed in carefully and deeply and, without a jar, carried on with his drawing of the Mayan animus glyph.
Perhaps they found what they wanted in the days that he didn't remember, where he woke with fur in his mouth, and only the computer's uncaring clock to tell him that a day, two or more sometimes, had been lost. The marks on his body troubled him little. Whatever they wanted they would have to deduce for themselves from his mute body.
They tried beating him while he was awake to remember it one day. Almost as if to see if it would do any good they watched while some faceless person administered a flogging, electricity, and other, worse things, until he was lost and sobbing with pain, but still silent, waiting for forever to come and kill him. He was sure that it would come. There was a moment, of great pain, when he thought, //it will be soon,// and when the dark closed in he reached gratefully for it, sure that he would find his other soul waiting for him, he could feel him, so close...
//I love you my Guide...I will come for you as soon as I can...//
//I trust you...//
...words echoing in his emptied head, and the memory of a kiss, light as angel's wings, deep as the ocean, promising everything he had ever longed for. Blair's eyes opened, and he smiled.
He couldn't hold onto it.
That evening they took him out again for questioning. Awake this time, again, the relentless voices battering his will.
"Where do you go, Mr Sandburg?"
"Nowhere, you saw to that. I haven't been anywhere in god knows how long, courtesy of you."
"Where did you go last night, Mr Sandburg?"
"To Lapland, to see dear old Santa Claus, and ask for a fucking earthquake for Christmas."
"Where did you go?"
"Where did you go?"
"Where did you go?"
Punctuated only by pain, and silence.
And eventually, "What did you see? Did anyone speak? What did they say?"
And maybe he told them... Inside his head he locked up layers upon layers. Where they took him with drugs and force, came only into the first few levels, reaching his unconscious mind, well regulated by his will. It would give way when they pressed, resist when they expected it, and was so finely crafted that they never even knew it was artifice. Perhaps the rest of his mind wasn't even there. He wondered sometimes. Perhaps it was with Jim, or running with the wolf, part of his indwelling spirit and knowledge carefully segregated from the rest, lest it be wrenched away with everything else.
Somewhere in there Jim was hidden, deep inside the first layer, the innermost place, the one where even he did not dare go. Jim, and the knowledge that his Sentinel would come for him. All he let himself remember was that Jim was safe. He never let that go.
And each time they drove him deep enough into himself, his spirit walked...
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The Labyrinth: Blair: Ordeal |
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Magnificent Seven stories, Sentinel stories, Star Trek Voyager stories, The Ragbag
Page last updated 21:42 28/03/2006.