My first time trying to write some Defiance fan fiction! Unfortunately, I own nothing, but even if I did, I'd give it back to Kevin Murphy and the other writers. They're just too good.

"Name?"

"You know my name."

The scribbling of a pen stops. The E-Rep are so quaint. "Sir. Name?"

"Datak Tarr."

"Occupation?"

"… Is this a trick question?" It's his turn to pause. "I'm a prisoner. I have no occupation."

The warden ignored him. This little tête-à-tête soon (read: immediately) bored the Castithan, as he called out answers with both increasing irritation and increasing disinterest. His mind was already elsewhere.

Datak Tarr felt that the day should have been worse. A little pathetic fallacy, a little acknowledgement from 'Reyetso' would have been nice. Would've made everything more real, and more final in his mind. He wished for storms and gale and razor rain, enough sloshing water to puddle and reflect the golden hubris falling apart inside his skull. Datak's eyes were unusually listless, his shoulders weighted. Visiting hours were over, now, and Stahma was gone. Alak was gone. He was alone, and the weather continued to seem bright and happy, as though not a thing had ever been broken, as though all sins had been scorched away in the light of a new day.

This was not the case.

"Your father - a religious man, no?" A brown-eyed pink-meat sat at the other end of the table, filling out details into a report that was obviously his. His new prison file.

"The Earth Republic must be low on funds if they're paying loose-mouthed fools to write idle gossip out by hand." Datak's statement was soured, pure scorn permeating the toxic breath of his words. The crisp, lean man at the other end of the table stopped scribbling momentarily, before raising his eyes steadily and even offering a smug smile – to which Datak's eyes glistened with the light of new information, silently gauging the prison guard, his head tilting backwards to appraise this reaction of arrogance.

This one was a predator, then.

"As a Casti born to a Yuke Liro priest," the warden said, lips parting and words dragging by in a slight southern drawl, "I imagine that funding is always on the front of your mind. How important to you it must be. I have no doubt you'll have little enough scrip when y'leave this fine establishment. Just think of that." The warden, then, righted his collar and slipped his pen into his front pocket as Datak watched in quiet shock - before the words sank in.

Datak Tarr's rage was mighty and cruel and terrible - it was too immense, even for him. He could feel his bones howl under the weight of it. His lips drew back in a feral growl, and his chained hands railed against the restraints. Mangled and furious, his gory threats carried throughout the room, reverberating and getting louder and more desperate with each passing sentence. The warden cared little at all: he walked out, and commanded two guards to take Tarr to his new home. He struggled, he tried to bite, to fight – but he had no weapons, or hands free. The guards had both.

The ensuing struggle was uncontested, the outcome being a mouth full of pale, pink blood.

Once they were done with thundering blows into his stomach, they tossed him out into the prison ring as though he was the same as the prison's filthy methods of food dispensing, as though he was already brainless and was now only meat and fluid and bone.

Perhaps he was brainless. It certainly felt like his head had cracked open and splattered all over the prison camp's floors. Slowly, like a malfunctioning bioman, he inched himself closer and closer to becoming a tightly compacted ball, exposed in the open but the pain blossoming behind his eyes prevented him from doing anything more than curling into himself and hacking blood up in throat-racking coughs.

Then – and only then – it began to rain.