Disclaimer: I don't own NCIS New Orleans or its characters…
Author's Note: This is entirely Marjorie K Place's fault. I blame her! She planted the seed in my brain by positing the question of 'what would it take to break Pride?' after I traumatized her with how I would break LaSalle (a story best left locked in the attic).
WARNING: MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH AND SOME GORE. ALSO, LOTS OF ANGST.
/You only managed to release one of my men, Pride. So you only get one of 'em back. You're gonna hafta-/
"Laurel."
There was no hesitation. There was no other choice. He'd failed. Even with the help of his crack team of agents, he'd utterly failed to track these bastards down. Stalling for time by following their demands had likewise failed, and one of the inmates they'd wanted released, that he and his team had pretended to release had indeed escaped. The other had been killed in the attempt. Pride had tried to make the argument that it was Bernard Cooper's own stupidity that had gotten him stopped by the state police and shot to death. But it hadn't worked. Dennis Pierce and his men were some evil fucking bastards. And they'd wanted blood. They'd wanted blood from the beginning. Why else go through all the trouble of kidnapping one federal agent and another federal agent's daughter just to bust some gang members out of jail?
His only hope was that the evil bastards held to some sort of sense of honor. Sometimes the psychotic types did. Sometimes they didn't. For Laurel's sake, Dwayne prayed they did.
/Take her an drop her off at the release point,/ Pierce called over his shoulder, and two of the substantially large group of masked men approached his daughter who was strung from the large branch of a Sycamore tree alongside his missing agent. When the group had first started broadcasting the video feed, there'd been a moment of pure gut-wrenching terror when Dwayne had thought the two most important people in his life had been lynched. But they simply had their arms tied up by the thick rope, keeping them suspended so that their toes barely touched the ground, rendering them immobilized and vulnerable. Thankfully, now the two goons cut Dwayne's baby girl down and ushered her off screen, causing his heart to stutter as he lost eyes on his daughter. Please, please let them allow her to go free and unharmed.
Pierce turned back to the camera with a sinister, yellow-toothed grin fit for a jack-o-lantern. Or a ghoul. The man was a ghoul.
/I'll tell ya where ya can pick her up in a little while,/ he said. /But first, there's somethin I want ya ta see./
It wasn't a rock hard lump that formed in Dwayne's throat. More like all of his insides had been petrified, turned to stone. Because only now that his worry for his daughter's safety had subsided a fraction, that she was no longer teetering on her tiptoes, her hands tied above her head, her mouth gagged and her eyes wide with terror, could he think of Pierce's other prisoner. The young man Dwayne loved like family, almost as if he were his own flesh and blood. Almost. But apparently, not quite enough. Because Dwayne Pride had just done the most terrible thing he'd ever done in his entire life. Hell, if reincarnation was real, it was probably the worst thing he'd ever done in all of the lives he might've lived, or ever would live.
They cut Christopher LaSalle down, too, removing the dark handkerchief gag from his mouth first -for reasons Dwayne didn't want to consider, but knew too well, to torture the man who was watching via a fucking untraceable feed, to make him listen to his friend plead.
It took four of them to subdue the young man. Even after being strung up like a side of beef for at least a few hours, if not the entire day and a half since they'd taken him... There must be shooting pain all through his arms but he was fighting. Somehow he was fighting- had tried to fight.
But they'd won.
Four of them holding him pinned to the ground, one for each arm and leg as he thrashed about.
"You don't have to do this, Pierce!" Pride shouted at the screen, the camera that fed his picture back to the hostage takers. "We can still work somethin' out. How 'bout a trade? Me for him?"
/Too late for that, Pride. An' I want you to remember that I didn't do this,/ Pierce brandished a razor sharp bowie knife. Dwayne had been mistaken. His insides weren't stone. They'd liquefied. /You did./
Dennis Pierce turned away from the camera, walked up to stand above his intended victim, watching as panic motivated the man to fight harder, throwing the smallest of his captors off one leg and kicking him in the ribs. The ferret-like masked man hastily threw himself bodily back down on Chris' left leg before he could shake any more of them off, and Pride felt his soul slowly slipping away as the ghoul straddled Christopher's waist, and placed the tip of that ridiculously large blade at the base of his young friend's throat.
Stop! Don't do this. Please, don't do this.
Dwayne had no idea if the words made it to his mouth. If they'd come out as shouts or rasping, broken pleas. He could barely hear Meredith Brody's shocked mantra of 'Oh-No. No-No-No...' from behind him, Percy rushing back into the room along with Patton, their frantic last minute attempts to trace the feed forgotten in their desperation. It was the eleventh hour. The last minute, the last seconds of the eleventh hour, and they'd failed.
He'd failed.
Christopher shouted as the blade bit into his chest, just above and to the left of his sternum. The flood lights the masked ghouls had set up painted the dark forest clearing with harsh light and deep shadows, the camera capturing the grisly scene in all too vivid detail. And all Dwayne could do was watch, frozen to the spot in shock and horror as Pierce cut his young friend open.
/It's not your fault, King! Tell Cade an' my momma an' my sister I love 'em! It's not your fault! It's not-/
His shouts degenerated into screams of agony. Dwayne had never heard the man he knew better than most men knew their own sons make those sorts of sounds before. Dwayne's insides were not stone, not liquid, but on fire and as cold as ice at the same time as he listened to Christopher scream, as he watched Pierce cut the young man's chest open, blood spraying up over his hands, a macabre torrent of arterial red that coated the remains of Christopher's grey shirt, his neck and face as he writhed and thrashed and screamed the primal scream of animals dying, dying in the most agonizing, horrible and inhumane way.
And then he stilled -mercifully, Dwayne thought, and hated himself with every fiber of his being for thinking it. He was dead. Dwayne tried to convince himself, was desperate to convince himself that his young friend whom he loved most in the world only second to his daughter was dead. His right leg twitched a little, but please God, let him be dead. For with a few flashes of silver somehow spared from the crimson coating of blood, Pierce proceeded to sink his hand into Christopher's gaping chest and pulled out his heart, tugging to snap the few lingering strings of connective tissue.
He carried the freshly disembodied organ over to the camera, lording over Dwayne, brandishing it like it was a trophy. Blood was still spurting from the flesh that -oh, god- seemed to try a futile contraction, one last half-beat, spattering little droplets on the camera lens like a plague rain over Egypt. Steam rolled off from Christopher's still warm heart into the cool night air. And there was a buzzing, a humming, an entire ocean crashing in Pride's ears. He couldn't hear what terrible, sick taunts the ghoul was calling out to him. He couldn't care. He couldn't feel. It might as well had been his own heart cut from his chest and held out for him to see.
The camera went black.
Or maybe his entire world had.
A/N: There is more to this angsty fic, because I find I do like writing Pride in this context. Also, what about everybody else? How are they going to deal with their friend's gruesome demise? Will they get revenge? Will it be enough? Will Pride ever recover from feeling guilty, that he sentenced LaSalle to death?
