Cross-Stitch
Fox trudged through the Venomese swamp, the black pool of icy cold sludge coming up to his knees. Yellow lightning streaked across the boiling olive sky. He looked up and prayed for escape, hearing them following him, rustling through the acrid fungus trees coming for him, shouting orders. He lost his energy. The crash had drained him. He slumped at the edge of the swamp, falling to his knees, clawing into the mud. His burned flight jacket provided no comfort from the paralyzing cold. "No," he choked in the nearly un-breathable toxic air. It had filled his lungs and head for too long and he suddenly felt light-headed, tranquil, and even a little giggly.
Guns were pressed to his head and body, six, hands grabbing him and pulling him up from the mud. He giggled, and looked at each of the brute monkeys with their white eyebrows. They dragged him back through the swamp, pulling him by under his arms. Fox held his hands out like a falling angel. Up into the olive yellow clouds.
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"McCloud," said a wide imposing voice. "I've never had such disappointment, mixed with such pleasure."
Fox awoke and found himself naked, strapped to a cold metal table. He struggled in his restraints, panicking. Andross leaned into his face. Fox squirmed and the ape's rough hand grabbed his forehead and shoved his head back into the steel, holding it in place.
"Congratulations, you've killed Star Wolf," the ape said. "I have to hand it to you. Expert piloting like your father. Just like your father." He lingered on father, stretching it out, holding it, dangling it over Fox's mouth like a drop of water. "But he's dead too."
"What do you want? Just kill me already." Fox shivered, his fur prickling all over his body.
"A replacement," Andross said. Several scientists, doctors in lab coats circled the table with tablets, glancing at the naked orange furred body, scribbling things down.
Fox tried to look at them. "What do you mean?" One doctor pulled measuring tape from Fox's underarm to his waist.
A salamander in a lab coat handed Andross a small marker. The ape leaned over Fox's body and started tracing a line on his muzzle. "For Wolf O'Donnell. You killed him, and then as fate would have it, you crashed. It seems most appropriate. Oh yes, and the rest of your team is dead."
Fox shook his head from side to side, causing the line Andross was tracing to shoot across his cheek. Andross frowned at the error and smacked Fox across the face with the back his hand, nearly shattering bone.
Fox saw stars, unable to react. He felt his lip pulse where it cut on a fang, blood running down his chin. Andross grabbed his jaw, squeezing blood out and continued the line, dotting as he went along. "We'll have to break the muzzle here," he remarked to a doctor who nodded. "Wolf's was two centimeters longer. We'll insert plastic extenders just under the skin."
"Should we do nerve synthesis?"
"Fuck the nerves. He doesn't have to move his face right. He just has to look like him. The legs too, Wolf was taller." Someone dotted his shins.
"What about the fur?" another scientist asked.
Fox tried to squirm again and found it helpless.
"Yes it is quite orange." His eyes traced over Fox's sculpted figure, lingering. Realization hit. "Ah, easy. Dipping him in a bromide-acetylene solution will necrotize the fur, turn it gray."
"That will kill him."
Andross thought, and smirked. "We'll just have to do it quickly then." He looked back at Fox's body, then his face and traced knuckles over his lips, picking up blood gently. "Like a nice warm bath." He smiled and glanced at the blood, studying it.
Fox stopped resisting, staring at the harsh lights above, trying to burn his eyes out.
The ape sighed and returned with the marker, dotting around the eyes. Fox stared, numb and unaffected. Andross took a tablet from a doctor and checked something, handing it back. "Also, the eyes are too shallow. I figure we'll simply shatter the supraorbital foramens, sink them in." He dotted over Fox's eyebrows.
"Goodness," the ape continued. "That reminds me. Wolf only had one eye." A doctor looked on, nodding approvingly. Andross pinched Fox's eyelid down and drew an X. "The left one."
When his eye opened again, tears ran out.
"How shall we remove it?" asked the doctor.
Andross looked at Fox, and he looked back, nostrils flaring, full of rage.
The ape smiled. "Like this."
He snatched a pick from a tray and stabbed it into Fox's eye. Every doctor stopped in their tracks and watched. Fox's claws tore off when he clenched the metal. He stopped thinking in the lightning, the thunder, the screaming, the emptying feeling.
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"There," said a Cornerian soldier leading a squad across the white frozen Fortunian landscape with rifles drawn, fuzzy figures in the distance running toward him. "That's him."
Fox was on his hands and knees by the smoking crashed Wolfen, his body emaciated and hidden in the pilot's jacket too big. Blowing snow burned into his face. He struggled to take off a glove and saw gray charred fur, the roots were white. He pulled his fur back and saw the skin blistered and red. His muscles burned as he pulled himself up along the burnt hull. He stood and pain shot from his ankles to his thighs, but he ignored it, seeing his reflection in the charred glass. Gray fried fur, his muzzle was broken and disfigured, longer, and he couldn't move the top, numb. His face was a nightmare, jutting bone under the split frayed fur, sunken in like he was already dead. He lifted the fur above his eyebrow and saw blood-caked stitches and taut skin where it had been pulled. An eye patch covered his left, and he lifted it seeing the empty crusted over socket.
Fox touched his face with both hands shaking. It hurt. But it was too late, Cornerian soldiers were on him, putting guns to him in an all too familiar feeling.
"Wolf O'Donnell, you are under military arrest for war crimes committed against Cornerian forces and citizens."
"No wait, please," Fox mumbled bewildered, his voice lost in the wind. They pulled his arms back sending jolts of pain through his racked body. He howled and whimpered.
"God," a soldier remarked, looking on. "Have you ever seen anyone more ugly?" Another soldier laughed, and bound his hands.
Fox cried, "I'm not who you think I am."
"Shut your twisted face you fuck."
They shoved him along in the snow, heading back to their patrol ship.
"No please, I'm Fox. Fox McCloud."
They laughed riotously at that, nearly losing their grip on their prisoner. Then another soldier hit him in the back of the head with his gun, and he was out, slumping in their hands.
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In the cell of the prison, a Cornerian doctor, a young calico with glasses looked up from her tablet. "Bravo Mr. O'Donnell. You're currently 95 pounds. You're killing yourself, and the prison will begin feeding you intravenously, whether you want it or not."
"Just kill me. Please."
The doctor adjusted her glasses. "Mr. O'Donnell, we are an enlightened planet with an enlightened government. Capital punishment was outlawed decades ago. You will spend your life in this prison. I suggest you change your attitude, and accept that."
"No," Fox said, staring into her eyes. "You don't understand. I need to die. I'm trapped in this body. I need to be freed."
She looked elsewhere, hiding her eyes from the emaciated broken shell of a person. "I'm sorry," the doctor said. "It isn't up to me."
"Please," Fox said. "Just please test my blood. I beg of you one last time. Test my DNA."
The feline rolled her eyes and lifted a page on her tablet, then let it go. "Still clinging to the Fox McCloud fantasy. I thought the psychologists worked you through this months ago."
Fox looked down and his hands shook, flexing his clawless digits. He lunged for his face with them, tearing futilely at his fur. "I'm Fox McCloud! I'm Fox McCloud!" he shouted, muffled in his paws.
"Guard!" the doctor yelled, getting up, holding her tablet protectively as the prisoner broke down.
"I'm Fox McCloud! I'm Fox McCloud!"
An armored guard burst into the room, and swung at Fox with a club, hitting him repeatedly until the shouting ceased and turned into a painful murmur. The doctor watched helplessly, then fled out the half open door.
In the night, Fox put his food tray aside on the floor and rose up to look in the mirror at his malformed bruised face in the dim fluourescent light. He raised his snout at an angle, checking the dried blood trails that ran from his nose. He touched his face again, unable to remember what it looked like before. The handsome poster boy features. The Cornerian hero. He tried to remember. Falco, Peppy, The Great Fox, ROB, Slippy. Suddenly he couldn't. He had no memory. Malnutrition was setting in. Neurons in his brain slowed to a crawl.
He stared at the broken face in the mirror, the sunken eye, the covered eye, all the gray fur.
"I'm Wolf O'Donnell."