Coughing through the sudden sand like storm of dust that swum around him, the astonished man felt his eyes bulge in his sockets. Glancing with a gaping mouth around the room, his pupils dilated as he took in the dead forms of the three armed guards.

His ears rang with the tell tale sound of heavy calibre bullets, their gate deafening in the tight confines and naturally amplifying make up of the small room.

The pupils contracted even further at the sight of Vlada slipping down the wall, his waxy fingers scrubbing frantically at an open wound that was spewing blood between the man's hands with a waterfall force.

He would be dead in a matter of seconds.

Paper thin eyelids fluttered over the astonished eyes.

This couldn't be real.

Perhaps now, his own mind was beginning to betray him as soundly as his body was.

The acerbic, thick dust coated his throat and he wheezed half heartedly.

…but if the smoke like substance was real, didn't that mean that the fire had to be real as well?

Opening his eyes once more, he saw the forms of various figures hovering over him, gazing at him with hungry eyes.

His own eyes blinked in confusion as those figures began to take discernible forms.

His heart sank as they did, and he cursed himself for allowing his mind to torture him so. He had thought he had done an adequate job in putting those demons to bed, and yet now…they were well and truly of said bed, dancing before his very eyes.

Turning his head to avoid the sickening hallucination, he wondered manically would they shoot him in the midst of a psychotic break.

His lips curved at that.

It wouldn't be that bad of a way to go. All things considered, it almost had the propensity to be considered quite peaceful.

Slipping away into the unknown, his heart being stopped in one single discharge, surrounded by loved ones.

Fake, wispy, spiritual loved ones who had never actually given a rat's ass about him, but still, it wasn't so bad.

He briefly hoped Curtis would find a new friend.

Lolling in the chair, he was vaguely aware of hands touching him. They were quite gentle for executioner hands he pondered, as his head lolled down onto his chest.

He was quite lucky he supposed, not everyone was so gently pressed and poked in their death chair. A death bed was too much to ask for, and if such a bed was anything like his cell brick mattress, he was ok with this chair.

Voices continued to echo around his head, and he resolutely ignored them.

He focussed on his breathing.

How had he never truly appreciated with a marvel the human body was?

Even now, in the immanency of his long awaited death, his heart beat with a ferocious gate, working hard to keep him alive. To keep him tethered to this earthly plane he so yearned to depart.

His lungs contracted and expanded with a reliability that also defied his needs. His brain too, continued to send all the necessary communications to his vital organs, ordering them to keep him rooted to this godforsaken hell hole.

The voices just wouldn't stop, and he turned his head further away in ire.

Hadn't he made it clear? Hadn't he sacrificed major portions of soft tissue in his pursuit of clarity on the matter?

He would not talk.

He did not want to talk.

He was unequivocally done with the art of speech.

All he wanted now was to die. To die with a muted dignity, to die the death he had earned.

A quick one.

A one where his earthly suffering would be ended with an immediacy, his mortal pain extinguished upon the collision of bullet and heart.

Alas.

The hands kept groping him, as he kept his eyes firmly shut. He was done with this game, he wouldn't open his eyes any more.

They were done.

He was done.

He'd seen enough.

More than enough.

Confused voices swam in a disorientating haze above him, and he tucked his chin down on his chest. Trying in vain to protect himself from their onslaught.

Fate was a cruel mistress.

Not satisfied with his physical dilapidation, it had seen fit to crucify him with his own psyche. To, in his dying moment, needle him with its despicably out of reach visions.

The voices were hauntingly true to form, as he shook his head in pointless frustration, eyes clamped tightly shut.

All those times, all those cases when he couldn't wrap his head around the things people would do and then blame it on voices, came back to him now…now that his voices were so devastatingly real.

It was as if they were standing right in front of him, it was as if the hands that were still prodding at him were theirs.

They were certainly more gentle than Vlada had ever proven capable of. Perhaps he mellowed at the finish line, perhaps a gentle presence was his way of sending his victims off into the next world.

Eyes rolled under still resolutely shut lids.

That didn't exactly fit in with the sadist's pattern of bloodthirsty torture. No…no, this was some kind of god awful continuation of his imprisoned hell.

Surely…surely they hadn't changed their minds.

His heart plummeted with the speed of a rocket. Bile rose in his throat. He couldn't take it anymore.

He'd been as good a soldier as he possibly could. He'd endured more than his fair share of horror. He'd kept his secrets, he'd protected his country.

He deserved a reliable death.

That's all he asked…to have the life snuffed out of him as quickly as possible.

Well, what little life remained in him anyway.

The hands were more insistent now, and he couldn't help but wince in pain. The prodding instantly melted away, and he felt a stab of confusion.

Why would they do that?

Usually his irrepressible utterances and grimaces of pain would cause the hands to increase their pressure, to find even more repulsive ways to increase his already intolerable agony.

But now…now…they melted away?

The voices were sounding again, urgent in their differentiated tones, reaching an almost crescendo pitch of nonsensical babbling.

About to turn his head away, to protect himself as best he could from this horrendously cruel breach of reality, a gentle hand caught his face.

The hand was careful.

It was the most careful hand he'd encountered in the best part of a year.

The thumb of that hand gently caressed his cheek, as if trying to wash away all the pain that his tattered visage had endured.

There was something horrifically familiar about that hand.

How much more betrayal from his own mind could he endure, before completely succumbing to the lure of mind numbing insanity.

There was no way that hand belonged to that person.

That person had abandoned him.

That person had cast him aside like a used car part, and that meant that there was no way in hell that that hand was the one gently cupping his puffed up face.

The voice, now alone in its utterance, was heinously real.

So real…

"Look at me…open your eyes."

The confused barrage of voices had completely stopped, now…it was just this voice. Just this lone voice and all of the hurt that came with it.

He clenched his eyes tighter still.

"Open your eyes."

The hand never left his face, and never lost its gentle, soft hold…but the voice took on an edge of authority, something that stirred in him his natural and acquired instinct for following orders.

His eyes fluttered in inherent compliance, before common sense and recent experience clamped them down once more.

It was a trick.

A deception of his own mind, that had come to ruin his much coveted death.

"Your eyes…open them, look at me…you know who I am, look at me…."

His lips trembled.

A burst of hope, of blinding natural hope erupted in him and he didn't have the energy to push it back down.

He did know who that was, but he couldn't bring himself to believe it.

It was too late…

Surely, it was too damn late…

The hand increased its pressure, but remained carefully soft in its grasp.

"Come on…trust yourself, you know who it is…just open them…"

This last command was spoken in a near whisper, and it cracked with raw emotion near the end.

It was only that faltering, that exposure of stark fright, that could have penetrated his heavily burdened mind.

He had never heard that voice sound like that.

Vulnerable.

Feeling himself begin to tremble, he took a deep breath that set his abused respiratory system into distress, and slowly….oh so very slowly, flickered his eyes open.

A blurred image met him, as he blinked tentatively. His peripheral vision identified two other upright figures surrounding him, as his direct vision struggled to process the crouched form in front of him.

Feeling his lips blister even as he spoke, he parted them with an almost superhuman effort.

Focussing his gaze as best he could, he tipped his head to the side and stared. His heart constricted painfully with staggering relief and joy, feelings that he hadn't experienced for months…so many months.

They almost felt alien to him.

But…the person in front of him, was no alien. He was as stout as ever, his familiar scent seemed to waft off him as he appraised him with eyes that had once glowed.

Blood trickled down his chin as his lips gave way to the grating effort of speech, and the gentle hand instantly moved to delicately wipe it away.

"Bo…" he swallowed, a mixture of blood and saliva soaring down his windpipe. "…Boss?"

The gentle hands found his excruciatingly damaged knees, and the warmth that imparted upon them was like a thunderbolt to his fatigued, frail body.

The almost whispered response was perhaps the most deafeningly, and beautifully melodious thing he had heard since his months and months of earthly hell had begun. His head felt dizzy with the rush of endorphins, which in beautiful turn, eased his physical pain.

"Yeah kid… it's me," the voice responded with an urgency, before cracking some more as it continued, an unprocessed agony evident in its murmured conversation, wrought with conflicting emotions.

The warm hold on his knees intensified.

"We've been looking everywhere for you, Tim."

…

TBC

…