Disclaimer: I don't own Thunderbirds.
FlashFictionFriday #106 "Barbed Wire"
Warnings for mentions of torture, and background character death.
It coiled, uneven and scrappy and curled in on itself awkwardly, all around the place. Razor sharp, but that wasn't the deterrent. The barrier between them and the outside world was psychological, not physical. With enough incentive – fear, determination, desperation – the physical could be overcome. Resultant wounds were barely an afterthought. It didn't matter what state they were in, once they were past the barrier.
Once they were free.
The problem was not the barbed wire. That, by itself, was surmountable. The problem was the guards.
Fingers perched perpetually on hair-triggers. Patrols were constant, with no blind spots. Blinding search lights killed any and all shadows.
The problem was not the barbed wire, because no-one ever reached the barbed wire.
Scott watched the latest hopeful get dragged back inside. Red smeared a trail behind the body – still breathing, because the organisation did not believe in easy ways out, but he knew that they'd soon wish they weren't.
Escape attempts were not viewed kindly. The bullet in his leg, too deep for him to gouge out with anything he could get his hands on, and not of enough concern for the organisation to remove for him, was a reminder of that.
It was a good day if the bullet in his leg was the only reminder. If the worst pain in his body was that ever-present throb of agony, then that meant he was ignored. Every time, he hoped it meant forgotten, but the respite had never lasted more than two days before they were back.
They called it interrogation. It wasn't a pretty word, but it still covered up the ugly truth they meant. Beatings, knives, more beatings. Worse.
Dragging his co-pilot by his hair across the filthy ground and breaking every bone in his body. Clinical. Detached.
Scott hadn't seen the man for some time now. He suspected he wouldn't see him again.
(Knew he wouldn't see him again, after the vertebrae in the man's neck had been snapped. The bullet in his leg had been to prove a point. His co-pilot had been the lesson. Captain Tracy held value. Corporal Jones did not.)
(Scott tried very hard not to think about Corporal Jones.)
They called it interrogation, but no matter how they dressed it up, torture was torture.
He didn't know how long he'd been there, now. He'd lost count of the days long ago – not that it had ever been an accurate count, when he spent most of his time in the dark underground. He only saw the sun on the way to or from their interrogation facilities.
More fancy words that just meant something ugly and cruel. Torture chamber.
Scott was more familiar with the room than he cared for. Too familiar, now, to shut out the memories of what was in there. He tried. Tried to preserve what sanity he had left by shutting it out.
Sleep was a luxury, but when it came he was always right back there, choosing to scream because if he was screaming he couldn't talk.
If he couldn't talk he couldn't tell them what they wanted to know, and his country – no, not his country; Scott was long past holding patriotic loyalty when he'd been here so long and not a whiff of retrieval had come his way. His family. His family would be safe.
Scott didn't think he'd ever see them again. Fantasy daydreams of reunion only made things worse, so he forced himself to face reality instead. He was stuck here, trapped inside the coils of barbed wire that taunted him with a taste of unachievable freedom. The barbed wire was surmountable, but unreachable, even before he got the bullet in his leg.
He was going to die here. Die, alone, abandoned. Screaming, most likely.
To start with, that had felt like the worst-case scenario. Now, he simply wondered what was taking so long.
This is set pre-series, and is the closest I've got so far to writing Scott in Bereznik - I still have no plans to write a full fic addressing it, but with the prompt my muses jumped straight to a pow camp, so here we are.
Thanks for reading!
Tsari