'Hurting is much easier than healing. And scars can't be mended the same way as fresh cuts.'
The afterlife is supposed to be...what exactly? Is it supposed to be bright? Is it supposed to be as empty as a hole in his heart? Or should it be like he hoped for at that moment underwater, letting go?
Wailing, wanting, calling, caressing a scar at the back of his hand, blinding warm feelings in his stomach, and the sound of voices. And who knows what is real anymore.
His head flickers with a short pain, and something pushes his mouth open even further. Slick rubber pushes in between his flesh, something gets pushed into his throat, makes it hard to breathe, and punctures his insides.
It doesn't hurt. It makes the part of him feeling twitch weakly in some strange sensation. Irritating as an irking itch and pull from within his flesh.
The dead aren't supposed to be anything but lost souls in the aether.
Yet, with the force of an exothermic reaction, the chain pull of a bomb, chemicals filling the world with heat, the thoughts about the unpleasant feeling continue. Something bloats in his system, bubbles in his stomach.
With a flicker of panic, he realizes he is not dead, again, even potent poison gets rejected from his system.
The next thing he realizes is that there's a tube stuck inside his mouth, pushing through his body.
He can't move. His system only weakly realizes the process to keep him alert. He can't move or do anything. He wants to rip the tube out. The idea rises in a last attempt of panic. His arms flail. His throat is occupied by soft plastic, and the only sound his mouth produces is a hectic gurgling.
Blurry figures dressed in bright neon swim before his eyeslits.
The imagery is too familiar, and his movements get even more hectic. His burned fingers try to claw at the tube that crawls through his insides. The white neon demons don't let him.
Hands push him back, hold him down. Careening, croaking like the crows that ate his comrades face in the ash of the world, fingers cling to him, sharp pain digs into his limbs.
Then, just like the breaking pain of cracking ribs and hollow bullets, something bites into his legs and chest.
He makes one more buckled attempt, but the burning in his stomach and throat is staying, he cannot move his arms anymore.
Then he loses his consciousness again, but in the knowledge, this life is never going to let him leave. Not even when he tries to take it from himself.
His pulse flies. His mouth screams, a loud screeching that runs over the walls like a spray of blood and brain in an assault.
A killer, they say, and they are right, how many has he murdered? The fingers on his hands aren't enough, faces are swimming around him, prick him just like tubes and needles and they never leave in the swathing swamp of destruction and death-
No I am not a hero or leader no no please I just want to be normal and I just want to feel-
Feel what?
Someone tugs a scarf around him, a deformed hand on a pretty red haired girl. A sneering motion of a welcoming dark skinned figure in a seat, how he made her run just because he had to test what he is and how he still exists, pain and splinters in a walking carcass-
The blood in his veins is like gasoline set ablaze.
When he wakes up again, an unwelcome memory is palpable, a scratched put mark, the tug of something too familiar on his inside.
The bed is creaking metal and white sheet, a horror of medical attention. The taste in his mouth is a little different than the last time, but the chemical burning stays the same in charcoal nuances.
Straps don't hold broken ruined skin this time in bandages but are holding him to the bed, tightly zipped to him, a straightjacket for the broken soul of his weak resistance.
Needles lead in lines from his scarred hand and the soft flesh of his veins to bags.
The diamond shards of one sharp face have warped to another, the shaded outline of a silent watching visitor with just the same blue eyes as his mother, eyes to drown and smother and suffocate yourself in.
Thomas' throat produces a heavy huff, nothing more in sore sickness.
Maven stares at the way he tries to break his arms than rather have him come closer, wiggling on the binding with force. The needles in his Thomas arm wiggle and the liquid white bag on it shakes where it hangs like a corpse on a gallow.
Maven just leans forward on his chair. His silhouette is a bleeding mark in Thomas panicking vision of drumming panic and confused hatred.
"Don't damage yourself more than you already have," Maven whispers. "It is futile. You wouldn't escape far even if you managed to free yourself."
"What would you care if I damage myself?" Thomas mutters back. "Why am I here?"
The eyes are focused on his molten face with the precision of a trained sniper.
"They pumped out your stomach. You fought for almost a week. Without the attention, you would be dead. That was a lethal dose of cyanide. But I suppose," Maven crosses his arms over his dark shirt, skin almost translucent in the white surroundings. The grey veins simmer and shift beneath the soft skin, for just a second Thomas remembers how his hands felt when they gripped the deadman's switch. "That was all you wanted to accomplish."
"I will take ten suicide pills to not be with you," Thomas croaks and fights the restraints again. He bends himself against the tight constriction, ready to break himself into pieces. His fingers and toes curl together.
If the insult has any impact on Maven, he doesn't show it. He barely blinks.
"Do you think I will just let you die when I barely got you back, Tommy? You took something from me. See it as an exchange." A cruel crooked line lies over his lips, his whole body is pointed forward very attentively. "We got so much to talk about. How you have been the last years. Where you have been. How you ended up being a resistance fighter in a forest. How long you have been part of the Scarlet Guard. And how much they must value you. Or not. Especially since you distracted me enough for a breakout and the infiltration and destruction of the parts of the palace."
He wiggles again, and for a second, just a second, he feels the slip of a tiny milimeter. Not enough. But it works. He just has to exhaust the motion. The fabric may cut him. But it is the glimmer of a hopeful moment.
Since Maven is the only other person in the room, no one notices.
Thomas stops and sinks back for now. His body quivers and shakes.
"Now you get it," Maven says. "Stop resisting. I don't want to hurt you. And I don't want you to hurt yourself."
"I will not tell you anything."
"Maybe not today. I'll come back tomorrow." With that, Maven rises slowly from the chair and rolls his shoulderblades. As if he has been seated on the uncomfortable furniture for hours, not minutes.
"I will kill you,"he promises, half-ghost haunting, half-burned boy. "I can do it with one arm. I'll end this."
"You could. You would. But I don't let you. And as I see it," Maven blows out a long stream of air, looking back one last time at the scarred figure on the bed. "Your maneuver has costed me a lot of time. But you're here now. Welcome back, Tommy. I will see you soon. Take a rest."
The room is windowless and shut tightly. It is reminiscient of many rooms in Thomas' existence.
No one come to him when he is awake.
A hand adjusts or removes needles when he falls into exhausted slumber, counting shadows on the tiles. It also zips him into the binding hard, pulling tight as can be.
Of course it wouldn't be that easy. If he wants to break them, his weak head constructs in the instinct of survival, one chance is all he has.
He spends the next waking hours wondering where they are and how to break out.
When Maven returns, Thomas has pictured twenty possible ways to murder him as soon as his hands are free and he enters the door, leaving a probable ensemble of guards behind.
Maven reads that thought of the tip of his nose, but doesn't comment on it.
His dark hair is slightly wet, it smells like cold air fused with smoke, his clothes radiate the same scent.
Like a motor or machine, a frantic factory, plumes of city life and cold icy rain. His coat and shirt are stained with trickling water, clinging to a too thin body.
"I am late, apologies," he says, but he doesn't mean it. Emptiness is sitting on his face.
"You never visited me when you almost murdered me," the ghost of Thomas answers as cold as the weather outside. "So I don't really expect a schedule now."
The words creep under the empty facade and shatter it with the force of a sledgehammer. Anger coils under the thin muscles. He can see it in the long fingers clawing at the armrests.
"I didn't mean to do anything bad to you, Thomas. You were my-"
"Your what now?" Thomas whispers and turns his head away. He counts grooves and nooks on the white ceiling. "Your mistake? I surely wasn't worth too much. I never was. You never visited me. Your mother got me a new name and I was gone."
"I thought," Maven states. "You were dead for years."
Thomas snaps his body around again, face forward the figure on the chair slowly drying.
"I am still dead. Look at me."
"I am," the answer penetrates an unwelcome border. "I do nothing else."
The ghost of Thomas feels the scar tissue numbly when he grimaces.
Flames and then nothing, extinguishing a friendly spark of life and energy and exchanging it to nothing until he dies again and again and again-"You did this. This was your fault. I was nice to you. I- HE loved you, and all you did was to hurt. To kill..us.
Me. Thomas, the old one, the one that didn't know about death or lies or new bloods and rebels," he presses out between his teeth. "He didn't deserve any of it."
Maven still stares at his face with a dark tuned line of thoughtfulness. Proving his words to look at him true. "I know."
"I will never let you forget that until the day you are finally dead too. I will never let you not see it when you close your eyes," he whispers. "What you did to me and what you did to that boy. What you do whenever you breathe and move and live."
"I would never forget myself."
For a moment, they just stare at each other, scanning for a trace of anything familiar in the other. He leans back in the restraints just as Maven does in the chair afterward.
"Good," he whispers. "Because that is what you deserve."
After too long, Maven moves forward. His hand is soft and warm, and it takes the immobilized repulsion with ignorance, touching the scars along the rim of the sleeve and back of his hand, careful around needles in the blue veins.
"I think you underestimate how much I wanted to see you again. No matter what you are now."
