Internal Conflicts: Kaidus' Dreams

Decay....

It started with the smell...the taste that made him want to wretch up everything he'd ever eaten. Even now when his mind wandered he could taste it oh so clearly. Death. It filled his senses, coated his flesh and his tongue. He tried to move away, to break free but all he seemed to find, all his hands could grasp was rotting flesh, liquidised human. It filled his palms, washed into open wounds. He swam in it.

What resbite could there be for such terrible sights and tastes? There was none, just a constant waved of nausea that only got worse. His mind tried to find some way to block it out...but all it found was the slow chipping away of his sanity.

Each time he closed his eyes, seared into the lids, organs spilling from open torsos, the screams of men as they were butchered, cut up like a hunters kill to be served...Served to him in this prison, served as a rotting wallpaper. Friends...family...men who had trusted him with their life and because of who he was they were dead...in the worst ways, dead in long suffering.

He turned, writhed...needed escape. All he met was his friend, Aakif, raised with him, entrails poured into the space between them, their bodies nearly touching. The agony in those glazed, wet eyes, of a man so strong dying like an animal. He struggled, desperate to help, desperate to give him mercy and end it...he tore the flesh so badly on his wrists he had to be kicked to stop. The limbs were broken already...at this rate he'd rip his hands off too. He didn't care...had to end it. His ears filled with the man's pleas, those desperate wails, a beast in unimaginable pain choking on his own blood as it spilled against Kaidus' body. He squeezed his eyes shut, tried not to see. His ears could still hear. He let them open only as the gargles of the dying creature began to fade....all that was left was his corpse now. Eyes were rolled slightly, still wide with gut wrenching misery and pain, face streaked with tears. Idly he recalled that he'd never seen Aakif cry before.

He couldn't turn his body, couldn't twist. There he lay, face to face with the cadaver, with a friend who'd died in long torment for what Kaidus was...for who he was to someone. Those eyes burned into him, that lolliping mouth, frozen in a last cry of gargled pain.

He wept. No other death hurt so much...or perhaps it was just the last straw to his battered pscyhe. He begged for them to move him, begged like a dog just for freedom from this pit of rotting flesh, from this room filled with accusing eyes set to liquidise.

He got it. A twisted reprieve...but Kaidus wasn't sure he wasn't thankful for anything in that moment. That man, the one with revenge and malice in his actions decided to take that broken body for all to see. It was the first time anyone had taken him by force. It wouldn't be the last. Despite his shattered spirit, at first he fought, he thrashed and bit and spat and slurred curses. His body didn't have the energy to keep it up for long. Several fists to his smashed jaw left his mouth full of blood and the fight knocked out of him. It was to be the first of many such forced tryst in his capture...he knew that. Flashes of breaking flesh and humiliation for all eyes slipped through the dreamscape but never did it linger long. By then such torture seemed minute.

The days ticked on in decay...insects...maggots...mistaking his broken flesh for that of the corpses, being slowly eaten alive by the desert beasts that squirmed in his skin. Nothing could ever feel worse...even being alive as his inside were ripped out, seemed to pale in comparison to the sensation. He struggled, barely, trying to shake them from his flesh. It didn't work. He didn't have the energy to fight.

Even those moments of freedom...even the rape didn't come anymore. Secretly he'd started to yearn for it...not for the act itself...but for the freedom, the moments away from the decay. Even that sick fuck didn't want to touch him now. He was the living dead...barely living. The dream never went like reality...there was no saviour in this nightmare. They ate away at his flesh, followed by the vultures which had found him after his death...A dream so real it was like being eaten alive again. All he could taste was death...and yet his own never seemed to come quick enough.

That always seemed to be the case with him. Death never came. And in those last few moments he felt Their hand again, metallic and cold, wrapped around his throat, delving through the rotted flesh of his chest to grip his heart and drag him to some unreal plane with a simple set of whispered words.

"You will always be mine..."

And then he woke screaming...struggling from the bed to wretch up his insides in the snow in hopes that the taste would go...and the cold wetness would cleanse him of his dream that seemed so real when he woke.