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lumpofwhump · 1 year

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Bad Things Happen Bingo: Public Execution/Torture

CW: Gore, emeto, death wish, corpse desecration

“What’s this?” Paul Waldrop, co-owner of Waldrop-Thornton industries, asked his old friend, accepting an ornate envelope with a raised eyebrow.

“I have an announcement to make,” John Thorton replied. “I’ve found the people who took Jinn.”

People, not person, Paul noted, trying to decipher where this was headed from John’s icy, distant expression. As much as Paul hadn’t liked the disruptively softening influence that John’s missing wife had been having on his partner and their operation, he found this new version of his friend even more unpalatable.

“I’ll be needing to make some changes in management as a result.”

Paul’s blood ran as cold as John’s eyes. “I’ll be there,” he said, doing his best to keep his voice even.

“Good,” John said with a thin smile, staring at his friend intently. “I’ll need your support if things get messy.”

–

“Be careful of his eyes,” Thornton had said to his goons before they’d set in on Barclay Fletcher some seemingly interminable length of time ago. “I’ll want them good and open.” After the beating, they’d left him bruised and with what he could only imagine were at least a couple broken ribs, alone in a dark room in the depths of the labs to think about this terrifyingly specific request.

When the door finally opened to his cell, his mismatched eyes were untouched but nonetheless ringed by dark circles and temporarily blinded by the slightly flickering overhead fluorescent lights at that. Before he could fully adjust, Thornton’s men roughly hauled him forward by the arms, not bothering to let him try to keep his balance on his own.

“Ow – Where are we going?!” he demanded in a voice hoarse from screaming and then disuse.

One of his escorts backhanded him hard to the back of his head, eliciting a yelp of pain.

“Hey, careful,” the other said. “The Director wants him conscious for this.”

They dragged and pushed him as necessary through the lab’s countless winding halls until he was biting back screams of pain from the effort of walking on beaten legs. Finally, when they came to a wide room cleared of equipment, the two guards released him, leaving him to stumble forward and fall to his knees. His face flushed with shame, and he looked up, a furious expression on his face. He immediately went pale as he registered the scene around him.

Genmods. Dozens of them, as many as a hundred. He recognized some of them, the ones he had personally experimented on – tortured, some part of his brain corrected, despite himself. The ones that even bothered to look at him had stone-faced, pitiless stares for him at best, and mocking smirks at his injuries more often than not.

Thornton stood toward the back of the room, looking down at him contemptuously. Director Waldrop stood next to him, nervously adjusting his tie and pointedly not looking at Barclay, or really, anyone in particular.

“Hey, Fletcher,” came a snide voice from off to his left. Barclay whipped his head to the side to see Ryan, Thornton’s monstrous, hulking genmod son, smirking at him and towering over another figure.

Director Richardson.

The last time they’d seen each other before he’d been hoisted from his bed, beaten, and locked in a cell some days – weeks? – back, the Director had been furious at him. He was supposed to dispose of a subject who’d outlived its usefulness… his subject. He couldn’t, though, for whatever goddamn stupid sentimental reason. So he’d had one of the med techs sneak it out to the safety of Medbay, conveniently out of his or even the Director’s control. Unfortunately, the Director had found proof of the call he’d made to arrange it.

You’re on thin ice, boy, the Director had told him. First you let my servants leave from right under your nose, and now you’re letting useless subjects out against orders… I’m beginning to think through which sort of tests you’d be the best material for.

He’d slammed Barclay roughly against the wall by his throat and watched him frantically struggle and choke out pleas, only to switch his grasp to Barclay’s hair and send him hurtling back toward his room in staff quarters.

We’ll continue this conversation tomorrow, the Director had threatened.

Now, though, the man looked if anything more beaten than Barclay imagined himself to be. His face was blotchy with bruises, one of his eyes thoroughly blackened and swollen shut. He steadied his trembling, kneeling body on one hand, the other being horrifically twisted and broken beyond all recognition. He wheezed in pain from injuries Barclay couldn’t see and definitely didn’t want to imagine.

“SIR!” Barclay shouted, or at least tried to. His voice nearly shook, but he held it together. For now.

The Director jerked his head up and over toward Barclay with an agonized expression. “CLAY!” he responded just as frantically, and turned toward Thornton. “My assistant has nothing to do with any of this, John,” he choked out. “No more than I do. Let him go. If you do anything for me before whatever happens here –” He swallowed. “Let Clay leave.”

Thornton narrowed his icy blue eyes and scowled. “I owe you nothing, Dave,” he said cuttingly. “And your boy here has done enough all on his own. Pick him up,” he ordered his men, who Barclay vaguely remembered as having tried to drown him some years back.

They hoisted him roughly to his feet, one of them not-so-accidentally brushing a hand against his broken ribs. He let out an undignified squeal of pain, thrashing against the men on either side of him. He glared, humiliated, in the direction of one of the genmods in the crowd who’d started to laugh at him, struggling for his freedom and what was left of his pride but causing himself more pain in the process.

“Don’t let him look away,” Thornton instructed.

“What - what is this?!” Barclay shouted, his voice tinged with panic. He looked toward Thornton and Waldrop and briefly noticed that the latter quickly averted his gaze. One of the men at Barclay’s side grabbed either side of his face and forcibly turned it back to face Ryan and the Director.

Ryan smirked at him.

Barclay tried to glare back, but from the genmod’s expression it was clear that he’d utterly failed to be the least bit intimidating.

“Now that everyone’s here, Dad,” Ryan said to John, “mind if I start opening my present?”

Barclay’s stomach turned at the euphemism while some of the genmods surrounding him chortled, if nervously.

“Don’t make it too quick,” Thornton said from behind Barclay, annoyance in his voice.

“Let him go!” Barclay screamed frantically. “He didn’t kill your wife or whatever, Thornton. Please! Let him –”

“What, Fletcher, you’d prefer it was you, then?” Ryan said with a hideously sadistic grin. With no further warning, he tore the Director’s left arm clean off at the elbow with a sickening sound, made worse by the older man’s seemingly endless shriek of pain. Barclay’s own scream joined in to create a cacophony of agony. He felt nauseous.

The Director collapsed forward onto his face, his remaining, shattered hand unable to support his weight.

“Oops, maybe I shouldn’t have started with your good arm,” Ryan said with mock-concern. “Sorry about that. Here, catch,” he said, turning to Barclay and throwing the severed limb at him.

Blood spattered Barclay’s shirt as the arm made contact, followed by vomit as the remaining contents of his stomach spilled uncontrollably out of his mouth. He let out a sob, only to begin loudly dry-retching. He shut his eyes to block out the sight of the bloodied Director writhing at Ryan’s feet. This earned him another smack to the back of the head.

“Don’t get yourself knocked out, Fletcher,” Ryan warned him. “Unless you want to give Dave here a few days to develop an infection before we start up again. Though… hm. I actually kind of like it. What do you say, Dad?” Ryan looked past Barclay at Thornton. Apparently Thornton shook his head, because Ryan followed up with, “So that’s a no. Eh. I’m not exactly the patient type, so… works for me!”

With that, he lifted Richardson upside down by the leg opposite to his missing arm and tore it off before letting him drop to the ground with another, hoarser screech.

“STOP! Stop, please stop!” Barclay begged, trying to pull free from the larger, stronger men holding him back. Tears flowed freely from his eyes as vomit continued to drip from his mouth onto his knees and feet.

Ryan frowned and raised an eyebrow. “What, you want to just leave him to suffer like this? I knew you were a dick, Fletcher, but really, that’s a bit much.” He shook his head chidingly.

“F-fuck you,” Barclay snapped, then involuntarily sniffled.

“Eh,” Ryan replied with a grimace. “You’re really not my type. Anyway! Here we go with Arm Number Two!”

Even some of the Director’s former subjects were looking away as Ryan knelt down onto Richardson’s prone form, dislocated his remaining arm with a loud snap, and then tore it off with an expression of (im)pure glee. He was as bloody as his victim now, if not moreso. The Director, for his part, could no longer force out pleas that were even slightly comprehensible, reduced to sobs, gasps and shrieks.

“Make it stop, you bastards!” Barclay screamed over the din, thrashing as tears and snot ran down his face. “What do you want?! You’ve got whatever fucking revenge you could’ve wanted, now let us… let him…!” He let out a despairing whine. “Sir… sir, please hold on, I’ll…”

“You’ll what, Fletcher?” Thornton said from behind him, sharply enough that Barclay flinched. The guards turned to let -- or rather make – him face Thornton, who stared completely unimpressed at the pathetic sight in front of him.

Other than the Director’s screaming, the room was silent as Thornton studied Barclay. Finally, he nodded to his men. “Let go of him.” Looking back in Barclay’s direction, Thornton spoke loudly enough for the entire room to hear. “Go save your Director, then, Fletcher. If you manage to fight off Ryan, I might even let the two of you go.”

“C’mon, Fletcher,” Barclay heard from behind him. “Davey here can only wait so long before he runs out of blood.”

Barclay swallowed and turned around to face Ryan, eyes burning with tears and hatred. His whole body was trembling. He clenched his hands into fists and took a tentative step forward. He was just steeling himself to make a run at Ryan when the huge man tossed the blood-soaked Director to the side and bore up to his full height, challenging Barclay to attack him with an upward jerk of his equally-bloodied chin.

Barclay forced himself a few halting steps forward on quivering legs. He faltered as Ryan’s grin widened, and flinched when the genmod picked up one of the Director’s arms and bit a finger off with a gut-twisting crunch, never taking his eyes off Barclay. He tried to will himself on with everything he had in him, but…

“I-I can’t,” Barclay admitted in a small, shaking voice as he sank to his knees.

“You want to say that again?” Ryan taunted. “Dave’s screaming made it a bit hard to hear you just now.”

Instead of further humiliating himself for Ryan, Barclay jerked back around to look at Thornton and Waldrop. “What am I supposed to do here, get myself torn apart? Was that the plan? Because - ha - I’m not playing along. I’m not going to go and let that…” He let out a whimper, with an involuntary look back at Ryan. “I just… I can’t, okay?” He finished weakly.

“And after all you’ve done for him,” Thornton said to the screaming Director as Barclay let out another sob. “Hold him, and make sure he’s watching,” he ordered his men.

Barclay bolted before he could think it through, making a run for the door as two, then three sets of footsteps pounded after him. He had to make it, or at least get them to make it quick for him, get it over with; he couldn’t let them drag him back to face the Director after his failure.

His determination meant nothing, though, as an enormous hand grabbed him by the back of his neck, scruffing him as easily as if he were a newborn kitten. “And here I didn’t think you were capable of disappointing me, Fletcher,” Ryan said. “But that… ‘ey, Dad, you sure I”m killing the right person here?”

Barclay started flailing in panic before Thornton even started to answer, imagining Ryan’s powerful hand wrapping around his arm, snapping bones, tearing them apart, his limbs one by one dropping to the ground in front of him. “NO! No, no, no, let me go, LET ME –”

“He’s made his choice,” Thornton interrupted with a shake of his head. “And you have a job to finish in any case. One thing at a time, Ryan.”

“Do you have to go and make this feel like work, Dad?” Ryan teased as Barclay shuddered at Thornton’s comment. “Anyway. Here.” With no further warning, he pushed Barclay forward, sending him stumbling into the grip of Thornton’s guards.

Either because of the blood loss or because he’d screamed himself raw, the Director had gone quiet other than letting out low whimpers. As Ryan approached, though, he resumed his pointless struggling, his one remaining limb useless in allowing him to escape. With the rest of the room gone silent, Barclay could hear his defeated words, let out between painful, ragged breaths. “Get it over with, you freak. And then – !” The Director gasped in pain. “And then let Clay go, he did nothing!”

“You’ve got that right,” Ryan said with a vicious grin at Barclay as tears streamed down the younger man’s face. “So, what do you say, Fletcher? Should I make it quick for him so I can start on you, or should I have some more fun here?”

Barclay shook his head as he mutely sobbed, squeezing his eyes shut to get both the Director’s mangled body and Ryan’s knowing, contemptuous grin out of his sight.

“Oops, you broke the rules there, Fletcher. Not supposed to look away, remember? Guess I get to choose, then.” Ryan picked the Director up by his ankle, holding him up high enough to look him in the eyes. “You really should’ve chosen a better assistant, man,” he said with a shake of his head.

He then tore another strained shriek out of the Director along with his last leg before dropping the helpless torso of a man to the ground, with an air of being disappointed at having broken his favorite new toy. Ryan shrugged at the onlookers and started to walk away, only to abruptly turn back and make a running start, giving the Director’s head a vicious kick that severed it from his body with a sickening snap and sent it into the crowd of his former victims.

Barclay was helplessly dry-retching at the corpse now twitching lifelessly mere feet away from him. The arms holding him let him go, and he collapsed into a heap on the floor, surrounded and overwhelmed by voices.

“John, what was –”

“Good on you, getting an eyeball!”

“ – disappeared my wife, Paul, they –”

“Get a knife, I want an ear.”

“ – gonna be sick…” The sound of vomiting.

“ – will you do with the boy, then?”

“He’s hardly a boy. You don’t need to worry –”

Blood stained Barclay’s shirt as he wrapped his arms tightly around something. It had been thrown at him, or maybe he’d crawled over to it. He’d already forgotten; it hardly mattered.

“Should we take the arm from him, sir?” a voice standing over him called out.

“Get the rest of the body. We’ll bring them back to the cell with him.”

Barclay clung for dear life to what he now felt to be Richardson’s mutilated hand, squeezing his eyes tightly shut as a guard grabbed him by the hair and yanked him hard toward the door. He squealed and thrashed in pain, but his mind was somewhere else, or trying to get there.

In the end, it went blank. He barely registered being thrown roughly back into his cell - only enough to crawl onto what was supposed to pass for a cot and curl in tightly around the severed arm, still oozing blood.

He didn’t know how long it had been by the time the door opened again, letting Thornton in to loom over him. He didn’t dare move.

“What a mess,” Thornton said disgustedly, stepping on something laying on the floor with a crack and a squelch. “And here you are doing nothing about it.” He walked over and scruffed Barclay by the neck, holding him face down over the side of the cot so he could see.

The Director. Or at least what remained of him. Three limbs, stomped and bent all to hell. A torso with ribs poking out through the bloodied remains of clothing. And a head torn and beaten and mutilated beyond all recognition if Barclay hadn’t known what had happened to him.

Barclay abruptly started dry-retching again, his shaking arms finally letting go of his macabre comfort object.

Thornton’s hand squeezed tighter around the back of Barclay’s throat, turning his retching into struggling gasps. “Pathetic,” he sneered, and tossed Barclay face first onto the hard floor. A beat later, he dropped a bag in front of Barclay. “I’ll give you three days to clean him up and put him back together,” Thornton said as Barclay shakily emptied the bag to find needles, thread, water bottles, glue, and a handful of other supplies that were hardly up to the task. “The least you can do is allow him a good burial.”

I couldn’t do anything! Barclay wanted to shout. You would’ve killed him anyways, and then me…!

He looked at the pack of needles for a long moment.

Maybe I should just…

“If you try to use those for anything other than their intended purpose, Fletcher, I will know,” Thornton cut in as if reading his thoughts. “There are much more creative things I could do with a corpse.”

Barclay nodded, very much not wanting to know what they were. “Y-yes sir,” he answered meekly.

Thornton’s lip curled in further disgust at this servile display, and he kicked him hard to the face. Blood gushed from Barclay’s nose, and his voice was almost entirely too weak to be heard over the crack of breaking bone.

“Get to work.”

He couldn’t, not for the first two days. Finally, he summoned the nerve to creep up to the body, arrange its dismembered pieces, set out the equipment with shaking hands, and then… Where was he even supposed to start?! Everything was slick with blood; the glue held the torn skin together for a matter of seconds before it tore open again. Trying to sew the Director’s body back together was hardly more successful; even if he had any real experience working with a needle and thread, he could barely see what he was doing in the darkness.

He could only guess that he was running up against the deadline at a certain point, making him desperate enough to do whatever small amount he could for his murdered mentor. Still, it seemed like he’d spent days making large, choppy stitches and applying thick layers of glue in some small hope of making the Director recognizable again.

The result was, if anything, more horrifying than the dismembered remains had been.

“You never fail to disappoint me, Fletcher,” Thornton said as he picked up Barclay’s best attempt, only to abruptly drop it to the floor. The glued-on head lolled to the side and broke off halfway. The more damaged arm flopped to the side, revealing that Barclay had sewn it on backward in his haste. Barclay let out a sob.

His eyes went wide, though, as Thornton’s two favorite guards stepped in with hands full of trash bags.

Thornton nodded to them.

“NO!” Barclay screamed, jumping from the cot and landing on the Director’s remains. One of the two men chortled as he lay face down and trembling in the mess of decomposing flesh. “No, don’t, don’t, DON’T, I tried my best, I tried… sir,” Barclay begged, of Thornton, of the guard standing above him, of the Director’s ghost, he wasn’t sure which.

The man who had laughed grabbed him by the ankle and hauled him away despite his scrabbling hands, and he watched helplessly as Thornton’s other goon scooped up the crumbling body and dumped it piecemeal into the various bags with a look of disgust.

“Consider yourself lucky, kid,” the man restraining him threatened. “We could throw you into the incinerator with him. Keep making a pain in the ass of yourself, and maybe we will.”

Barclay froze up, his blood running cold.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Thornton said, not even looking in his direction. “The dumpster will work perfectly fine.”

“No…. you said… you said you were going to give him a real burial!” Barclay yelled in despair.

“Well, you certainly fucked up that chance,” Thornton said dismissively. “If nothing else, you gave Dave exactly what he deserved.”

With that, he walked out of the cell with a wave to his men, the first of whom flung Barclay against the wall with another short laugh.

Barclay didn’t dare move until the door slammed behind them, and even then he only slowly curled his aching body into a ball. He tried not to think about how long he’d be here, or for what purposes. There was no point, where no one would be coming to get him this time.

His nails dug into his knees until they drew blood. It ran down to the cell floor, mixing with the tears that wouldn’t stop flowing.

–

It had been two months, and Paul was having the same damn dream again. The one where John’s son had…

Where Dave had been…

Dave’s eyes had been so desperate, and so unbearably reproachful.

But worse was the boy.

No, not a boy, just like John had said. Barclay Fletcher had killed subjects. Tortured them. Including the now-missing Mrs. Thornton.

Still, he hadn’t disappeared her. That had been Paul’s own doing.

It was too late to confess it now, he told himself. It wouldn’t bring Dave back even if he wanted to, and it was probably too late to save Fletcher too. And besides.

“Paul?” his wife asked drowsily, turning over to face him with a look of concern. “Is everything alright?”

He couldn’t let that happen to him.

“You know you can tell me,” she tried to reassure him.

For her sake, he told himself.

“I’m fine,” he told her, sinking back into his comfortable bed and disturbed dreams.

Based on an in-person roleplay scene between @skinofafish and I. Barclay Fletcher and Paul Waldrop are my characters. John, Jinn, and Ryan Thornton along with David Richardson are @skinofafish's characters.

Taglist:

@whumpsday / @skinofafish

@badthingshappenbingo

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