blood on your hands
empires superpowers au masterlist (note: the masterlist is not currently being updated)
ough angst. takes place about two weeks after the end of ‘poisoned rats’.
cw: violence, mild gore, abuse, flashbacks, vomiting, death (of an oc)
~
“Oh, little bird,” Xornoth coos, and Jimmy stares blankly at their feet.
He’d messed up. They had given him a command—they’d wanted him to hurt the bystanders to send them away—and he hadn’t obeyed, leaving Pearl to escape.
He doesn’t know what the punishment will be. He hopes he has the strength today to accept it.
The doors to the meeting room burst open—two guards dragging a handcuffed man between them enter, hold him in a standing position, even as the man sways dangerously, blood dripping down the side of his head. Xornoth stands, pulling Jimmy up with them.
The man is middle-aged, balding, his button-up white shirt stained with his own blood. His eyes blink rapidly, his teeth chatter and lips tremble as if cold. Or maybe it’s a symptom of the severe stress he’s probably under.
“What’s your name?” Xornoth asks the man, who noticeably swallows back his anxiety before answering.
“K-Keith, I—sir.”
“Do you have a family, Keith?”
Keith’s face pales. “You—you leave them alone, they never did anything—”
Xornoth smiles, a repulsive sight. “You’re a construction worker, is that right? You have a pet dog. Your daughter has just developed powers of her own and you mean to celebrate this weekend.”
Dumbfounded, Keith nods. Quick as anything, Xornoth pulls Jimmy right up to them by the chin, forces him to look into Keith’s eyes. Jimmy sees terror, confusion—though maybe it’s just a reflection of himself.
“See, pet? Keith here is a person with a life, one that he loves and wishes to return to. He has a family, a favorite food, and people who love him.”
Jimmy stares blankly at his master, some sort of emotion stirring beneath the surface. He doesn’t know what he feels. But he has a sinking suspicion that he knows where this is going.
He’s right. With a flick of their wrist, there’s a tentacle worming its way out of the ground, crawling up Keith, up his throat, up his chin and over his lips to his nostril, where it squiggles inside. Keith shouts, even as another tentacle rises up and slowly squeezes around his throat.
Jimmy gags instinctively, tries to turn away—he doesn’t want to see this—but Xornoth’s hand on his collar is enough to keep him in place.
Keith is begging, begging even as blood drips from his nose and mouth, even as he chokes on nothing, begging for anyone to help, and it’s horrible and suddenly Jimmy is screaming as well, begging for his master to spare a man who’s done nothing wrong—
Keith’s body slumps as the first tentacle exits through his mouth, bloodshot eyes rolling back into his head. Jimmy gags again, nearly vomits but for the emptiness of his stomach.
Xornoth pulls Jimmy by his hair, their mouth pressed against his ear, and their breath is foul when they speak.
“Keith’s blood is on your hands, pet. He died because of your disobedience. Obey me next time, and we won’t have to have a repeat incident.”
Then they throw him to the ground, into a pool of Keith’s blood. He falls hard, his bad hip popping out on impact. The next couple of minutes are blurry with pain as Jimmy gathers what little strength he has and rolls, popping it back into place.
Once he’s recovered enough to take in his surroundings, he finds that his master is gone. The guards are gone. The door to the room is shut.
It’s just him and the body. The body of a man with a family, loved ones, a career, a belief system. . . .
Who will tell his spouse that their husband is missing? Who will tell his daughter that her dad is never coming home? Will they know? Will there be a body to find? Or is Jimmy doomed to be the only one to know of Keith’s fate, never to make it out of here and find his family?
All because he’d been a bad pet. He’s a bad pet. It’s all his fault, it’s always his fault, this is just another person’s blood that he’s responsible for and there’s so much, there’s always so much pain. . . .
He gathers enough courage to approach the body after an hour, crawling toward it with cuffed hands to gently close Keith’s eyes. Then he backs away quickly, because even though it’s just a body he still wants to vomit just being in the same room with a dead person, especially one so brutally killed.
He makes his way to the opposite corner of the room, where he can only see Keith’s lower half between the table and chair legs, curls up in the most comfortable position possible with his screaming hip, and sobs drily into his hands. He’s shaking badly enough that he could break apart at any second, and there’s someone dead in front of him and he killed them, it’s his fault they’re dead. . . .
He stays there, waiting, praying that someone will come get him and take him to his cell, where he can wash his hands of this as best he can, where he can tuck the image of Keith’s head bursting from the inside that’s burned into his retinas deep in the recesses of his mind, never to be seen again.
No one comes.
They leave Jimmy alone with the corpse for two straight days.
-
Jimmy jolts up in bed, running for the bathroom before he even knows where he is. He barely makes it in time, vomiting his guts up practically before he can lift the toilet seat.
He wipes his mouth when he’s done, blows his nose to dislodge any chunks, flushes the toilet. His stomach is rolling, throat burning, and he can still hear Keith screaming like it’s still happening.
He’s too tired to get back up, too shaky to even consider standing. So instead he presses his head against the cool porcelain of the bathtub (it feels so nice against his flushed cheek, he’s so tired and everything is so fresh and raw) and falls asleep.
-
“Hey, can you wake up for me? It’s Lizzie, I’m here. . . . I’m here, Jimmy, can you wake up?”
Jimmy blinks awake, looks up at the blue-haired blob leaning over him. He blinks a couple more times, and that blob reveals itself to be his sister.
"Hey," he croaks, and her face twists in concern.
“What happened? Are you okay?”
He sits up, groans at the stiffness in his limbs from such an awkward sleeping position. For a moment, he’s not sure where he is. Then he remembers the previous night, the flashback-nightmare, running to the toilet. He groans again.
“Bad night,” he manages, grimacing at the sour taste in his mouth. Lizzie takes notice and helps him up, where he can lean against the sink and brush his teeth.
He doesn’t want to think about the flashback. He doesn’t want to think about it at all, but every time he blinks he sees it happening. He sees blood, he sees bulging eyes, he sees. . . .
He gags, pulling his toothbrush away from his mouth as he leans over the sink. He killed a man. He killed him.
Lizzie makes some noise of disgust as he spits out a bit of bile, nothing else in his stomach to throw up. He cringes automatically, one hand darting up to cover the scar on the back of his neck.
“How about you go lie down, yeah?” she suggests, stepping out of the way of the door. She surveys the room with a slight wrinkle of her nose. “I’ll clean up in here. Just go lie on the couch, grab a plastic bag or a bowl or something.”
Jimmy follows her directions robotically, taking a moment to rinse out his mouth before shuffling off to the living room, stopping to get a plastic bag from the bag of bags. He’s been laying on the couch for a full minute before he realizes he still has his toothbrush clenched in his fist. He keeps hold of it, not sure where to place it.
A few moments later, Lizzie reappears, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him. She’s still in pajamas, Jimmy notices, her short hair tangled and eyelids heavy with sleep. She must’ve just woken up to find him on the bathroom floor.
Just lying there. Like he was dead. Like Keith. Like all the others.
There’s a lump in his throat and a sour taste in his mouth and his eyes itch really badly, but he can’t cry. He can’t cry when he survived, he made it out intact, while so many others are dead by his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he rasps, swallowing several times. “I—I don’t know—”
“It’s all right, you’re not feeling well,” Lizzie cuts in, running a hand down the side of her face. “I can call in to work, say I’m sick. Or I can call Scott or Joel to come take care of you while I work, but if you’ve got a bug I’ve probably got it as well. . . .”
“I’m not sick,” says Jimmy. When Lizzie fixes him with a disbelieving look, he adds, “Really. I just—I just had a bad dream. A . . . a flashback.”
The look turns to one of sympathy, and Lizzie moves as if to rub his arm, but holds herself back. “Do—do you want to talk about?” she asks awkwardly.
He shakes his head. There’s nothing they can do. Lizzie will just tell him that it isn’t his fault, that maybe he should talk about it in therapy, et cetera. More coping, no doing. No real owning up for his actions.
At least, that’s what Scott would do. Lizzie’s quite a bit more pragmatic than Scott.
“Well, maybe,” he says slowly.
She holds back a sigh, he notices. One of relief or frustration, he can’t tell. But he forges onward anyway, because this is not just something he can drop.
He decides to just cut to the chase. “I killed people,” he says. Blunt, perhaps, but Lizzie doesn’t flinch.
“I know,” she says drily. “Believe me.”
She’s blunt too, of course. Jimmy swallows, then forces himself to go on.
“Four by my own hand and choice—at least, recently. Because they told me to.” He takes in a shuddering breath. He can do this. “Five others because of me—I think. I’m not sure. I don’t know. Maybe more. They—they killed people, to make me behave sometimes, and it’s my fault still, their blood is still on my hands because I knew what the punishments were like and I still—I still fought back. And . . . my actions had consequences. And too often, innocent people suffered them.”
Jimmy stops, overcome. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, breathes in and out. He needs to confess this. There’s been guilt gnawing at his stomach for so long, long enough that he didn’t even realize it was there. He deserves punishment, he killed so many people, and hurt so many others. . . .
“I didn’t know them,” he manages. “I didn’t even know them. But because—because I misbehaved, they got pulled in and I had to watch them die. I was—Lizzie, it was my fault they died, they didn’t deserve it and—I don’t—”
He cuts off, tears choking his throat. He can’t look at Lizzie. He can’t bear to see the disappointment, the disgust, on her face.
Closing his eyes doesn’t help. Behind his eyelids all he can see is blood dripping from everywhere, places he never thought possible, eyes and ears and nostrils and cheeks—
He grabs the bag, just in case. He doesn’t think he’s going to vomit again, but it’s always a possibility.
It wasn’t just Keith, of course. There were others. Four others before Keith, four lessons ignored until the fifth finally stuck. He doesn’t know their names, their occupations, their home lives. He doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse.
“Jimmy,” says Lizzie eventually. “I doubt that you’ll believe me right now, but anything that Xornoth did is not your responsibility.”
But it is. Those people would still be alive if Jimmy had just behaved. He could’ve been good, he could’ve been good and everyone would have been safe, but he acted out and it hurt him and others time and time again.
“They had their agency,” Lizzie continues. “They made the choice to do that, after subjecting you to inhumane conditions. That isn’t on you. You were just trying to survive.”
Maybe, somewhere deep within his mind, that comes as a relief. For some part of him, that’s exactly what he needed to hear.
It still isn’t enough.
“If that’s true, why does it feel wrong?” Jimmy asks, sniffling. “I feel—I feel like I ought to be punished, still. I knew there would be consequences, and I still chose to—I still—”
“‘Chose’ is not a word that applies, I think,” Lizzie says. “And really, that’s a very common abuse tactic. Imagine—say, imagine a man who gets angry at his wife—for, er, not cooking dinner right—and he throws a vase at her. Then he says that it was her fault the vase is broken since she made him angry. Is that an okay thing to happen?”
“No,” Jimmy admits after a moment. “But—it’s different.”
Lizzie sighs. “Scott is so much better at this,” she mutters. “I really don’t see the difference. Why would you—er, ‘misbehave’, as you said?”
Flashes of all the times he wilfully disobeyed a command zip through his mind. Every time, he did it—
“To stop someone from getting hurt,” he says, looking up. Lizzie’s watching him, chin propped on her hands. “I thought—I thought I could handle getting hurt, if someone innocent was all right. But then—it wasn’t always me. Who got hurt.”
“Don’t you see? You had good intentions, Jimmy. You just wanted to help people. Xornoth had no right to treat you so horribly, and when you tried to save others from getting hurt, they would turn your good heart on you.”
She’s right. If he wasn’t so tired, it would be easier to see. The guilt doesn’t go away, but the knot in his chest loosens a little.
“That’s exactly what Scott would say,” he mumbles. “I thought you’d be on my side. Instead I got therapized.”
Lizzie snickers. “It’s unfair how good Scott is at that. I would have called him, but it’s like, three in the morning. Did I at least help?”
“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “Sorry. It was—” he shudders, seeing it all over again— “It was a really bad nightmare.”
“Well, if that’s solved, I’ll head back to bed,” says Lizzie, getting ready to stand. “How are you feeling, though?”
Guilty. Like a monster. Like he needs to be punished.
Something on his face must betray that, because Lizzie pauses, offers him a sympathetic smile.
“Just because it isn’t my fault—I guess—that—that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve help,” he says. “Is there something I can do? For their families?”
“Maybe,” Lizzie says. She nods a little bit, her expression turning thoughtful. “I’ll call your boyfriend, see if he has any contacts that can figure that out.”
Jimmy groans. “Just—he has a name, don’t—”
“We’ll see what your boyfriend says!”
-
It takes time, but eventually a charity is set up for the families of Xornoth’s victims. However, after only two weeks, Lizzie silently hands Jimmy a list of ten names. At the top is Keith Rowland. He doesn’t know how she got the names. He doesn’t ask.
Jimmy makes his reparations in the best way he can think to. He leaves envelopes of cash with apology cards in their mailboxes, rings the doorbell, then runs. He stalks the families online, makes sure that they have everything they need at the moment, are comfortable and all set to continue their lives.
He doesn’t stop feeling guilty, exactly. There are moments when his heart clenches, when all he can see is gruesome death that he knows is his fault.
But there’s nothing else he can do. For the most part, he’s content. And every day, it gets a little bit easier to separate himself from the evil that Xornoth forced upon him.
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