GWOT III - Why The F___ Bother?
Sep. 12th, 2024 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyGWOT III - Why The Fuck Bother?
At long last we were reaching the endgame.
The sheer amount of suffering I'd had to endure to get to this point.
The physical torture was bad enough.
The way the first interrogator had mistreated me - even by the standards of destructive interrogation - had enraged and annoyed me. Enough to kill him; not enough to break me.
The second interrogator had gotten under my skin. Reminded me of things I preferred never to think about. Asked questions that made me think and sent me back to my cell to think about them. He hadn't put burning slivers under my fingernails. He'd slid them into my soul instead.
But he was gone and I was now in the hands of the finishers.
Increasingly I was a thing to which things were done.
I remember the blood gutter mostly because they removed the head restraint to make me look at it, as the fingernails on my left hand were excised. First the damaged ones, then the healthy ones. With a scalpel indistinguishable from a hobby knife.
Oh it hurt. And it was horror. Doesn't grow back.
But I was reconciled to my death in this building, on this floor or the one below. The surgical wards, or the incinerator. So life altering injuries no longer moved me.
Each time, I was given "one chance" to start cooperating.
Every now and again, I was asked, as if casually, while being rolled to and from or while we waited for a 'technician' to be available.
"Why are you [R]esisting?"
I could hear the capital letter. The Resistance was doing things. Even though my file now read that I wasn't a Resistance member, in order to torture me properly everyone had to pretend I was a Resistance operative.
I knew better.
I was still on a third side. My own.
America may have receded into the distance. Site was a memory, mostly bad. Before that, I had merely endured.
When you are in the middle of the road, you get hit from both sides.
The Resistance had tried to assassinate me at Site. I had killed Resistance troops, both covertly and openly.
Homeland had taken me into custody, murdered my last few friends in the world, for all I knew run Site through a blender. They accused me constantly of killing Homeland troops, but as far as I knew, the first Homeland officer I had murdered was the one in this building. After arrest and torture.
(Murdered? An interesting question. If I were a Resistance operative, it would be killing in war. But as I was not, it was just civil murder, actionable treason by Homeland standards, but outside whatever protections a partisan might enjoy from the laws of war.)
This might be my last moment of clarity. Like, ever.
Eternity awaited. My open grave yawned in front of me.
I had no illusions of a hereafter. Dead is dead. I'd seen it enough. I'd _done_ it enough.
So why the fuck did I bother?
I'd watched a dull science fiction movie. But a quote from it had caused me to do a little reading.
Captain Ahab's last words.
"To the last I grapple with thee; from Hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee."
It wasn't that. I didn't feel the hatred anymore. I was past that. Just as I no longer feared death, I no longer hated. Not even the clerks and jerks who wheeled my dying meat around and hooked and prodded it. Just meat market workers. Not worth the effort to hate.
The closest I'd come to breaking was my interview with the (not good) Colonel. He'd asked smart questions and he'd actually _listened_.
Intellectual interest. Gossip between peers. We both were useful to Homeland in our own ways. And we'd both taken losses. Mine worse than his, but there had been a point where I might have ended up in Homeland employ and he might have ended up strapped to one of these rolling gurneys.
He'd played the game. I had not. A lesson worth remembering, if I get a next life.
I knew intellectually that I was disassociating. Even when in that rare and vague moment of clarity. Not a good sign.
I did not hate Homeland. Perhaps intellectually, for so damaging America - but I'd fallen out of love with her too, so it evened out.
I no longer hated the H-1B visa holders for whom I'd risked and suffered so much. Their own graves awaited. Soon or late, we are all initiates of the mysteries of death.
At long last, I stopped hating and resenting my family. They were long dead.
They had given me a dark gift, that had helped me immensely as the torture in this building worsened.
There was no new ground here. I'd been beaten, raped, tortured and emotionally abused as a child.
This was not worse. It was just more.
The crazy was still there. But in this moment, it receded, like a wave and a beach.
This was my last walk along that beach. I could sense it.
I'd told myself, more than once, that if my death were imminent, that I would attempt to appreciate some beautiful thing in that last moment before the dying of the light.
There was little to admire here.
Perhaps the little flicker from the pilot light of the incinerator, when they wheeled me into it again.
(Yes, I said again. The most mercenary teasing bitch you can imagine at a nightclub has nothing on Homeland's final stop for her victims.)
I'd learned, in my studies of psychology as it affects military history, that most people love and that other people are all the meaning most people can find.
There were perhaps a few people I'd cared about, that maybe Homeland hadn't murdered yet.
Brooke. Betty. Sarah.
Least first. Sarah. I felt for her, she'd gotten a very raw deal in the Firecracker. But while we had a debt between us, and I'd cared for her like no one had ever cared for her - or for me - our relations were neither romantic nor sexual. I suppose adopted daughter is close enough. But she had HIV, and she was symptomatic, and she was a fugitive from Homeland. She would cut a swath through whatever Homeland unit took her down, but take her down they would.
Betty. Bitch. There had been sexual tension between us, mostly on her side, but never consummated. The idea of her surviving Homeland hunting her was almost laughable. But she was clever. I knew she wouldn't turn. So she would lose, and die, and if she were lucky, it would be quick.
Brooke. I sighed.
A little sexual tension on my side. None on hers. Also never consummated. Her sexuality could be used as a straightedge - 100% full bore lesbian, laughing at butch and femme but borrowing from elements of both. We had fought together, trained together. As her commander she was a reliable extension of my will. As her leader she could count on me for her life - even if I chose to spend it. We had lived together for months, so closely that some fools thought we were lovers. When the triple beeps of a Site alarm went off while we slept, it caught us in each other's arms. We thought nothing of shaving, showering and shitting in front of each other.
My darkness was my past and my life. Hers was her first and only wife, dead. Murdered by bandits, but given what Homeland had done to make all that banditry possible, she might as well have been sidewalked. We were united in that dark, a pair of lonely flashing beacons that synced.
In a sane universe we would have never been what we were. But in this universe, this insane mess, I was *her* wife. Outwardly she was my orderly and bodyguard. But she was in fact my keeper, and I was hers. A wedding made of the blood of those we suffered to protect.
Even Hercules cannot fight two. Homeland would take her down. She would die hard, but die she would.
There was nothing they could do for me, and I could do nothing for them.
So, the living or dead, the people were also receding into the past. There was beauty there, but even the memory of the memory was fading.
There was a sunk cost here.
I had suffered so much pain. Sunk cost fallacy. What was a little more?
Why not?
At the end of the day, my last hour of my last day, it came down to the most cynical point imaginable.
Oh well, what the hell. Never mind that burning smell.
Cauterized fingernails.
It was something to do.
The pain punched through my clarity, and I howled.
I would die as I had chosen to live.
Why the fuck not?
At long last we were reaching the endgame.
The sheer amount of suffering I'd had to endure to get to this point.
The physical torture was bad enough.
The way the first interrogator had mistreated me - even by the standards of destructive interrogation - had enraged and annoyed me. Enough to kill him; not enough to break me.
The second interrogator had gotten under my skin. Reminded me of things I preferred never to think about. Asked questions that made me think and sent me back to my cell to think about them. He hadn't put burning slivers under my fingernails. He'd slid them into my soul instead.
But he was gone and I was now in the hands of the finishers.
Increasingly I was a thing to which things were done.
I remember the blood gutter mostly because they removed the head restraint to make me look at it, as the fingernails on my left hand were excised. First the damaged ones, then the healthy ones. With a scalpel indistinguishable from a hobby knife.
Oh it hurt. And it was horror. Doesn't grow back.
But I was reconciled to my death in this building, on this floor or the one below. The surgical wards, or the incinerator. So life altering injuries no longer moved me.
Each time, I was given "one chance" to start cooperating.
Every now and again, I was asked, as if casually, while being rolled to and from or while we waited for a 'technician' to be available.
"Why are you [R]esisting?"
I could hear the capital letter. The Resistance was doing things. Even though my file now read that I wasn't a Resistance member, in order to torture me properly everyone had to pretend I was a Resistance operative.
I knew better.
I was still on a third side. My own.
America may have receded into the distance. Site was a memory, mostly bad. Before that, I had merely endured.
When you are in the middle of the road, you get hit from both sides.
The Resistance had tried to assassinate me at Site. I had killed Resistance troops, both covertly and openly.
Homeland had taken me into custody, murdered my last few friends in the world, for all I knew run Site through a blender. They accused me constantly of killing Homeland troops, but as far as I knew, the first Homeland officer I had murdered was the one in this building. After arrest and torture.
(Murdered? An interesting question. If I were a Resistance operative, it would be killing in war. But as I was not, it was just civil murder, actionable treason by Homeland standards, but outside whatever protections a partisan might enjoy from the laws of war.)
This might be my last moment of clarity. Like, ever.
Eternity awaited. My open grave yawned in front of me.
I had no illusions of a hereafter. Dead is dead. I'd seen it enough. I'd _done_ it enough.
So why the fuck did I bother?
I'd watched a dull science fiction movie. But a quote from it had caused me to do a little reading.
Captain Ahab's last words.
"To the last I grapple with thee; from Hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee."
It wasn't that. I didn't feel the hatred anymore. I was past that. Just as I no longer feared death, I no longer hated. Not even the clerks and jerks who wheeled my dying meat around and hooked and prodded it. Just meat market workers. Not worth the effort to hate.
The closest I'd come to breaking was my interview with the (not good) Colonel. He'd asked smart questions and he'd actually _listened_.
Intellectual interest. Gossip between peers. We both were useful to Homeland in our own ways. And we'd both taken losses. Mine worse than his, but there had been a point where I might have ended up in Homeland employ and he might have ended up strapped to one of these rolling gurneys.
He'd played the game. I had not. A lesson worth remembering, if I get a next life.
I knew intellectually that I was disassociating. Even when in that rare and vague moment of clarity. Not a good sign.
I did not hate Homeland. Perhaps intellectually, for so damaging America - but I'd fallen out of love with her too, so it evened out.
I no longer hated the H-1B visa holders for whom I'd risked and suffered so much. Their own graves awaited. Soon or late, we are all initiates of the mysteries of death.
At long last, I stopped hating and resenting my family. They were long dead.
They had given me a dark gift, that had helped me immensely as the torture in this building worsened.
There was no new ground here. I'd been beaten, raped, tortured and emotionally abused as a child.
This was not worse. It was just more.
The crazy was still there. But in this moment, it receded, like a wave and a beach.
This was my last walk along that beach. I could sense it.
I'd told myself, more than once, that if my death were imminent, that I would attempt to appreciate some beautiful thing in that last moment before the dying of the light.
There was little to admire here.
Perhaps the little flicker from the pilot light of the incinerator, when they wheeled me into it again.
(Yes, I said again. The most mercenary teasing bitch you can imagine at a nightclub has nothing on Homeland's final stop for her victims.)
I'd learned, in my studies of psychology as it affects military history, that most people love and that other people are all the meaning most people can find.
There were perhaps a few people I'd cared about, that maybe Homeland hadn't murdered yet.
Brooke. Betty. Sarah.
Least first. Sarah. I felt for her, she'd gotten a very raw deal in the Firecracker. But while we had a debt between us, and I'd cared for her like no one had ever cared for her - or for me - our relations were neither romantic nor sexual. I suppose adopted daughter is close enough. But she had HIV, and she was symptomatic, and she was a fugitive from Homeland. She would cut a swath through whatever Homeland unit took her down, but take her down they would.
Betty. Bitch. There had been sexual tension between us, mostly on her side, but never consummated. The idea of her surviving Homeland hunting her was almost laughable. But she was clever. I knew she wouldn't turn. So she would lose, and die, and if she were lucky, it would be quick.
Brooke. I sighed.
A little sexual tension on my side. None on hers. Also never consummated. Her sexuality could be used as a straightedge - 100% full bore lesbian, laughing at butch and femme but borrowing from elements of both. We had fought together, trained together. As her commander she was a reliable extension of my will. As her leader she could count on me for her life - even if I chose to spend it. We had lived together for months, so closely that some fools thought we were lovers. When the triple beeps of a Site alarm went off while we slept, it caught us in each other's arms. We thought nothing of shaving, showering and shitting in front of each other.
My darkness was my past and my life. Hers was her first and only wife, dead. Murdered by bandits, but given what Homeland had done to make all that banditry possible, she might as well have been sidewalked. We were united in that dark, a pair of lonely flashing beacons that synced.
In a sane universe we would have never been what we were. But in this universe, this insane mess, I was *her* wife. Outwardly she was my orderly and bodyguard. But she was in fact my keeper, and I was hers. A wedding made of the blood of those we suffered to protect.
Even Hercules cannot fight two. Homeland would take her down. She would die hard, but die she would.
There was nothing they could do for me, and I could do nothing for them.
So, the living or dead, the people were also receding into the past. There was beauty there, but even the memory of the memory was fading.
There was a sunk cost here.
I had suffered so much pain. Sunk cost fallacy. What was a little more?
Why not?
At the end of the day, my last hour of my last day, it came down to the most cynical point imaginable.
Oh well, what the hell. Never mind that burning smell.
Cauterized fingernails.
It was something to do.
The pain punched through my clarity, and I howled.
I would die as I had chosen to live.
Why the fuck not?
