Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Categories
- All Categories 112
- In Character 21
- Thul Ka 20
- Elsewhere 1
- Out Of Character 91
- Character Sheets 21
- General 8
- Works In Progress 27
- Showcase 35
Obituary Thread
Henwen
Member
In the move from Old Thorns to Thul Ka, many of us are in the position of having dead characters on our hands. Perhaps we could have a place for us to lay those characters to rest if not in this thread, then somewhere where it would be more appropriate as they are canon-ly killed off characters. Posts could be lit styled detailing their last dying day in heartfelt detail, or could be simply a one line sentence: Name, Date, and where and how they came to be dead.
Tagged:
Comments
Oho you asked for it....
Ira Barley sentanced to death for murder, conspiracy, high treason and terrorist activity. 2713
His last meal is watery beer served in a lumpy clay mug with a cheese and pickle sandwich. It's been roughly handled and pulled apart by guards, to check that she hasn't tried to smuggle a key or a shank inside of it. As he reaches through the bars, he's grasping and gasping and desperate for something nourishing to pass his lips after being close to starving in this place for so long now.
There's a strange taste in the air, monic resonants and leftover spells lingering like the bruises speckling across his face. The witch in front of him has eyes shimmery with tears and they can't touch but they can press their feilds together and try to find comfort in it. He longs to grip her hand, to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear and feel out the warmth of her cheek with his hands. Wants to slide down the side of his cell and start sobbing, begging, pleading to anything out there that will listen.
I don't want to die. Oh gods, don't let me die.
"You'll stop em coming tomorrow? Please. They...they have to stay away," he urges her instead. Vicka tugs her head away and chews down on her lips.
"They want to see you, Ira. Be there for you. They miss you."
"No," he growls in a low voice. His children will have to get used to that and he can't do anything about it. He's failed them so entirely now. In all his promises to keep them safe and happy, sheltered and loved.
The last thing he can ever do for them is make sure that they don't have to see him like this; ragged clothes, strung up in chains and struggling to stand up. Make sure that they don't have to watch him die.
"Okay, I'll try. I will. I promise."
His breathing slows slightly, but it’s still rattled , his chest is still heaving. As if his lungs know and can’t stop pulling in oxygen because soon he won’t be able to at all. His knuckles turn white on the cell bars, “Tell ‘em the cart’s theirs’. They know all the best spots. There’s a little money in a jar in the kitchen. Tell ‘em to keep their heads down. To make sure they keep eachother safe...tell ‘em...tell ‘em…” his voice catches with a shuddering gasp and he looks up towards the ceiling. At the low brickwork and the wet damp and green mildew running up through it.
Tell them I love them and that I’m so, so sorry.
He can’t weep. Can’t have a crying broken man be the last memory anyone has of him.
“People’ll watch out for Biddy and Junior. They will. Everybody-” hands to her face, clutching at the neck of her dress, “everybody loves you, Ira.”
He presses his forehead to the bars. Trembling all over as he keeps thinking and wishing and praying that this is all a mistake. That somehow, something will change. That the resistance will storm the prison. Another explosion to break down these walls and he’ll be able to slip out, back home to his buttercup yellow house and his girl and his boy. He thought he’d been ready, had accepted his fate. All through the trial he’d known, listening to them rattle of a list of his crimes, that he was already dead.
He’d been numb then. But now, with his execution just a night away, it feels as though he’s waking up. Smelling the iron of his chains. The sweat on his body. Feeling each nerve and synapse firing and each beat of his heart. Waking up, only to die a few short hours afterwards.
I don’t want to die. Please, please, please.
When the guard tells her to go, he fights everything he has not to grab her, make her stay with him tonight. Maybe hold her, maybe kiss her. Something that people who are alive do, to remind himself that he’s still here. Still breathing and seeing and being.There are still things left to say, messages left to give to his children. How can anyone expect him to fit an entire lifetime of words into a few short minutes. If he could write he could have given Vicka a letter to give to his children, something tangible for them to hold onto.
But he can’t. So he can only give them nothing.
"Alright now Barley. You've had enough time," says the guard.
And it’s the longest. Lonliest. Shortest night of his life. Each second, minute and hour is an eternity and the space it takes to draw breath all at once. For all his talk of not wanting to see his children, all he wants is to have them here with him. So he can take them up in his arms and drink in each detail of their faces. So he can consume the idea of them, and each minute motion, their hearts beating and their chests rising. He wants to look at Junior’s dark eyes full of fire, Biddy’s solemn grey ones. Hold them and marvel at how he’d managed to make something part him, part Bridget and yet so wholly themselves now.
He’ll have that, he tries to tell himself. He made two people so he won’t be entirely erased from the world as if he never existed at all.
But it’s not enough. Not enough for him, not anywhere near enough for them.
Shortly after Vicka leaves, he throws up the cheese and pickle sandwich into the tin pisspot in the corner, overflowing and unemptied out for days. The flies careen around it, the stench is unbearable and when he chokes miserably a guard rattles on the bars. “Feeling something now aren’t you? Murdering bastard,”his eyes are alive with hate. “Hope your spirit never finds a new body stuck in the afterlife forever you ragged cunt..”
Hauling himself up, Ira can’t rise to that. Hasn’t the energy for it or any kind of righteous anger. The sentencing wasn’t unjust; he isn’t an innocent man being sent to the gallows tomorrow. He’s done bad things, broken the gollies’ laws and they’re hanging him for it. He knew what he was getting into when he joined.
But he has wondered if he should pray. If that’s what people do when they’re due to die.Pray for forgiveness and to the gods that the rope is the right length, that his neck snaps and that it’s quick. Pray that Biddy and Junior live long, happy lives without him and that somewhere, among ghosts and phasmonia that his wife has been waiting for him and that they’ll go into antelife together.
He tries but somehow he can’t believe in all that tonight. All he wants to pray for is for time to stop. Right now. And he can live out his forever in these last dwindling moments, lost in memories of his wife and the children when they were babies and sunshine days collecting trash on the junk cart.
It doesn’t stop.
Time is relentless.
He sees the gears of it grinding, like some great machine rattling towards him. Ready to crush him.
In the morning he’s fitted with cuffs on his ankles to match the ones on his wrists. The sky is a bright blue colour and he can hear birds making nests in the roof shingles. Little families pulled in close together, singing and taunting him. Ira’s going to pass out. He can’t stand up.
Just stand up. Just walk a little way.
This isn’t happening. This can’t be real.
It’s warm outside the prison. Warm sun on his face and a warmth underneath his clothes. He’s sweating and the sky is perfect above a sea of faces. Ira tries to scan the crowd and see something familiar, but they all swim together, a flesh coloured lump like a blurry, badly taken spectrograph. His field is buzzing uncomfortably, like pins jutting into his skin, but it’s still there and he tries to savor it. Savor the last sights and the last smells and these last few breaths.
They’re not here. Thank gods. Not here. Vicka kept her promise. He feels better about that and yet….
And yet he wishes he could have seen them again. Just once.
Alioe, there it is. The scaffold.Towering over him like it’s about to pierce the sky. Ira had been to hangings before, when he was alive, but the scaffold had never seemed so huge to him before. It never loomed like it does now, casting a long, black shadow that seems to stretch all the way out across the square. Back when he was alive. But is he dead yet? Is it better that he gets to count each step out now. Experience each last movement and motion as he propels his own body closer and closer to the abyss.
What’s going to happen? he asks the ether. It’s response is nothing.
So much nothing. On and on and on.
At the top of the stairs he thinks quickly about Bridget’s hair and the night he met here when they were both five or six years old. He thinks about when Biddy was born. When Junior was born. They’re going to be the last thing he thinks of. They have to be. He’s going to smell the bakery on the street corner and he’s going to see his wife’s face. Is that the lever? Is that the rope?
Is it new? Or has it strangled other men too? How many people have died on this scaffold?
They put a hood on his head. Tears slip out one by one in the darkness and he has to stand there while they read out what he’s been found guilty of. That’s all the people here know him as. As a resistance member who killed people, who was tried and who will die in front of them. They don’t know anything about a wick child, abandoned by his mother who ran away from a foundling home and met an orphaned human girl who became like his other half, his shadow, his best friend and his whole world.
They don’t know that they got married, had two children. That she died and how much he loved those kids.
Loved. Love. Will continue to love.
Forever. For the next two minutes
.
One minute.
They have to pull the lever soon surely, if they don’t he’s legs are going to give way. He can feel them shaking underneath him and vita is shifting, slowly going around and around. Day and night.
Think of their faces. Let them fill up the darkness.
Alioe please let his neck snap. Don’t let him swing there, struggling, choking, slapping about like a fish on a hook. Make it quick.
But don’t make it quick. Alioe, don’t make it quick and let him have a little more time.
It’s been ten years since he buried her. Ten years and how his children have grown. In ten years what will Biddy be? Twenty three years old, with a family of her own. Junior will be a man, will he look like Ira?
He just wants a little more time.
Time to breathe a little more, think a little more. Live a--
The trap door opens. He drops like a stone.
She nearly screamed.
The office, and by extension Ben’s home, was almost completely ablaze. She leapt up from the desk as flames licked her pant leg, her chair clattering across the floor and into the fire. “Ben! Ben, wake up!” she shouted, shaking him so hard his teeth likely rattled. He woke with a start, and it didn’t take him long to register what was going on. They were both on their feet and making for the stairs in seconds. They managed to make it down, but as they were running for the door, the floor above gave way.
When Libby turned around, Ben was gone. There was no way to find him in the flaming debris. More of the floor gave way, and she was forced to leave. When she burst out the front door, she was met with a mob. Most of the block was on fire, humans and wicks and goddess only knows what else standing in the streets cheering as the gollies burned. She felt rage grow inside her, as white hot and furious as the flames that framed her soot-streaked form. She didn’t need to think. Her hand moved on it’s own, her field crackling and popping and mirroring her fury. She used their weapon against them.
With a crack like thunder, a fireball sped into the crowd. There was screaming as it hit it’s mark. A woman hit the cobbles, half her face burned away. A second followed as Libby hurled another ball of flames. It burned her hands, the mona being unkind over her sudden, vengeful spellery. She didn’t care. A third fell, the smell of burning flesh filling the air, and there was another crack -- this time, a gunshot.
The bullet met her flesh, tearing into her shoulder like a hot poker ripping through her skin. It only served to make her angrier. More of the mob fired upon her. Another bullet grazed her cheek, while a third bit into her leg. She threw more fire, raining it down on the crowd to an extent that she lost track of how many she hit. She was growing weary, the constant, quick spellworking draining her of her adrenaline-fueled strength. She hit another.
Then there was another gunshot. This one hit home in her chest. She could feel it peel through her breast, and drive home in her heart. It felt like her ribs were exploding. She hit the steps not long after, staring up at the angry, orange-red sky as the mob broke into cheering again.