Higgs' Choice - wip excerpt
898 words - gen (sam/higgs in the finished work) - mature
cw: suicidal ideation, canon typical existential crisis, spoilers for higgs in general
Higgs has a lot to think about while he's waiting to die. Especially when one of his biggest regrets most dangerous enemies drops her bag by his head.
Fragile’s offer of a choice is a joke - a damn funny one, too. Sure, he’s a proud man, but even Higgs can laugh at the dark, ironic humor. He has to. The sound tears itself from his throat without his permission, broken and manic in all the same ways he is.
“Listen up, Higgs. I got a proposition for you,” she grits out. A twisted echo of his own words. The venom in her voice is impressive, though not surprising. He earned it, after all. All he can do now is wait on his knees for the choices she will present when she turns to face him.
“Do you want to live out your days in a prison of your own failure, or would you rather take your failure into your own hands?” she asks on cue, her accented voice as hard and cold as the stones under his knees. She doesn’t summon his cocky saunter as she approaches and somewhere deep in his tiny, withered heart he finds a shred of pride in her for that. That slow, measured stalk suits her better anyway. When she doesn’t continue, he tries to pick up the slack it’s his line, after all.
“Get to the point,” he rasps out. Broken ribs send out shockwaves of pain in protest and he snaps his jaw shut. The bone shifts and grinds in a way that doesn’t hurt so much as it sends a shiver of sheer wrongness down his spine. Fuck him then, he didn’t need to chew his food anyway. Briefly, he entertains the mental image of his broken jaw opening and unhinging like a snake’s to swallow Fragile whole. Manages something close to a smirk at the thought.
She doesn’t speak again until she’s standing just in front of him, towering over his muddy, kneeling form in her pristine uniform. There’s no way to feel dignified and he doesn’t have the energy to put on a show either, so he just meets her cold eyes as she looks down on him. Loathing burns in his chest. Whether it is for her or himself is a question he doesn’t care to examine.
“If you want to live, all you have to do is stay here,” she finally explains. “However, if you don’t fancy wandering the beach alone for the rest of eternity, then you’ll have to put this gun to your head and pull the trigger yourself.”
And there it is. The catch. That’s when the laughter tears from his chest, even as black tears roll down his cheeks. She doesn’t say anything else after that, because what else is there to say? Fragile looked at Higgs, with his thick eyeliner, gold-striped cloak, and raging god complex, and saw right through the mask to the too-proud, too-scared man underneath. Both options are equally crushing.
While he is blinded by his options, Fragile turns her back and walks away. The gun she leaves on the wet sand couldn’t land hit on Sam the goddamn bastard, Amelie’s favorite, somehow more perfect than Higgs could ever be now that Amelie is protecting him and even worse… fuck, he doesn’t even want to try. The realization hits him in the chest as hard as Sam’s boots had.
He sure as hell wouldn’t fire on Fragile - and didn’t he prove that already? Even when she threatened to fuck up the grand plan he couldn’t destroy her with his own two hands. That’s something he’ll think about some other time, which punches a pained laugh out of him because time doesn’t exist here. He’ll have eternity to dwell on his reasons for loving that strange, broken woman so goddamn much.
Shooting Amelie has never been an option, never will be, that’s kind of the whole point. Love isn’t the right word for that. It’s terror, if he has to be honest - which he never is, with himself or otherwise. The sort of fear that gripped him like so many tar-black hands dragging him into an endless pit. Amelie is endless. Inescapable. Raising a gun to her is like… well, like throwing a nuke into a tar pit. Pointless. A waste of firepower. It’s far easier to just embrace the inevitability. And if he got to feed from that intoxicating, endless well of power? That was just a little perk.
But Sam? Oh, he’s been ready to kill Sam since Amelie first mentioned his name. Her warm tone and sad smile, the way she beamed with pride every time little Sammy Porter connected one more dot, it all made him want to retch. People were proud of him, once. This battle on the beach had been his chance to finish off the insufferable cockroach. So why? Even as Higgs reaches out to lift the rifle off of the sand, he knows that he won’t try.
It doesn’t matter. Even if it does, it won’t for now, he decides that and thinks it into becoming the truth. What matters is that Fragile has given him two options: death or stranding. There are only a handful of bullets left and infinite grains of sand under his knees. He raises the gun, eyes fixed on the horizon, where the colorless ocean waters meet the grey of the sky.
Higgs pulls the trigger. The bullets meant for his brain disappear into the distance.
(visit me on ao3 @ kittleimp to read the finished piece when it is published!)
