CW: Death mentions, living weapon whumpee, sui ment, some fantasy racism, torture mentions, and well. Death wish.
Sometimes, Polaris wondered what waited for people beyond death.
He was used to it, in a sense. It came with the job. He’d be sent to a target, interrogate them, or just end their life in the act.
Polaris knew humans went to Heaven when they died. Or at least, he was pretty sure they did.
But he wasn’t sure what happened to the ones like him. The impure. Inhuman. The lesser.
He wondered if they just ceased to exist. If there was an afterlife for them too.
--
Once, he was assigned to torture a woman. He wasn’t very good at it at the time. She had screamed, and begged, after giving up on escaping. She begged mostly to be left free. For him to stop. And then she started begging for death.
Polaris was used to having that feeling of dread sinking on his gut, used to sucking it up and continuing, but that time he succumbed to it.
He had failed that time.
He was supposed to keep hurting her. But he had gotten his keys to go down the prison one day, grabbed the whip, and instead of continuing as scheduled, he split her spine open.
It had been an almost comforting sight.
The woman’s eyes had been pretty peaceful for a second.
It had been years ago. But Polaris still thought about it every now and then.
She wasn’t a human—like him—so there was no guarantee Heaven was waiting for her on the other side. But, still, she might know something about death. If not, why had she been so eager to go?
--
On another occasion, a man asked Polaris if he wanted to die.
The question took him off guard. He had never thought about it. His job was to keep himself alive, and the others, dead. It would be against orders to just want to die.
He’d replied that to the man, who stared into the distance with the whitening knuckles of one hand grasping firmly on his saber, clutching the cap of his uniform with the other. Polaris asked the man if he wanted to die.
He’d said yes.
He didn’t get the chance to ask why, because in the next mission, an enemy shot the man between the eyes.
Polaris had wished he could have seen his face. If he was peaceful, too. Or if it was anguished like every other one he’d killed or seen die.
--
A few years later, Polaris met another person. They were around his own age. They were also pretty skilled. He knew they hadn’t been in the army for very long, but they had already risen up in ranks enough to be assigned to the same operations as him.
They always had a dark, hollow look on their face.
Polaris had seen that look before. Many times, in fact.
He asked them if they wanted to die.
They didn’t answer for a second.
“Should I?”
“Maybe not,” he’d said. “You are human, after all. I guess it would be pity for your life to end.”
That had gotten a bitter laugh out of them. Polaris didn’t know why.
--
They didn’t die very soon. That made Polaris sort of happy. He liked them.
They both killed many people together.
Polaris was a bit afraid they’d cause their own death after a while.
He wasn’t very happy to be proven right.
--
Polaris had woken up that day in the middle of the night.
He’d had a nightmare.
He didn’t have nightmares very often. Polaris always was given pills to sleep the whole night, and they also made the nightmares go away. But they didn’t always work.
He hated the nights where they didn’t.
Polaris didn’t try to go back to sleep. He didn’t want to. But he didn’t want to be awake, either. There were screams shouting on his head. He rolled over the bunker and covered his ears with his pillow. They didn’t stop.
He wondered how dead people could be so loud. One of his doctors had told him the screams weren’t real. That he heard them sometimes because the memories were so strong his mind was playing tricks on him. They were always right, so he believed them.
But Polaris would very much like it better if it did not do that.
He would like to go back to sleep. But if he did, the cries would follow him into slumber, get louder and louder, form faces and necks and bodies, crawl to him with their cold, bloody hands and try to drown him in rotting flesh.
He shifted to the other side of the bed.
Polaris would also like this night to end. He wanted the sun to rise and drive away the shadows that gnawed at the back of his head. The stars were too faint of a light to do that. He wondered if stars died, too.
But tomorrow, when the sun rose, he’d be sent to another mission. And the screams and blood wouldn’t just be on his mind.
He wanted to sleep.
He didn’t want to wake up to tomorrow.
Polaris wondered if death would be like sleep when the pills worked.
New refs for the entire draonkrif royal family! :D
Featured characters: Prince Solarii Phoebus Aelius, King Dysmas Aether, Queen Altansarnii Amaryllis, Princess Iolanthe Sitara, Prince Polaris, Princess Ayelet Hashachar, Prince Chrysanthos
