@corvid-42! Some little time ago you suggested someone expand upon the idea of Vimes finding Vetinari in the Oblong Office, nailed to his chair.
Obedient as ever to the whims of my mutuals, I have done so!
It's literally just a sketch of that scene. It is uncertain if I will do anything more with it (and it will certainly not be for a while if I do), so if you know what happens next, by all means steal this and continue it.
I've tagged this for torture but I'll put the scene below a cut to be safe.
The palace had never seemed particularly welcoming to Samuel Vimes, but the experience of padding through the deserted corridors in the small hours of the morning was downright eerie.
All his instincts were screaming that something was wrong.
Vimes hadn’t survived as long has he had by ignoring his instincts. He paused in a convenient shadow to consider.
Right, messenger from Vetinari, unusual at this hour but not unheard of, the damned man apparently never slept and assumed none of his subordinates did either, hence Samuel Vimes padding through the deserted corridors of the palace at four in the morning –
The deserted corridors.
At four in the morning.
There.
This was Vimes’ world, the world he’d grown up in and spent most of his life in, the world he still considered real life. Not the palace, that was a new addition, but the time. The dead of night and even more dead of the morning, when the only people awake were the ones who couldn’t afford to be asleep.
People like Vimes, until recently.
People like coppers and thieves, Assassins and those who merely murdered for money, bakers and cleaners and maids – a surprisingly significant subset of the city’s population.
Damn near the entirety of the palace’s population, in fact.
So, with all those people who should be up and about, lighting fires and baking bread and creeping in from questionable little errands they’d never officially been sent on – why were the corridors deserted? This should have been the busiest time of the day.
Paradoxically, Vimes relaxed. He’d figured out what was wrong. Now he just needed to know the why.
There was one bastard who probably knew the answer.
Silently, Vimes proceeded to the Oblong Office, and paused again at the door.
It was just a door. A nice door, as all the doors in this part of the palace were, but just a door. There was no reason for it to be looming forebodingly. And yet.
Vimes decided not to knock.
Vetinari had – well, had not specifically shown Vimes how to open the door to the Oblong Office without triggering its usual wake-the-dead screech. But he’d done so in front of Vimes once. It hadn’t been a demonstration. It had very pointedly not been a demonstration, and there was no way it had been an accident. It was just one of those little preparations Vetinari scattered about the place like landmines, against the day some poor unsuspecting conspirator to set them off
Vimes hoped like hell today wasn’t that day, that he was reading too much into this and all he’d get for sneaking into Vetinari’s office in perfect silence in the dead of night would be a pointed comment and an even more pointed eyebrow.
And gods, what did it say about the atmosphere of the palace that Vetinari’s sarcasm seemed comforting by comparison?
Silently, Vimes opened the door.
Vetinari was sitting at his desk. Nothing unusual there.
He didn’t look up at Vimes’s entry, but there was no way the omniscient bastard wasn’t aware of him, silence of the hinges be damned. Nothing unusual there either. Except...
What’s wrong with this picture?
The patrician, seated at his desk so late it was turning into early, working by the light of the single candle...
There.
Vetinari wasn’t working. Silence reigned in the Oblong Office, unbroken by the scratch of the quill that was as omnipresent as a heartbeat, and, in here, far more regular. Vetinari wasn’t writing, was resting his arms on the arms of his chair. Vimes racked his brains, trying to recall if he’d ever once seen Vetinari at this desk without at least one project in his hands.
Now that Vimes had let the inner copper out, he could see the tyrant wasn’t even looking at the surface of the desk – his head was bowed as though he hadn’t the strength to hold it up. As he padded across the room, Vimes wouldn’t have sworn Vetinari’s eyes were even open.
And – the half-light, again, but there was something odd about Vetinari’s complexion. If Vimes had been inclined to use a word like “ashen”, he would have used it here.
“Sir?” he said, less certainly than he had intended. “Everything all right?”
Vetinari started at the sound of his voice. “Vimes?” he said faintly, looking up at last, eyes glassy and unfocused. “What are you—”
Vimes’ hand reached out without permission and rested on Vetinari’s shoulder. “Sir, you look like—” He broke off. Not because he’d thought better of telling Vetinari exactly what he looked like, but because his hand had touched something unexpected.
As it did, Vetinari—
He didn’t whimper. Surely not. This was Vetinari, and there was no universe in which the imperturbable tyrant would make that noise.
But it had sure as hell sounded like—
Vimes’ hand, he vaguely realised, was covered in blood.
With a reluctance born of dread, Vimes looked down.
Protruding from Vetinari’s shoulder, almost concealed by his robes, was a nail.
“What the fuck?” said Vimes.
It... wasn’t alone.
There was another nail through his other shoulder. Vetinari’s arms, which had looked so odd resting on the arms of his chair, were held in place with nails though his wrists and elbows. The angle was wrong for Vimes to see his legs, but the unnatural angle of Vetinari’s boots suggested more nails going through his legs and into those of the chair.
“What the fuck?” said Vimes.
Vetinari startled and seemed to focus. “Vimes,” he said urgently. “Vimes, you shouldn’t be here, you have to leave n—”
Something hit Vimes in the back of the head so hard he saw sparks and then, for a while, he didn’t see anything at all.
One wolf wants to analyze the symbolism the other wants to laugh and go woof. I just finished my reread of Jingo and my god Vimes gets called a dog so many times.
