trans_9 | Buy a Little Mercy [Open; Potentially Graphic Material]

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Buy a Little Mercy [Open; Potentially Graphic Material]

Less than an hour after the ship leaves Agrestic's orbit, an announcement is broadcast throughout Stacy.

|| Attention, crew. Your crewmates, Howard Bassem and Charles Merriman, have been apprehended attempting to desert. They will now be given Punishment. According to established guidelines, you are all requested to report to the Observation to witness the Punishment. Attendance is not mandatory, but highly suggested. This will serve as a reminder of the consequences of treason and desertion. ||

On the observation deck, Archon Yavek, Archite Rekkti, two other Daligig and a handful of Kessek soldiers stand outside a spherical force field. Inside the bubble, Orc and Howard are suspended by tentacles looping around their wrists. Orc's ceased thrashing around and struggling against his restraints; rust-colored fissures have developed around his shoulders and forearms from the strain, but now he simply hangs there, looking defeated. Howard's nose is bleeding, and every time a drop falls to the bottom of the forcefield there's a small sizzle. He's weeping and begging the Daligig with every plea possible, but they act as if they aren't listening. Instead, they wait for an audience.

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"You intend to?" Yavek smirks then nods at the Kessek. The Kessek looks for Goliath to Yavek and back, and then throws his fist at Goliath's face.

The exchange gives Goliath enough time to block.

The kessek is stronger than he expected, though, and grabbing the oncoming fist leaves him off balance as he throws a retaliating blow.

The Kessek grabs Goliath's fist in one hand and then his wrist in the other, and in a display of brute, grotesque power, rips them apart and tosses the hand to the ground.

Pain and horror hits Goliath at the same time and he stumbles, almost falling to his knees, gripping the stump where his good hand used to be, stemming the blood flow from the open wound, too shocked to even roar.

A brief moment passes, in which it looks like he will succumb to the clear defeat.

The moment ends when he lashes out with another blow, kicking the Kessek's armored chest with talons that can tear through reinforced steel. His roar is shot through with fury and pain.

Like the majority of the crew, Elisa had hurried to the observation deck as soon as she'd heard the ominous announcement. Now that she was there, she couldn't believe what she was seeing. She recognised Howard. She'd apprehended him stealing from the medical bay only a few weeks earlier. But she didn't need to recognise the person suspended from the tentacles to be horrified by the sight.

The worst thing was the fact that this was only the beginning.

Before she could demand some sort of explanation, before she could even start to thinking of a way to stop what was happening, she was distracted by a familiar roar. It was full of anger, and, more worryingly, fear and pain as well. Drawing her gun, Elisa ran in the direction of the sound without any way of knowing what she would find when she got there.

What she found was the sort of scene she’d dreaded since waking up from the pods and finding herself in the middle of this battle.

Goliath stumbled, one hand trying to stem the flow of blood from the stump of other. She didn’t scream; there wasn’t time. She raised her gun at the Kessek instead.

The Kessek goes flying back and skids across the floor. It gets up, seemingly unharmed, and runs to tackle Goliath to the floor.

Stacy, sensing the bullet in the barrel of Elisa's gun, whips a tentacle down and tosses the gun to the side. She won't stop the fight, but she will stop anything that looks like an attempt to murder. And Goliath's injury, though horrible, is not an immediate threat if he can be kept from bleeding out.

And there is definitely bleeding. Still, aside from gripping the bleeding stump while the Kessek charges, Goliath is ignoring it about as much as he can, his eyes still white with rage.

He braces himself as the Kessek charges, attempting a complicated maneuver as it reaches him, one meant to loop his bleeding arm around the Kessek's throat. For once, his strength is not his advantage in his fight, and he has to bank on his agility outmatching the armored Kessek. His wings and tail lash out as he grapples with the Daligig's bodyguard, attempting to throw his opponent off-balance.

It is most definitely a losing fight that he's waging, but he shows no signs of slowing down any further than his injury already demands. Though at the rate he is bleeding out, it won't be long before the demands of his injury will be more than his anger can power through.

Before Elisa had a chance to fire and find out if her bullets would have any effect on the Kessek, her gun was snatched from her hand. She didn't bother to protest. The ship was unlikely to listen to reason. However, there was a chance that Goliath would.

"Goliath!"

She ran forward, almost slipping on the blood on the floor of their makeshift battlefield. She kept her balance, somehow, and tried not to look at it. (She'd seen her fair share of wounds on the beat in New York, but there was a lot she didn't know about gargoyle physiology. An amputation didn't have to be fatal, but how much blood could he afford to lose?)

"Goliath, stop! This isn't a fight you can win!"

There was no way for her to get between him and the Kessek, so she rounded on Yavek instead.

"You've proved your point!" They'd proved beyond any doubt that they were the ones in control. "Unless you want to let one of your own soldiers throw away their lives, stop this."

Throwing their lives away in a battle against the Ohm was one thing, but this was something else.

"Kessek, restrain him! Don't injure him further!" one of the Kessek captains yells. Yavek remains silent.

Another Kessek joins the fight and between the two of them, they overpower Goliath. And yet they are true to their code - in restraining him, they do as gently as they can.

It occurs to Goliath, as he's forced to the ground, how fundamentally flawed it was of him to expect honorable combat from a race that thinks torture is an appropriate way to quell disobedience.

He hangs onto his consciousness as he kneels in his own blood, growling at Yavek. Elisa hovers on the edge of his field of vision, and only her presence keeps him from voicing his thoughts - that he will die without accepting the Daligig's rule - lest they make his declaration true in front of her.

Hiccup could only stare in slack-jawed, abject horror when Goliath's hand had been ripped off of his body. While they hadn't talked in a while, he liked Goliath, and more than that, the sight of someone else losing a limb had a much more personal impact for him than it might have had for some other people.

After the Kessek forced Goliath to the ground, Hiccup's horrified expression faded to one of single-minded resolve and he darted forward. To some, it might have looked like he was trying to make a possibly ill-advised attempt to attack the Kessek.

What he was really doing was making a beeline for Goliath's severed hand. The ship could probably reattach it, right? He wanted to try to see if he could keep it from getting even more damaged and get it to Medbay to be preserved long enough that they might have a chance of fixing it.

Edited 2012-03-19 05:43 (UTC)

One of the Kessek reacts on instinct, smacking a heavy, armored hand down onto Hiccup and slamming him into the floor. She brings a foot down on Hiccup's chest to keep him there.

His head was bleeding now and he was probably concussed. Again. Panting and having trouble getting the air into his lungs because of the foot pinning him down, Hiccup looked up at the Kessek with wide-eyed terror, and then he closed his eyes for a second, his expression relaxing back into the resolve of moments before.

Opening his eyes and looking over at the Daligig, his voice strained from the weight on his chest and slightly slurred, but very calm, he said, "I was just trying to get his hand. To get it to Medbay. So they could hopefully reattach it."

Blood trickled down his face and he had to work very hard to string all the words together.

"I have no powers and I didn't have a weapon in my hands. And as far as I know I didn't break any rules like trying to desert. And I didn't throw any punches."

Which meant they basically looked even more like tools, hitting an unpowered, unarmed, non-hostile, one-legged teenager that looked like a couple of rubber bands tied together--before he even threw a punch.

"I sure hope it doesn't get out to your allies that you're okay with knocking around unarmed noncombatants--who are, by the way, former elected officials--when they were just trying to help someone who was injured. That would be a pretty inconvenient tidbit of information to wind up released publicly on, say, those interdimensional GIA news networks."

Punishment for desertion they could explain away as inciting a necessary response for the sake of discipline. Giant Kessek slamming down tiny disabled people for trying to help someone who was hurt was a little more difficult to pass off.

Even if it wasn't, it probably didn't hurt to remind the Daligig that everything that was happening here wasn't private, wasn't something they could keep a dirty little secret from the rest of the GIA, an alliance comprised of countless member worlds that likely didn't all have the exact same opinion on how the war was to be handled. If they wanted to torture two teenagers that broke a rule they didn't know was even there, beat down on people trying to save them, rip people's limbs off, and knock down the little guy, they needed a little reminder that everyone else they were allied with could find out about it.

Edited 2012-03-19 06:39 (UTC)

"Stand down!" Yavek orders. The Kessek captain repeats the same order a moment later.

The Kessek standing on Hiccup's chest back away. Yavek approaches Hiccup - and extends a hand to help him up.

"I apologize for the Kessek's impulsive reaction."

Hiccup didn't take it, trying instead to sit up and finding that he was far too dizzy to. The room was spinning and he felt a wave of nausea rising up in his gut.

Between the fight with the Green Death back home and the many times he'd been concussed in fights on the ship and on missions, he'd taken a few too many hard knocks to the head at this point.

So he stayed there on the floor, staring up at Yavek.

"Goliath needs to go to Medbay."

Someone else was going to have to grab the gargoyle's hand because Hiccup wasn't going anywhere for a while.

Yavek uses the hand he was offering to Hiccup to wave the Kessek into letting Goliath go. They won't help him get there, but they won't interfere.

As Hiccup darted forward in a valiant but ultimately fruitless attempt to retrieve Goliath’s lost hand, Elisa ran to the gargoyle’s side and pulled off her jacket, using it to try and stem the blood flow as she knelt next to him, Kessek or no Kessek. The dark red leather was soon darkened even further by his blood. They needed to get him to the medical bay quickly, but there was no way that she could manage it on her own and she wasn’t sure how far he could get without help. She glanced around at the nearby members of the crew, looking increasingly desperate with each drop of blood that Goliath lost. Although most of the people on the observation deck were focused on the two boys suspended above them, or engaged in their own private skirmishes with the Daligig, some of them had been caught up – as she had been, as Hiccup had been – in Goliath’s fight.

Within a few seconds, it became clear that Hiccup would need medical treatment as well. She didn’t know him well, but she was grateful to him for what he’d tried to do, even if she wasn’t entirely surprised that it had failed.

“I’ll be back,” she murmured to Goliath, before crossing the blood stained ground to finish what Hiccup had started. She’d have risked it even if she hadn’t been able to overhear the exchange – there was a chance that it could be reattached – but it looked as if the fight really was over now.

She picked the hand up, trying not to think of the innumerable times that Goliath had used it to stroke her hair or take her hand as they stood underneath the stars. She couldn’t afford to fall apart and, steeling herself, Elisa returned to Goliath’s side.

“We need to get you out of here.”

Funny how disordered one's thoughts became, when one had lost a lot of blood and had a lot to think about. It occurred to him that Elisa's jacket was wrapped around the stump, and he was bleeding on it. Elisa loved that jacket. It would not do for him to bleed on it.

He'd stripped it off by the time she returned, wrapping his remaining fingers around his arm so tightly that his talons bit into his unbroken skin. He must have been in pain, because tears had begun leaking from his eyes, but a separation seemed to have come up between what his body felt and what his mind acknowledged.

A wound he would not recover from. A first for him. Being one-handed would present a lot of difficulties that he'd so long taken for granted. And the children would doubtlessly still receive Punishment. And Hiccup was even now still struck down for his sake.

But Elisa! She'd returned, and the Daligig had not ordered his execution in front of her, or harmed her at all. That was enough to make him smile. It even touched him, the way she'd returned with his severed hand, futile though the gesture was.

"Elisa." He sounded almost calm and pleased, as the shock settled in and his blood continued to pool in a slow trickle. "It cannot be helped. Sleep will stop the bleeding."

Why Stacy had not yet turned him to stone to allow him to heal, he did not know.

"Is the Viking injured?"

It didn't occur to him through his haze that Elisa would not know that the scrawny boy who'd darted forward and been struck down by the Kessek was a Viking at all.

"It's also hours away," she pointed out, gently but firmly replacing the jacket. "If we get you to the medical bay quickly, they might be able to reattach it."

And if they couldn't, they could at least make sure that the blood loss and shock didn't kill him before he was healed by the stone sleep.

Elisa did a brief double take when he referred to Hiccup as a viking, but, as distracted as she was, it wasn't difficult to guess who he was referring to.

"Not as badly as you," she answered, putting Goliath's good arm around her shoulders to try and help him to his feet. She couldn't hope to carry him, but she could guide him in the right direction. "Come on, big guy."

Reattach it? They could do that? Human medicine was a marvel.

The only flaw in that plan was that though Goliath was attempting to stand, his exertion against the Kessek and the blood he'd continued to lose since had sapped his strength. His first few attempts to stand just winded him, and when he finally stood, his legs shook before he steadied himself. Elisa's support helped, but he could not rely on her too much without hurting her, and that was unacceptable.

And the walk ahead of them was long.

Billy had been frozen to the spot for far too long, shock giving way to illness and illness giving way to endless calculations. If they could easily brutalize Goliath---there would be nothing he could do, even morphed. It was likely that even the entire team wouldn't have been able to make a difference. Any interference would've needed a less direct tactic, and there were others working on that.

Elisa's visible desperation finally startled him into action. He darted forward, offering himself as a second support. Ducking under Goliath's injured arm as gently as possible was proving to be difficult, but he eventually secured it.

"Yeah. And---and if not, we've made mechanical limbs and parts before. It might need some magical assistance to work with you, but I'm sure we can." He hated how frightened he sounded.

At some point, drawn by the noise and the commotion, Zuko had arrived in time to see his ~~best buddy~~ puny student smacked to the ground by an alien thug several times his size.

He didn't stick around to risk getting de-handed himself, and managed to find a doctor right about when the commotion ceased.

"You can probably figure it out from here."

He hung around in case Hiccup needed carrying to the Medbay.

With both Billy and Elisa to lean on, he was able to walk, but slowly.

When he groaned, it wasn't out of pain, but out of a vague sense of distaste for the idea of a mechanical replacement. Maybe he could get a sword mounted, instead.

"Someone - will need to tend to Hiccup."

Preferably not one of the people supporting him right now - but he didn't want to know that someone had suffered needlessly trying to help him, and gone unhelped.

Faiza took one look at the situation and nodded. Luckily, she also had a head for names. "Please, Ms. Maza, Mr. Cranston, keep Goliath's injured arm above the level of his heart. You have the hand, yes?" She bent to look at Hiccup's eyes, checking how bad the concussion was. "I believe your medical file says that you're magical, Goliath?" She'd listen to whoever answered, though. It was going to play into her triage. "Mr. Haddock, I'm going to need you to stay awake and with us, all right?"

"I can prob'ly make it to Medbay with a little help. Just worry about Goliath right now."

A lost limb was way more serious than a knock to the head, especially if he was still conscious, and for Goliath's sake, he hoped they could get it reattached. Life without a limb wasn't the worst but there were times it could be horribly inconvenient.

Hiccup looked to Zuko. "Think you can give me a hand?" Then he winced. "And let's also just pretend I didn't use the most awkward, insensitive wording possible right there. I'm blaming the head injury."

It was convenient.

"I'll try not to throw up on you," he promised Zuko.

People let me tell you 'bout my best friend~

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