fic: misc.

He was trapped, pinned under the crushing weight of what felt like tons of rock. Not that that was a logical estimation, obviously: as far as Gage could feel, his bones were broken, not crushed. But then the pain was clouding his mind, stripping away reason and logic and relacing it with a feeling of cold, damning terror.

Gage had never felt fear before. He suddenly understood why lesser people might allow it to rule their lives.

He couldn’t see. His eyes hurt. Possibly these two facts were related somehow.

Gage realized that he could still move his hand—even his head, if he didn’t mind the stabs of agony that shot through his neck when he tried to turn it. Carefully, he reached out: there was rock above him and uneven ground below him.

His hand encountered a toe.

Gage paused and drew in a labored breath in sharp, biting surprise. A toe? Yes—attached to a foot—

And then someone spoke.

“I don’t believe you’re still alive.”

It was a male voice, maybe that of an older child. Gage sensed idle amusement.

He tried to turn his head, tried to see, but his body refused to respond. And he realized suddenly that his hand wasn’t obeying him anymore, either; when he tried to move it, his fingers just curled weakly, useless.

“Not for long, though,” the person said in a voice suddenly distant. “Hey, Gage, I bet you don’t want to die, right?”

How do you know my name? Gage thought, and his fingers twitched. Suddenly a warm hand was covering it. It was oddly comforting, except that, buried under thick layers of fear and pain and numbness, there was another thread of feeling—dread, anticipation, something, a feeling that scrabbled at the edges of his mind and told him to run—

“This is probably going to hurt,” the voice said.

It did.

Labels: _fiction, verse: misc.