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mid-knife-crisis · 4 months

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A Lesson in Cooperation

[Karita Masterlist]

contents: lady whump, immortal whumpee, captivity, a lot of dying, torture, asphyxiation, cutting, implied surgery, briefly mentioned eye gore.

~~~

Every time someone called Karita the immortal, it was terrible news.

She tried to be secretive, and usually she succeeded, but every once in a while someone would find out. There were people strongly attuned to magic of all sorts who could sense something strange about her and piece it together; there were those who simply saw her come back to life; and there were the most mundane ways, finding her old photographs, mentions of her in documents, because no matter how hard she tried, she could never fully erase her existence from the records.

Which meant, of course, that those in power were the most likely to find out about her secret.

"So, you're the immortal I've read so much about," Princex Yari drawled with a sly smile, looking down at Karita, who answered with her best look of confusion.

"Excuse me?" She frowned. "I-I think you got the wrong person. Your Highness," she rushed to add, her eyes widening as she put her entire heart into playing the part of a confused, intimidated mortal.

It rarely worked, and judging by the princex's laughter, this time it did not.

"Don't lie to me," they said, giving one of the guards standing by their side a nod. "I can easily test it."

Karita let out a terrified gasp when the guard handed the princex a dagger, shiny and bejeweled, more of a beautiful accessory than a weapon.

"No, please!" she choked out, struggling in the guards' grip. "Please, I swear I don't know what Your Highness is talking about, I'm not immortal!"

"That's just too bad." Yari shrugged, approaching her. "If you're telling the truth… Well, I'm terribly sorry, and I hope you had a good life."

The freezing blade was pressed to her throat, making her shudder, and with a quick precise cut her fate was sealed.

"Have you ever considered becoming an actress?" Yari asked, giddy with excitement, as soon as she came back to life. "I'm sure you'd shine in death scenes."

She glared at them, abandoning her wholehearted impression of normality.

"What do you want from me, Your Highness?" Her voice was dripping with venom.

"Information," they replied, leaning down to be closer to eye level with her. "A lot of information."

"I'm not telling you shit," Karita sneered. She saw stars when her reply earned her a hard slap to the face. It was annoying more than anything, but it drove a different point home: once again, she was a captive, after a mere few years of peace.

"Maybe you won't have to. All I need is your full cooperation."

"That's not gonna happen either."

"Really?" Yari raised one eyebrow, still smiling. "I think my offer is quite sensible, especially considering what will happen if you refuse."

"Oh? Then why don't you tell me about it?"

She had been presented with many offers she couldn't refuse throughout her life. It always turned out that she could, in fact, refuse, and the consequences were bearable. There wasn't much that could scare her into submission.

"Like I said, I need information. Information about the Serpent Cluster.”

Karita frowned. Serpent was a lost cluster, taken over long ago by loosely organized groups of the underworld, now a death sentence to any ship that passed too close. The cluster was being monitored as much as it could be, which wasn’t a lot, and for decades there had been plans and promises to deal with it once and for all, but it wasn’t going to be an easy operation, and as years passed, the groups ruling over the cluster only continued to grow stronger. No-one had been stupidly brave enough to venture there, including Karita - she wouldn’t lose her life in the cluster, sure, but she knew better than anyone that there were fates worse than death.

“I don’t have any.”

“I know,” Yari said with a patient smile. “But you’re going to get it for me.”

“What, you expect me to just waltz in there and ask around?”

“No, of course not. We’ll go with a more stealthy approach.”

“We?” Karita snorted, even as fear started to set in. “I’m not going to cooperate and you know it.”

“Yes, you are. Anyway, the plan is as follows: We’re going to put implants right here.” Before Karita could react, Yari grabbed the sides of her head and ran their thumbs behind her ears, pressing down to the point of pain. “They’re going to record everything you hear while you’re there, and send it directly to us. It’s only sound, but it will have to do for the most part.”

“No?” Karita stared at them in disbelief. “You’re not putting that crap in me.”

Yari sighed.

“Aren’t you forgetting something, immortal? I’m a princex. I’m in charge here, and right now I control you. You can act tough all you want. In the end, you’ll do exactly what I want you to do.”

“No,” Karita repeated and shook her head. “You can’t force me. What are you going to threaten me with? Death?”

“Actually, yes. In a way,” Yari laughed, and gestured at the guards, who grabbed Karita by the arms and started leading her - or more like dragging her - out of the room. Her thoughts were racing, her heartbeat frantic, as she tried to guess what the princex had in store for her. She had died more times and in more ways than she could count; mundane, horrific, suicide, murder, freak accidents, magic. She had suffered, she had been mutilated, there was nothing that could sway her and convince her that going to the Serpent Cluster to act as a spy was the better alternative.

She was pretty confident, until she started to realize where she was being taken.

She pulled. She tried to dig her heels in, to stop the guards, to free herself, to do something, and maybe she was wrong, but there it was, the airlock, and two people in spacesuits, and the vast universe outside.

No.

She was paralyzed with terror at this point, which didn’t happen often - she had learned long ago to act no matter what, to fight through the fear, not let it overpower her, but this-

The star exploded.

She could’ve been there, on one of the destroyed planets, fire, burning, melting, ice, freezing, floating in nothingness, no hope of ever being found.

Sturdy manacles were closed on her wrists and ankles. Yari appeared in front of her, holding a helmet.

“So,” they said, taking in her terrified expression, “it’s just death, isn’t it? You’ll be fine, no matter how long you’re there. I still haven’t decided, to be honest. Let’s say… six hours, and then I’ll ask for your cooperation again. Then… we’ll see.”

"No." The word left her before she could stop herself, and that was it for acting tough. They knew how scared she really was.

She wasn't going to be there forever, though, or even for several days, months, years. Six hours to start with, after which…

She couldn’t agree. She just couldn’t.

The princex put the helmet on her, but she already suspected it was only temporary - she didn't have a spacesuit or any protective magic, and a helmet offered a sliver of protection that her newest captor obviously didn't want her to have. The two guards in spacesuits grabbed her and pulled her towards the airlock, and she struggled, she did, but there was absolutely nothing she could do.

Immortality couldn't save her from this.

The hatch behind them closed, the one in front of them opened, and she was pushed into a nightmare.

Freezing pressure immediately surrounded her body and her breath caught in her throat. The guards wasted no time attaching a tether to the manacles on her ankles. There was no sympathy, no hesitation in their actions as they followed their orders, testing the tether, then taking the helmet off Karita, leaving her head unprotected from the ruthless vacuum.

They pushed her further away from the spaceship - the tether was long enough for that - and left her to die.

The first time she did, she wasn’t sure what was happening. She was freezing, but at the same time her blood and saliva were boiling and- She passed out.

When she came back to life, there was a layer of ice on her face, and she screamed soundlessly when she felt her eyes boiling too, an agony she had never experienced before. The vacuum was pushing, squeezing her body, compressing her lungs, she ran out of the meager amount of air she came back to life with, and passed out again.

She had read about this, just like she had read about every potential deadly situation she’d heard of, imagining what it would feel like, learning how to survive it, if there even was a way. The source of that particular report was a gnarly one, shady experiments on unwilling human subjects in a magically recreated contained vacuum; it wasn’t a publicly available document, but she had to find it, and she succeeded, only to be plagued by nightmares for days.

The subjects lost consciousness after ten to fifteen seconds.

She plummeted into darkness more merciful than that surrounding her, speckled with stars.

Death occurred around the ninety second mark.

She gasped when she came back to life, only for the vacuum to take all of her air, as if pulling it out of her, leaving her struggling weakly until her brain shut down again.

Deceased subjects recovered after 24 hours were frozen solid.

How long had it been? Karita was in no state to try and count the moments of consciousness, short, and yet feeling like an eternity. Freezing, boiling alive, suffocating, struggling, suffering, with no end in sight, unless it had been three, four, five hours already and she was going to be taken back soon, but it might as well have only been half an hour.

There was also the possibility that Yari was going to leave her like this for much, much longer. Maybe they were watching this, enjoying her pain and panic, or maybe they couldn’t handle it. Based on what was happening to her body, she could only imagine what she looked like.

This could be her eternity. The tether was the only promise that she was going to be brought back eventually, but if it failed, or if someone undid it, she would have no anchor. Restrained, and dying too often to be able to do much anyway, she’d be left at the mercy of space until she could no longer remember what it was like to be anywhere else.

It never got more bearable. If anything, it was even worse than she had imagined and feared for so long. She couldn’t handle it. She wasn’t strong enough.

Resigned, she died. She died. She died. She woke up in the grip of two guards.

She was inside the spaceship again. Every breath was agony. She managed to look up and saw the princex, who smiled at her and said something, but she couldn’t make out their words. The bejeweled dagger shined in their hand, was pressed to her throat, and sent her back into darkness.

“So? Do I have your full cooperation?” Yari asked when Karita opened her eyes.

It was always strange to come back to life free from pain. She had just spent hours in agony, and now it was only a memory. Her clothes and face were damp, but at least not frozen anymore - the temperature must have been cranked up to make her thaw out faster.

She should refuse, but the thought of being out there again filled her with panic that made it hard to breathe. The Serpent Cluster really did seem like the better option.

“Yes.” She wanted to simply nod at first, but she had to make sure she could still talk.

“Good. I’ll give you a moment to compose yourself and… clean yourself up.” The princex grimaced and scrunched their nose. “Then we can proceed.”

She was dragged to a bathroom, and she was glad it had no mirrors. She sat in the shower with her eyes closed to avoid looking at what the water was washing off of her until she was forced to leave when one of the guards knocked on the door insistently.

The walk to the medbay felt like walking to the gallows, and she was barely aware of what was happening; her body was walking down the corridor, but her mind was somewhere else. They made her lie down on her stomach on the operating table, tied her hair into a tight bun so it wouldn’t get in the way, and hooked her up to machinery she didn’t even bother to try and recognize.

They were merciful enough to sedate her before the procedure, and someone even reassured her that there was no chance of complications, as if it mattered much in her case, as if what they were doing was supposed to help her. That was never the case - as soon as she lost consciousness, they got to work turning her into an unwilling spy, nothing more than a tool.

~~~

taglist: @stab-the-son-of-a

#broooo wtf this is so good

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