napoleongonewrong:

“April 20, 2012, 16:00.

“When I found him, the expanse of his back had been transformed into a giant canvas of red, oozing welts. His face was rather like one might expect of an animal forced to go through regular dog fights.

“He had this half dead look in his eyes. As if someone had tried very hard to break him, but hadn’t quite succeeded.

“He looked at me and then he looked right past me. Didn’t say a word, didn’t acknowledge my presence but for the slight widening of his eyes as they passed over me.

“The terror was evident.

“He thought me a hallucination. And rightly so.

“As far as he had been concerned up until that point, I was dead.

“He took it to mean that they had finally broken through his psyche, and were already working on remodeling him.

“An understandable fear.

“We had to sedate him before he could be removed from the room to which he had been assigned. The nurse we dragged in to do it almost threw up halfway through. The smell of urine, excrement, and sickness was so pungent that her olfactory senses couldn’t handle it.

“If not for the gasmasks we had donned earlier, I suspect that she wouldn’t have been the only one.

“I carried him out myself. That was how weak his body had become. It hardly took effort to lift him into my arms, carrying his frail body out and to the cars. 

“I pressed him down into the backseat and tucked a blanket around his naked body.

“We went back inside once he had been collected. Everyone who wasn’t killed by the gas was slaughtered brutally. I made certain of it.

“It was revealed to be a trap.

“The Elder Holmes himself came to say hello as we were leaving. He seemed to think that he had caught me out with his great scheme.

“It was with a profound sense of pleasure that I drove a metal pipe through his heart.

“Sebastian woke up confused a few hours later. He referred to me continuously as ‘Holmes’, and seemed torn between complete — if not confused — subservience, and murderous rage towards me.

“The doctors were unable to treat him until he had settled down, which did not occur until I wrapped my arms around his body as best I could without aggravating the wounds, and whispered in his ear.

“I told him the things that Holmes never could have used, and he fell silent against me.

“A tear fell down his cheek, and he refused to release me while they worked.

“His shoulders shook in suppressed sobs as he stroked his hair. It wasn’t the pain, he said he couldn’t feel that anymore. He couldn’t pretend to not be a wreck, but he acted as if it wasn’t a concern, asking me when he could come back to work. Asking me if he still had a job.

“He shuddered as I kissed his forehead for the first time, and told him to sleep.

“He needed his rest, and I had a world to tear apart for what they did to him.”