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Entry tags:	movies: fic

Fic: Ourobouros 1/23
TITLE: Ourobouros
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17 overall
FANDOM/SOURCE MATERIAL: Doomsday
PAIRING(S): Sinclair/Norton, Norton/OFC, Sinclair/OMC
SUMMARY: Everyone carries the past with them.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Don’t let that summary fool you, this is totally the melodramatic amnesia/romance/mystery/war story that was promised. All unsavory instances of literary merit will be marked with warning signs.



When the final arrow pierced his back, it was a pain so brilliant that for a second he mistook it for purification. Norton made a startled gagging sound from low in his throat and heard the wet noise that came with it. His breath started to whistle, and he tasted copper at the back of his tongue.

Hit the lung, he thought as his legs went out from under him as abruptly as those of a marionette who’s strings had just been cut. You’re in trouble now, mate. He made eye contact with Sinclair-with Eden-for only a second before she turned away, back towards the car and to the people that she could save. Norton did not begrudge her this choice; she was a soldier in the same vein that he was, and she knew how these things worked.

Norton tasted dirt and blood at once and figured that this was going to be it, the end. It was a moment that every soldier had to prepare for, on some level, even if the vast majority of them never had to get so close to it that they tasted blood in the back of their own throat. He tried to spit it out, but that hurt, so he lay still instead with his eyes closed and listened to the feet moving around him. He would be dead in a few minutes; they could not use him for whatever marginal information that he might have on their real enemies, the people in the city.

Norton took another deep breath, listened to it whistle, and opened his eyes to see the dirt puff out in front of his face. He felt cold all over, and his arms and legs were heavy. He couldn’t make any sound louder than a grunt when someone put their boot into the center of his back and then stepped down hard. Norton’s silence ended on a full-throated yell as his captor jerked the arrow up, hard, and out of his flesh with a dull tearing sound. His yell ended on a gargle as his own blood flooded his mouth and throat.

“Fuck, he’s going fast,” the unknown person said above him. A crackle of static was the response, and then a staticky noise that almost approached a voice.

You’re not supposed to have that, Norton wanted to say. Your little king on his little hill is going to kick your arse from one end of the hold to the other for it. But he was so cold and so weary that the rest of his body had started to rebel on him altogether, and he wasn’t certain how much longer he was going to have the energy to keep breathing, let alone mount a protest. He was hardly able to manage more than a whisper when his captor leaned down and broke off the arrows in his leg and shoulder, quick, efficient snicks that were more like pinpricks compared to the roaring pain that had moved through his chest and back when the arrow was removed from his lung.

“Deal with those later,” his captor said. Norton struggled to keep his eyes open and saw a male, pale-skinned and dressed in the tattered and hand-made clothing that all of Kane’s people seemed to dress themselves in. He seemed familiar; probably one of the captors back at Kane’s keep. Norton drew in his strength and kicked out hard. Maybe if he could hit something tender if not vital with his last breath, he could content himself in the afterlife by knowing that he had at least given the bastard a bruise. It made every single part of his body that had a vested interest in not moving jerk at once, and it was the worst pain that he felt since being shot in the first place. Norton made a gagging noise as his scream caught on the blood in his throat, and nearly passed out. His captor caught his boot. “Easy.” It was almost an afterthought, like he was soothing a horse. Had Norton the strength for it, he would have kicked him again on that alone. “Save your lung. It’s about to fall right out from under you.”

He was being optimistic. Norton could hear the way that the air was whistling in his chest, and every breath that he managed to draw was the hardest thing that he had ever done before in his life. His eyes started to roll back in his head.

“Better than a sedative.” Hands grasped him about his bicep and his thigh and lifted him without warning; Norton made another aborted sound of pain. “Easy there, lad, I can guarantee that I’m going to have to hurt you more before I can stop.” His captor settled Norton into a fireman’s carry and then whistled through his teeth at the rest of his men. Norton caught flashes of them from upside down, all hard-faced and dirty men who looked as if they were in their forties, but might have been a good fifteen or even twenties years more youthful than that and had only been rendered that way through cruel living. They looked back at Norton with no more interest than if he had been a pack that their leader was choosing to soldier alone.

The world spun; it took Norton several minutes to realize that this was because his captor had turned and was starting to walk, and not because his grip on consciousness was becoming even more tenuous. Being upside down helped, marginally. The blood that he had not yet lost was all finding its way into his head and making it possible to think again, even if the rest of his body was going alarmingly cold at the same time. His captor had a knife hanging at his belt. Norton stared at it in a daze and finally realized that even with the blood rushing to his head he was still operating impaired before he began to reach for it. It was as if in a dream; in the real world, he never expected that he would be able to dispatch an enemy with such ease.

One of his captor’s men lunged forward and uttered a curse that likely would have mortified their religious madman of a king if he had been able to hear it. He grabbed Norton’s wrist, twisted hard enough to make him grunt, and jerked his hand away from the weapon before he could so much as brush the hilt. “Damn you, Geoff,” the man holding Norton’s wrist in a vice-like grip grunted. “Your fucking charity is going to get us killed.”

“And your mouth is going to get you branded.” There was nothing of hostility or warning in his captor’s voice that Norton could hear, but the man holding his wrist still went pale and stepped back. “Don’t lecture me on charity, lecture the one who’s offering it. He’ll be interested in your opinion, I’m sure.”

Norton’s wrist was released, though he could still sense the baleful glare that was being directed at him. “Doesn’t need to give a damn about anyone he’s getting killed, does he?” It was still said as a low, sullen mumble. Norton risked craning his neck and saw that the man was looking at the floor.

“Brave man.” Norton did not need to see the face of the man who was carrying him to know that he was smiling, the dangerous, glittering kind of smile that men had sometimes that looked more as if they belonged on a dog. “Say that to his face when we get back.” Norton thought of dogs again, the way that they could hold their tails straight out behind them like rudders, unmoving, and how that made them the most dangerous of all, because you never knew what their mood was when they did that.

He blacked out.

The terrible whistling noise coming from his own chest woke Norton, and with it the feeling that some great weight was sitting directly on his sternum and only scrabbling for renewed purchase every time that he tried to throw it off. Norton gagged on the thick, coppery taste of his own blood and tried to spit it out before it choked him. Most of it wound up on his own face and the pants of the man carrying him. He gagged again. It sounded like an animal dying.

“Fuck, his lung’s going.” The man carrying him did not seem to realize that he had just broken his own cardinal rule about obscenity. He unslung Norton from his shoulder and dropped him back down to the earth. Norton landed flat on his back, discovered that there were some indignities that the arrow wound in his shoulder would not tolerate, and tried to yell as the pain ripped from his neck down to the base of his spine. It came out as a wet wheeze; blood was filling Norton’s mouth and throat faster than he could cough it out again.

They were outside, Norton realized. For some reason, he had been taken out of the tunnels and back into the open forest. Birds were screaming at each other; it was a harsh noise that Norton could not imagine possibly coming from songbirds, and which made him wonder if the carrion eaters had not already begun to arrive. The sun was peeking at him through the thick upper branches of the trees, only to hide its face again immediately afterwards when it saw the kind of state that he was in. Norton drew a final breath, the deepest that he could manage and still only a pant, as he ran his fingers across the moss beneath him and thought that it was still not a bad way to die, not having been forced to give up any information on his mission, his people.

Norton’s eyes drifted down to half-mast; they had gone no further than that when the pale, ragged man who had carried him so far grabbed his face and yelled something into it. Norton paid no attention. That man was the enemy, and Norton was going somewhere where he did not matter. He didn’t even pay attention to his shirt being torn roughly open. Maybe Kane’s people in his terrifying mockery of King Arthur’s castle did not hold cannibalism in such disdain as they liked to pretend. In thirty seconds or less, Norton was sure that he was no longer going to be around enough to give a damn about what was done to the meat.

The pale man lifted a long plastic syringe topped with one of the most wicked needles that Norton had ever seen before in his life high over his head. Is he going to-- Norton started. He did not have time to finish before the man did exactly what the oxygen-deprived remains of Norton’s mind had not been able to quite convince themselves was truly possible and brought the syringe down hard. The needle slid between Norton’s third and fourth ribs with a sharp sensation that was next to nothing, compared to what arrows going in felt like. The man had excellent aim; Norton probably would have thought that this observation was much funnier under other circumstances. He stared with dazed eyes and a sluggish brain as the man drew back slowly on the syringe, and brought with it a mass of blood. When the syringe was full, the man withdrew it from Norton’s flesh, turned, and shot the blood out again in a long jet across the forest floor. Norton’s chest made a rattling sound as he drew his first breath in a long while which felt as if it was actually getting somewhere.

The man turned back and smiled when he saw that Norton was watching him. He didn’t have the fangs of a dog, though the rest of his demeanor certainly reminded Norton of one. They were too small, too pale and pointed: the teeth of a weasel or a rat. They would probably be easy to break.

The man mistook Norton’s long stare for something other than it was and clasped at his shoulder. Norton’s attempt to knock him away was too sluggish to even approach a threat; he could already feel blood surging up in the back of his throat again. “You’ve a collapsed lung, mate,” the man told him. He was trying to be comforting, after a fashion, but it was clear within seconds that comfort was in his nature; he tone was nearly a sing-song which implied that he was enjoying this all far more than he wanted to let on. “Gonna have to that more than once, unless you want to drown on your own blood, and we don’t want to waste medical supplies, do we? Don’t have a nice, refillable cabinet of them every time that we scrape our knees like you do out beyond the wall.”

There had been a riot on the East End two years prior, because people had been unable to get something as simple as penicillin for the pneumonia that had been breeding in such tight, drafty quarters. Norton would know; he had been there to help put it down. He doubted that the man kneeling in front of him wanted to know such details of his illustrious service to the Crown; there were days when Norton did not want to know them himself. He rolled his eyes back, sucked in another deep breath of air that tasted like growing things while he still had the capacity for it, and tried to ask the most important question that he could think of. “Why--?” There was a semicircle of boots standing around his head, and a cluster of hostile faces looking down at him. None of them seemed to see any problem with letting him drown in his own blood right there on the forest floor.

Weasel showed his teeth again, only for a moment before he grew solemn. Norton noticed that he had begun to play with the syringe that he still held, twisting it this way and that. He was a capable soldier-Norton had arrows still resting in his body which attested to this fact rather bitterly-and his inability to keep still now was telling. Norton tried to focus on this fact, knew that it was important in some way, but with blood rising in his throat again and his breath whistling once more like an abandoned tea kettle it was difficult to focus.

“He saw righteousness in you,” was all that Weasel said, ultimately. “Enough of it to try to burn the rest away.” He flicked his gaze up and glared hard when one of his men let out a contemptuous noise. The next sound that Norton heard behind his head was a submissive shuffling of feet. “Once more.” The syringe was driven into Norton’s chest again, filled with blood again. Norton drew the deepest breath that he was able and let the oxygen buzz about his brain for a moment, renewing it, before he lashed out hard at his captor. Weasel caught his wrist in one hand and gave it a twist that ground the tendons together and made it everything that Norton could do not to cry out, and yet was nearly casual from Weasel’s end.

“We won’t be having any of that,” Weasel told him in a calm voice, and with his free hand bound Norton’s wrists together quickly, efficiently with a piece of rope that he procured from somewhere on his person. Norton hissed through his teeth when he felt how quickly the knots were being tied.

“You don’t want me to die, but you’re all right with my hands falling off?” he asked. Even that much speech exhausted him. “Kane’s a bit of a hypocrite, yeah?”

Weasel paused only long enough to give him a smile that would have been beatific on anyone else. “God has a special place in heaven for martyrs,” he said. “Or don’t they still have church on the other side of the wall?” He nodded to the men behind Norton’s head, who knelt down as one and hauled him roughly to his feet while Weasel busied himself in cleaning and repacking the syringe. Norton’s damnable survival instinct, unable to understand that every moment in which he was left alive increased the likelihood that he was being allowed to do so for some future purpose that he was unlikely to enjoy very much, hoped that Weasel did not put the syringe anywhere where it was going to be difficult to access in a hurry. Already, the tightness had begun to return to Norton’s chest.

His bad leg buckled beneath him as soon as he tried to put weight on him, drawing a curse from Norton’s lips. He had at least been able to entertain dim thoughts of escaping up to that point. Norton eyed the fold on his person where Weasel had secreted the syringe away and thought that now was as good a time to face it as any: in order to ensure that he was not used for whatever purpose that Kane had in mind--and Norton could not help but think that torture for information factored into it somewhere--he was going to have to ensure that he did not live to see Kane’s castle again.

Two sets of rough hands grabbed him as he began to fall, dragged him over to a group of horses who had been nibbling foliage and watching the entire proceedings with liquid, disinterested eyes. A tall, gray animal thrust its muzzle out at Norton, inhaled deeply, and then made a whuffing sound that he could not help but interpret as dissatisfaction. It stomped its hooves in the moss and had to be soothed by another soldier laying his hand upon its bridle.

“You’re not his rider,” one of the men holding Norton up said. He had blond hair, and a mouth that twisted easily. “Horses are smart, they can sense the truth. That bitch killed his rightful handler in the tunnels.”

“Do you expect me to light a candle?” Norton managed. He doubled over and coughed, each jerking movement lighting his back on fire, until he was able to spit a gout of blood out onto the moss. It began to soak in almost immediately. He was jerked back upright and made to stare into the man’s eyes. They put Weasel’s to shame.

“Yes,” the man told him calmly. “Before this is over, I expect you to pray.”

Norton was lifted up onto the back of the horse like so much corn that had to be transported, and discovered within seconds that this was not a bad analogy. His arms and legs were so weak and sluggish to obey his commands that he wondered at his own ability to maintain a grip upon the saddle. The situation worsened when another of Kane’s knights rode past and deftly flipped the gray’s reins over its head so that Norton no longer even had the pretense of remaining in control of the animal. He slumped low over the saddle and struggled to breathe.

They stopped frequently so that Weasel could draw the blood from Norton’s lung and thus allow him to keep drawing just enough air to remain conscious. All three of his arrow wounds were in agony before they had gone more than a mile, but nothing for the pain was offered, and Norton did not ask. He slumped low over his saddle and ground his teeth against each other as each of the gray’s rolling strides jarred them that much further. His breathing would have been ragged even if one of his lungs had not been injured; he noticed that the gray’s ears flicked back frequently to monitor the sound. It would have taken a man more optimistic than Norton was capable of being at that moment to think that he and the animal were warming to one another. He thought it much more likely that the horse was kin to the soldiers ringed around him, and merely waiting for the moment when he would give up, slide off, and die. For a man who had seemed to hold his keep in such rigid control while Norton had been there, his soldiers were not shy about expressing their displeasure with his ends now.

“We’re getting close,” Weasel assured Norton as they stopped one final time to draw the blood out of Norton’s lung. His skin was already riddled with painful puncture marks. Weasel was right; Norton raised his eyes and could see the top of the weather-battered stone, rising above the hills. It would be over soon.

Norton took a ragged breath that Weasel likely interpreted as one of pain, for he made an apologetic moue in response. He waited until the man had drawn back and turned away to put the syringe back where it belonged before he kicked the gray’s sides hard. The animal squealed and jerked backwards, drawing its reins taut in the hands of the knight who was holding it. Norton was counting on the animal being high-bred and made for war rather than pleasurable rides through the countryside, and he was not disappointed. The gray, rather than stopping when it felt the pressure on its bit, only grew more excited. It pulled back harder and tried first a hop onto its back legs and then an outright rear, its front hooves pawing at the air. Norton threw himself forward and wrapped his fingers through its mane so that he would not slide off while the animal squealed and continued to dance backwards. He knew the exact moment when the knight holding its reins had no choice but to let go or risk taking a potentially fatal blow to the head, for the gray lowered itself back onto four legs and wheeled around immediately. Norton drove his heels hard into the horse’s side again, and it lunged forward.

Bred for war, and bred for speed, too. The gray made a grunting noise that Norton almost wanted to call pleasure as it accelerated into a full gallop. The rocking motion of its gait would have been soothing if Norton had not been wounded; he ignored the pain and spurred it even faster. The horse turned the ground into a blur beneath its hooves in response. As injured as Norton was, it would take only one good fall to finish him, and end whatever it was that Kane wanted from him. He listened to the loose reins slapping against the gray’s chest, only serving to excite it further, and thought, Even better. A fall was almost certain to kill him at this point, but there was no chance whatsoever that he would survive the gray becoming tangled in its own reins and falling on him as well.

Norton ignored the soldiers yelling behind him and listened instead to the sound that the ground was making beneath the gray’s hooves. When it changed, he glanced down, saw that the horse was now running over grass interspersed with stone. There. That was what he needed. Norton loosened the fingers that he had been keeping twined through the horse’s mane in order to keep his balance and saw its ears flick back at him, but it was likely only listening to the sounds of the soldiers yelling. Its breathing had begun to grow labored, and sweat to darken its smoky shoulders.

“Whoa!” A dark shadow appeared beside Norton; the two horses whickered to each other as if they were doing nothing more than playing an elaborate game that the humans on board were perhaps taking just a bit too seriously. The blond man had been riding a dark horse, Norton remembered, and nearly swore. He threw his weight to one side in the hopes that that would be enough to cue the gray into veering away, but without the reins in his hands he was essentially at the mercy of wherever the animal decided that it wanted to go. What had seemed like a brilliant facet of his plan when he had first driven his heels into the horse’s flanks now seemed like a terrible weak point.

His expression suggesting that he was on the verge of swearing himself, the man riding alongside him shouted “Whoa!” again and then leaned over so far that he was in danger of losing his own seat if his animal should stumble over one of the many stones that had begun to riddle the grass. He lunged, and caught the reins of the gray as it was gathering stride. The man straightened in his saddle and pulled up on the reins of both animals, slowing them into a canter, then a trot that made Norton wish that he had thrown himself from the horse while he had a chance, and finally a walk. The gray blew air and then shook its mane as if nothing more had happened than an exciting romp among friends. Already inclined to dislike the animal for the pure dislike that it had shown him, Norton swore that it knew of his plan and was glad to have been able to play a part in disrupting it.

Weasel rode up at a gallop only a few seconds after the man on the dark horse had been able to bring them to halt. His face was set and cold, and yet it was still an improvement over the blond, who looked as if the only thing that was keeping him from shoving Norton from his mount himself was the presence of his superior. “Clever,” Weael told him, and spit. “Very clever. How much do you really think that you accomplished with that, if I might ask?”

Norton started to answer, but found the world finally giving up and growing hazy around him. His limbs felt cold while his head felt hot, and he slumped forward over the gray’s withers as blackness swelled around him, all the while thinking that he had timed his fall wrong, after all.

*
He was still hot, he was so goddamned hot, and he said so to the first person who would listen to him, an olive-skinned man who had blood ground into his cuticles and who looked at Norton as dispassionately as if he was more accustomed to dealing with animals than with human beings. Norton had no difficulty in believing this; the man held him down with one hand pulled the arrow from his leg with the other, not caring that Norton yelped in pain and tried reflexively to lurch away.

“Watch what you say,” was all that the man said in return. He swabbed at the wound in Norton’s leg with something that burned fiercely and yet did not smell like alcohol. Norton took a breath, heard that wet wheeze again. He thought that he saw the edges of the man’s mouth turn up for a second before he added, “No, you won’t be running away from us quite yet.” The man took Norton’s wrist in his hand, ignoring Norton’s attempt to pull away the same way that he might ignore the attempt of a colt or a puppy that he was treating, and frowned at what he felt there. Norton’s temperature or his pulse, it could have been either one; Norton both felt as if he was standing at the mouth of a furnace and as if his heart was trying to escape his chest independently of the rest of his body. “You might not be running anywhere.”

Norton inhaled, trying to force his chest through will alone to do the job that had used to be so easy, and was gone again before the exhale.

*
He was sweating so profusely that the sheets were sticking to him, wet and clammy. They felt like they were binding him, and Norton tried to shove them away for several seconds before he realized that he had in fact been bound to the bed. The curse that escaped his lips sounded like a growl to his own ears, and a desperate one at that.

“I don’t allow the Lord’s name to be taken in vain here,” a voice said. It rang with authority; Norton jerked his head in the direction of its owner without intending to. “It’s a foolish thing, to tempt grace when it has already been offered once.” Kane was sitting in a chair just a few feet from Norton’s bed. Upon seeing that Norton was watching him, he rose to his feet, crossed the distance so that he could lay his hand onto Norton’s forehead. Norton started to jerk away, but Kane’s hand felt so cool and the rest of him felt so burningly hot, and in the end he held himself in a trembling stillness.

“What the fuck do you want?” Norton asked. He put a deliberate emphasis on the obscenity and watched Kane’s eyes darken, but the other man did not move.

“I survived a plague that will destroy the rest of the earth,” Kane said. There was a finality to his voice that made, without any other evidence being needed, their mission here in Scotland seem silly and stupid and doomed to failure. This was the man who had stood by and watched the virus from the beginning and had made a study of it for the nearly three decades since then. Surely he would know if there was any hope to be had.

Kane had a dangerous voice, Norton realized suddenly, no matter what he was saying with it at the time. It was a demagogue’s voice. He tried to jerk away.

Kane paid the movement no more mind than the olive-skinned man had before...Norton did not know how much longer before, his world was blurring from one elastic moment into the next without an orderly passage of time. “I believe in grace myself, because of this,” Kane went on. “I also believe that mercy cannot come without a purging fire, or else sin will merely bloom again from the very same earth.” Kane’s hand moved across Norton’s forehead, and Norton damned the fever that made that hand feel soothing even as it belonged to the enemy. “And what do you believe in, Sergeant?”

End Part One