POST #1

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Cruelty of the Beast (Isaac, gen, angst)

[(Anonymous)]

Tried my best to fill - not sure how well it worked and whether this was what you wanted, OP. Hope anyone who comes across this finds it satisfactory.

Warning for minor gore.

---

The blood was the worst part, the blood.

In retrospect, the shock must have blocked out the pain. That should certainly have been worse. But, as one claw crushed his torso to the ground, the warm, wet blood showering down on his face was what drove him mad, so much blood, and that thing dangling in the pink head's mouth, was that his arm-

The blue head let out a roar that sounded like approval, like laughter. He'd hear that in his nightmares for years to come.

The pink head shook the flesh hard, snapping the few hideously-stretched bonds of connective tissue, and gulped it down. In his delirious state, he swore it looked at him and grinned. Yes, it was a dragon - a reptile. It had no lips. But the way it regarded him, mouth open, serrated teeth stained with his blood and strips of his flesh still clinging wetly to the jaws -

There was a scream from behind him, and a bolt of blue Psynergy took it right in its leering muzzle; the beast stumbled back, taking the claw off his torso, and he could breathe again. But the shock was too bad for him to move. His head lolled over, seeing the red and ragged mass that extended from his left shoulder, then lolled away. His breath hitched on a sob.

He was failing them all, his mind told him dimly. This was Venus. His element. He could take this... he should get up and fight...

But there was no strength left in him - nothing but a spreading cold.

---

He didn't really know what happened next. He remembered hearing words, in bits and pieces, but that had a dreamlike quality - voices in a fog, coming from someplace very far away. The details he knew from his friends.

They defeated the Fusion Dragon. Whether their fury and horror had driven their Psynergy to new heights, or the dragon had overreached in their - its - spite, they didn't know. It had collapsed into Saturos and Menardi, who had in turn collapsed into the beacon.

(And had her mouth been red with blood, had there been meat between her teeth? Had Saturos, even dying, died smiling?)

Felix and Sheba were... gone. There had been a sudden quake, the Lighthouse ripping itself asunder before mending itself as though the sundering had never been. The three of them had managed to stay on it, but those two had not been so lucky.

Perhaps they could have done something to save them. They should have tried to do something to save them, even it was hopeless. But they were too focused on him.

He knew that part of what happened. He could not have missed it.

Ivan, screaming in panic that he was fading fast. Mia, weeping over him, her warm tears hitting his face like blood as she cried that her Psynergy wasn't enough. Garet, ashen-faced, begging Isaac to forgive him as he called fire to his hands -

And then there was blinding, burning pain, the hiss of sizzling liquid, and the stench of cooking meat.

After that, he knew nothing.

---

He wouldn't wake for days.

When he did, it was to pain in a limb that was no longer there. He remembered turning to look at it and finding only a bandaged stump; he'd stared at it dumbly, wondering how nothingness could hurt so much.

They explained what had happened in kind, quiet voices. There had been no saving his arm; Mia's Psynergy could heal wounds, but not regrow a severed limb, and the brutal derangement of the tissue that remained had kept her from salvaging it. He would have bled out shortly if Garet had not cauterized the injury, burning it away beneath the shoulder. After that, their only concern had been to stabilize him, trading Djinni between them to spread who could use healing Psynergy, doing their utmost to force his traumatized system back to a semblance of functionality. It hadn't just been the arm... the dragon's crushing weight on his torso had inflicted internal injuries, which they'd healed as best they could. Could he feel his legs? He could? Oh, praise all the gods...

He could barely hear them. Yes, Saturos and Menardi were dead.

But that girl, Sheba, was... gone, and Felix - whatever his crimes - with her. Venus was lit. And, when he shut his eyes, he saw one head of the dragon, muzzle slick with his blood, leering down at him; when his attention wandered, and the voices around him faded, he heard echoes of the other head's laughter.

He wasn't sure that they'd won.

---

In his nightmares, they didn't.

But it wasn't always him - that was the worst part. In the dreams where he had two arms, it was Garet on the ground, the red of his hair blending with the blood - Mia, her dress soaked with it - Ivan, crumpled and broken - even once Jenna -

Sometimes it was the dragon. Sometimes it was Saturos and Menardi apart, the spray of arterial blood giving Menardi's scythe and smile the same scarlet gleam, Saturos's teeth flashing as he roared with laughter -

It didn't matter. Because he could never do anything. Because whether it was an arm or a leg or something worse, it didn't matter whether he was himself on the ground or frozen with horror or screaming and running at them with his sword upraised, because it had already happened, he couldn't undo it, and he was so damned helpless -

He'd awake shaking and sobbing, and the arms that came to encircle him might be Garet's or Mia's or Ivan's or some combination of all three. He was grateful - more grateful than he could ever express to them. He was more fortunate than he had any right to be, to have them with him.

To the extent he could, he repaid them by retraining. It was hard - he had to adjust to fighting one-handed, to fighting off-balance, to using Psynergy with his hand still clamped around his sword - but they told him he managed. He could fight off common monsters, after a while. Wasn't that good enough?

When they asked him that, there was a tightness in his chest that might have been panic, or might have been an immense talon pressing down on his armor, on his ribcage, holding him down as teeth sank into his flesh and the strong muscles of one brutish neck twisted and ripped-

No.

No, nothing would ever be good enough.

---

The cold cut him, and the gusts whipped his hair into his face. His vision blurred as his eyes watered; he could barely see.

Not that it mattered, because he knew what he had to reach, with arm or Psyenergy or both. The nightmare was tightening around him, awake though he was - it was just as he had seen, even if the situation was different, his friends needed him, they were screaming for him, and he was helpless to help -

"Isaac, please!" Mia cried from below, herself only an inch from the precipice - "You've got to save Garet!"

He was trying, couldn't she see that? He was trying - one-armed or not, he was an Adept, he just needed - one of the Psynergy techniques he had learned on this journey had to work, it had to, he just needed to grip Garet with a hand-that-was-not-a-hand, a grasp far tighter than anything that could be provided by absent flesh, and -

"No, I'm afraid you won't be doing that," came a deep voice, and Isaac's head jerked to look around and over the shoulder that terminated in a stump.

His eyes should have gone to the great brute. He was the one who had spoken, after all, and twice the size of the girl by his side.

But it was that red-haired girl who was looking down at him, head tilted back, mouth half-open in that smile, that same damned smile, a bestial leer more befitting of something gargantuan and reptilian than a human face -

Ivan was speaking, but it was redundant. With a cold numbness spreading inside him that was deeper than any wind-chill, Isaac understood.

In the howling gusts around him, he heard a dragon's laughter.