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The Boy With A Thorn In His Side

The boy with the thorn in his side,

Behind the hatred there lies,

A plundering desire for love.

 

-The Smiths

 

 

“So…Are you going to talk now?”

 

The Trill mumbled something incoherent and his head lolled to one side. A short dribble of blood flowed from the side of his mouth with a gurgling sound. It trickled down his cheek till it fell like tiny crimson raindrops onto the cold metallic floor of the interrogation room. He watched them fall, almost enthralled in the image of it. This mission had been so simple and now, here he was.

 

“Look at me when I speak to you!”

 

Something moved like a blur and took Segami’s face in a vice-like grip. The prisoner tried to scream but there wasn’t even enough breath in his lungs to do that. The man’s hands stank and his filthy nails dug into the Trill’s skin. They belonged to a Cardassian, a damn large one at that who had been his only companion for so long.

 

“I want you to be polite you little turd. Or do they not have manners where you come from?” The Cardassian sneered. “Now answer the question. Are you going to talk?”

 

Segami used all his strength to croak something through the man’s fingers.

 

“Oh you are for once! How lovely.” The bastard said before letting go. “Go on, out with it. What do you have to say?”

 

The Trill had been here, in this small room on this decrepit station, suffering for days, maybe weeks. For all he knew it could have even been months. He couldn’t tell one bit. After being tortured in every way known to man, the concepts of time, space and even his own identity were a blur. All he knew now was pain, pure unspeakable pain.

 

His naked body, strapped to a metal chair, was an ungodly, unrecognizable mess. It resembled a slab of rotten meat. Every inch of his form was either bruised a dark black or crusted in red. There were burn marks on his chest, three of his fingers were missing and there was no right eye to speak of. His jaw had been broken on the first day with an iron bar and every time he drew breath it was with an awful wheeze from his lungs.

 

Every time he heard that sound he knew for a fact that he’d never make it home to his alive. There had been far too much damage. He would have liked to cry at this thought but even then, he was so dehydrated there were simply no tears left to do so.

 

He looked hard at the face of his captor. Hard enough to see the man’s twisted poisoned soul in that sardonic smile he wore. Segami didn’t even know his name. The one time he’d tried to ask resulted in the first loss of a finger. He stared hard at this monster and with every bit of strength in his body he tried to force the words out. The words that could mean the end of it all. He’d simply had enough. It hurt so much, so very much but the only noise he could make when he tried to talk was a soft rattle.

 

“Come on now!” The Cardassian taunted as the rattling continued. “Speak up. Just tell me anything, anything at all and I’ll let you go immediately. We already know you’re from this “Federation”, that you’ve come here to spy on us and cause trouble. Just tell me something like a name, or a rendevouz location, or even a rumour you heard, and you’re a free man. I promise.”

 

Segami’s face strained, every muscle was tensed, his veins stuck out but it had a result, he began to tell the Cardassian exactly what he needed to hear.

 

“You…”

 

The Cardassian looked like a child on Christmas Eve “I…yes, yes, what? I what”

 

“You need…to message…”

 

“Who? Who do I need to message?” The Cardassian shouted at the crippled form. This was it. Finally the subject had cracked. “A contact of yours?”

 

“You need to message…your mother…”

 

The trill coughed blood.

 

“So you can tell her…I won’t be shagging her today…I’m a little beat.”

 

With his wrists restrained and his torturer now shocked silent, the pained Trill raised a single middle finger on the hand that still had one to the man who had made his life hell.

 

The Cardassian, his eyes full of rage, swung his arm and gave Segami a backhand so hard it knocked the Trill out cold. He did so a few more times, screaming expletives before leaving the room in a fury.

 

The door slammed shut behind the sadist and the lights went off, plunging everything into darkness. But in that little room something small but far more powerful than any brute strength remained. Something simple yes, but nobody could take away

 

The smile on Layor Segami’s face.

 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

That same smile rested on the face of another Segami many years later. A host named Atticus. He remembered exact;y how that day felt as he lay on the floor of his current cell in the mirror universe, staring up at the ceiling.

 

He recalled how it was only after that incident that Layor was finally released from the horrific nightmare he’d endured and was soon saved by a federation rescue team. Sadly Layor was ultimately right, he was so badly wounded from the torture he never actually made it home. But in the end that isn’t what Atticus considered important. The Trill’s body may not have survived but his spirit did. That spirit, that stubborn, cheeky, unbending spirit lived on. Now it was in him.

 

That’s why Atticus smiled now. Though he was unlikely to survive this mission, he knew that right up until the end he would keep that spirit alive. He’d never stop fighting, never lose his resolve and never stop being a pain in arse to the guards. Because as long as he did that he’d never really lose. Its only when a man has lost his sense of humour, his passion, his pride and his willingness to make a nuisance of himself, that he dies.

 

And so to prove a point to no-one in particular, with the image of a fanged crewmember in his mind Atticus lay back…and grinned.

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