1 . Name: Jaxson @ 2013-05-14 12:39

I want to apologize for each and every grievous formatting mistake, for I am most utterly lost on this site, and despite being a lurker for a bit longer than is technically legal, I haven't even the slightest idea how this site works. So for that, I am sorry.

As for the story itself, a friend of mine once asked what about Scout abuse, exactly, appealed to me. So I thought about it for a long time, and wrote down everything I thought of, and here it is.

---



Men lied to them, and so they went to die.-Robert Hillyer



The new Scouts arrived on a Sunday, our one day off.

I took it upon myself to welcome them, show them around, and scare them off of any budding friendships. There were maybe six or seven of them, of both teams. It would never do for them to grow attached, especially here, especially now.

I explained everything to them, as they stood around in a clumpy semicircle. I told them about Respawn, the miracle of miracles, that we had once had. Not anymore. Not after all the Australium had been exported back to Australia for some sort of government emergency.

No Respawn.

I showed them the Pit. The smell was a little incredible, I suppose, for those unused to it. More than one of the new Scouts had to run off and puke in the bushes and I was proud of the ones that didn't, the ones that remained standing at the edge, staring down into the gorge filled nearly halfway with bodies. Most of them had been burned, of course, but we didn't burn every day, only Sundays. I had saved the burning for the Scouts, as a little welcome gift.

A pit of bodies.

Then I gave them strong tea and strong words, and we made a small fire a ways off, away from the smell. They asked many questions, and I answered all that I could.

Most of them would be dead in time for the next burning.

---

I found myself hoping one of the Scouts in particular would not die, not so soon. He was a young, flexible thing, as most Scouts are. I could not tell you, now, anything about his face. After a while, all the faces start blending into a single, collective face to represent their class. They come and go so quickly, I suppose it is just easier to forget that they are actual people, with thoughts and feelings and memories and families and belongings. Once they fall into the Pit, they become just another pile of charcoaled bones.

I remember his body, though. It was really nothing too special, just a body. But it had those features which I found myself thinking of, when I found myself unable to sleep at night. Instead of recalling the screams and terror and blind, raw fear, I remember bodies.

His chest was flat, with just the beginnings of muscle making a few defining crests and valleys over planes of pale skin. There were freckles on his shoulders, and when he straightened his spine, his shoulderblades would slip seamlessly into a back with no fat on it at all, and just enough muscle to make the whole movement as smooth as a finely tuned machine.

And his spine. When he bent forwards, his spine, the little ridges, would poke out just a little, and his shirt would cling to his skin, wet with sweat, and I would think of this and smile and slip my hand under the blankets.

Pedophile?

I've been called worse.

They are usually of age anyway, and those that are not often still have that last bit of baby fat that I find rather unappealing. A little chub on the cheeks can be nice. Other places, not so much.

---

That particular Scout was lucky enough to find himself on my team, and because of my role when he first arrived, I was lucky enough for him to think of me as a friend, among the eighteen-plus men that serve as our team. The extra men are a necessity, you see, because, due to the lack of Respawn, we seem to go through teammates at quite a good clip.

That Scout, he was brave. He killed many, and I always made sure to be nearby with a healthpack should he become targeted. He thought I cared for him as a friend might.

I decided to treat him like the friend he thought he was.

---

It was a Thursday night when I decided to trust him. I bid him follow me, and we crept through the darkness, toward and around the Pit.

He asked where we were going, but I ignored him.

At last, we reached our destination; a small, gated enclosure a good two or three miles off the map of our little world, with an iron fence made of spikes and a few trees, here and there. It was about the size of a graveyard, and even had a grassy hill and scavenger birds to complete the illusion.

The difference, of course, was in the fact that graveyards were for those to be buried and honored.

I locked the gate from the inside, explaining to my Scout that we did not want to be surprised by the enemy. Our own team was just as much of a threat, if they were to find this place, but I let him assume they already knew about it.

I listened to him talk of menial things as we walked up the hill, only because once we had crested it, it was so satisfying to hear his voice halt in shock as he saw the figures.

---

There were a hundred, maybe two, littered throughout the space. Many were impaled on the spikes of the fence itself, more still hanging from their necks in trees, splayed out on the ground, or tied in forced submissive positions and left leaning against one another, nondiscriminatory of team color.

My own personal forest of Scouts.

It was dark, but the moonlight was enough to make out their silhouettes, and the glisten of old blood, or their eyes, white with death and wide-open. They were in varying states of decay, but quite a few of them were relatively fresh. The ones on the fence, particularly, I liked to keep around only as long as their flesh would retain itself. As soon as the skin of their cheeks started peeling, falling off in soft, slimy clumps to reveal the blackened, blood-choked interior, I added them to the pile in the Pit.

I explained this to my Scout as he puked behind one of the trees.

My favorites, of course, were the ones impaled, but not on the fence. I had special stakes, with sharp points on both ends. One end I would dig deep into the soft earth, and the other, I would drive through a Scout. All of the ones displayed in this manner were in the same position: knees on the grass, arms hanging, head tipped back as far as it would go. The stake was driven through their crotches and up, inside the delicate rib casing, and back out, through the tops of their chests, and back in, through their jawbone, to poke out through their mouths, amid a stream of black blood. I had six or seven of these.

When my Scout was able to control his gag reflex, I explained to him what was special about each of the displays.

The ones hanging in the trees were due to a certain fascination with the hands of a Scout. When he is hanging, lifeless face tipped up and away, his hands dangle most wonderfully, fingers limply half-curled. I could barely resist stopping to suckle on one or two of those beautifully limp fingers, but there were more wonders to show him.

The ones with the darkly oozing rings around their throats had been saved from battle, but already dying. I loved to watch a Scout struggle for breath, the way he claws at his bindings and kicks and spits, like a feral cat in a bear trap. It was always wonderful when, in the last moments of life, he gave up, and I managed to steal his last breath for myself, capturing it with my lips.

There were some whose wrists had been bound firmly to their ankles, forcing their bodies into a triangular shape. These ones had all had their hearts cut out, and I made sure to try my best to describe to my Scout exactly what it felt like, to reach one's hands into a warm, gushing chest cavity and pull out an actual organ, and to lick the hot blood from their chests as they choked on the heart one had stuffed down their throats.

I don't believe I did the experience justice.

---

Of course, my Scout didn't hang around to hear my explanations. They never did. He had panicked, as Scouts are liable to do, and had taken off at quite a speed, even for a Scout, leaping over and ducking around the corpses of his class-mates as he searched for an exit, scattering the scavenger birds that had come to feast on my displays as he went.

I was prepared for this. The only exit was the gate through which we had come, and that I had securely locked, with the key I now held tightly in my fist as I stopped to breathe across the bare chest of one of the fresher Scouts--one who had, in fact, been a part of the group with which my Scout had come--whose arms were bound above his head to the highest horizontal bar running the length of the fence. His eyesockets were empty, excreting the black ooze that had once been blood, and I kissed his purple lips gently before giving his streaked cheek an affectionate pat. He had been a feisty one.

I calmly walked back over the hill to the gate, where I knew my Scout would be waiting. He would have decided to try to overtake me, and threaten my life in return for freedom. Most of them did.

I found him there, pulling at the doors desperately and whining and whimpering in fear. When he saw me, he screamed, and I let him. If he managed to make himself heard back at the bases, no one would know where the sound had come from, and would likely assume it belonged to one of the opposite team's numbers, crying out in their horror-filled dreams of war.

My Scout was crying, and wailing and talking so fast he was nearly incomprehensible. Something about regretting everything he'd ever done.

I'd heard it before.

I pulled him close, and he screamed even louder and at a higher pitch as he struggled. I was stronger, however, and pushed him up against the fence, trapping him. He was nearly insane with fear, and I closed my eyes and listened to him babble, letting his fresh, raw, unchecked terror get to me. I could not resist pushing myself up against him, making him moan and wail even more pitifully.

He whimpered and bit his lip, somehow managing to mumble past it, and his hands came up to push me away. It was almost as though he'd forgotten to use them before. I avoided them easily, as his movements were clumsy and slow, and it looked as though he could hardly see, through the thick sheen of tears building up on his eyeballs. He had eyelashes any girl would be proud of, and each time he blinked they sent little droplets flying.

His hands gave up trying to push me, and instead went behind him, to grasp at the iron fence, trying to propel himself farther from me, though there was no room left to go. I lifted his face with both of my hands, one still tightly holding the key, and his tears ran down my arms, to drip from my elbows. I kissed him, and he could only whimper and cry. His tears wet my cheeks, and salted the taste of his fear.

Then I let him go, and he collapsed at my feet, choking on his horror. I knelt by him and held him, and his hands gripped my clothes tightly. I ran one soothing hand through his hair, and when at last he calmed down, and was only huffing hot, anxious breaths into my shoulder, I pulled, wrenching his head back violently.

He made an odd sound, as though trying to yelp, but his windpipe was in quite a compromised position. He began struggling again, but I would have none of that, and drove the pointed end of the heavy brass key through the velvety soft skin just above his laryngeal prominence, or adam's apple.

He gurgled and coughed, and blood spurted in my face. His arms trembled, and his puffy, blotched eyes looked up, into the cloudy sky. His body was rejecting the pain, and his spine was curved away from me at a rather impressive arch, so that I had to sit up on my knees and lean forward just to withhold my grip on him, my fingers threaded through his hair and pulling his head back.

Then his hands went limp, just the way I loved, and I was more than a little distracted by the warmth in my pants, tugging at my consciousness like an impatient child on his mother's pant leg.

But he wasn't dead yet. He gurgled some more as his lungs filled with blood, and somehow managed to spit out, along with a river of blood, just two words:

"Fuck... you."

"And just how do you propose to manage that?" I asked. "A little hard if you're dead, don't you think?"

His eyes glazed over when the pain finally hit him, and I pulled the key out carefully, but quickly. When I let go of him, he fell over into the grass, and I wasted no time allowing my hands to explore those wiry muscles I'd admired so much. They were taut with the strain of feeling the pain, and hot, I was delighted to find. His heart was pounding, sending blood everywhere it could, and as a result his skin was hot all over, but growing ever colder as his blood found itself being rapidly expelled.

I slipped two fingers into the ragged hole in his throat, and pressed them to his lips.

Seconds later, he was dead.

Asphyxiated.

Such a pity.

In memory of the way his hands had fallen limp, I had him strung up in the trees.