Give In

Breathe in…

Breathe out…

Breathe in…

Breathe—

TICK.

Breathe out…

Each breath felt like he was inhaling the sun itself, but he kept going. In a way, it was cathartic, a method to distance himself from the excruciating pain that now blanketed every part of his torso.

TICK.

Thirty more minutes… Thirty more minutes, and this would all be over. Or, if he was lucky, he'd die before then and save himself the trouble.

NO.

Fate had said it many times before, he was a spiteful man. His death or Seri's was exactly what that masked murderer wanted. Why should he give his torturer the satisfaction?

TICK.

The timer hit 155 minutes, a little under half an hour before he would be free. All at once, the heat spiked to the limit set before of 170 degrees Fahrenheit. The ticking stopped. He tensed as his exposed flesh where his scar once sat started to burn.

Even his bones now felt like they were on fire.

'Give in…' whispered a voice in his head. It sounded like his own, but he knew he would never think such thoughts.

'Give in. I am a bad person. Say it. It's true, so just say it.'

'Even if it is true,' Fate thought, 'I'm not giving in. If I am such a bad person, then my life for hers is a perfect way to atone.'

'GIVE IN,' the voice shrieked, rattling Fate's skull so painfully he temporarily forgot about the fact he was being cooked like a chicken sandwich. 'Give in, and live your life! Why should your life be worth less than hers?

'Why should you undergo such torment, such pain, for some uppity Five member that sees you as a lesser being?'

'Lesser?' Fate wondered. He didn't think she thought that at all. In fact, she was actively encouraging Fate to kill her. 'You're not me. Who are you?'

The directionless voice laughed madly. Hearing his own voice perverted into such a sickening laugh was profoundly unsettling, but he only reiterated his question.

'Who ARE you?' he demanded before he tensed in pain. The flesh on his back was gone, and now his bones were directly facing the scorching heat of the metal torture device.

He tried to let out another scream, but it came out as a faint, coughing gasp with no small amount of scarlet flying from his lips. His vocal cords were torn and bloodied from his constant screaming, so now he couldn't even give voice to the torment he was going through.

'I am you,' the voice spoke, pounding at his eardrums and hammering at his temples. It echoed throughout his entire body, his heart skipping a beat and his lungs seizing as the sound combined with the heat to burn not just his body, but his mind.

'I am you,' the voice repeated. 'And I am a bad person. WE are bad people. We don't want to die. We're a selfish, spineless wimp that can't even get a proper job or support our parents after all they've done for us!

'But what have the Vedavo done for us?' the voice asked. 'How are they any better? What have they done besides fail to stop the crimes in our city, fail to stop robberies and murders? They even failed to protect our own sister!'

"SHUT UP!" Fate shouted, launching himself into a coughing fit that cost him at least a liter of blood.

'And when they finally caught the twisted fuck who took your sister's life, what did the Vedavo do?'

"STOP IT."

'They let him go! They sent him away with smiles on their faces because he was ONE OF THEM!'

Fate roared, buckling against his shackles as his psychic sense broiled. His Prodigy-strength Divine Energy folded in on itself, his skin bursting into blinding light as he went from a Prodigy to an Exemplar.

He refused to only look at the bad in every situation. He refused to play the victim. Every cloud had a silver lining, and he could see the Light at the end of this tunnel. There were only ten minutes left. He could make it.

'You can't!' cried the voice that sounded like his but wasn't. 'You'll die, horribly and tragically, unless you give in!

'Give in.

'Give in.

'Give in. Give in. Give in. Give in. Give in. Give in Give in Give in Give in GIVE IN!'

"FUCK OFF!" Fate yelled, lashing out against his shackles. Even with his enhanced strength, he couldn't even leave a scratch on the Flowing Steel, but now he could feel the heat was much weaker, as if the Light radiating out from him was a buffer.

The Flowing Steel's Imprints around him sucked away as much as they could, but Fate's Prodigy-power-turned-Manifest-Power never needed that much Divine Energy in the first place.

At best, he only needed to double his input to keep up, but Physical (Self) Manifest Powers could usually last for hours at a time with no external factors. How could halving that time do anything to him, when there were now only seven minutes left?

As the overwhelming heat became slightly more serious than a hot summer's day, Fate's mind was free to unravel the intruding voice in his head.

It was sluggish and stumbling in its start, from the damage to his psyche that the voice had caused, but it quickly gained traction and chugged along the rails of his thoughts.

He knew now that it was most definitely NOT his own voice, although he was genuinely worried for a second that he truly thought those things the voice had said.

No, this voice was coming from the leather band that held his head in place, wrapped around his forehead. Now that his thoughts weren't plagued by pain, he could feel the trickle of Divine Energy flowing through it and into his brain.

'Nice trick,' Fate sneered.

'I've got to make it interesting somehow,' Fate's borrowed voice replied. The contaminant slithered out of his mind and back into the headband, taking a metaphorical kick at Fate's brain as it left that made his head swim.

'But, that option's gone now,' the voice said, gradually shifting back into that of the Azure Anarchist with every word. 'Spoilsport.'