Title: The Lingering
Author: pre_raphaelite1
Characters: Walden MacNair/unidentified female
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: character death, torture, noncon, snuff, spanking...
Themes/kinks chosen: Necrophilia (damnit, why won't any of the rest of you lot write the hard stuff? :P )
Word Count: 1075
Summary: People thought- wrongly, Walden knew- that methods not birthed in green light were just as final, just as crisp. But he knew how some bodies held something, he didn't know how to identify it, but something lingered.
Author's notes: So, this was written in 40 minutes in the middle of the Prison Break Ball at Azkatraz when I remembered today was my posting day... And this did cause my poor girlfriend to have another squicked flail of "OMG! I dating pre_raphaelite1!" (yes, she uses my username for this flail)



The handle of his axe was worn to a shine, the wood gleaning with a warm polish that attested to its frequent use. He'd been offered new weapons: longer handles that would give him more distance from his victim, heavier blades that would reduce the effort it took to severe a head, sharper edges that would slide through bone and sinew like mother's milk, enchantments that would limit the blood splatter over his clothes.

But Walden MacNair always refused the offers, the thinly veiled attempts at bringing in politics and compassion and weakness into his duties. This was not a job of clean hands or for clean hands. It was physicality and truth and gore. It was life in all its bleeding, dying, messy beauty.

And when it was done, all that was left was the corpse. People thought- wrongly, Walden knew- that methods not birthed in green light were just as final, just as crisp. But he knew how some bodies held something, he didn't know how to identify it, but something lingered. Without a head or a heart or that vital pulse of blood through contracting veins, some of the supposedly empty corpses lived. He'd catch a glimpse of it beyond the glaze of clouded eyes or in smallest finger. A movement that was no more apparent than a flick of a fly's wing, but just as indicative. These were the flicks and twitches and flutters that Walden watched for, hungered for.

He found the fear in people's eyes intoxicating, the resolution to their fate even more so. It was these sorts, oddly enough, that resulted that lingering. As he wasn't a man who valued the thoughts one pondered over a brandy and a cigar, Walden didn't focus on the why of it. He only noted it so he could more readily anticipate when he might have a body at hand that died slower than the rest.

Her head was bowed. Her clothes torn from her body like the flesh from her arm. Perhaps at one point her hair had been brown but it was only dirt and blood and bits of her own skin fused into matted knots. She swayed even in the corner of the room where she huddled, shivering from a cold that was only in her mind. Walden knew Lestrange had been keeping the girl/woman- her age was lost in empty eyes and bruised lips- and no one could break a soul apart like Lestrange could, as easily as if the power of faith, pride, and hope were glass trinkets under booted feet.

But like such trinkets of memories forgotten even by the spun glass, the girl had lost meaning when she no longer fought, screamed, or refused. So Lestrange left her for Walden to dispose of, though he had no inclination to do so quickly. He reached out with his free hand to catch the twisted locks, so much like dried out seaweed and tangles of brittle wool, and he pulled her out of the corner. Her hand came out, weakly, out of reflex, but it had not the strength to do more than flutter in butterfly futility at his wrist. Tossing her into the center of the room beneath a flickering shaft of light from somewhere high above them, Walden could feel the liquid heat of arousal pooling low in his balls, hanging heavy as the axe in his grasp. Her shoulders hunched in preparation, in acceptance, head never lifting up as the axe rose above her. He swung it down, without so much as a grunt of effort, so long had he been wielding his weapon of choice, and it met its mark. A moment of initial resistance as metal met flesh and bone then nothing as it sank through, cleaving the girl's head from her thin, battered body. Both fell: the head with a rolling thunk, the nose breaking both itself and the head's trajectory; and the body with heavy thud of nevermore proud shoulders on uncaring stone.

Walden watched for a moment while the head finally came to its messy pause halfway across the room and the blood spurted from a neck ringed with fading bruises, the girl's wasted attempt to heal herself. He slid to his knees behind her and laid his axe along side, the metal bathing now in her blood. He rubbed his right hand over his flies as he used the other position her better, drawing her hips up now, raising her arse high, lines of mottled purple and red crossing it, and Walden had to push away the thought of days he spent as a child having to write his letters in a high cursive script between carefully measured lines or risk the bite of his father's leather belt. The memory did nothing good for his erection and he focused on giving her arse a few more slaps, hard as he could without toppling her, but there was not enough blood left in her to be raised. The quiver of her flesh in response to his strikes, however, made his cock jerk back into full hardness and he freed it from his trousers.

The choice was never difficult for him, nothing so troubling as short sword or broad sword, hands or garrote. Her cunt was lined with dark curls that seemed to tremble as he rubbed the head of his cock over it then he drove in, forcing his way fully into her. And he felt it. That last final clench of refusal, of acknowledgment of what he had done, of who had finally, completely mastered her.

Walden fucked her slowly then, savoring the gradual cooling of her body. He was taking every last pulse of life from her, drawing it out as his cock slid in and out and back in again. And only when there was just the sound of his own breathing, when the puddle of blood under her and now under him started to congeal into a thin layer of rusted jelly, did he find his own release, filling her lifeless cunt with his pale spunk, millions of opportunities for life and vitality pouring into her, seeking out any remaining lingering in her. But Walden had taken every drop and tremble of it from her. So he withdrew from the corpse and cleaned himself up, before leaving it and its silently screaming head to rot alone in the darkness.