Characters: Jackson

Word Count: 500

Summary: What you see if what you get.

Warnings: dark!fic, descriptions of torture and amputation

Mirrored

Jackson awoke to the sounds of his own screams reverberating off the cement walls that surrounded him. He struggled against the ropes that bound his chest, all the while hearing the screams being torn from his throat and not understanding that they were his or why he had to listen to them. Dim yellow light drifted in through the dirt-streaked window on the wall, showing the dark pools on the dirtier cement floor. He's been here so long, so much longer than he can remember, and it's all been dark and dirt and that horrible noise that has burned his chest raw from the inside out.

He twists his body and feels the ropes tighten, digging in, but he's facing a new direction now. There's silence. A mirror is propped against the wall; it's also streaked with dirt and oily smears. The light hits it well enough to show him the silhouette of himself reflected back, but it's wrong, so wrong. The familiar outline is truncated at the shoulders.

And he doesn't want to, but he does anyway because he always questions what the mirror shows him. He looks down at himself, his eye tracing the lines of where his arms should be.

They cut them off.

They fucking cut them off.

To keep him from escaping.

To torture him.

To destroy him.

He can't choose.

They didn't use anesthetic.

Or care.

They held him down and carved,

taunted,

laughed at their own cleverness.

The stumps of his arms have healed over; they would have expected that. Cut off his arms first, cut him in half later, when they got what they wanted. He's shirtless and covered in dried blood that chafes under the ropes. Blood cakes his hair, sticks to his lips and eyelashes.

His mouth opens, his throat closes. No more sounds emerge. He's beyond that point now.

The floorboards quiver with footsteps overhead. He can hear them plotting. They're so proud of themselves. He grits his teeth, feels his heart thudding in his chest. The air is thick with damp and piss and persistent agony

that spilled from his control.

He won't be doing that again.

Movement in the mirror catches his eyes. He sees the silhouette raise its shoulder like it wants to wave. The arms are gone. If he had them, he could easily escape. They've been severed, chopped from his body. Limbs don't grow back, even for werewolves.

He's not a werewolf.

Jackson closes his eyes and concentrates on his body harder than ever. He visualizes the muscle groups in his shoulders and arm, how they stretched and contracted during workouts, how they ached afterward. He thinks about his fingers, how they will gouge into the tissue of his tormentors' necks and rip out their revenge. He imagines claws and scales spreading across his flesh and how much better this makes him.

His eyes snap open.

He grins into the mirror, two rows of sharp teeth barred,

and raises his arms to unbind himself.

END

A/N: For the prompt: loss of limb/limb function

A/N: Strange formatting is intentional.