Chapter Text
She was not always called Coinín. It began as a taunt and slowly turned to an endearment, and then a designation. But she used to be someone else, before. And though she couldn't know it then, the day of her capture was the last day she would ever hear anyone speak her name.
From where they had her kneeling, a girl who was not Coinín imagined she could discern figures moving in the darkness swimming behind her blindfold. She was trying to form some notion as to the layout of the room; she marked the low chatter of the soldiers behind her and the measured footsteps of someone pacing, a task which would have proved a great deal easier, she was sure, if the poor sod to her left wasn't nearly hyperventilating.
“Get ahold of yourself,” she hissed, and elbowed him sharply in the ribs with some careful maneuvering of her bound wrists.
“No talking!” someone barked, and she wheezed as a booted foot kicked her soundly in the stomach, sending her tumbling backwards without the use of her arms to support herself. At the commotion, her neighbor began huffing with renewed enthusiasm. So much for that.
As she was struggling to right herself, a door hissed open, and her head whipped toward the direction of the sound. She counted several sets of footsteps entering the chamber before the door slid shut.
“Captain,” came a lazy drawl. It was a new voice. A woman?
“Ah, Doctor,” he greeted the newcomer. After a beat of silence, he cleared his throat awkwardly and said, “This is all of them. Take your pick.”
Someone—the doctor, she expected—moved to the leftmost end of the line and slowly walked their ranks, stopping occasionally. They weren't wearing boots, she noted, but hard-soled shoes that clicked noisily with every step, making their movements easy to track. The chatter had died down; the only sound in the room was the echo of their footfalls as they came closer, closer.
Head down, head down—
Then the footsteps paused directly in front of her, and she started as a cold hand grasped her jaw and turned her head one way and then the other. She tensed all over, burying her nails into the meat of her palms as every muscle in her body screamed at her to lunge. She had a script to recite if they tried talking to her, but they didn't, and after a moment they relinquished their grip on her chin and let it drop back to her chest. Even as she heard them move on, she could feel the ghost of those fingers boring into her skin, and she itched to rub them away.
“Yes?” It was the captain.
“This one, this one…him, and that one there.” A woman, she decided. She spoke with the rounded vowels and elongated r’s of an accent she couldn’t quite place…Irish? Scottish? American, maybe?
She heard movement behind them again, and someone grabbed her under the arm and hoisted her to her feet. Why were they splitting them up? Had they already negotiated their release? Stumbling and blind, she was hauled to the front of the room, where they kicked her knees in again, and she grimaced as her shins crashed against the floor.
Over the shuffle, she heard the captain ask, “And the rest?”
If there was an answer, she did not hear it.
“At my command,” he called to the rest of the room, and her eyes widened behind her blindfold as she realised what he meant to do. There was more shouting and protest among the prisoners. They couldn't be serious. This was a suicidal miscalculation.
“Commence firing,” he ordered, and the small room erupted into the sound gunfire, followed by that of her former squadmates’ lifeless bodies slapping the concrete.
She had made a miscalculation.
And something scraped over her scalp and carded through her hair, and she felt a fresh wave of utter revulsion wash over her at the realization that it was someone’s hand, their sharp fingernails. She reared back and snarled.
Then something else cracked against the base of her skull, and the darkness shattered into a brilliant, shrieking red, and she felt nothing at all.