Post by Deleted on Apr 1, 2023 12:09:59 GMT -5
[oneshot, warning for discovery of a body]
Until further notice, Ber was on staff duty. As far as he knew, that meant his days were filled with mind-numbing chores instead of training and his evenings were filled with self-imposed training instead of rest. Despite the lack of oversight, he would still be expected to hold his own well enough against every other soldier who prepared for war full time lest he find himself without a job or a home. It was not great, but he had accepted it for what it was: punishment.
What he found considerably harder to accept was that despite the premature conclusion of his Woodwick-imposed swimming lessons - the silver lining to this whole affair - Ber still found himself bathed in the gray early morning light of a perpetually overcast sky, in the frigid water along the docks. If it wasn’t because of @warren , it was due to physical therapy for his arm. He could literally never win.
When his hand came into contact with waterlogged fabric covering something solid, he initially thought nothing of it. There was a medic in the water somewhere nearby who was guiding him through various exercises, and given that his fingers were practically numb anyway, Ber figured it had been him that he’d brushed up against. Only when he looked over and saw the man standing out of reach did the soldier abruptly right himself from where he’d been floating on his back and turn to see what exactly he had touched - and immediately splashed backwards in alarm.
Bloodless and bloated, the body bobbed innocuously in the waves with its back barely visible above the surface of the waves. Face down in the water, the corpse’s clothing was stretched and partially torn, and its head and limbs remained submerged. There was a fraying rope around its waist. Unlike the horribly decomposed man that Ber and Woodwick had discovered in a chest, this person still seemed to be mostly intact, and unlike the aforementioned morbid discovery, Woodwick wasn’t here to do the dirty work so Ber didn’t have to.
After a quick shout at the medic to go find someone who would know what to do in this situation, Ber turned back to the problem at hand. Nose wrinkled in disgust, the soldier gingerly reached out a hand and grabbed the fabric that had ridden up the body’s back, intending to drag it back to shore - only to have the worn clothing rip in his grasp. Swearing quietly under his breath, he took a breath to steel himself, reached beneath the surface of the water, and felt around until he found the body’s arm. At least the sleeve of the shirt meant that he didn’t have to touch the body itself.
Only after he’d managed to drag it out of the waves did Ber see the true extent of what he’d unwittingly found. The back might have appeared intact, but that didn’t mean the rest of the body was. When he turned the corpse over to try to identify it, some of the wrinkled skin on its hands sloughed off into his own - he flung that away from him real fast - and the underside showed some evidence of animal predation. The body’s face wasn’t in much better shape, but with mounting horror as Ber stared at the nearly unrecognizable features, he realized he knew who this was.
Fabian Winters.