Looking Like Meat

[Applesintime]

"Fuck you."

Gregory threw the can of beans at Fisk.

[ItzToxie]

Tonk!

Fisk stumbled back, putting a hand over his eye after getting beaned by a can of beans. He gasped and groaned, holding his head. “Gah! Fffuck!” Blood dripped from his eyebrow. “You motherFFFFFFUCKER!” Panting, Fisk looked up the white of his eye a bright pink, a splotch of red in the corner of his eye. With his free hand, he punched the wall behind him as he knelt over. “You. Hit. My. Eye.”

Fisk grabbed a nearby bookshelf and pulled himself to his feet. “You petty bitch... I’ll give you that one too.”

“What else you got?” Fisk began to stride towards Greg.

[Applesintime]

Huh. Gregory hadn't actually expected that to work, much less actually do some damage to him. It was satisfying. He may be dead, but he can still make Fisk hurt, he can still make him bleed. The can had rolled over to the doorway, so Gregory couldn't repeat the trick, but he was going to die anyway. He wasn't strong like, uh, strong people, and he didn't have enough to make Fisk really hurt or kill him, but he wasn't just going to sit down and let Fisk murder him.

Stumbling to his feet, his legs threatening to give out at any moment, Gregory pulled out a drawer from a nightstand next to the bed, unsteadily swinging it at Fisk.

[ItzToxie]

Fisk brought his arm up and ducked down, letting his arm take the brunt of the swing instead of his ribs. Greg was slow and sluggish. This wasn’t a fight, this was an execution, yet here he stood, defiant, not knowing what’s coming to him. He wondered if he’d be so brave if he knew what Fisk had in store for him.

Fisk Stepped forward and brought his leg up and snap kicked Gregory in the stomach, folding him over like a lawn chair.

Fisk stepped forward. “You’ve got more than that in you. Get up and fight, hero.” Spat Fisk, with sarcastic vitriol.

[Applesintime]

Gregory collapsed back against the bed upon Fisk kicking him, coughing and retching from the kick to the stomach. That didn't go so well, but it was his dying throes, Gregory knew that deep down. Fighting back against Fisk until he either died or just couldn't fight back anymore, and he hoped it was the first one. He didn't wanna be alive for whatever Fisk did to him. "F-fuck you..." Gregory managed to get the words out, sluggishly moving to push himself up off the bed, trying to reach for the drawer that he had dropped.

[ItzToxie]

Fisk reared his arm back, and gave Gregory the backhand of his life.

[Applesintime]

Gregory fell back against the bed, blood starting to drip from his nose. The impact put him in a sort of daze, and it took him a few seconds to actually get his head back in order, but once he did, Gregory snarled and launched himself at Fisk. He had never hated someone more in his life. The fucking asshole murderer - Gregory wasn't going to just go down after a little kick and a little slap. "Fuck you!" He wheezed, trying to push Fisk away, give him a chance to pick up that can and hit him again.

[ItzToxie]

Fisk caught Gregory as he tried to pushed him back. Two steps, three steps, four, then he stopped. “Is that all you got to say?! Fuck you?” Fisk gripped Greg by the neck with one hand, and began pushing back.

“Is that all you got in you?” Fisk began to push back, stepping forward, hand gripped tightly around Greg’s throat before pinning him against the window.

“Here’s what I got to say, what I got to ask; what was your mentor saying about me? I heard ‘em talking shit. Something about a ‘dickless tweaker’?” He pulled Greg close to his face to stare into the collar camera. “Real fucking brave behind that camera, huh? You know what I got to say?” Fisk bared his teeth.

“Actually-“

He pulled Greg back and slammed him against the window, cracking the glass behind him.

“I’ll tell him to his face.”

Fisk punched Gregory across the jaw with his free hand, forcing his head through the window. He then gripped him by the collar, and pulled him back, throwing him to the ground.

[Wham Yubeesling]

And that was when a third person came through the door, staggered towards the bed, and did their best to not just collapse on the spot.

"Sorry-"

She clutched her stomach. Took a long, laboured breath.

"Not-"

Another one.

"Good-"

Another one.

"At running-"

[Applesintime]

Everything hurt. His head hurt the most, though; he could feel like, trickles of blood pouring down from his scalp and the back of his head and like, pretty much everywhere, it felt like. Spluttering and coughing, Gregory noted that he was coughing blood, which should have worried him. Instead, he just accepted it. Trying to push himself up, Gregory just couldn't. His arms kept giving out, and he didn't have enough strength. If only he hadn't been shot. He should have killed Verity first, went for her and then grabbed the gun, but that didn't matter now, just one possibility out of hundreds of thousands of millions.

"Fuck..." A coughing fit wracked through his body and Gregory curled in on himself. He didn't want to die. He wanted to go out in like, something better than this. Fighting Fisk and Verity, making them hurt. "Ben... He sa... said you're a dickless... dickless fucker." He spat at Fisk, but it just landed on the floor. He hadn't proven Ben's theory wrong.

[ItzToxie]

Fisk watched Verity come through the door, out of breath after sprinting up and down multiple floors of a cruise liner. He didn’t blame her, she pushed herself and really, she did the important work, they’d have never caught the little shit if it weren’t for her aim. “You’re good. You did fine. Better than that, even.”

Fisk turned his attention, and listened to Gregory speak, as Fisk unbuttoned his sport coat. He stepped over Gregory and draped it over the back of the chair as he finished, rolling his sleeves to his elbows. He stepped forward, and kicked Greg in the bullet wound in his side.

“I know that you dumb bastard, it was a rhetorical question. I heard your bitch mentor say it, I just wanted to know if he had the balls to repeat it.”

He squatted down in front of Greg’s face. “But you; you’re a ballsy little shit, I’ll give you that. Waste Rhonda in front of Ivan and you get away with it, and the first thing you do when you see Stokes is cut her down, knowing we’re right there. Biggest trick of them all was trying to assassinate me, and you got just about as close as you did with Rhonda.”

“I’d clap, but that shit would hurt thanks to you.”

Fisk stood up, and began to pace circles around Gregory, pulling out Greg’s knife. He began to flip it and catch it with his good hand as he circled Greg like a shark. “Still gotta pay you back for that. Though I know now, you weren’t alone in this endeavor. See, actions have consequences, that’s a given, but what people don’t understand is that sometimes, someone else has to suffer in place than the perpetrator, solely because the perp is in a position of untouchability.”

Clank. Clank. Clank.

“It sucks, but that’s life. Now Rhonda was going to suffer, but she’s not here anymore, so you take her place, on top of you trying to kill me. Not only that, but your oh so brave mentor, who should’ve known who the fuck he was talking to, led you here, but he’s out in where the fuck land, so...”

“You gotta pay for him too.”

Clank. Clank.

“See, I get it, you thought I was just another mark, that I wasn’t paying attention. You get an excuse, not that it changes much. Your shithead mentor though? He saw what I did to one of his boys yesterday, along with just about every other thing I’ve done. Yet he fools you into believing you can take ME on?!”

Clank. Clank. Clank.

“Probably told you some inspirational bullshit, how you’d be a hero if you won, a martyr if you lose. I know why. You’re disposable to him. All of you are. All these fuckhead ‘mentors’ have a pact going. They want me out of the picture, even my own mentor’s in on it. They’ve been feeding Ivan info, helping him pick my friends off, one by one, because I wouldn’t play nice, because I valued my friends more than their arbitrary bullshit rules...”

Clank.

“My friends are dead. I’m supposed to be next. I tried to play nice, give them a good show, but none of that matters. Now I’ve got no reason to. They took it away. Now I’m gonna play dirty. I’m gonna show them what I really think of this game. You’re gonna be a message to the whole world, to Ivan, to these fucking producers who took everyone I cared about away. I want people to be disgusted. I want them to feel what I felt, seeing each individual corpse of the people I loved, back to back, to back.”

Clank.

Fisk stopped in front of Gregory. He turned his head to look at Verity. “I know you’re not squeamish, but I recommend you look away.”

He looked down at Gregory. “I’m going to make what happened to Crawford and Hoffman look like child’s play...” Fisk’s voice rattled.

Fisk stopped over Gregory, and did one quick slash down the back of his shirt. Fisk ripped it open, and stood on his shoulder.

[Applesintime]

"Fisk, have you ever..." Gregory spat out a gob of blood, coughing. He wasn't much longer for this Earth, he knew that. Sammy was a pretty devoted Christian, always praying and like, making comparisons to bees and something from the Bible. Gregory hadn't been just so religious as him, or even religious at all - he went to church with him but like, he wouldn't go regularly like Sammy did - but now he found himself hoping it was true. That like, he'd get to do a bunch of cool shit in Heaven, find Cory and Rhonda and apologise to them and then like... his train of thought was slowing down.

"You ever consi... considered you're a fffffuckin... narcissist or something? N-nobody gives enough of a shit about you to plot against you! You're a fucking... You'll be forgotten. You'll be... the DeVasher of this season." Fisk was as Sammy would put it, a few plants short of a garden. He wouldn't be forgotten, though. He certainly wasn't DeVasher. Fisk had lived long enough, got a few kills; he was gonna be Seo-yun or like, uh, Ivan or probably that guy who had like six or seven kills, Anthony. No, Gregory'd probably be the one forgotten. He couldn't bring himself to care.

"It was... my idea. You killed... Stokes, she didn't-" Gregory coughed up more bloody phlegm, blood trickling out of his nose. "Didn't deserve that. I... wanted to make up for Rhonda and Cory. Two bad for two good." Then Fisk stamped on his shoulder and he let out a grunt of pain, looking up at him. "Fuck you. I hope... Ivan gets you. I'll be praying." That was the only thing he could do now. Pray that being shot kills him before Fisk can.

[ItzToxie]

Fisk stood over Gregory as he unzipped his own leather vest, tossing it on the couch with the jacket. Got called a narcissist as he loosened his tie, because he had too much dignity to wear a clip on. He listened to Gregory talk him down as he unbuttoned his blouse, untucking it from his trousers. He took off his suspenders as he was compared to DeVasher. He pulled it off and slipped it out of his arms, revealing to the cameras the L shaped scar he had since he was a kid, along with the countless other notches in his right arm. Sure, he disrobed multiple times during the course of this game, but this one was different. He tossed his blouse to his pile of clothes on the couch.

Standing shirtless over Gregory, he gripped the knife. He scowled. Little shit had no idea what he was talking about. A naked man has few secrets, and Fisk was a firm believer in honesty. For Gregory, a flayed man has none. "Six." He said. "Let's get something straight here. I'm not doing this for me. I can put my knife in someone, and twist it and laugh about it. That's one thing. But what I'm going to do to you?"

"It disgusts me, truthfully. The scent of someone's insides, the incessant cleaning afterwards, the sounds and textures. Watching it on pay-per-view doesn't prepare you for it. I'm not doing this so I will be remembered, I'm already there. All the scenes I've had are already on some Little Dark Age edit on Tiktok with a million views, I don't give a fuck. What I'm doing here is for the six I've lost."

"The disgust I've felt, the pain I've suffered from losing those six, is why I'm doing it. Everyone watching will feel what I feel. I want people to be disgusted. I want them to hate me. I don't want to be a role model. I'm not their star. I will already be remembered, that's not the point. I want six other names remembered as well, I want them burned into everyone's retinas until they are blind, I want them shouted in their ears until they are deaf. I want them carved upon their skin until they are raw."

"Most of all, I WANT my friends back, but that won't happen. So I'll have to settle for this." Fisk's voice shook. His arms shook, his chest shook. Now that he was here, now that he had the ability to do all the things he'd promised to do to Ivan on someone, he was anxious...

No, the truth was, was that he was scared. Yeah he could kill, yeah he could carve a little notch on someone's forehead. Hanging a corpse or dragging a body didn't much matter, they were dead, and in the case of Ivan barely conscious. This? Fisk inhaled a rattley breath through his nose, exhaled out of his mouth. People were ants...

People were ants...

But don't ants wiggle around when you pull their legs off?

He had to do this. It was all set up for the cameras. For the entertainment, for the people. The casting crews. The other contestants. His teeth chattered. This was for more than that. This was so they could be remembered. So people can feel what their names meant to him. He knew they wouldn't want this, not like this, but... They can't be forgotten. Victory or death. Death before dishonor. Dishonor before irrelevancy. The names will hurt to hear before they're forgotten. They'll never be forgotten, not after this.

He won't let them be taken away from him again.

"Verity, look away. NOW." He didn't want her to see this. This was his last warning.

"Sofia..."

"Keegan..."

Fisk knelt down.

"Bacchia..."

"James..."

With his free hand he pushed down on Gregory's head.

"Giselle..."

He pressed the knife into Gregory's back. Not too deep. Flesh deep. Before bone, before organs. This had to last.

"V-Vasily..."

Fisk began to guide it back.

[Wham Yubeesling]

"Fisk-"

[Applesintime]

Alright, Fisk had taken his shirt off after rambling for a while; Gregory hadn't been listening. Then, a knife was pressed to his back, and he braced himself to feel it stab into him, to take his life. But instead, all Fisk did was pull it back slowly. Squirming, Gregory let out a yell of pain, feeling the warmth of his blood coming from the wound. What the fuck was he doing? "G-get this fucking... over with!" Gregory gasped. Fucking Fisk couldn't just kill him normally, no. He had to be weird about it; probably marking an F or something in his back. Asshole.