dot.

9: Tiro, Some Boxes and a Bad Decision

a/n: rest in peace to the tin of jackfruit that was sacrificed so i could write this chapter. gone but not forgotten.

  "I have a decision for you to make."

  Tiro was straight to the point, as per usual. Unlike the Doctor, who tended to be more manipulative and two-faced, Tiro never made an effort to hide his true intentions.

  Sometimes, he would even do things to Dot without the Doctor's permission- things that had no real benefit to the company, but rather just for his own cruel enjoyment.

  Judging by the sadistic glint in his eyes, today was going to be another act that even the Doctor wouldn't approve of. Dot dreaded to think of what it could be.

  The straw-haired man had dragged Dot from his room earlier this morning (despite Felix's rapid fire questioning of where they were going) and had made him sit on a steel table. There were no restrictions apart from a single leather strap, which was nerve-wracking in itself: what could Tiro possibly be planning to do that didn't require him to be tied down?

  He brought out two white boxes from an adjacent room, both identical save for the black number smeared on the top: one was labelled '1', the other '2'.

  "Choose a box."

  Choose one? What for?

  "One of them contains something nasty, the other something nice. Now hurry up and choose." Tiro was a stern and impatient man, who didn't take kindly to being made to wait- especially by those he deemed less important than him. As Dot wasn't even human, Tiro could justify his cruelty to himself- even if others would think he was insane for the things he did.

  Dot lifted a hesitant wing and rested it on the left box, feeling himself begin to sweat as anxiety built up inside him while he waited for Tiro to reveal which box was which.

  The man's face split into a gleeful grin and Dot felt dread fill every part of his body, the drowning emotion cutting off his ability to think clearly as Tiro exclaimed that he had chosen the wrong box, his terrifying smile never leaving his face.

  "Bad decision! The one on the right was right, ha! You chose the left one, stupid boy- look at what you could have had." He hastily opened the box and showed Dot a container full of painkillers. The hybrid felt faint, digging his blunt claws into the steel so hard that they began to splinter and crack, blood pooling under the surface in little red lakes.

  Tiro then opened the second box, the one Dot had chosen, to reveal a small metal object. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before, with many little jutting holes in the surface and a plastic handle attached to the side of it, presumably to make it spin.

  "I know you've never seen anything like this before, but I wanted to see how you'd react to me using a common household item in a... let's say, a somewhat unconventional way." He smirked, taking immense pleasure at how the blood fled from Dot's face, leaving behind a shaking ghostly figure.

  "You use it to grate cheese- you put it in the top and spin, see? This is a rotary one, I thought it would be more fun than a regular grater."

  Dot swallowed meekly, trying to keep himself together and ignore how every part of his body throbbed in unbearable anticipation. He felt like his eyes were swelling with each heartbeat, as if the very sight of the device made them want to leap from his skull.

  Tiro grabbed his leg roughly and secured it onto the table with a leather strap, paying no heed to Dot's weak protests and kicks.

  With a manic, insatiable grin he shoved Dot's foot into the opening of the grater so that his flesh sat flush against the cold metal surface.

  He could feel every bump, every blade, every little grating arc–the anticipation dug into him like a blunt, rusty knife to the heart–pushing down on his chest until it burst and finally letting the anxiety inside spew out in ugly ribbons.

  Just before Tiro began to turn the white plastic handle of the grater, he turned to stare at Dot with a terrifyingly crazy glint in his eye: a look of greed, a look of pleasure.

  He almost jumped up into the air in his excitement to begin spinning, hurling the handle downwards in an unfiltered, ripping cruelty that shredded through his skin much like the cheese that should have been in it.

  The pain sprung up through his body, electric agony leaping through his spine and making him clench the table ever tighter so his nails splintered deeper until they reached his fingerbeds and broke open like tiny volcanoes of blood. He kicked out his free leg, aiming for Tiro's head in an uncharacteristic act of defiance only to throw his head back in a silent cry as the grater jammed against one of his bones and scratched past the surface like nails on a blackboard.

  With his hands roughly clamped around it, Tiro brought the handle round again and again until his hands sported crimson gloves and Dot was writhing at each fresh wave of slicing, skinning, tearing pain.

  Still Tiro turned, the once-white handle getting stuck on bone and sinew alike yet never ceasing to force its infernal spinning.

  The deadly sharp, metal blades ripped and bit at the feeble limb over and over, shredding it into a grisly crimson confetti that fell down to the floor and collected in a squirming, gruesome pile.

  He yanked Dot's leg down further as the hybrid did his best to scream, his good eye swelling with a spring of tears at the silence he produced. This room should be full of his yells, ear splitting screeches and wails that would pierce through the walls and carry on down the endless corridors in their unfiltered agony: yet there was nothing.

  Tiro grabbed a jagged knife from the table opposite him and sawed through the membrane connecting Dot's legs so he could push the grater up further and saw even higher up the bloody, zombie-like limb. It looked as if it was rotting, like a burst, half-eaten tomato that sat at the bottom of the bowl in its bright red pool of pity.

  The grater got stuck, jammed on a tendon in Dot's lower leg. Amongst Tiro's shouted curses Dot could feel it being stretched further and further as he tried to spin like a rubber band about to snap, until it finally divorced itself from his bone and followed the device in its destructive path.

  Each fresh slice and turn of the grater felt like hundreds of stinging bees or cutting daggers of glass all embedding themselves into his flesh before being brutally torn out again and taking as much of the boy as they could with them.

  Dot's muscles were jamming up the machine now, more and more with every turn. Tiro had to constantly increase the amount of effort he put into making the rotary grater turn and tear the dripping red meaty tendrils away from the bones they so desperately clung to.

  His skin did not shred like cheese does, rather it was grated into thin strips by the merciless blades that refused to fully rip away from the main part of his leg. Instead of falling they just hung there, attached to the leg like melancholy, half-eaten cheese strings that dripped crimon in a sickening, irregular pattern.

  The parts that the grater did slice off were bluntly torn from the muscle before making their bloodstained way deep into the mechanisms of the grater where the spinning motion would squeeze them until they popped, spirting blood and specks of muscle alike all around the room and onto Tiro himself. By the end of it, the man's blood-soaked face bore a striking resemblance to a piece of fuzzy red felt, roughly cut up with play scissors by some careless child.

  Finally, he finished with his torture and ripped the device away from Dot with one final tear, stripping the limb of whatever pathetic, oozing strips of skin that had survived the ordeal.

  He carelessly threw the grater into the waste disposal area and out of sight, grinning maliciously at the way Dot flinched at the clanging sound.

  The hybrid, at this point, was struggling to breathe or think, saliva dropping from his mouth in a warm, sticky stream while his seeing eye flickered lazily and his blind one stared at nothing.

  Tiro exited the room, presumably to go and find Nimue, leaving Dot by himself to try and stay alive.