Author note: I didn't embed this picture because it's grimdark.
It was hard to say what woke Redheart. Possibly the pain in her head, possibly a sound nearby. Her eyes opened, but she couldn’t see. Based on the touch of fabric on her muzzle and ears, there was some kind of bag over her head.
She tried to move. Her hooves were bound, rear legs straight out and together, forelegs crossed and flat on her stomach. She didn’t seem to be secured to whatever was below. It felt like metal. Redheart felt it wiggle a little as she moved. A table, probably.
A door opened and hooves clacked on the floor. Based on the sound, the door was heavy and metal, and the floor was something hard like tile. Redheart twisted, trying to face the source of the noise. “Who’s there?”
The ropes on her hooves suddenly tightened, hauling Redheart aloft to an upside down position. She yelped in surprise and a little pain as the rough bindings dug into her legs.
“This is where being a pain in my flank gets you,” said Caricature’s voice. Redheart struggled to curl up her upper body, but he smacked her in the face through the hood. She slumped back, her body swaying as her head hung downwards like the pendulum in a clock.
“You always wanted to ask questions. I should have done this a while ago.” Redheart heard his voice coming from a little further away. There were a few soft sounds, as if he was working on something.
“Why were you trying to get me to kill Gold Bullion?” she asked.
Caricature barked a short laugh. “If you had, I might have let you live. He told you what he found out, though, didn’t he? Don’t worry, he’s next.”
“Why are you doing this?” asked Redheart, unable to keep rising panic out of her voice. “I thought you were one of the good guys!”
“I realized there’s not actually much difference,” he said. “So why limit myself?”
“Are you some kind of turncoat?” Caricature didn’t answer. Redheart tried again. “What did you do, just warn ponies that Dominator was coming for them?”
“All I could do,” he said. “They wanted more.”
Was that a little panic in his voice? Were the criminals he had allied himself with demanding something else?
“What could you possibly do?” asked Redheart. It sounded a little more condescending than she intended, but it had the desired effect.
“They wanted to control Dominator. They wanted me to designate targets of their choosing.” Caricature laughed again. “Even if I wanted to, that wasn’t going to happen. The first time I tried that—on another local asset just like you, Redheart—Ms. Fromage asked if I’d made a mistake. It’s good that I was able to talk my way out of that. She’s the only one who personally handles Dominator.”
Redheart was confused. “If your boss does that, then what is that file you carry around? Just a hit list? Are you saying that you’ve never actually talked directly with Dominator?”
“If Dominator has ears to listen,” he muttered. “After some of the insane pieces of work I’ve seen, I wonder.”
“Wait, you don’t know what Dominator is?” demanded Redheart.
“You know how I was always reprimanding you for asking questions?” said Caricature. “I was in that position once. Unlike you, however, I learned that there are some things you just don’t need to know. That’s how I got where I am.”
“By backstabbing everypony around you?”
That remark got Redheart slapped again, but it didn’t change her mind. She realized that questioning orders was not an easy decision to make. On the one hoof, it caused mistrust and ineffectiveness in job performance. On the other, sometimes the order was just wrong. She was now glad that she’d backed out of the command to kill Bull, considering it had come from a traitor.
Caricature grabbed her head to stop Redheart from swaying too much. He leaned in close. “Well, as much as I dislike you, I have to say that you’ve been useful. What I was saying the other day about you being good at your job was true. Now you’re going to help me with something else.”
He tapped the side of her neck and seemed to be looking for something. Redheart’s stomach felt like it was tying itself in knots. She recognized the movement as basic phlebotomy. Caricature was looking for a vein.
The pinch of the needle was simultaneously more and less painful than she expected. The rushing adrenalin in her system dulled Redheart’s pain, but the catheter Caricature had stabbed into her blood vessel was a very large diameter. He taped it in place, and let go of Redheart, allowing her to return to her head-down position.
“It’s a lot easier to dismember a body and make it disappear if you get rid of the blood first,” said Caricature. His tone suggested that he knew from experience.
There was no way to know how much time she had before bleeding to death. Very severe injuries, like a severed femoral artery, could render a pony unconscious in perhaps thirty seconds. Depending on the size of the needle and tubing in the catheter, Redheart guessed she had more than three but less than ten minutes.
It was not easy, but instead of struggling she tried to calm herself. Caricature would stop any move she made to get free. The only option open was to slow her heartbeat and try to tense the muscles in her neck to restrict flow as much as possible.
Redheart couldn’t feel the necklace Rapier had given her. She must have been stripped of all her possessions after being cracked in the head. An injury like that seemed relatively minor, now.
There was a pattering sound coming from above Redheart’s head, which of course meant close to the floor. She realized it was the sound of her blood dripping away. Her stomach, already under stress from her fear and unusual position, felt like it might be about to reject its contents. Being upside down with a bag on her head, that would only make a bad situation worse.
Caricature tapped a hoof while he waited. Redheart could feel her limbs starting to go numb and cold. She wouldn’t get lightheaded, as the blood was being pulled down by gravity. She would be conscious until the end.
There was a muffled smashing sound. Caricature started. He ran to the door and opened it. There was a moment’s pause.
“Dominator.” He spat it like a curse. Redheart heard his hooves take off at a dead gallop. She began to struggle.
The bones in a pony’s fetlocks were somewhat like a hinge, allowing movement in only one direction. Redheart knew what the structure of the bones looked like, and could picture it in her mind. Just a little pressure here…
She gritted her teeth in pain as she forced a dislocation in her right front fetlock. She bent the leg past the point where it should have stopped naturally and managed to slip it out of the ropes.
Her left front leg was easy to unbind after that. Her first priority was the catheter. The tape removed some hair with it, but that couldn’t be helped. The vein would likely continue to bleed, but not as badly as if a steel needle was holding it open.
Redheart tried to bend in order to reach the other ropes that still held her dangling upside down, but couldn’t make it. She took a deep breath and tried again. The blood loss made her too feeble.
The door slammed open, knocking over something that clattered across the floor. Redheart didn’t stop what she was doing. She would only lose more blood and get weaker.
A hoof pressed into the center of her back. She jumped at the touch, but it wasn’t hostile. With gradual pressure, she was pushed upwards until reaching the rope that bound her back legs. Redheart felt something like a pipe that the rope was tied to. She managed to wrap her dislocated hoof around it well enough to hold herself while working on the knot with the other.
The helping hoof suddenly disappeared. Redheart continued to fuss with the rope unaided. Not being able to see what she was doing didn’t help. It came as a surprise when the knot finally came untied and she fell hard onto the floor, splashing in the pool of blood.
Redheart pulled at the hood, managing to get it off. The room was some kind of cross between torture chamber and hospital, with equipment for both saving and ending lives. In the middle of it all, she lay all alone. Her mysterious beneficiary was already gone, and her neck continued to bleed.
