Chapter Text
“Position.”
Perhaps it was always meant to end this way. It should not surprise him now, should it? It was either this or the hangman's noose. Maybe this was quicker, kinder, cleaner.
"Load.”
The martyred son of a martyred father on the bloodied altar of freedom. Just another body the British Raj would claim, put down like a rabidly vicious dog. A footnote in history, if even that.
"Aim."
He was that boy again, crouching under the sun— burning too bright, too harsh, too bitter against his skin— and putting a bullet in his father’s spine, amma and chinna’s bodies cold behind him.
"Shoot."
Exploding plumes of charcoal and sulfur, thunder in the air and salted iron in his mouth. Lead bullets carving a fiery path through the meat and bone of his shoulder, then his leg, then the side of his head, then, then, then—
“Bhaiyya.”
“Anna?”
“Ramudu.”
“Na Rama.”
Pain. Fire and blood. But also… darkness. Nothing but a sweet void.
Oh, how he wished he could see the soft dark curls and the fierce eyes of the tiger one last time.