Dark Savior,, challenge #211 'benevolence', Kurtliegen, tehexile

[tehexile]

  Title: Birthday

Author: tehexile

Fandom: Dark Savior

Pairing/Characters: Kurtliegen

Rating/Category: PG-13/Gen

Word Count: 455

Spoilers: mild spoilers
other tags: mentions of institutional abuse

Summary: The Warden celebrates his birthday along with everyone and tries not to think about the vile slander of his critics or the creeping realization that the space-time continuum is collapsing.

The Warden had a heart. He swore it.

 

He demonstrated it every year on his birthday by holding an island-wide celebration, when fireworks were let off, jolliness and merriment abounded, several of the less popular security measures were lifted and there were even (assuming that the boat was actually seaworthy, a recurring problem that wasn't really his fault and he complained about every year), visitors. Of course, his critics claimed that he only lapsed the restrictions so he could monitor people in secret and see what they actually did when left to their own devices, usually the best way to weed out traitors and attempts on his life. While that was true, it was standard policy and only sensible in such a dangerous prison. The filthy dissidents also claimed that the only reason for the festivities was so that he could pretend his birthday was a state holiday in some petty dictatorship. They even went so far as to claim he punished people for not celebrating enthusiastically enough, except when he really needed them to keep working in the mines, in which case he conveniently forgot to tell them and it wasn't as if there was a way to tell the time down there. They had no proof of any of this. Besides, he had a legitimate reason to monitor people's morale levels when the island was so full of psychopaths who couldn't be trusted to react to anything normally. As for the continuation of industry, he had the particularly vicious criminals down in the mines, totally unsuited to being let out onto the port with civilians wandering around, and the island needed to make some money for itself, what with the supply boat mysteriously exploding every other year.

 

As for his own wishes, it was high time someone respected him, and, as he was practically forbidden to leave the island himself by the ceaseless politics of the Agency and in any case had no time to spare from his job of fixing the constant emergencies that broke out like bush fires in summer, there was nowhere to do so except the prison. 

 

And as for the other rumour - that every single day so far had been his birthday and that it wasn't just his insane ego and the fact that the clock up in the tower hadn't worked since the place was founded, every day was literally the same... 

 

That one legitimately worried him. Because it genuinely wasn't something he had ever caused to happen in the first place, or had any control over,  or understood in the slightest, and while it was a far-fetched rumour, he couldn't really disprove it and he was starting to suspect himself that it was all true.

 

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