Sachi fought like a wildcat all the way to the gallows, but it did little good. With one guard on each arm, she was dragged through the crowd that spit and sneered at her, the captured thief condemned to die. Here and there, she even got pelted by rotten, rancid fruit that soaked into her hair and clothes and made her gag.
Angry and bursting with adrenaline, it didn't even occur to her to be afraid until the crowd parted and she caught her first glimpse of the noose, dangling at the top of the scaffolding while the hooded executioner still fiddled with it. That was when anger turned to panic, and her struggles redoubled. Loudly cursing her captors, she twisted in their grip and tried to kick them, jerked back and forth between them to test their hold, and even leaned as far as she could to try to bite one. But that just earned her a smack across the face and a bloodied lip, and she soon found herself at the bottom of the steps that would lead up to her death.
"W-wait!" she said, turning to the guard that hadn't smacked her. "Hey, wait, ya don't...haha, ya don't really wanna do this, right? Murder a poor girl?"
The guard didn't look at her. "It's not murder when it's a criminal. It's justice."
"Justice." Sachi shook her sweaty silver hair from her eyes, the dirty locks falling in a tangled mess around her shoulders. Prison hadn't treated her well. "C'mon, ya don't even know me! What if I'm like...uh...a mother! Got a family!" She winced when she saw him roll his eyes skyward. "I could have a family! Ya never know! I was only stealing so I could eat, though. Honest! Doesn't that just warrant the lash? Can we do that instead? Sounds like a great time to me!"
"Holding up a carriage so you could eat," the other guard, who had been listening in, said flatly. "Mhmm."
"...I was really, really hungry?" Sachi said with a sheepish, miserable smile, amazed at herself for being able to joke even now. But the guard only scowled and she hunched her shoulders.
Seeing she'd find no sympathy here, her eyes darted around the crowd, searching for empathy somewhere. But all she saw were jeering faces. She swallowed hard, sweat beading along her pale skin. She needed to figure out something, and fast. Unfortunately, strategy had never been her strength; she was a girl of action.
"You could just, you know, look the other way and I'd smack you and we could both pretend you fought real hard but I got away anyway?" she suggested with a weak laugh, to no response.
At the top of the scaffold, the executioner gave the guards a signal, and Sachi grunted as they starting dragging her up the stairs. Heart lodging itself in her throat, she set her feet against the steps and tried to brace herself so they couldn't drag her, but they yanked her forward and she just ended up stumbling and scraping her knees on the steps, tail lashing about wildly as she tried to balance herself. Even struggling and swearing all the way, it wasn't long before she reached the top.
One of the guards forced her to her feet and bound her hands behind her back while the other held her. And then, when he was done, another guard held her in place as the executioner slipped the noose around her neck, tightened it, and checked the placement of the knot.
She was running out of time.
"Any last words?" one of the men said as Sachi struggled to stand, her legs turned to jelly.
She latched onto that.
"YES! Actually, I do have some last words! A lot of them, actually!" She cleared her throat, surprised her voice wasn't as wobbly as it wanted to be. Something about this all still felt very, very surreal.
"I, er, I prepared this story, you see, and it's super sentimental and important to me so my last request is that I get to tell it before I die 'cause I haven't told it to anyone else and it's super great if I say so myself! Okay, so, there was this guy, see, and he lived under a bridge, but one day this crazy thing happened and..."
And she was totally pulling this out of her ass. But it had worked in that one story from the desert, about a girl scheduled to die who had prolonged it through storytelling, so...
Why not?