Armin found the image in his mind only after being broken - made into something twisted up, and slack with an aching pit at its core.

He was not Darey with witty banter, not Chief with colorful swearing, not someone who could wield Low Gothic or the scattered slang of the lower decks to call a thing by another name.

No, Armin wasn't them and unlike them he couldn't turn a phrase, poke a distant memory, provoke a thoughtful silence or a roar of laughter. 

A rusted wrench was just a rusted wrench - and yet, there was the Chief, who would thunk that wrench against his palm and call it "the Emper's Holy Wraf'," and he'd go on to call that rust "dried up blood n' bits from the last shit-brains who fuggin' forgot to tighten haf' the nibbits on a big fuggin' hunk of metal, like we ain't alls gotta walk under it."

But Armin had found something like that, he reckoned.

Armin once watched the corpse of a rat being dissolved in some hissing spitting bubbling sulphurous acid.

A canister of the stuff was dumped into a clogged up waste gutter to clear the blockage, and Armin paused for a moment and watched the rat's mangled, mangy, oily little body transmuted into a black tarry sludge, bones and all. It happened just like that. A few breaths. Gone.

Armin found that image in his memory, and knew it was his life in the last dozen (?) cycles. 

This bit of things was the part with the corpse dissolving away into the black sludge, down there with the other scraps in the gutter. 

Armin knew what happened next, soon it'd all be gone, washed away down the drain.

What of everything else kicked down into the gutter with his broken rat body?

The ship? Maybe it was already flushed down the pipe. 

Before the blaring alarms and the panic and the boarders, there was the amount and type of suffering which could be endured. 

Swollen stinking flesh around a split toenail?

Well, something like that was worth a wince or two in the shift - when the makeshift cloth wrapping was catching on the cracked nail, working its way into a hot throbbing wad in the boot, but it was tolerable. 

Just some tiny little agony did not prevent Armin from placing one foot in front of the other. Not a thing like that. With a bit of concentration, Armin would even walk without a limp. 

The steady tread was the habit, and making it through all the way was the skill. Carry on - and when you can, you take a moment to ease the pressure. 

Shove on through... Like... Like putting some more muscle behind opening a rusted hatch.

He was getting the hang of this.

Push through the anticipation of suffering. Push through the pain, the strain, the stumbles, the dumb fucking fights, the shouted orders...

And then, you endure for long enough and suddenly your work crew is getting beaten into the deck plates by heretics, and afterwards you're chained up and hauled off...

And just like that, suddenly the suffering wasn't endurable anymore. Suddenly you were a rat in a bath of foaming acid, shoved along with a metal pipe, hissing and fuming and down and down into the abyss. 

No work to do, neither any respite. Just packed up and hauled away.

Broken, gutter, acid, drain.