| Bruised and Alone [closed to Ryouma and Tsume] | [Jul. 6th, 2008|09:58 pm] |
[[Third installment of the Mission of DOOM. Follows Restlessness and Fury.]]
Ryouma woke in darkness, screaming.
He caught himself almost as soon as he knew that the ripped-raw voice was his, but it was already too late. Cloth rustled in the black; skin brushed his bare shoulder and tickled down his side. A finger traced the lips of the gash along his ribs, dragging little ribbons of fire in its wake.
"Not even a scratch from us," a woman's voice said thoughtfully. "But those bandits carved you up pretty well, didn't they?" The finger slipped; a nail dug into the open wound. Ryouma strangled a hiss. The woman laughed.
"Stop poking at him, Yuuko," a man said. He sounded bored, and his voice was roughened with smoke. Ryouma could smell the cigarettes clogging the air, under the thick reek of rot. No breeze at all; they were in some enclosed space. He sat upright in a straight-backed chair, arms hanging loosely by his sides, legs sprawled casually apart. He stared straight ahead into darkness, and the brush of the woman's fingers through his hair and across his forehead told him they could see his face.
He couldn't move. His chest inflated just enough to allow him shallow breaths; his head could turn just enough to track sound. But his arms and legs hung as loose and still as if every tendon had been cut, and his back could not pull away from the chair no matter how hard he struggled.
Paralyzed? he thought, wildly, and then, Captured.
And Kuromaru was dead, and Tsume had to be, too, and their blood gloved his hands.
The woman laughed in astonishment. "Hey, look at this, Sano! He's crying!"
"Bitch," Ryouma said, very quietly. "I'll kill you first." |
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