ꜱᴜʙᴊᴜɢᴀᴛᴇᴅ | [ᴛᴏᴊɪ ᴢᴇɴ'ɪɴ 𝙭 ʀᴇᴀᴅᴇʀ 𝙭 ᴠᴀʀɪᴏᴜꜱ]

Choice

Toji was unsure how much time had elapsed with Y/N collapsed against him, immersed in the swathes of pulsing, impending darkness, two lone figures out in the middle of nowhere. So many tears had cascaded from her eyes, her expressions broken as she mumbled strings of incoherence sentences.

He remained kneeling in the sands, his thick, powerful arms wrapped around her tiny, shivering frame. Toji's hands and touch were inexplicably soothing to her as he kneaded her flesh - she couldn't grasp nor fathom how this man, who's name she didn't even know, could be so gentle in this moment. Perhaps her mind refuted to understand it, like in a defense mechanism to preserve what remained of her wavering sanity.

The moment she had said those three words, he had instantaneously felt desensitized. Numb. A wave of torpidity washing over the coils, windings and involutions of his brain. And yet, he couldn't find it within him to act through cruelty.

The girl was alive, wasn't she? He could easily have shut her up, gagged or bound her up with cords and rope that bit into the flesh and made her bleed - Shoved her into the back seat of the car and stuffed some filthy rag into the wet cavern of her pretty little mouth to drown out her cries of desperation.

It would have been so much simpler than this.

Toji exhaled with all the crushing weight of his existence like it was a condemnation, his gaze lancing out to the firmaments above as if searching for a reason why.

Why the fuck was this happening to him? Where was fairness, where was ruth? Where was justice in this sick, plagued world of cursed magic and why had he been dragged into it? They'd voided him of cursed energy and now all he could be was a walking embodiment of carnage.

What kind of fucked up existence was that anyway?

To the East, the latent darkness was beginning to dissipate, the horizon tinged with a faint, ephemeral pink hue bleeding into the skies. In a matter of a few hours, the sun would be birthing.

Toji cursed the Gods above, they always seemed to toy with him, he felt like they reveled in seeing him suffer, laughed at him. Time was such a fickle concept, it could be violated and manipulated at will. And within the decrepit, putrescent shack both the 4-dimensional space-time continuum had contracted and warped, violating the sound principles of time flow and his perceptions of the substantial real world.

So in tangible reality, twenty four hours had passed.

Twenty four hours since he cleaved wide open a man and sundered a woman in two. Twenty four hours since he had abducted the girl. Twenty four hours in which he hadn't slept nor eaten, only saturated adrenaline throbbing in his corrupted intravenous system acting as his driving force.

"Come on sweetheart, you can't stay like this forever."

Y/N softly shook her head, still leaning upon him. She was irremovable. Toji stroked her face, his fingertips barely grazing past her lips just before hooking the loose strands of her now filthy hair behind the small shell of her ear.

With breath perishable, Y/N summoned the residues of her vain anger. Brittle, sapped fingers shook the cloth of his shirt, the etiolated skin stretching over the bone of her knuckles. It looked so frangible and anemic he wondered if it would flake away from the strain.

Just tragic, he thought.

"Did you... Did you rape me?"-she rasped with soul-petrifying voice.

Shit. The question point blank seared into the schism of his decadent, corroded heart, like a screaming bullet, renting open a whole damn fissure that caused his mind to fault violently too. Even the iron fibers of his pectorals rippling in an involuntary shudder of abhorrence.