Ink Stained

62: slipping sanity (3)*

She shouldn't have come here.

"You shouldn't have come here."

Rikuto. The deeper, masculine voice, the way the words roll...it belongs to Rikuto.

He is angry. She has never heard him sound so aggravated, not even when he almost punched Saeki to death for purposefully breaking Noriko's arm after she already yielded in their sparring match two weeks ago. Noriko is the only one Rikuto ever gets angry over. Her heart thumps in her chest as she wonders who Rikuto is mad for now.

A snide laugh, feminine, crystalline, hateful.

Her fingers twitch when she hears it. Before she realizes it, a curving blade is clenched between her fingers. She looks down at the karambit for a second longer before easing her hold on the fabric of its existence. It disappears in a haze of black smoke an instant later.

"Are you telling me that I shouldn't have been reassigned back to the branch I was a part of from the beginning?"

"Oh, that's right. You only left to pretend like you were being held hostage. Congratulations on such amazing acting." He replies, every word dripping in contemptuous sarcasm. A sharp clap sounds, one, two, three. "You should've been an actress instead of a fucking Agent."

He...her tongue flicks out over her dry lips. He knew?

Slowly, like a snail that is reluctant to move from the blissful safety of sheltered ignorance, holding back the white braid of her hair from swinging forward with one hand, she looks around the wall.

It is Rikuto. He is wearing a grey slim tee that hugs his torso and his chest, and matching grey training slacks with white stripes down the sides. Shoes of the same make as hers are on his feet, standard issue for So Fu trainees. His hair, having grown longer from the last year he has been in So Fu, is pulled back into a short ponytail at his nape. It is a deep black that flashes bits of a rainbow as he stands under the harsh, unforgiving luminance of the lights.

Standing by his side, clad in standard Agent's uniform of black leather-synth, looking up at him with a frown on her straight black brows and her arms crossed over her chest, is her.

Her hair is the same as always, cut in its customary severe bob just under her jaw. Her bangs fall over her eyebrows. The same moss green shine out from eyes fringed with long, curling lashes she and her share.

Midori looks exactly as she did on August the sixteenth, two and a half years ago, when everything in Pai's world came crashing down in blood and bones and ashes and fire and chanting that still sears her with its burning pain whenever she allows herself to stray too close to the memory of that bullet-riddled night.

She is pressed up against the wall with Rikuto glowering down at her. His hands are braced on either side of her, preventing her from moving away. That doesn't make a difference, though. Pai knows she has the same training Pai has gone through for the last eighteen months.

Midori can move if she wants to, maybe break his arm along the way, for good measure. Midori has always been on the more physically violent side.

Interesting that she does not, Kuniumi mutters, her distaste and loathing clear in the mocking tone of her voice. In the entire world, there can only be one other who hates Midori more than she does; Kuniumi. She knows it is because Midori's betrayal mirrors Kuniumi's own too much for her to wilfully ignore.