Ink Stained

70: it's been too long*

それは長すぎる

She stands frozen, staring down at the man secured to the metal chair by manacles of steel to keep him locked in place.

The room is white. Plain. They are all white, plain. Every room looks like a mental asylum holding cell, but nothing is soft and padded to stop the insane from hurting themselves. Everything is all hard edges. The man, with his dark hair, is the sole spot of colour in the emptiness of the room.

Him, and she.

Tufts of dark brown fur matching the hair on his head curves over the top of his ear. He breathes heavily through small sharp teeth that belong more to a deadly animal than a man in his humanoid form.

He wears the criterion So Fu prisoner uniform. White pants, white shirt, and white shoes with no laces, to eliminate the possibility of prisoners committing suicide by hanging themselves with their shoelaces. She thinks it might have happened before, to draw So Fu's attention to the fact of its possibility. So Fu learn from experiencing, from anticipating the passing of the most obscure futures and preparing for any eventuality.

Trainees like she used to be wear the same shoes. The same white shirt. The same white pants.

His clothes should be white, but they are stained brown with dried blood. She wonders how much blood he has lost. There is hardly a spot of white left on the uniform. He is tall, and wiry, but after being kept on a barely-sustainable diet for the last two weeks, he is now long and skinny. A twig that was once a strong, sturdy branch, reduced to breaking bone that crumbles to dust at a single touch.

Electrodes are fixed firmly in place at his temples, and one is stuck on his pulse at his neck. The white wires of the conductors coil down, trailing along the slippery floor before doubling to the back of his chair, where a small machine is strapped to it. Her eyes follow the wires to the machine, then back to the man manacled to the chair.

She manages to suppress the jerk of surprise when the door behind her shuts with an echoing click behind her, Yamato leaving her to her mission. The prisoner does not stir at the sound of the door closing. She doesn't know if it is sleep or unconsciousness that keeps him oblivious to the sounds of the small white world around him.

She recalls the smirk on Yamato's face before he turned away. He thinks she can't do this. She knows he knows that this reminds her of his own little session with her that resulted in white hair, broken wrists, bloody eyes. Her lips twist.

Who would it have been better to kill – Akira for what he did to her, or Yamato for breaking her?

Yamato will be watching her. He is in charge of missions like this. He will be watching her to make sure she goes through with her mission.

Her mission. Her mission. Her mission.

The words bounce back and forth in the caged walls of her skull. Even Kuniumi cannot stop them, does not try to. Kuniumi knows it is futile to try.

This is not a mission she is supposed to do. This mission is not supposed to have landed in the pile of folders that hold all the information about all the pending missions she is to be sent to. She is not supposed to receive torture missions. Those go to Yamato's trainees, and she is not one of his.