(no subject)
Yuki just remembers having an idea in his head when he's younger, is all, a stereotypical concept of what 'story time' is supposed to mean to a child.
It should have been nice. It should have been enticing, friendly, rewarding. Fun. Story time was a good thing for kids, at least as a general rule. Princesses and dragons and castles far, far away where there were things like unicorns and fairies and true love at first sight. Yuki had distinct memories of stories like that, of other people mentioning them, fairy tale lands where things were better than actuality, where one could escape.
Story time was supposed to be fun time.
Story time wasn't supposed to instill a new kind of horror every time it was mentioned.
He still remembers, very vividly, the first time Akito tells him not to let the bed bugs bite. Yuki had the sheets pulled up, his head halfway to the pillow, and asked in a tiny seven-year-old voice, what are bed bugs, why do I need to watch out?
He also remembers, in exact detail, how Akito had knelt beside Yuki's bedding, placed a congenial hand on his shoulder and told him he had no reason to worry. Bed bugs simply crawled out from the floorboards, hid within the folds of their sheets and crept out at night while children were sleeping, set for the golden opportunity where they could burrow under human flesh and start gnawing at you from the inside out.
"Can you imagine?" Akito had asked, eyes wide in a caricature of concern. "A burning sensation of dozens of bugs chewing on your organs, day and night? A constant, agonizing pain until finally you wither and collapse in on yourself." Yuki didn't say a word, his own eyes mirroring Akito's, less teasing and more real, unadulterated horror. He couldn't think of a fate more terrible. His fingers tightened on the sheets. Akito smiled nicely and bid Yuki a fast good night, practically skipping from the room.
Yuki had been out of the sheets nearly before the door was even shut, across the room and in the corner, teeth gritted and knuckles white as he clasped his hands tightly together. He slept there, that night, and for a few weeks after, crouched in the corner and terrified of his own bedding.
It was just little stories, little things that Akito told him, at various intervals before things were bad and Akito's world had gone black. Before they'd painted the room. Akito would laugh and say he was joking, for a lot of them, and Yuki would forgive him - he didn't know any better, right? It was all in good fun, so long as they were few and far between?
But things changed. So did Akito.
And so did the stories.
It was with the room, Yuki was fairly sure, that the rats started coming. He wasn't sure if Akito just knew these, offhand, or if he'd found them from other places, horrible stories with mice and rats and rodents galore. Stories of mice in science labs, experimented on, dying and ill and turned blind, running into walls. Stories of rats in sewers, feeding on feces and whatever garbage happened to float down their way. Rodents of Unusual Size skewered alive, Templeton and his untrustworthy ways, the poor abused mouse in Alice in Wonderland.
And then there were medieval times. Medieval times were Yuki's least favorite.
Rats, and rats and rats and rats. Rats in the streets, rats in houses, rats bringing plague, ruining lives, consuming dead humans and treated as filth, with despise, with real hatred. Rats brought the Black Plague. Rats single-handedly ruined everyone's lives back then, nobody liked rats, did they, Akito would tell him, musing.
Yuki remembers, most acutely, the time Akito had told him about the torture methods. They'd tie a traitor to a table, and place a bottomless cage with a rat inside on the victim's abdomen. Hot coals would be placed on top of the cage, generating heat. The rats, in their discomfort, would find any way out they could. Lacking the skills and strength to break through the bars of a wrought iron cage, they'd seek other means of escape. Through softer tissue.
He remembers that day very well. He remembers the detail Akito would go into, slow and deliberate as he described the rats chewing their way to safety, a gradual and incredibly painful way to die, through agonizing torture. All because of a rat who was only thinking of itself. Yuki'd whimpered and shook and begged Akito to stop, several times through. It took him months to stop thinking of it. To stop seeing rats, everywhere, crawling all over him when he shut his eyes. To stop waking up in the night, clutching his stomach and praying to whatever god that would listen that there weren't going to be filthy, horrible rodents chewing their way through his viscera.
The nightmares. Oh, God, the nightmares.
It's just the sort of things he recalls later on, surprisingly with more disdain than he remembers black paint and locked doors, whips and cigarettes and stinging slaps. The physical torment, he could have handled, he could have taken in stride. It was words that broke him, tendrils of fear ebbing in, Akito's lies delineating his every pore and sinking under his skin until he wasn't sure what was true and what was false or up or down or left and right.
He didn't know. He just didn't know.
And he certainly didn't want to hear any more bedtime stories, not for quite some time.