[chaptered] Breaking Zero Kelvin - Chapter 14 (Calm Before the Storm)
Title: Breaking Zero Kelvin (Multichapter)
Author: Luna (dreamweavernyx)
Pairing: Kazuyuri
Genre: Fantasy/Scifi
Summary: AU. They are two runaways, chased out of society through a deep-rooted stigma though they have no say in it at all. Only relying on word-of-mouth rumours and a set of sketchy directions, they now have to set out on their own journey to accomplish the impossible: escape.
Notes: Character list here.
Previous chapters: Prologue | 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13
~
14: Calm Before the Storm
The next day the officer had come again.
Tae shot him a dirty look, but he ignored this. Instead of Tae, he grabbed a surprised Shizuna, before dragging her out of the cell. Shizuna had just only recently had an interrogation session, so Tae was quite shocked that her cellmate had to go for another one so soon.
However, when Shizuna was brought back a long time later, she looked to be completely distressed. Tear trails remained on her face, her eyes were red and puffy, and she was still trembling as the officer shoved her back into the cell, an impassive look on his face.
“What happened?” Tae asked concernedly, but Shizuna simply shook her head, still trembling and sniffling a little.
Shizuna did not talk for a good half of the day, and she did not even make a dent in their single daily meal when it came. Tae frowned in concern and tried to feed her spoonfuls of the thin cabbage soup, but Shizuna did not eat anything.
Finally, long after her still-full tray of food had been cleared and the people in the nearby cells had gone to sleep, Shizuna spoke.
“Today they made me watch another witch get executed,” she said in a small voice, and Tae winced. Watching anyone get executed right in front of your eyes was probably not a particularly pleasant experience, especially if there was nothing you could do to stop it.
She kept silent and kept patting Shizuna’s hand, encouraging her to continue talking.
“It was brutal you know?” Shizuna’s words came out in a rush, as though she did not want them to be bottled up within her for a second longer. “They tied him to a pole and burned him, and when he was screaming they were just laughing and laughing. Like all those witch hunts he told me used to happen back in the old days way before the Great Revolution.”
Hang on a minute, Tae thought as she processed Shizuna’s words.
“Who was executed, Shizuna?” she asked aloud, hoping she didn’t sound too tactless.
Shizuna was silent for a while, as fresh tears began to slowly drip down her cheeks again.
“Tai-nii is dead,” she eventually whispered rather hollowly. “Tai-nii is dead and they made me watch as he died and I couldn’t do anything to help and he was crying and screaming in pain and oh my god-”
Tae held her hand tightly as she began to hyperventilate, trailing off and crying into her knees. Sobs racked her frame, and it was only then that Tae realized the full extent of damage psychological torture could inflict on the human mind.
Sick bastards, she thought furiously, as she tried to calm Shizuna down. Sick-minded disgusting fiends.
Even then, she could do nothing but awkwardly pat Shizuna’s back until the sobs wound down to gasping hiccups, and then back into morose silence.
~
“Should we change our names again?” Kei fretted, glancing at the name generator.
Kenta shook his head.
“The officer last week said that we can go once a week, right? Besides, why ‘we’? You’re staying right here with Kohei.”
“They may have moved her,” Kei argued. “I’m going too.”
Kohei glanced at the two of them.
“What, does this mean you guys are leaving me behind again?”
“Your arm’s pretty much fine, and you have a gun,” Kei retorted. “I’m going up to the prisons with Kenta and that’s final.”
He didn’t notice Kenta frown slightly, or Kohei roll his eyes.
I just want to see Tae, he thought to himself. Make sure that she isn’t dead yet.
“You just want to see your partner again, isn’t it?” Kenta said quietly, hiding a grin when Kei jumped guiltily.
“What- no- it’s just concern-”
“This goes beyond ‘concern’,” Kohei laughed. “Even I’m not concerned about Kenta to that extent.”
“Maybe you have a cr-”
Kei cut Kenta off with a scowl.
“She is my partner, guys. Stop blowing things out of proportion.”
He stalked off to another corner of the tunnel, and Kenta threw Kohei a rueful look.
“Someone’s in denial,” Kohei snorted.
“Am not!” Kei yelled from where he was.
Kenta just laughed.
~
Shizuna was still quiet the next morning.
Tae peered out of their door to see officers hurrying around, fiddling with the lock mechanisms.
“It’s going to be the public reopening soon,” she reported to Shizuna in an undertone. “Possibly tomorrow or the day after or something.”
Shizuna let out a mumble of assent, then went back to staring blankly at the wall. Heaving a small sigh, Tae settled down next to her, and felt Shizuna lean her head on her shoulder.
“…Shizuna?”
Shizuna was sound asleep, and Tae sighed, stretching her legs out in front of her and wiggling her sore toes. Shizuna was probably tired from all the crying she had done, Tae reasoned, and so let her friend sleep on.
Tae couldn’t blame her - she supposed it was extremely hard to lose someone that close to you. She knew she hadn’t cried much when she had learned of Erena’s death, but she supposed that watching the person die was probably a whole other story.
I wonder how I’ll react if I saw Erena die like that?
Tae pondered this. She remembered having seen Erena get shot at back in District 13 when she was running away, but she hadn’t felt much then. Was it because of the adrenaline? Or simply because she hadn’t been as close to Erena as Shizuna had been to Taisuke?
What about Kei, then? a tiny voice in her mind piped up.
Tae could feel her cheeks burn in the darkness at the question. Since when had a part of her begun to recognize Kei as someone close to her? Someone like a brother, or something else even closer…
Forcefully, she yanked her thoughts away from wandering down that path, and tried to get herself to clear her mind and sleep instead.
~
“It’s night!” Kei called down, watching as Kohei made another mark on their calendar.
“Finally, we can go up to the prisons tomorrow,” Kenta mused.
Kei grumbled in agreement, climbing down the ladder.
“About time, too. It’s been such a boring week down here, I’m dying for some action!”
Kohei rolled his eyes.
“Instead of yearning for action, you should check to make sure you’re carrying the ring to pass to your partner tomorrow.”
Blinking, Kei did as he was told.
“Kenta,” he said at last. “Are you sure that two people can travel with only one ring?”
“It should work,” Kenta said quietly. “I don’t think it’s possible to calibrate it to transfer two separate things at the same time, anyway.”
Sighing, Kei rolled the supplementary ring between his fingers.
“It had better work,” he muttered to nobody in particular, though Kenta caught it and smiled slightly.
“It will,” he murmured comfortingly.
Kei grunted in assent, studying his fingers.
~
Tae was woken from her sleep by the sound of footsteps, and sleepily pried her eyes open to see that people had already begun flooding into the prison again.
She gently shook Shizuna to wake her up, but when her cellmate simply swatted her hand away and rolled over, she sighed and sat in the corner by herself, watching as the public walked past her cell, throwing the occasional expletive at her.
Shizuna woke up after the first thirty people or so, and stared blearily at the visitors through a curtain of sleep-mussed hair.
“Damn,” she muttered, voice slightly hoarse. “Should have slept more.”
She crawled over to where Tae was sitting, and they watched side by side in the lit area of their cell as people continued to mill around. The crowd slowly got thicker, and Tae guessed that it was probably around mid-morning, when most people had woken up to head to the prison.
Some movement caught her eye, and she noticed the blonde man who had been staring at her for so long last week. Once again, he stopped in front of their cell and stared in. The only difference was that this time, he was no longer scrutinizing Tae, but Shizuna instead, and she squirmed self-consciously under his piercing gaze.
“He’s creepy,” she muttered to Tae, shooting the blonde man a wary glance.
“He did that last week too,” Tae replied, gaze drifting from the blonde man to the slightly taller man standing behind him dressed in a hooded brown cloak. Last week there had been two hooded escorts trailing behind the blonde man - today there was only one.
Finally, after what felt like ages, the blonde man turned his gaze back to his partner and gave a brusque nod, before walking on slowly.
The hooded man moved closer to the cell door, and Tae shrunk back in case he decided to throw in a piece of rubbish or the like. She watched as he fumbled in his cloak, before drawing out something small. He looked around furtively, then tossed the object in.
As he strode away quickly, Tae crept forward to have a look at the object. It appeared to be a metal cylinder that probably could fit on her pointer finger, with a strip of paper tied to it.
While more people milled around and walked past the cell, Tae unfurled the piece of paper to read the handwriting on it.
Tae. Put this ring on immediately, and don’t take it off. Don’t let go of Shizuna’s hand either. When night falls and the guards aren’t walking around as much, press the button on the ring. For now, just wait. -Kei
Tae’s eyes widened at the name scrawled right at the bottom.
“Kei,” she whispered, and Shizuna jumped a little, startled. Tae showed her the paper while fitting the ring onto her finger, taking care not to press the large red button embedded in it.
“He’s going to help us escape?” Shizuna hissed in an undertone, trying but failing to hide the excitement that filled her voice.
“It appears so,” Tae replied, equally quietly. “That hooded person must have been him…”
She settled against the cell wall to wait for nightfall.
~
Tae looked even more gaunt than when he had last seen her, and that worried him.
Shizuna, too, had looked terrible - the obvious dark circles around her swollen eyes had alarmed him. It scared him to even try and imagine how they were treated in the prison, and could not wait until night had fallen to free them.
Now though, they were heading back to the tunnel so that Kenta could begin making the two clones.
Kohei welcomed them with some dried apricots, a can of peanuts, and Kenta’s sketchbook. While Kei settled down and began to eat, Kenta drew a rough sketch of Shizuna’s face, before getting straight down to work.
Making the clones looked like rather simple business to Kei, but Kenta assured him that it was in fact rather complicated. Kohei had to be on standby to feed Kenta as his hands glowed and two humanoid shapes formed in front of him, before he proceeded to add in detail.
It was a long while, but eventually two clones that looked almost exactly like the two witches in the cell sat in front of Kenta, wearing blank looks on their faces. Bending down, Kei attached a supplementary ring to the Tae clone’s finger, and then stepped back to admire Kenta’s handiwork as Kenta himself slept, exhausted by the effort.
Soon, Kei thought to himself. Soon.
~
The crowds were slowly beginning to thin out.
Tae supposed that this meant that night was going to fall soon, and that people would be heading back home for their dinner.
She and Shizuna ate their meal - their last drugged meal, Tae thought with no small amount of glee - in relative silence, while the officers bustled around re-activating the electric mechanisms on the doors.
Tae did not know how the ring Kei had given her would help her escape - perhaps it would sprout some sort of laser sword? Tae was not averse to the idea, though she hoped it was something else - she did not have any experience whatsoever in wielding a sword.
The murmurs of the officers grew fainter and fainter as they began to leave the prison floor one by one.
Soon, Tae thought, studying the button on the ring and gripping Shizuna’s hand tightly. Soon.
Author: Luna (dreamweavernyx)
Pairing: Kazuyuri
Genre: Fantasy/Scifi
Summary: AU. They are two runaways, chased out of society through a deep-rooted stigma though they have no say in it at all. Only relying on word-of-mouth rumours and a set of sketchy directions, they now have to set out on their own journey to accomplish the impossible: escape.
Notes: Character list here.
Previous chapters: Prologue | 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13
~
14: Calm Before the Storm
The next day the officer had come again.
Tae shot him a dirty look, but he ignored this. Instead of Tae, he grabbed a surprised Shizuna, before dragging her out of the cell. Shizuna had just only recently had an interrogation session, so Tae was quite shocked that her cellmate had to go for another one so soon.
However, when Shizuna was brought back a long time later, she looked to be completely distressed. Tear trails remained on her face, her eyes were red and puffy, and she was still trembling as the officer shoved her back into the cell, an impassive look on his face.
“What happened?” Tae asked concernedly, but Shizuna simply shook her head, still trembling and sniffling a little.
Shizuna did not talk for a good half of the day, and she did not even make a dent in their single daily meal when it came. Tae frowned in concern and tried to feed her spoonfuls of the thin cabbage soup, but Shizuna did not eat anything.
Finally, long after her still-full tray of food had been cleared and the people in the nearby cells had gone to sleep, Shizuna spoke.
“Today they made me watch another witch get executed,” she said in a small voice, and Tae winced. Watching anyone get executed right in front of your eyes was probably not a particularly pleasant experience, especially if there was nothing you could do to stop it.
She kept silent and kept patting Shizuna’s hand, encouraging her to continue talking.
“It was brutal you know?” Shizuna’s words came out in a rush, as though she did not want them to be bottled up within her for a second longer. “They tied him to a pole and burned him, and when he was screaming they were just laughing and laughing. Like all those witch hunts he told me used to happen back in the old days way before the Great Revolution.”
Hang on a minute, Tae thought as she processed Shizuna’s words.
“Who was executed, Shizuna?” she asked aloud, hoping she didn’t sound too tactless.
Shizuna was silent for a while, as fresh tears began to slowly drip down her cheeks again.
“Tai-nii is dead,” she eventually whispered rather hollowly. “Tai-nii is dead and they made me watch as he died and I couldn’t do anything to help and he was crying and screaming in pain and oh my god-”
Tae held her hand tightly as she began to hyperventilate, trailing off and crying into her knees. Sobs racked her frame, and it was only then that Tae realized the full extent of damage psychological torture could inflict on the human mind.
Sick bastards, she thought furiously, as she tried to calm Shizuna down. Sick-minded disgusting fiends.
Even then, she could do nothing but awkwardly pat Shizuna’s back until the sobs wound down to gasping hiccups, and then back into morose silence.
~
“Should we change our names again?” Kei fretted, glancing at the name generator.
Kenta shook his head.
“The officer last week said that we can go once a week, right? Besides, why ‘we’? You’re staying right here with Kohei.”
“They may have moved her,” Kei argued. “I’m going too.”
Kohei glanced at the two of them.
“What, does this mean you guys are leaving me behind again?”
“Your arm’s pretty much fine, and you have a gun,” Kei retorted. “I’m going up to the prisons with Kenta and that’s final.”
He didn’t notice Kenta frown slightly, or Kohei roll his eyes.
I just want to see Tae, he thought to himself. Make sure that she isn’t dead yet.
“You just want to see your partner again, isn’t it?” Kenta said quietly, hiding a grin when Kei jumped guiltily.
“What- no- it’s just concern-”
“This goes beyond ‘concern’,” Kohei laughed. “Even I’m not concerned about Kenta to that extent.”
“Maybe you have a cr-”
Kei cut Kenta off with a scowl.
“She is my partner, guys. Stop blowing things out of proportion.”
He stalked off to another corner of the tunnel, and Kenta threw Kohei a rueful look.
“Someone’s in denial,” Kohei snorted.
“Am not!” Kei yelled from where he was.
Kenta just laughed.
~
Shizuna was still quiet the next morning.
Tae peered out of their door to see officers hurrying around, fiddling with the lock mechanisms.
“It’s going to be the public reopening soon,” she reported to Shizuna in an undertone. “Possibly tomorrow or the day after or something.”
Shizuna let out a mumble of assent, then went back to staring blankly at the wall. Heaving a small sigh, Tae settled down next to her, and felt Shizuna lean her head on her shoulder.
“…Shizuna?”
Shizuna was sound asleep, and Tae sighed, stretching her legs out in front of her and wiggling her sore toes. Shizuna was probably tired from all the crying she had done, Tae reasoned, and so let her friend sleep on.
Tae couldn’t blame her - she supposed it was extremely hard to lose someone that close to you. She knew she hadn’t cried much when she had learned of Erena’s death, but she supposed that watching the person die was probably a whole other story.
I wonder how I’ll react if I saw Erena die like that?
Tae pondered this. She remembered having seen Erena get shot at back in District 13 when she was running away, but she hadn’t felt much then. Was it because of the adrenaline? Or simply because she hadn’t been as close to Erena as Shizuna had been to Taisuke?
What about Kei, then? a tiny voice in her mind piped up.
Tae could feel her cheeks burn in the darkness at the question. Since when had a part of her begun to recognize Kei as someone close to her? Someone like a brother, or something else even closer…
Forcefully, she yanked her thoughts away from wandering down that path, and tried to get herself to clear her mind and sleep instead.
~
“It’s night!” Kei called down, watching as Kohei made another mark on their calendar.
“Finally, we can go up to the prisons tomorrow,” Kenta mused.
Kei grumbled in agreement, climbing down the ladder.
“About time, too. It’s been such a boring week down here, I’m dying for some action!”
Kohei rolled his eyes.
“Instead of yearning for action, you should check to make sure you’re carrying the ring to pass to your partner tomorrow.”
Blinking, Kei did as he was told.
“Kenta,” he said at last. “Are you sure that two people can travel with only one ring?”
“It should work,” Kenta said quietly. “I don’t think it’s possible to calibrate it to transfer two separate things at the same time, anyway.”
Sighing, Kei rolled the supplementary ring between his fingers.
“It had better work,” he muttered to nobody in particular, though Kenta caught it and smiled slightly.
“It will,” he murmured comfortingly.
Kei grunted in assent, studying his fingers.
~
Tae was woken from her sleep by the sound of footsteps, and sleepily pried her eyes open to see that people had already begun flooding into the prison again.
She gently shook Shizuna to wake her up, but when her cellmate simply swatted her hand away and rolled over, she sighed and sat in the corner by herself, watching as the public walked past her cell, throwing the occasional expletive at her.
Shizuna woke up after the first thirty people or so, and stared blearily at the visitors through a curtain of sleep-mussed hair.
“Damn,” she muttered, voice slightly hoarse. “Should have slept more.”
She crawled over to where Tae was sitting, and they watched side by side in the lit area of their cell as people continued to mill around. The crowd slowly got thicker, and Tae guessed that it was probably around mid-morning, when most people had woken up to head to the prison.
Some movement caught her eye, and she noticed the blonde man who had been staring at her for so long last week. Once again, he stopped in front of their cell and stared in. The only difference was that this time, he was no longer scrutinizing Tae, but Shizuna instead, and she squirmed self-consciously under his piercing gaze.
“He’s creepy,” she muttered to Tae, shooting the blonde man a wary glance.
“He did that last week too,” Tae replied, gaze drifting from the blonde man to the slightly taller man standing behind him dressed in a hooded brown cloak. Last week there had been two hooded escorts trailing behind the blonde man - today there was only one.
Finally, after what felt like ages, the blonde man turned his gaze back to his partner and gave a brusque nod, before walking on slowly.
The hooded man moved closer to the cell door, and Tae shrunk back in case he decided to throw in a piece of rubbish or the like. She watched as he fumbled in his cloak, before drawing out something small. He looked around furtively, then tossed the object in.
As he strode away quickly, Tae crept forward to have a look at the object. It appeared to be a metal cylinder that probably could fit on her pointer finger, with a strip of paper tied to it.
While more people milled around and walked past the cell, Tae unfurled the piece of paper to read the handwriting on it.
Tae. Put this ring on immediately, and don’t take it off. Don’t let go of Shizuna’s hand either. When night falls and the guards aren’t walking around as much, press the button on the ring. For now, just wait. -Kei
Tae’s eyes widened at the name scrawled right at the bottom.
“Kei,” she whispered, and Shizuna jumped a little, startled. Tae showed her the paper while fitting the ring onto her finger, taking care not to press the large red button embedded in it.
“He’s going to help us escape?” Shizuna hissed in an undertone, trying but failing to hide the excitement that filled her voice.
“It appears so,” Tae replied, equally quietly. “That hooded person must have been him…”
She settled against the cell wall to wait for nightfall.
~
Tae looked even more gaunt than when he had last seen her, and that worried him.
Shizuna, too, had looked terrible - the obvious dark circles around her swollen eyes had alarmed him. It scared him to even try and imagine how they were treated in the prison, and could not wait until night had fallen to free them.
Now though, they were heading back to the tunnel so that Kenta could begin making the two clones.
Kohei welcomed them with some dried apricots, a can of peanuts, and Kenta’s sketchbook. While Kei settled down and began to eat, Kenta drew a rough sketch of Shizuna’s face, before getting straight down to work.
Making the clones looked like rather simple business to Kei, but Kenta assured him that it was in fact rather complicated. Kohei had to be on standby to feed Kenta as his hands glowed and two humanoid shapes formed in front of him, before he proceeded to add in detail.
It was a long while, but eventually two clones that looked almost exactly like the two witches in the cell sat in front of Kenta, wearing blank looks on their faces. Bending down, Kei attached a supplementary ring to the Tae clone’s finger, and then stepped back to admire Kenta’s handiwork as Kenta himself slept, exhausted by the effort.
Soon, Kei thought to himself. Soon.
~
The crowds were slowly beginning to thin out.
Tae supposed that this meant that night was going to fall soon, and that people would be heading back home for their dinner.
She and Shizuna ate their meal - their last drugged meal, Tae thought with no small amount of glee - in relative silence, while the officers bustled around re-activating the electric mechanisms on the doors.
Tae did not know how the ring Kei had given her would help her escape - perhaps it would sprout some sort of laser sword? Tae was not averse to the idea, though she hoped it was something else - she did not have any experience whatsoever in wielding a sword.
The murmurs of the officers grew fainter and fainter as they began to leave the prison floor one by one.
Soon, Tae thought, studying the button on the ring and gripping Shizuna’s hand tightly. Soon.