[chaptered] Breaking Zero Kelvin - Chapter 15 (The Great Escape)
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
~
15: The Great Escape
While the prison floor had 24-hour surveillance, it was obvious that around night time, if one bothered to crane their necks and peer around from their cell, that there were less guards around at night.
In fact, that night Tae only saw one fat one sitting at the start of the corridor, sleeping in his metal foldable chair with his cap pulled over his face.
“It’s time,” she whispered to Shizuna, who nodded and gripped her fingers tightly.
Taking a deep breath, Tae pressed the button on the ring that sat on her index finger. There was no immediate change, but slowly Tae began to feel a strange cool sensation around her feet. Looking at them, she bit back a surprised gasp as she realized that there was a dimly glowing blue ring moving up both her legs, as well as Shizuna’s.
Silently breathing a sigh of relief that the glow wasn’t too bright to alert anyone, she wiggled her toes. To her surprise, while she could still feel her toes wiggle, the toes she saw in front of her did not move.
Gradually, she became aware of a new sensation under her legs. Instead of cold smooth metal, as the blue ring slowly made its way up her legs the cold surface was replaced by a warmer, rough surface that felt strangely like dirt.
“Wicked,” Shizuna whispered from next to her, staring at the ring as it slowly made its progress up their bodies.
The process was agonizingly slow, and Tae kept on fervently hoping that the fat officer on guard would not wake up and decide to walk up and down the corridors.
Shifting a little in her seated position, Tae leaned her head back against the wall of the cell and closed her eyes. Judging by how the ring was now creeping up her thighs, the entire process that the ring was supposed to be carrying out (whatever it was) would take a long time to finish.
~
A peek outside had told Kei that night had fallen, but he did not know exactly when Tae would press the button on the control ring to begin the transfer process. Restless, he paced around the perimeter of their tunnel campsite, until a sharp hiss from Kohei stopped him short.
Kenta was staring at a faint blue glow starting to move slowly down the clones’ feet.
“It’s begun,” he said quietly, and Kei quickly scrambled over to wait and watch.
“…It’s a slow process, isn’t it,” Kei commented after a while of watching the blue glow slowly move up the legs. He did not see any difference between the bit that the glow had already passed through and the bit that had not, until one of the Tae clone’s toes suddenly wiggled, seemingly of its own accord.
“That’s her foot, then? Not the clone’s anymore?” Kei asked curiously, and Kohei nodded.
“It was quite a strange process when it happened to me, but I realize watching it is even stranger,” he observed.
The blue glow had finished with the legs now, and Kei noticed another set of blue rings form on the clones’ fingers, moving up in sync with the large one going up their torso.
It was indeed a disconcerting experience, watching as body parts that had already been transferred seemingly move on their own, as if they did not belong to the clones whose faces were currently staring straight ahead into thin air.
Kei fidgeted slightly as he waited for the process to end. It was at the middle of the torso now, and as he watched it crawled up at a snail’s pace until it had reached the neck, and then the face, and soon Tae’s closed eyes came into view.
The glow reached the top of their heads, and then fizzled away into nothingness.
“Tae,” Kei whispered, and her eyes snapped open.
~
With her eyes closed she was made even more aware of the cool, slightly ticklish sensation of the glowing ring moving up her body.
The glow was past her neck now, and then it began to move up her face. Gradually, she became aware that there were sounds of breathing that were not Shizuna’s. She squeezed her eyes shut, and her fingers curled as she waited for the process to end.
The coolness rose up her face, past her hair, and then…into nothingness.
“Tae,” a whisper came, and her eyes shot open in surprise.
A familiar pair of eyes stared straight into hers, and her heart skipped a beat.
“Kei?”
He smiled a little, eyes crinkling at the corners. Suddenly, he appeared rather weary to Tae.
“You’re safe,” he informed her quietly, and Shizuna, overhearing this, broke out into a small smile before disentangling her fingers from Tae’s. Meanwhile, Tae pulled the ring off her finger and handed it back to Kei, who in turn handed it to a blonde man who had been sitting slightly out of Tae’s range of vision.
“You!” she gasped, looking at the blonde man. “You’re the one who kept staring creepily at us!”
The blonde man, who looked even more tired than Kei had, nodded slightly, smiling.
“He needed to know what you looked like,” Kei interjected. “Otherwise the clones he made to replace you two wouldn’t have been very convincing.”
“…Clones?”
The other brown-haired man sitting next to the blonde man smiled.
“It’s Kenta’s power, see.”
There was a short pause as Tae’s gaze drifted from the blonde man to the brown-haired one, and then eventually landed on Kei, sending him a silent plea for introductions.
Kei laughed.
“Tae, these are two of the friends I told you about, Naruse and Naoto. They’ve changed their aliases now, so it would be better to call them Kenta and Kohei.”
Tae nodded to them, and the one Kei had named as Kohei broke out into a grin.
“Your partner’s even prettier up close, Kei,” he said, humour evident in his voice. “Even with all those torture scars.”
Kei’s eyes widened at the word ‘torture’, and his gaze snapped back to Tae and swept over all her scabs and bruises.
“They tortured you?” he asked in a low voice, and Tae nodded slowly.
“I didn’t tell them anything, though,” she said, and a wave of confusion swept through her when a look of frustration crossed his face.
“That wasn’t my- Never mind. We should probably leave soon - the more ground we gain before Kenta’s clones fade away and Central is alerted to your escape, the better.”
Tae noticed his gaze shift to Shizuna, who was now sitting by the stove burning away near a pair of motorbikes.
“Shizuna’s coming with us,” she murmured in response to the unasked question, and Kei nodded.
“Alright. She won’t fit on the motorbike though, so she’ll have to be in the sidecar.”
Sure enough, there was a rather battered-looking sidecar attached to Kei’s motorcycle that certainly had not been there the last time Tae had laid her eyes on the motorcycle. She guessed that Kei had probably borrowed it from his friend or something.
“First, you’ll need to change your appearance,” Kenta spoke up for the first time, startling Tae with his low, smooth voice.
Kenta held up a pair of scissors and a strange bottle filled with black liquid, along with another filled with brown liquid.
“Hair dye,” he said after glancing at Tae’s inquisitive stare. Nodding, Tae reached for the scissors, gently trimming away her hair until it was around shoulder length. She had no mirror and thus guessed that it looked rather uneven, but she didn’t really care much.
Shizuna crawled back over and watched curiously as Tae next attempted to snip a little off from her bangs.
“Done?” she asked eventually, and Tae mumbled a sound of assent, giving the ends of her hair a final snip. Shizuna accepted the scissors and begin to snip away at her own tangled hair as Tae reached for the brown hair dye and squeezed a little.
Thankfully, it was simple enough to apply, and within a short period of time the dye had dried, leaving her with a head of shoulder-length chestnut brown hair. Shizuna, on the other hand, had not changed the length of her long hair much, only dyeing it to a dark rich brownish-black.
“Done,” Shizuna said happily, trying to push all the cut hair on the ground to one side.
Kei rolled his eyes.
“No need to clear the hair,” he said dryly. “You probably need to change your aliases too, just in case. I’ve changed mine too.”
“What to?” Tae asked curiously.
“Seiji,” he smiled. “I think it should still be safe.”
Just to be sure, after Tae had fished out the name generator from the boot of the motorcycle she tested that name first.
“Seiji,” she told the machine firmly, and nodded when the light flashed green.
“Safe,” she said, turning to Kei - now Seiji - who nodded. In the dim light of the tunnel, she realised that he had actually given himself a slight haircut as well, though he did not look very different save for the slight brown hue his hair had taken.
Shrugging, she turned and began to devote her attention back to the machine. The last time she had wanted to make up an alias for herself, it had been an extremely long and frustrating process, and she had nearly exhausted her brain of female names. Now, she was sure that even more names had been taken since then, and mentally began to prepare herself for a long session with the machine.
~
Surprisingly, it had not taken her as long to get her new alias as she had thought. She supposed this was partly due to the fact that her new strategy to use the most unique names she could think of was rather effective.
“My name is Mioka now,” she informed Seiji who nodded, committing the new name to memory.
“What are we going to do now, K-Seiji?”
She winced inwardly at the slip - she was not yet used to the new alias, but a mistake like that above ground could be costly - and brought her glance to his amused face.
“Well, after Shizuna finishes struggling with the machine, we’ll begin our drive away from District 7. Kenta and Kohei are going to stay here because Kenta’s still too tired to drive and Kohei doesn’t know how to drive, but we’ll leave first since Central will probably want to target us more than them.”
This made sense to Mioka, and she nodded slowly.
“How will we go above ground from now on?” she asked, and Seiji snorted.
“Same as what we’ve done before - we sneak around at night. You should remember that before all of this happened, you were walking around with pretty much the same face that’s in Central’s records, so this is hardly more risky than before, especially since you’ve now changed your appearance a little.”
Mioka nodded, but was stopped from answering by a yell of relief from Shizuna.
“About time!” she cried happily. “The last time I never had to bother with such technology, we just randomly chose names and hoped they weren’t blacklisted. From now on call me Mariko~”
“You were lucky then,” Kohei laughed, and Seiji nodded at the new alias.
“Well then, if we’re all ready, the three of us will begin to head off towards District 6 first then.”
Kohei got up to clap Seiji on the shoulder while Kenta nodded from where looked as if he were about to doze off at his spot leaning against the wall. Shizuna - now Mariko - squeezed herself gingerly into the sidecar, which she proclaimed a better fit than it looked. Mioka swung her leg over the seat of the motorcycle, and wrapped her arms around Seiji’s waist as he started up the motorcycle.
With a roar and a final goodbye wave to the two men still sitting inside the tunnel, they were off.
~
It was back to the familiar long drive through nearly pitch-black darkness, though now Mioka welcomed it fiercely, keeping to the promise she had made to herself never to complain about the long drives again.
“We’ll drive until I need to sleep,” Seiji yelled to her over the roar of the engine and the wind whistling by. “After that we’ll stop to rest.”
“Alright!” she yelled back, smiling slightly to herself.
Everything was back to normal, and she was satisfied.
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
~
15: The Great Escape
While the prison floor had 24-hour surveillance, it was obvious that around night time, if one bothered to crane their necks and peer around from their cell, that there were less guards around at night.
In fact, that night Tae only saw one fat one sitting at the start of the corridor, sleeping in his metal foldable chair with his cap pulled over his face.
“It’s time,” she whispered to Shizuna, who nodded and gripped her fingers tightly.
Taking a deep breath, Tae pressed the button on the ring that sat on her index finger. There was no immediate change, but slowly Tae began to feel a strange cool sensation around her feet. Looking at them, she bit back a surprised gasp as she realized that there was a dimly glowing blue ring moving up both her legs, as well as Shizuna’s.
Silently breathing a sigh of relief that the glow wasn’t too bright to alert anyone, she wiggled her toes. To her surprise, while she could still feel her toes wiggle, the toes she saw in front of her did not move.
Gradually, she became aware of a new sensation under her legs. Instead of cold smooth metal, as the blue ring slowly made its way up her legs the cold surface was replaced by a warmer, rough surface that felt strangely like dirt.
“Wicked,” Shizuna whispered from next to her, staring at the ring as it slowly made its progress up their bodies.
The process was agonizingly slow, and Tae kept on fervently hoping that the fat officer on guard would not wake up and decide to walk up and down the corridors.
Shifting a little in her seated position, Tae leaned her head back against the wall of the cell and closed her eyes. Judging by how the ring was now creeping up her thighs, the entire process that the ring was supposed to be carrying out (whatever it was) would take a long time to finish.
~
A peek outside had told Kei that night had fallen, but he did not know exactly when Tae would press the button on the control ring to begin the transfer process. Restless, he paced around the perimeter of their tunnel campsite, until a sharp hiss from Kohei stopped him short.
Kenta was staring at a faint blue glow starting to move slowly down the clones’ feet.
“It’s begun,” he said quietly, and Kei quickly scrambled over to wait and watch.
“…It’s a slow process, isn’t it,” Kei commented after a while of watching the blue glow slowly move up the legs. He did not see any difference between the bit that the glow had already passed through and the bit that had not, until one of the Tae clone’s toes suddenly wiggled, seemingly of its own accord.
“That’s her foot, then? Not the clone’s anymore?” Kei asked curiously, and Kohei nodded.
“It was quite a strange process when it happened to me, but I realize watching it is even stranger,” he observed.
The blue glow had finished with the legs now, and Kei noticed another set of blue rings form on the clones’ fingers, moving up in sync with the large one going up their torso.
It was indeed a disconcerting experience, watching as body parts that had already been transferred seemingly move on their own, as if they did not belong to the clones whose faces were currently staring straight ahead into thin air.
Kei fidgeted slightly as he waited for the process to end. It was at the middle of the torso now, and as he watched it crawled up at a snail’s pace until it had reached the neck, and then the face, and soon Tae’s closed eyes came into view.
The glow reached the top of their heads, and then fizzled away into nothingness.
“Tae,” Kei whispered, and her eyes snapped open.
~
With her eyes closed she was made even more aware of the cool, slightly ticklish sensation of the glowing ring moving up her body.
The glow was past her neck now, and then it began to move up her face. Gradually, she became aware that there were sounds of breathing that were not Shizuna’s. She squeezed her eyes shut, and her fingers curled as she waited for the process to end.
The coolness rose up her face, past her hair, and then…into nothingness.
“Tae,” a whisper came, and her eyes shot open in surprise.
A familiar pair of eyes stared straight into hers, and her heart skipped a beat.
“Kei?”
He smiled a little, eyes crinkling at the corners. Suddenly, he appeared rather weary to Tae.
“You’re safe,” he informed her quietly, and Shizuna, overhearing this, broke out into a small smile before disentangling her fingers from Tae’s. Meanwhile, Tae pulled the ring off her finger and handed it back to Kei, who in turn handed it to a blonde man who had been sitting slightly out of Tae’s range of vision.
“You!” she gasped, looking at the blonde man. “You’re the one who kept staring creepily at us!”
The blonde man, who looked even more tired than Kei had, nodded slightly, smiling.
“He needed to know what you looked like,” Kei interjected. “Otherwise the clones he made to replace you two wouldn’t have been very convincing.”
“…Clones?”
The other brown-haired man sitting next to the blonde man smiled.
“It’s Kenta’s power, see.”
There was a short pause as Tae’s gaze drifted from the blonde man to the brown-haired one, and then eventually landed on Kei, sending him a silent plea for introductions.
Kei laughed.
“Tae, these are two of the friends I told you about, Naruse and Naoto. They’ve changed their aliases now, so it would be better to call them Kenta and Kohei.”
Tae nodded to them, and the one Kei had named as Kohei broke out into a grin.
“Your partner’s even prettier up close, Kei,” he said, humour evident in his voice. “Even with all those torture scars.”
Kei’s eyes widened at the word ‘torture’, and his gaze snapped back to Tae and swept over all her scabs and bruises.
“They tortured you?” he asked in a low voice, and Tae nodded slowly.
“I didn’t tell them anything, though,” she said, and a wave of confusion swept through her when a look of frustration crossed his face.
“That wasn’t my- Never mind. We should probably leave soon - the more ground we gain before Kenta’s clones fade away and Central is alerted to your escape, the better.”
Tae noticed his gaze shift to Shizuna, who was now sitting by the stove burning away near a pair of motorbikes.
“Shizuna’s coming with us,” she murmured in response to the unasked question, and Kei nodded.
“Alright. She won’t fit on the motorbike though, so she’ll have to be in the sidecar.”
Sure enough, there was a rather battered-looking sidecar attached to Kei’s motorcycle that certainly had not been there the last time Tae had laid her eyes on the motorcycle. She guessed that Kei had probably borrowed it from his friend or something.
“First, you’ll need to change your appearance,” Kenta spoke up for the first time, startling Tae with his low, smooth voice.
Kenta held up a pair of scissors and a strange bottle filled with black liquid, along with another filled with brown liquid.
“Hair dye,” he said after glancing at Tae’s inquisitive stare. Nodding, Tae reached for the scissors, gently trimming away her hair until it was around shoulder length. She had no mirror and thus guessed that it looked rather uneven, but she didn’t really care much.
Shizuna crawled back over and watched curiously as Tae next attempted to snip a little off from her bangs.
“Done?” she asked eventually, and Tae mumbled a sound of assent, giving the ends of her hair a final snip. Shizuna accepted the scissors and begin to snip away at her own tangled hair as Tae reached for the brown hair dye and squeezed a little.
Thankfully, it was simple enough to apply, and within a short period of time the dye had dried, leaving her with a head of shoulder-length chestnut brown hair. Shizuna, on the other hand, had not changed the length of her long hair much, only dyeing it to a dark rich brownish-black.
“Done,” Shizuna said happily, trying to push all the cut hair on the ground to one side.
Kei rolled his eyes.
“No need to clear the hair,” he said dryly. “You probably need to change your aliases too, just in case. I’ve changed mine too.”
“What to?” Tae asked curiously.
“Seiji,” he smiled. “I think it should still be safe.”
Just to be sure, after Tae had fished out the name generator from the boot of the motorcycle she tested that name first.
“Seiji,” she told the machine firmly, and nodded when the light flashed green.
“Safe,” she said, turning to Kei - now Seiji - who nodded. In the dim light of the tunnel, she realised that he had actually given himself a slight haircut as well, though he did not look very different save for the slight brown hue his hair had taken.
Shrugging, she turned and began to devote her attention back to the machine. The last time she had wanted to make up an alias for herself, it had been an extremely long and frustrating process, and she had nearly exhausted her brain of female names. Now, she was sure that even more names had been taken since then, and mentally began to prepare herself for a long session with the machine.
~
Surprisingly, it had not taken her as long to get her new alias as she had thought. She supposed this was partly due to the fact that her new strategy to use the most unique names she could think of was rather effective.
“My name is Mioka now,” she informed Seiji who nodded, committing the new name to memory.
“What are we going to do now, K-Seiji?”
She winced inwardly at the slip - she was not yet used to the new alias, but a mistake like that above ground could be costly - and brought her glance to his amused face.
“Well, after Shizuna finishes struggling with the machine, we’ll begin our drive away from District 7. Kenta and Kohei are going to stay here because Kenta’s still too tired to drive and Kohei doesn’t know how to drive, but we’ll leave first since Central will probably want to target us more than them.”
This made sense to Mioka, and she nodded slowly.
“How will we go above ground from now on?” she asked, and Seiji snorted.
“Same as what we’ve done before - we sneak around at night. You should remember that before all of this happened, you were walking around with pretty much the same face that’s in Central’s records, so this is hardly more risky than before, especially since you’ve now changed your appearance a little.”
Mioka nodded, but was stopped from answering by a yell of relief from Shizuna.
“About time!” she cried happily. “The last time I never had to bother with such technology, we just randomly chose names and hoped they weren’t blacklisted. From now on call me Mariko~”
“You were lucky then,” Kohei laughed, and Seiji nodded at the new alias.
“Well then, if we’re all ready, the three of us will begin to head off towards District 6 first then.”
Kohei got up to clap Seiji on the shoulder while Kenta nodded from where looked as if he were about to doze off at his spot leaning against the wall. Shizuna - now Mariko - squeezed herself gingerly into the sidecar, which she proclaimed a better fit than it looked. Mioka swung her leg over the seat of the motorcycle, and wrapped her arms around Seiji’s waist as he started up the motorcycle.
With a roar and a final goodbye wave to the two men still sitting inside the tunnel, they were off.
~
It was back to the familiar long drive through nearly pitch-black darkness, though now Mioka welcomed it fiercely, keeping to the promise she had made to herself never to complain about the long drives again.
“We’ll drive until I need to sleep,” Seiji yelled to her over the roar of the engine and the wind whistling by. “After that we’ll stop to rest.”
“Alright!” she yelled back, smiling slightly to herself.
Everything was back to normal, and she was satisfied.