[fic] With Dragon's Blood - Chapter Twenty Five ~Blood of the Dragon~
Title: With Dragon's Blood
Author:
prettyorianna
Pairing: Akame, PiKame, JunDa, Koki/Maru
Rating: NC-17.
Genre: fantasy
Beta by: my cat. okay, seriously, nobody
Disclaimer: I don't own KAT-TUN, any of its members, any other JE people. I write this for fun and for other fans of these fine folks. But don't steal my plots, mmkay? I put a great deal of time into them except for when I'm randomly spastically spitting words onto a page. But I value those too... ALSO NOTE that if you steal my land, the language, the names, myths, maps or anything else from it and I find you, I'm sooo gonna be pissed. This world is special to me and I've spent almost 15 years on it.
Summary: Nobody believed an army could cross the mountains. Perhaps that's why nobody was prepared when they did...
Warning: Character death(s). Violence. Maybe more stuff; will modify as needed.
Nifty Banner done by Deshisoraba!!
Author's Note: Yay, another new chapter! I'm on a roll. Warning: graphic at certain places.
The Master Posts:
On my journal - With Dragon's Blood Master Post
On the akame_ Community - With Dragon's Blood Master Post
On the akame_fanfics Community - With Dragon's Blood Master Post
On the je_kamenashi Community - With Dragon's Blood Master Post
On the kattun_fanfics Community - With Dragon's Blood Master Post
On the jin_fics Community - With Dragon's Blood Master Post
Chapter Twenty Five ~Blood of the Dragon~
Wait… this all looked familiar? Hadn’t he already come through this way? Was he walking in circles? But… that wasn’t possible. He’d taken a straight path, one foot after another in a single direction.
Kame couldn’t shake the feeling he’d already been there, though. And then later, when he was pretty sure he was in that same location yet again.
What was going on? Had he entered some bizarre magical moving labyrinth and not realized it?
Great. Juuuuuust great. He’d finally decided to go home, accept his responsibilities as the future King of Aveena, and now he was stuck wandering in a small circle over and over.
Maybe if he actually tried to walk in a circle, it would cancel out? Because Man’dekael only knew how long walking straight would keep spinning him around.
+++
Marina hadn’t left her room in over 24 hours. She had a small loaf of bread on the tiny table in the room but she’d finished that off yesterday, right after she calmed down from the invasion and feeling outwards for Kame. So she was ravenously hunger but she didn’t want to leave her room. She didn’t want to remind anyone of her presence until, well, it couldn’t be avoided.
When her door handle started to jiggle, she knew it was time. She snatched up the small bread knife. OH, she realized how pointless it was because she knew exactly how it was going to go… but, it just wasn’t in her to give up without a fight. Futile though it might be, they would have to overpower her if they wanted to drag her out of her room.
Catriona’s voice carried through the door, “Open the door or they’ll break it down.”
Marina did no such thing, instead backing away so that when they did manage to break it down, she wouldn’t be hit by it.
It didn’t take them long at all.
“A knife? How… cute.” And then two of men with her advanced as she backed away, until they had her cornered.
“S-stay back,” she warned, waving the knife in front of her. When the first one reached out to take it from her, she took a swipe at him and managed to score a really shallow line across the man’s palm but it gave the second man all the time he needed to catch her wrist and then snatched the blade from her.
“Son of a…” the one man cursed, the one she’d nicked. “What is it about the little cuts that hurt so much worse?”
“Get over it, you baby, and give her the damn shot!” Catriona hissed, holding out a syringe. She sounded annoyed.
And the one holding her wrist grabbed her upper arm, so that she couldn’t pull away from the needle.
Whatever was in the syringe worked fast. Everything was kind of… fuzzy… blurring around the edges… she would have sunk to the ground, except the man still had her arm. The other man took her other arm and together the two of them pulled her out of the room, following Catriona.
“Let… go… of me…” she said in a low voice. She just somehow couldn’t work up the strength it would take to speak louder.
But as they approached the throne room, through her haze, Marina felt a familiar presence. Oh, no… “No…” she murmured as they pulled her in the room where they were waiting with her mother. “Mama…” she cried out, but she couldn’t pull out of the grasp of the two men that held her.
Her mother shot her a heart-wrenching gaze and then turned away, towards the throne. “Promise you won’t hurt her… and I’ll do whatever you want.”
+++
That apparently got Orantina’s attention. Good.
“Or, better yet, we’ll do whatever we want to her until you cave with absolutely no promise for the future she will face.” Koki felt like such a terrible person. True, it was better than setting the torture specialist loose on the woman, but… he had a family of his own, after all. Using a mother’s love of her child like this just didn’t sit right.
Even so, he gave Maru the nod and the man walked over to the princess Marina. Taking her chin in his hand, he tilted her face up to look at him before releasing it and backhanding her. The woman gave a pitiful whimper and started to cry, which was probably the strongest reaction the drugs in her system left her.
“S-stop! I’ll… Please don’t hurt her! I’ll…” and Koki watched in amazement as the older woman’s features started to shift. Gold streaks shot through her hair and her face because more rounded than it had been. He’d never actually seen magic so this was a treat. Well, as long as you overlooked everything else going on, he supposed.
“See? Don’t hurt her! Do what you want with me but let her go…”
Still feeling like an utter asshole, Koki gave the wave and then watched impassively as Orantina/Shadow sank to her knees. The crystal container was place in front of her and the man with the large dagger took her by the hair, pulling her until her throat was right over the container. One quick, deep slash across the throat and the blood started to spill, dripping steadily down into the container. Once it was full and the woman was dead, her lifeless body was pushed aside while the container was sealed and the climate controls were turned on.
“Mama…” the young woman Marina cried softly. “Mama… Come back, mama… Don’t go… Don’t go, mama…”
Just how much of the sedative had they given her? She looked about ready to collapse.
Nope, scratch that. She already collapsed. Just great. She’d obviously been given too much of the sedative. He didn’t know what game Catriona was playing but he was sure he didn’t like it.
Well, he supposed the next thing to do would be to take Orantina’s blood back up to the Kattun for storage. He’d better do that himself; Mage blood was to precious a resource to not handle personally. Might as well bring the girl along, too. To Maru he said, “Grab her and let’s go back to the ship to plan the next move.”
+++
The power in the container of blood would only last a few hours, but luckily before they had left for the mission, the top crystal technicians had come up with an apparatus to insert the containers into that drew power from the engine.
Not that Koki didn’t trust his men because he did, but Maru could remember the insistence Koki had that the thing be installed into their cabin, even if that made more problems for the technicians. At least it turned out possible.
It never ceased to amaze Maru, the rate at which the scientists and engineers were making new discoveries and inventing new technology.
Princess Marina was surprisingly light; he’d scooped her unconscious body up in his arms and carried her to the ship-to-ground boat and then from the boat to the cabin he and Admiral Koki shared. He was a bit concerned at how slow her breathing and heart rate were, but if she was going to overdose she would already have died.
For lack of anything better to do with her, he sat her on the floor, back again the cabin wall, all the way across the room from the door.
They were in a bit of a bind over her, truthfully, but the discussion could wait. What was more pressing at that moment was planning the assault on Castle Escarpa to get Lashane/Spirit and, just to be sure, Laureth (the steward’s mother).
Locking the cabin door behind him, Maru left for the command center, to help with the planning.
Eventually, they decided that the best way to get at Lashane/Spirit would be to take the tunnel from outside the wall into the city and castle, since one of its passageways led directly to a closet in the queen’s bedroom. Catriona had mapped the tunnels pretty extensively.
Maru knew Koki hated shifting ship crews around (he felt that a ship’s crew learned to work with each other better than they’d be able to do otherwise) and since the Kanjani’s crew was the group with the most soldiers suited to that sort of mission, Koki ordered all the slaves moved from the Kanjani’s hold to the Arashi and sent the Kanjani off to Azella in Escarpa.
They would drop off a few teams at the tunnel entrance and once they were in position, Kanjani would uncloak as a distraction, allowing the ground teams the chance to grab the other woman as well. This time, he decided they should just go ahead and bleed them there ,instead of trying to transport two potential Mages.
It seemed for a moment that Koki was going to have Maru go with the Kanjani but apparently he decided it would be better for Maru to stay in Bayrichta.
+++
Once Ryo saw Tatsuya was no longer in Junno’s room, he excused himself from the conversation he was in and went looking for Junno. What he was going to say, he had no idea. He just couldn’t let it be, though. He needed… hell, he wasn’t sure. Just, he wanted to be sure Junno wouldn’t hurt Tatsuya.
It seemed the man was still in his room. Ryo cautiously knocked on the door.
It took a minute but finally the door swung open and a pretty distraught Junno said, “What do you want, Ryo?”
He couldn’t help but ask, “What happened to you? Are you okay?” But Junno just started to nervously chew on his bottom lip. Great. Just great.
“I think… I have a problem. I think...” and Junno’s eyes were suddenly full of determination. “Please, come in and listen to what I have to say and then I swear you’ll never hear from me again.”
That sounded like the best thing Ryo had heard in weeks.
“Fine, fine.”
Once the two of them were situated with the door closed for privacy, Junno rather bluntly asked, “Do you love him?”
“Wait, what?”
“Do you love Tatsuya?”
Eyebrows furrowed, Ryo answered, “Not that it’s any of your business, but yes.”
“You… will take care of him, keep him safe no matter what happens in the future?”
That sounded ominous. “You know something is coming, don’t you? Who are you?”
“Just a man who stupidly fell in love. But don’t feel threatened. In three days, I will be gone forever. Just promise you’ll watch over him.”
Sighing and feeling terribly confused, Ryo finally said, “I always do.”
Then he just left the distraught Junno behind to sulk or whatever it was he was doing.
What in the five circles of hell was that about? What was going to happen in three days?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The story continues:
Chapter Twenty Six ~The Two Triangles~
A/N: Poor Orantina, all dead :( That was MY character :( I killed me off! LOL
Poor Marina for have to watch that, even if she was so drugged up that it probably didn't seem real.
And what's up with Kame and the traveling in circles? Any guesses? Well, that's okay because you'll find out soon.