[chaptered] Breaking Zero Kelvin - Chapter 11 (Moving On)
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: Moving On
Kei had not intended to stop by District 8, and he told Naruse as much by whining to the older man with a sour look on his face.
“You’ll need to stock up on food and fuel,” Naruse told him patiently. “After you rescue your friend, you’ll need to get away from District 7 as quickly as possible - the clones only give you that much extra time before they disappear.”
“I could just rescue her the day before her execution,” Kei grumbled, but fell silent when Naruse shot him a look.
“Not every execution is made public,” he said quietly.
“Just get your food, Kei,” Naoto cut in, sounding very bored. He was currently freeing himself of the straps that had kept him seated rather awkwardly on Naruse’s motorcycle despite his bandaged arm and leg.
Heaving a sigh, Kei set up the ladder at District 8’s tunnel entrance, and when he noted that night had fallen he left the tunnel, food bag in one hand. Thankfully District 8 was rather quiet, and unlike the previous district there did not seem to be much activity going on, much less a sudden witch check by Central.
When he had finally lugged the final full jerry can of fuel back down the ladder, Naruse promptly set out some sleeping bags.
“We’ll head for District 7 tomorrow,” he told Kei, before turning off the stove that had provided them with light and falling asleep almost immediately.
Left with no choice, Kei could only fumble for his own sleeping bag in the dark, before lying awake there in the quiet darkness trying to fall asleep.
~
The officer had come again, but this time it was not Tae but Shizuna that he dragged out, roughly handcuffed, and began to push down the corridor.
Suddenly, the cell felt much emptier to Tae, and she fidgeted as she waited for Shizuna to return. After spending a long time counting the number of bolts driven into the metal bars on her cell door, she exhaled slowly and resorted to curling up on their thin mat, trying to while away time by sleeping.
Her legs ached (for how long had it been since she had last had the opportunity to do any walking save for the times she had stumbled to and from various locations?) and even now she could feel her muscles protest as she curled into a tight ball.
Tae idly wondered how much time had passed.
I wonder what Kei’s doing now, she thought to herself. Unbidden, the face of her partner popped up in her mind’s eye. She figured that he was probably lying low, and wondered if enough time had passed that he had already reached District 6. Had he found a new partner yet, or was he traveling alone in those winding tunnels as he had done before they had met?
It hurt a little, imagining that Kei had gone on and left her behind, but she knew it was probably the most rational decision that he could make - she was as good as dead as it was, after all.
Tae rolled over and closed her eyes, trying to shut out such thoughts. With her eyes closed, she suddenly became hyperaware of the sounds around her. She could barely make out the muttering of the elderly women in the cell opposite her, and if she concentrated she could just hear some wailing from one of the children’s cells from down the corridor as well.
Observation of the cells as she was led by them on the way to the elevator had told her that Central sorted their prisoners in quite a complex manner. People of different genders and age groups had different cells, and gradually Tae came to understand why Shizuna and her did not have any other cellmates - no other young women their age were held within the complex.
Her ears perked up as she heard heavy bootsteps, and her eyes flew open to see a silent Shizuna shoved back into their cell.
“What happened?” she whispered once the officer had left.
Shizuna remained quiet for a while, staring at the wall in shock. Finally, playing with the split ends of her hair a little, she answered.
“I had my trial,” she told Tae in a small voice, devoid of any emotion. “I’ll be executed in around three weeks or so.”
Shock hit Tae like a truck speeding down a hill at a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, and it was all she could do to try and form coherent sentences as she gazed at her cellmate with her mouth hanging open.
“I’m sorry,” was all she could come up with, and Shizuna laughed bitterly.
“It’s not your fault, Tae,” she whispered.
The two of them sat in the cell for a long, long time, a depressing silence draped over them.
~
They drove, and drove, and drove.
If not for Naruse taking constant breaks to make sure Naoto did not feel too much discomfort, Kei was pretty sure he would have been willing to drive on and on until he collapsed from exhaustion.
Naruse’s plan relied on timing - if they missed their chance they would have to wait an entire week for the next chance to come along. Kei was intent on rushing so that they did not miss their chance, though he was aware that if they arrived too early they would have to languish in the tunnels to while away time.
Nevertheless, he kept up a punishing pace that Naruse kept chiding him for at every break. Every time, Naoto tried to persuade him to let Naruse take the lead instead, and every time he failed to convince Kei.
“I’ve never seen you so worked up over saving someone,” Naruse told him on the second night, as Naoto watched their dinner simmer in its can.
Kei only grunted, fussing with his food supplies.
Naruse laughed.
“That partner of yours is pretty special to you, isn’t she?”
Kei did not give a reply to that.
~
The officer in the white coat - Tae had taken to calling him ‘Professor Clipboard’ since he always seemed to carry it around and refer to it - slid a photograph off his clipboard and showed it to her at her third interrogation session.
“I’ll make things easy for you,” he sighed. “This is the boy you were found with, yes?”
It was indeed the little boy she had tried to save, but Tae kept her mouth shut anyway.
Clucking his tongue to produce a sound of disapproval, Professor Clipboard pressed a button on his remote, and Tae winced as the metal band around her left wrist began to tighten, ever so slowly.
“Yes,” she gasped at last, when the band felt like it would break her wrist bones any time soon. “He is, but I don’t know anything else about him.”
Professor Clipboard looked smug, and stopped the tightening of the metal band with the press of another button.
“You don’t know anything about him,” he asked, making it sound more like a statement than anything else.
He took her silence as a no, and referred back to his clipboard again.
“The name ‘Kato Seishiro’ means nothing to you?”
Ever so slightly, Tae shook her head, and sagged slightly in relief as Professor Clipboard pressed another button and the metal band released its grip on her wrist.
“There,” he said, sounding rather pleased. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? I hope you will be as cooperative in future sessions to come. I think we’ll stop here for today, don’t you think?”
Waving at the one-way mirror, an officer with an impressive walrus moustache walked in to bring her back to the cell. Tae winced when her left wrist was freed, as she had caught sight of the painful red mark imprinted on it. It stung painfully as the officer grabbed it to wrestle into a pair of metal handcuffs, but she would not allow either officer the pleasure of seeing her face contort in pain until she was out of their sight, back in her cell.
Only when the officer’s bootsteps had faded away did she allow herself to rub at her left wrist gently, wincing in pain as her fingers brushed across where the band had chafed against her skin and left cuts.
“I hate this place,” she muttered, kicking angrily at the floor.
Shizuna made a small noise that Tae took to mean that she shared the same view.
“We all hate this place,” she agreed in a quiet voice. “Every single one of us here.”
~
“It’s not Saturday yet,” Naruse reported when he had come down from his inspection of District 7. “Today is only Thursday, so we have to wait here for two days before we can go up.”
Kei shrugged.
“Let’s make up fake names first, so we aren’t caught off-guard later,” he suggested.
Naruse nodded in agreement.
“I registered myself as Naruse before, but now that half of my fake name seems to have been blacklisted recently I’ll have to use a different name.”
“Shouldn’t you just switch alias, just in case?”
Naruse nodded thoughtfully, then his shoulders drooped as something else struck him.
“That means I’ll have to change alias twice,” he groaned, and Kei snorted, digging out his own name generator from the boot of his motorcycle.
“Suck it up, lazy ass,” he said dryly, and Naruse sighed.
Naoto just laughed at them from where he was seated on the ground with his bandaged leg stuck out straight in front of him, before Kei rolled his eyes.
“You should change your name too, just in case,” he informed Naoto, who groaned.
“Troublesome.”
~
Tae strained to hear bits of the officers’ conversation as they walked past her cell door.
“It seems that the weekly opening of the prison will be tomorrow,” she informed Shizuna, and the other female witch let out a long sigh.
“Oh joy,” she muttered, with not a single speck of excitement in her voice. Tae wondered what about the public opening was so bad, but decided it would be easier to experience it herself the next day.
For now though, they just sat in the darkness, hoping that the officers walking past would not stop by their cell to drag out either of them.
~
“My name is now Kenta,” Naruse introduced after what felt like a full two hours of fiddling with his name generator. “Yano Kenta. Nice to meet you.”
Naoto massaged his temples.
“This is going to be so hard to commit to memory,” he groaned, and Kei sighed.
“I’m Kurono Kei,” he said dryly. “Hurry up, Naoto.”
Naoto shot Kei a dirty look, before going back to pitting various names against the name generator.
Naoto: 0, Machine: 2395409, Kei thought idly a long while later as Naoto’s suggestion of “Yamashita!” had the machine flash red.
Finally, as Naruse (now known as Kenta) began to take out the tinned sardines to cook, Naoto looked up from the machine with a satisfied look.
“The name’s Kohei,” he said, attempting to imitate an English movie Kei dimly remembered watching with Ryuu when they were kids, called ‘Joe Bond’ or something similar. “Kiuchi Kohei.”
“About time,” Kei grumbled, feeling slightly hungry as Kenta stirred the tomato sauce the sardines were packed in.
“The patient man catches the fish,” Kenta said randomly, the perfect semblance of patience as he knelt on the dirt floor of the tunnel poking at red tomato-and-onion sauce with a spoon.
Kohei choked.
“Kenta, I swear you had better stop that before it develops into another one of your withdrawal symptoms from fishing.”
Kei just laughed.
~
“I don’t want tomorrow to come,” Shizuna groaned, burying her face in her knees.
“Look at it this way,” Tae said, trying to be slightly optimistic (or as optimistic as you can be in a cell with no windows and a death sentence hanging over you). “The faster tomorrow comes, the faster it’ll go away.”
Shizuna only sighed noisily, wiggling her toes.
“It’ll be alright,” Tae continued weakly, but Shizuna did not look convinced.
Tae did not blame her - she herself was not particularly convinced by her own argument either.
Shaking her head, she leaned back against the wall and tried to prepare herself for the following day.
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: Moving On
Kei had not intended to stop by District 8, and he told Naruse as much by whining to the older man with a sour look on his face.
“You’ll need to stock up on food and fuel,” Naruse told him patiently. “After you rescue your friend, you’ll need to get away from District 7 as quickly as possible - the clones only give you that much extra time before they disappear.”
“I could just rescue her the day before her execution,” Kei grumbled, but fell silent when Naruse shot him a look.
“Not every execution is made public,” he said quietly.
“Just get your food, Kei,” Naoto cut in, sounding very bored. He was currently freeing himself of the straps that had kept him seated rather awkwardly on Naruse’s motorcycle despite his bandaged arm and leg.
Heaving a sigh, Kei set up the ladder at District 8’s tunnel entrance, and when he noted that night had fallen he left the tunnel, food bag in one hand. Thankfully District 8 was rather quiet, and unlike the previous district there did not seem to be much activity going on, much less a sudden witch check by Central.
When he had finally lugged the final full jerry can of fuel back down the ladder, Naruse promptly set out some sleeping bags.
“We’ll head for District 7 tomorrow,” he told Kei, before turning off the stove that had provided them with light and falling asleep almost immediately.
Left with no choice, Kei could only fumble for his own sleeping bag in the dark, before lying awake there in the quiet darkness trying to fall asleep.
~
The officer had come again, but this time it was not Tae but Shizuna that he dragged out, roughly handcuffed, and began to push down the corridor.
Suddenly, the cell felt much emptier to Tae, and she fidgeted as she waited for Shizuna to return. After spending a long time counting the number of bolts driven into the metal bars on her cell door, she exhaled slowly and resorted to curling up on their thin mat, trying to while away time by sleeping.
Her legs ached (for how long had it been since she had last had the opportunity to do any walking save for the times she had stumbled to and from various locations?) and even now she could feel her muscles protest as she curled into a tight ball.
Tae idly wondered how much time had passed.
I wonder what Kei’s doing now, she thought to herself. Unbidden, the face of her partner popped up in her mind’s eye. She figured that he was probably lying low, and wondered if enough time had passed that he had already reached District 6. Had he found a new partner yet, or was he traveling alone in those winding tunnels as he had done before they had met?
It hurt a little, imagining that Kei had gone on and left her behind, but she knew it was probably the most rational decision that he could make - she was as good as dead as it was, after all.
Tae rolled over and closed her eyes, trying to shut out such thoughts. With her eyes closed, she suddenly became hyperaware of the sounds around her. She could barely make out the muttering of the elderly women in the cell opposite her, and if she concentrated she could just hear some wailing from one of the children’s cells from down the corridor as well.
Observation of the cells as she was led by them on the way to the elevator had told her that Central sorted their prisoners in quite a complex manner. People of different genders and age groups had different cells, and gradually Tae came to understand why Shizuna and her did not have any other cellmates - no other young women their age were held within the complex.
Her ears perked up as she heard heavy bootsteps, and her eyes flew open to see a silent Shizuna shoved back into their cell.
“What happened?” she whispered once the officer had left.
Shizuna remained quiet for a while, staring at the wall in shock. Finally, playing with the split ends of her hair a little, she answered.
“I had my trial,” she told Tae in a small voice, devoid of any emotion. “I’ll be executed in around three weeks or so.”
Shock hit Tae like a truck speeding down a hill at a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, and it was all she could do to try and form coherent sentences as she gazed at her cellmate with her mouth hanging open.
“I’m sorry,” was all she could come up with, and Shizuna laughed bitterly.
“It’s not your fault, Tae,” she whispered.
The two of them sat in the cell for a long, long time, a depressing silence draped over them.
~
They drove, and drove, and drove.
If not for Naruse taking constant breaks to make sure Naoto did not feel too much discomfort, Kei was pretty sure he would have been willing to drive on and on until he collapsed from exhaustion.
Naruse’s plan relied on timing - if they missed their chance they would have to wait an entire week for the next chance to come along. Kei was intent on rushing so that they did not miss their chance, though he was aware that if they arrived too early they would have to languish in the tunnels to while away time.
Nevertheless, he kept up a punishing pace that Naruse kept chiding him for at every break. Every time, Naoto tried to persuade him to let Naruse take the lead instead, and every time he failed to convince Kei.
“I’ve never seen you so worked up over saving someone,” Naruse told him on the second night, as Naoto watched their dinner simmer in its can.
Kei only grunted, fussing with his food supplies.
Naruse laughed.
“That partner of yours is pretty special to you, isn’t she?”
Kei did not give a reply to that.
~
The officer in the white coat - Tae had taken to calling him ‘Professor Clipboard’ since he always seemed to carry it around and refer to it - slid a photograph off his clipboard and showed it to her at her third interrogation session.
“I’ll make things easy for you,” he sighed. “This is the boy you were found with, yes?”
It was indeed the little boy she had tried to save, but Tae kept her mouth shut anyway.
Clucking his tongue to produce a sound of disapproval, Professor Clipboard pressed a button on his remote, and Tae winced as the metal band around her left wrist began to tighten, ever so slowly.
“Yes,” she gasped at last, when the band felt like it would break her wrist bones any time soon. “He is, but I don’t know anything else about him.”
Professor Clipboard looked smug, and stopped the tightening of the metal band with the press of another button.
“You don’t know anything about him,” he asked, making it sound more like a statement than anything else.
He took her silence as a no, and referred back to his clipboard again.
“The name ‘Kato Seishiro’ means nothing to you?”
Ever so slightly, Tae shook her head, and sagged slightly in relief as Professor Clipboard pressed another button and the metal band released its grip on her wrist.
“There,” he said, sounding rather pleased. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? I hope you will be as cooperative in future sessions to come. I think we’ll stop here for today, don’t you think?”
Waving at the one-way mirror, an officer with an impressive walrus moustache walked in to bring her back to the cell. Tae winced when her left wrist was freed, as she had caught sight of the painful red mark imprinted on it. It stung painfully as the officer grabbed it to wrestle into a pair of metal handcuffs, but she would not allow either officer the pleasure of seeing her face contort in pain until she was out of their sight, back in her cell.
Only when the officer’s bootsteps had faded away did she allow herself to rub at her left wrist gently, wincing in pain as her fingers brushed across where the band had chafed against her skin and left cuts.
“I hate this place,” she muttered, kicking angrily at the floor.
Shizuna made a small noise that Tae took to mean that she shared the same view.
“We all hate this place,” she agreed in a quiet voice. “Every single one of us here.”
~
“It’s not Saturday yet,” Naruse reported when he had come down from his inspection of District 7. “Today is only Thursday, so we have to wait here for two days before we can go up.”
Kei shrugged.
“Let’s make up fake names first, so we aren’t caught off-guard later,” he suggested.
Naruse nodded in agreement.
“I registered myself as Naruse before, but now that half of my fake name seems to have been blacklisted recently I’ll have to use a different name.”
“Shouldn’t you just switch alias, just in case?”
Naruse nodded thoughtfully, then his shoulders drooped as something else struck him.
“That means I’ll have to change alias twice,” he groaned, and Kei snorted, digging out his own name generator from the boot of his motorcycle.
“Suck it up, lazy ass,” he said dryly, and Naruse sighed.
Naoto just laughed at them from where he was seated on the ground with his bandaged leg stuck out straight in front of him, before Kei rolled his eyes.
“You should change your name too, just in case,” he informed Naoto, who groaned.
“Troublesome.”
~
Tae strained to hear bits of the officers’ conversation as they walked past her cell door.
“It seems that the weekly opening of the prison will be tomorrow,” she informed Shizuna, and the other female witch let out a long sigh.
“Oh joy,” she muttered, with not a single speck of excitement in her voice. Tae wondered what about the public opening was so bad, but decided it would be easier to experience it herself the next day.
For now though, they just sat in the darkness, hoping that the officers walking past would not stop by their cell to drag out either of them.
~
“My name is now Kenta,” Naruse introduced after what felt like a full two hours of fiddling with his name generator. “Yano Kenta. Nice to meet you.”
Naoto massaged his temples.
“This is going to be so hard to commit to memory,” he groaned, and Kei sighed.
“I’m Kurono Kei,” he said dryly. “Hurry up, Naoto.”
Naoto shot Kei a dirty look, before going back to pitting various names against the name generator.
Naoto: 0, Machine: 2395409, Kei thought idly a long while later as Naoto’s suggestion of “Yamashita!” had the machine flash red.
Finally, as Naruse (now known as Kenta) began to take out the tinned sardines to cook, Naoto looked up from the machine with a satisfied look.
“The name’s Kohei,” he said, attempting to imitate an English movie Kei dimly remembered watching with Ryuu when they were kids, called ‘Joe Bond’ or something similar. “Kiuchi Kohei.”
“About time,” Kei grumbled, feeling slightly hungry as Kenta stirred the tomato sauce the sardines were packed in.
“The patient man catches the fish,” Kenta said randomly, the perfect semblance of patience as he knelt on the dirt floor of the tunnel poking at red tomato-and-onion sauce with a spoon.
Kohei choked.
“Kenta, I swear you had better stop that before it develops into another one of your withdrawal symptoms from fishing.”
Kei just laughed.
~
“I don’t want tomorrow to come,” Shizuna groaned, burying her face in her knees.
“Look at it this way,” Tae said, trying to be slightly optimistic (or as optimistic as you can be in a cell with no windows and a death sentence hanging over you). “The faster tomorrow comes, the faster it’ll go away.”
Shizuna only sighed noisily, wiggling her toes.
“It’ll be alright,” Tae continued weakly, but Shizuna did not look convinced.
Tae did not blame her - she herself was not particularly convinced by her own argument either.
Shaking her head, she leaned back against the wall and tried to prepare herself for the following day.