He's flat on his back when the first line of pain breaks the skin of his neck, and that's when Sinbad finally realizes, Damn, this kid could actually kill me.
The thought jerks his foot up to the ground beneath him; he kicks himself and his assailant into a roll. His fingers scrabble for a hold in the cords around the boy's arms as the tarnished steel blades dart for his face again. Just as he catches the slack rope behind the boy's shoulder, something in the floor clicks.
The floor gives way beneath them. For Sinbad, the next moment is a gasping whirl of arms and legs, flailing and grabbing at the trapped stone in the frozen seconds. When his heartbeat slams against his chest again to remind him he's alive, he peeks up to find himself alone at the edge of the drop, splayed against the stone as tightly as a storm-drawn halyard. A double line of red runs over the lip of the trap; it twitches a half-inch to the right and he flinches reflexively at the answering jerk at his arm.
He's still got the cord caught in his fist, he realizes, blinking at it dumbly. He closes his other hand around the two lengths of rope with slow care and then climbs back to his feet. His heartbeat still pulsing with a nervous fleetness, he steps cautiously up to the drop and looks over, ready to pull back at the first flicker of flying metal.
The wall of the trap isn't sheer like he thought; worse, it curves inward away from the drop like a concave lens. Some forty feet down, spikes, crags and bodies line the floor. The boy sways in the void like a spider at the end of its thread, fingers clutching white-knuckled at the pendulum length that's keeping him from joining the skeletons below. One small hand unclenches, shaking, and swiftly closes again an inch or two higher, but Sinbad can see at a glance that the kid's stuck. His thin arms are tangled and winched together, and even if they were free, he doesn't have the upper body strength to make a ten foot rope climb with no wall to brace against. He gets one more hand raised before his buckled elbows extend, bare feet kicking at the empty air.
He goes abruptly still. A few seconds pass and Sinbad swallows as the boy looks up at him. The pupils in his flat gray eyes have dilated into wide black circles, but his expression remains blank and remote as he regards the youth above him. The Partevian opens his mouth to speak and something—acknowledgement, Sinbad thinks, or even relief?—moves through the boy's stare. He closes his eyes and his grip goes slack.
"Hey!" Sinbad shouts in dismay, dropping to one knee as the assassin—falls, but only a few inches, wrists still ensnared in the red cording of his weapon.
"Hold on, okay? I'll pull you up!"
This is stupid, he thinks feverishly as he wraps his arm twice in the rope and peers over the ledge at the unmoving child below. He's going to slit my wrist as soon as I give him my hand.
That's stupid. His arms are trussed up like pork loin.
They were trussed up before, too, and look how much good that did you—and you had your hands free.
He shakes off the conflicted thoughts and concentrates on pulling—arm over arm, letting his shoulders and waist turn with the movements rather than jostling the ropes about. It should take more effort than it does, and Sinbad wonders if he's gotten stronger or if the boy's just that light.
Something bumps at the underside of the ledge, and Sinbad carefully leans out over the yawning gap to hook one arm under the boy's shoulders and pull him back up. He rolls the blond to the ground and hurriedly backs towards his fallen sword, away from both the assassin and the drop, watching warily. The boy doesn't move.
"…Hey, are you okay?" Sinbad tries after a minute, thinking uncomfortably back to stories he's heard of assassins who'd rather kill themselves than fail at their mission.
The child rolls over, opening his eyes to stare distantly up at the mural-bedecked ceiling. Sinbad follows his glance hesitantly, but sees no answers in the panoramas of djinns and sultans and many-armed monsters.
"Do we really have to fight?" he asks. He wishes he could just say, We don't have to fight, but without knowing why the boy's with the assassins, he can't just assume. Everyone has their reasons; otherwise there's no reason to go dungeon-exploring to begin with. "I'm trying to make Partevia a better country. Why do you guys care about that?"
"The assassins don't care."
Sinbad startles and turns back to look at the boy, but the hollow whisper continues before he can speak.
"The emperor of Partevia does."
Sinbad bristles, thinking of his mother lying cold and abandoned on the floor of the place that had been his home; of Drakon's outraged bluster and desperate eyes; of lying awake at night in his one-man craft, staring up at thousands of glittering stars and clutching his sword to his chest, feeling completely adrift in the vastness of an uncaring world.
"The emperor of Partevia should care less about me and more about his people!" he snaps angrily. "If he did I wouldn't have any problems with him at all!"
"What's your solution?" the boy asks. His voice is low and hoarse, like he doesn't use it much, or like—other things. Sinbad's seen discolorations like the ones on his blades before.
"What?" he asks, distracted and off-balance.
"He's a problem. How are you going to solve him?" The boy looks at him again and Sinbad has to fight off a shudder of horror at the dead stare. He firms his jaw and flashes the seal emblazoned on his sword—Baal's eight-pointed star.
"I'll become 'king'," he answers, steady and full of conviction. He hopes he sounds like that, anyway. Inside, he can feel the mar of doubt that's kept him away from his homeland, that drove him to this dungeon on the new island between Partevia and Sindria Kingdom.
Finally, the blond stands. The Partevian hurriedly lifts his sword to a ready stance, but the younger boy ignores him, tugging at the cords of his weapon and respooling them around his forearms where they've bunched up around his elbows and wrists. When he's finished, he stoops to pick up the flat blades from where they drag on the floor and tucks them into his sleeves. He looks up at Sinbad.
"…What?" the older boy asks, sensing that something is expected of him.
"Where are we going now?"
Sinbad's jaw drops.
"Y-you're coming with me?" he sputters. "But why? I mean, you can—I mean I'd love you to! But it's just me, and I don't even have a plan or anything, and there's still all those other assassins around, and, I just… Why do you want to go with me all of a sudden?"
The boy goes on staring at him and Sinbad finally falls silent, feeling like an idiot.
"I carried out my duties as I was taught. After failing in my mission, I let go of my life. But you caught me. No one else would have even tried." He recites the facts plainly, like he's going down a list. There's still no emotion in his face, but Sinbad could swear there's something like rebellion in his eyes. He wonders if the kid can even feel it himself. "I 'died.' I was never told what to do afterward. So for now I'll follow you."
"You—are you sure you want to?" The prospect of a companion makes Sinbad's heart leap, but this wasn't exactly how he imagined it happening. And on the one hand, the kid's too young to just leave somewhere, but on the other, no matter what nonsense the kid says about "no one else," Sinbad was just doing the same thing any decent person would have, so it kind of feels like taking advantage to take him on just like that. "I'm not sure where I'm going to go after this. It's going to be really dangerous."
"That's another reason for me to go." The other boy definitely has an emotion in his eyes now, but condescension is not really what Sinbad was going for. He walks past Sinbad and heads back up the passage. "You're an idiot."
"Hey!"
The next batch of monster fights conclude much more quickly. In battle, the kid is little more than a blur, a tiny bullet of bandages and hissing cord prefacing a flash of iron and something spraying wrong-colored arterial fluid all over the nearest surface. (Twice in the last few hours this has meant Sinbad. It smells like harbor refuse and he's worried that his hair is going to be permanently dyed bruise-mottled-eggplant if they don't find some water soon.)
Once whatever-it-is lies twitching and bereft of life—and often limb, Sinbad thinks smugly, because that at least is his work—the blond returns to his side, grey eyes distant as he fidgets with the rough linen around his arms and neck. He hasn't strung more than three words at a time together since Sinbad dragged him up out of the pit trap. It's freaking Sinbad out but good.
He hopes Drakon shows up again soon. At least he has brothers; maybe he can help get a handle on how to treat an emotionally-wrecked ten year old. (Okay, Drakon is still after him with assassins. But still. He's got to have at least one useful anecdote somewhere in all that outrage about duty and loyalty…)
Sinbad hops onto a fallen pillar and gingerly assesses the circle of welts raised in an angry red on his abdomen. Across the room, the kid jumps lightly down from the horned crest of the monstrous worm he just rode to the ground via stabbing it in what was probably its brain and comes over, craning his head to see.
"We should rest," he opines, soft but blunt. Sinbad opens his mouth to protest, but stops when he sees the fine tremor in his companion's shoulders, visible mainly by the way it disrupts the lines of the cragged stone walls beyond him. He hasn't complained, but that means nothing. If anything, it's even more damning. Sinbad turns his thoughts away from his mother's tired smile and the unmoving stiffness of hands clenched in blankets to hide their shaking. He nods. Looking around for a likely temporary hideaway, his gaze settles on the gap in the wall the worm had emerged from.
Should be fine, he reasons to himself. If there were any more in there they'd have come out when the big one did. Dungeons are here as tests for humans, not safe ecologies for monsters.
"We can stay in there for a few hours," he says, pointing at the small cave entrance. "Long enough for a meal and a nap, anyway." He exhales as the boy nods and lets the readiness for battle slide off his shoulders like a too-heavy cloak, standing back up.
"So what's your name, anyway?" he asks as they clamber over the felled worm. The blond doesn't look at him, gray eyes fixed on the aperture of stone, but at least he answers.
"Ja'far."
This is based more in the Prototype manga than the actual Sinbad spin-off, if only because I expect this to be wildly decanonized as soon as the latter gets around to Ja'far's introduction. A present for a friend who wanted Magi worldbuilding. There will be three chapters in all, to be written whenever I need a break from the Fate/Zero fic that's devouring my life.