CONTENT WARNING: The following chapter contains violent imagery.
NOTE: This story is set in the same universe as Future Talk, my HieixOC fic, and takes place after Future Talk ends. This story contains references to and potential spoilers for Future Talk. I recommend reading FT first, as FT lays the groundwork for certain in-universe details that might not make sense out of context. If you haven't read FT, read Speak at your own risk. Thank you!
Speak
Prologue:
"Interrogations"
The demon seemed bigger after he shackled my arms above my head and bound my ankles tight together. My feet slithered over the slimy floor; I wasn't sure if the stones were slick with my blood or the water dripping from the dungeon's ceiling. I suppose it doesn't matter. Every time I slipped a white-hot pain sizzled in my shoulders, wrists, and elbows. Those joints weren't supposed to hold the weight of my entire body. It didn't help that I was already exhausted from blood loss, dehydration, and lack of sleep.
And that's saying nothing of my agonized emotions.
I watched through swollen eyes as the devil paced back and forth through the tiny cell. His serpentine tail swept across the flagstones, scales scraping the ground like iron nails on a chalkboard. The sound built an ache inside my temples, a pounding scream of pain and stress. The ram-like horns curling from his forehead nearly brushed the ceiling when he turned my way. I wanted him to stop moving, to quit confusing my eyes with his erratic walk and glittering blue skin. The light from the cell's only torch set his crystalline hide ablaze with facets of aquamarine light.
I couldn't stop nausea's rising tide. When I vomited onto the ground and down the front of my torn dress, he shot me a disgusted look. The bile made my lips burn.
"Is the brave little bitch showing weakness at last?" he sneered, coming close. I cringed and lost my footing, sliding this way and that. The devil wound his claw-tipped fingers into the collar of my dress and yanked me upright. We came nose to nose, my feet hanging inches above the ground. I would have sighed in relief—my arms were free of pressure at last—but then his face dipped near and I froze.
"You're strong, for a human," he said, and then he opened his mouth, leaned forward, and breathed onto my ear. His breath misted like a blizzard across my skin, shooting subzero pain across my cartilage piercing. I opened my mouth to scream, air hissing through my throat in agony, but no sound came out—not even when his massive fingers snapped the ice-encrusted earring out of my skin. A chunk of my blue flesh came with it, surrounding the stud like an aura.
"You don't scream," he said, tone clinical as he set me back down. I slumped, gasping from pain that was both scorching and arctic all at once. He picked flesh away from the metal bauble as if he were uncovering a treasure mired in sandstone. "You don't whimper. You don't moan. You don't even try to reason with me, let alone beg for your life. It's the single most infuriating reaction any victim of mine has ever had."
He finished extracting the jewelry from the remnants of my ear and held the stud between two claws.
"Rest assured," he said, orange eyes ablaze with fire that belied his power over cold, "you will talk. You will tell me all you know of Kurama, and then you will beg me to kill you to ease the pain."
With claws as precise as a surgeon's scalpel, the demon pressed the dull earring into my cheek, raking a furrow from just below my eye to the top of my jaw. The cut bled like a river of red fire, fluid sliding down my skin and into my scream-widened mouth, drops pattering warm and wet onto my bare chest.
Still, I made no sound.
My torturer's scaly brow furrowed. "Why won't you scream?" he growled.
I didn't reply. He grunted, displeased, and dug a new cut into my other cheek. He sliced this gash into the path of my tears. When I cried, screaming soundlessly in pain, salt washed into the wound and made it sting. I looked up at him, edges of my vision darkening with labored breath and spent blood. Still, our eyes met.
"Why won't you speak?" he said, puzzled behind his veil of anger. A light dawned in his midnight pupils. "Is your love for Kurama that deep?" he asked. "Are you so certain you'll betray him if you speak that you silence even your screams? Is your loyalty to him that great?"
I drew in a deep breath, and then I shook my head.
I don't love him, I tried to tell him with my eyes. Just as he will never love me, so I will never, ever love him. That lying bastard of a man is everything I will never allow myself to love. And I'm silent not because I want to be, but because I can't not be silent.
But my devil didn't understand.
"So be it," he hissed. "I will get you to talk."
But I can't talk, I wanted to tell him. It's not that I don't want to, it's that I can't!
His tail snaked out, as dexterous as another arm, and wrapped around my throat. Scales rubbed my skin raw, made the muscles in my throat squeeze tight with pain. When I did not make a sound his eyes hardened, chips of tiger's-eye set deep in his reptilian features. I noticed, vaguely, that he would almost be handsome had his skin not been such an unearthly shade of blue...
Unearthly, I thought as the devil's tail crushed the air from my lungs. I slumped against my chains; my blackened eyes fell shut.
Unearthly... just like those viridian eyes I thought I loved so much.