Janitor, custodian, even caretaker if one wanted to get fancy with the term, all-in-all it wasn't the greatest job by far, but for her it was favorable over the few she had had to interview for—one of which involved leading small animals to slaughter. That said, in spite of the decent pay and the few benefits it came with, the risk did not justify the means. But then again, she was desperate, and with her current level of skill: nearly no work experience, the best she could get was this high risk, low reward job. Nao wasn't even aware Cochlea had janitors given the fact that it was a prison for ghouls and cleanliness didn't seem high on the guards' list of priorities.
Nao thought about how—given the fact that there was an opening—the previous custodian may have been devoured by one of the inmates. The thought sent a shudder down her spine before she tried to comfort herself with the idea that her predecessor may have quit or transferred to one of the CCG buildings in the area. Though given the guards jeers each time her scrawny form passed by, and the bets made behind her back, the idea slowly slipped away.
'It was a man's job,' they told her. 'You don't have what it takes to work here,' was what one of the investigators said during the initial interview. She knew that in a situation such as this, one would normally say, "How can you tell by first glance? Put me to work and judge how well I do then!" If she had a stronger backbone she would have said just that, but she was meek and hardly spoke aside from voicing her opinions when it mattered.
"True, but I'm hard-working, desperate, and I doubt you'll find anyone else willing to work for what you're offering in exchange." Her backbone wasn't made of short, to-the-point demands; it was made of thought-out quips pointing out the obvious. As far as cleaning floors and bathrooms went the job gave meager yet adequate pay and a sizable compensation should any part of her get eaten. Still, most people would rather look for another job than live without an arm or a leg and because of this they hired her before the week let out.
At first Nao was glad to simply just have the job, but as the weeks wore on the small feeling of elation wore off, and a ball of stress began to form in her stomach as she took care to keep her distance from the cells. The ball of stress gave way to a bout of fear less than a month in when one of the Interrogators called her to his room to "clean up a mess". As she followed the man to the interrogation room, she fought to remember who he was, taking in his near middle-aged profile as she dragged a mop and a bucket of simple hot water—as per his request—with her. She knew nearly nothing about the people she worked with and spent very little time learning who everyone was. The one thing she remembered about this man was that he was an Interrogator that most of the guards avoided.
She hadn't wondered why until he opened the door and led her inside.
For the record, pools of blood and a heavily mutilated corpse did not define as a "mess" in her book. The smell alone made her want to vomit, but she refrained from doing so in the interest of not creating another mess to clean up. "Wha—Wha—" she'd panted, stumbling back against the wall and dropping the bucket as her hand flew to her mouth to cover her shock, the water splashing over the rim and mixing with the splatters of blood that had managed to fly to where she stood five feet from the body. Fear consumed her as she wondered if he'd go after her the same way he had gone after the corpse sitting in the middle of the room.
"Clean it up. Someone will come for the body later," he said in a gruff voice, leaving her alone in the room with the body and offering no words of explanation beyond this simple command, the door slamming shut behind him and bathing the room in meager darkness and dim fluorescent lighting. It took her more than twenty minutes to compose herself and a further hour to clean the copious amounts of browning blood from the floor, staining the water in the bucket a translucent red. True to the Interrogator's word someone came in as she was working on cleaning the blood from underneath the chair and retrieved the body. She suspected they were from the morgue and were going to extract its kakuhou before storing the body somewhere beneath the facility. Although she had been curious some time ago about the process she no longer cared to know if this brutality was part of it.
While she had been cleaning she had looked over the mangled corpse of the (probably once powerful) ghoul. Despite what it was, the things that had been inflicted on it looked too cruel to be allowed. Sections of its flesh had been removed in strips and nails had been embedded in its muscle. Deep knife wounds—healed and freshly cut—marred its barely recognizable face and littered its body. Holes were drilled indiscriminately and looked as deep as the bone (if not farther) and its Achilles tendon had been severed several times on each ankle. Worse still was the tender looking pink flesh covering its toes and fingers, scars from where it had been severed and grown repeatedly appearing as a pale, jagged ring around each individual digit.
The ghoul might not have been human, but that didn't mean the Interrogator was one either if he inflicted this kind of torture.
From that point on she kept her distance from that room and its main occupant and dreaded each time she was called. At first she thought that the worst thing she would find in that room was a freshly-killed body, but when she was called in a week later and found a grown male ghoul whimpering in the chair—its toes freshly severed and a large chunk of flesh missing from its side—she decided that was the worst thing she had seen. It was one thing to see a corpse; it was another thing entirely to see one in the making.
And so it went on. Week after week, month after month she cleaned the bathrooms, mopped the floors, wiped the few windows in the establishment, and—while the ghouls were out enjoying one of their few liberties: minimal exercise—she cleaned out the cells one by one. At least a few times a week (if not more) she was called into the interrogation room to mop up the pools of blood that seemed to accumulate endlessly from the groaning bodies. Never did she speak to the victims, and the few times she did she received no reply beyond their continued anguished mutterings. Often the ghouls pled blindly for help, for mercy or, more often than not, they mumbled nonsensical numbers. When she paid closer attention to their mutterings after a few weeks she noticed they always muttered large numbers that seemed to descend. She didn't know why they did it—maybe to stay sane?—but she guessed it was something the Interrogator had them do.
The routine didn't change and she didn't ask questions—mainly out of fear that she would receive the same treatment as the ghouls—she simply continued in this way with pity in her eyes each time she entered that room of horrors. It's just for a year, she told herself as she moped up the blood around its feet. Just one year and then I can quit. But simply because she was counting down the clock didn't make time go by faster or the circumstances any less unpleasant. More so even as—one day after half a year of this routine—she found herself face-to-face with a large, unmarred ghoul who stared at her with blatant hatred in its red out-of-focus eyes—a clear sign it had been pumped with RC suppressants and hated every minute of it.
"Uh…s-sir, did I come too early?" Nao asked the Interrogator hesitantly, dragging her eyes from the large ghoul seated in front of her to the man beside him who held a mean sneer on his face that seemed to form into a twisted smile after a moment. He slid his thumb over his forefinger and pressed it down towards his palm, a loud crack bouncing off the walls of the musty, blood soaked room as he told her to stay. She bit her lip and debated leaving him to continue his interrogation by himself, but because the order came from a superior she did as was told and closed the door behind her, leaning the mop against the wall and dropping the heavy bucket on the floor. She folded her arms across her stomach and stood rigidly in front of the door, fear etched onto her face as she watched the Interrogator with apprehension. She'd never seen an interrogation in person before, and given that this was a ghoul she suspected it wouldn't be like the ones she'd seen on TV—the blood she'd had to mop out every week and the various injuries she'd seen on all the bodies before helped with that fact.
Maybe it was necessary. Ghouls were tough so it must take a lot of work to extract information from them. But then she thought about the all the dead bodies she had come upon up to this point and the mutterings of their slow descent into madness and a knot started to form in her belly. She was about to watch the process first-hand. She suspected it would start out with a question about whatever the CCG wanted to know from it and lead from there with…torture.
Or at least that's how she thought it would go until, from a table standing beside the him, the Interrogator picked up a large pair of pliers, knelt down in front of the ghoul and started on the torture immediately; no questions, no inquires and no rhyme or reason as far as she could tell. The ghoul made muffled grunts of pain as its toes were snipped off almost methodically, a light squelch sound preceding each cut before it was followed by a sharp snap and a grunt of pain. The process reminded her of a much more innocent time when her mother used culinary scissors to snip chicken wings for dinner. Now that memory was tainted by this brutal act.
Soon after the first foot was devoid of its toes she discovered the reason why all the victims before mumbled numbers incoherently as the Interrogator commanded the ghoul to count down from one thousand by sevens; only the act's purpose escaped her. The ghoul resisted doing so as the Interrogator continued on the other foot, its head bent as it clenched its teeth together in a small attempt to muffle its grunts of pain as they escaped its throat, its leg twitching as it slowly bled onto the checkered floor.
When all ten toes were removed, the Interrogator stood and cracked his forefinger again. A small laugh escaped his throat, like he was amused, and he said again, "What's one thousand minus seven?" It was then that Nao discovered why the other guards spent little time around him, why the ghouls up until now were so brutally mutilated.
He's enjoying this…? He's a sadist. No, he's a psychopath! This guys a freaking psychopath! She thought, unfolding her arms and nervously twisting her fingers around themselves as she withdrew a step, her back pressed against the door as the handle dug into her spine. In front of her the ghoul glared up at him, unclenching its jaw as still it refused to speak.
The pliers snapped with a clack as the Interrogator walked back to the table and set them down, trading them for a butcher's knife that seemed to Nao to either be rusted or stained with dried blood. She didn't know what the Interrogator intended to do with the knife—to either carve out a chunk of flesh or to sever the ghouls tendons—but as he raised the knife above his head, its sharp tip glinting dully in the low light before he brought it down upon the ghoul, Nao had a moment of panic and exclaimed, in a trembling voice, "S-sir!". The young woman immediately bit her tongue as the Interrogator halted the knife's downward descent before it made contact with the ghouls upper thigh and turned his face a bit to look at her, his features hidden in shadow and making it difficult to discern what mood he was in. the ghoul itself looked at her with gritted teeth and a hostile expression, like it was mad she had interrupted its supposed interrogation session. Nevertheless she gathered up courage and voiced the reason behind her outburst.
"U-uh…I uh…shouldn't you be, um, asking it…questions? About um…what it knows?" It was a reasonable question that sounded pathetic in her ears as the Interrogator dropped the knife by his side, turned around to face her, and—in three long strides—crossed the room to stand before her. She was sure to be reprimanded for her insolence but she wasn't sure of the extant until the Interrogator had grabbed a fistful of her dark brown hair in his free hand and shoved her head back against the door, the handle now pressing painfully against her tailbone as the Interrogator brought the knife up to rest lightly against her bare throat. The blood on the blade was now more obvious to her as the old metallic smell wafted past her nose.
"Don't interrupt," the Interrogator commanded in a stern voice as she fought to keep herself from pissing her coveralls. It was enough to be threatened by a psychopath; she didn't need to embarrass herself in front of him and the ghoul, too.
"Y-Y-Y-Yes, s-s-sir," she stammered as she fought to keep herself from crying as well, doing little in way of keeping her fear out of her voice. The Interrogator said nothing else to her as he removed the knife and released her hair. Her weak knees buckled under her weight and she slid to the floor, watching with wide eyes as the Interrogator turned his back on her and went back to the ghoul. For a split second her eyes locked with the ruby reds of the panting ghoul and what she saw irked her greatly. Beneath its frayed black hair it looked at her contemptuously before it flicked its hateful glare to the Interrogator as he neared.
Nao watched as the blade ascended once more before it plunged into the thick, muscular thigh of the ghoul. It threw its head back, its teeth once more clenched tightly though she could hear no sounds it made as she quickly covered her ears against its anguished cries. Her eyes remained open to its torment, though she saw nothing as she wished the interrogation to end quickly—not for the ghoul's sake, but for her own. As the interrogation dragged on the hot water in the bucket beside her cooled off, thin coils of steam evaporating as the minutes ticked—agonizingly slow—by.
Nao was knocked back into her senses as the Interrogator set down a sliver of indescribable metal and turned his back on the—now silent—ghoul as it sat hunched over in the chair, blood running down its face and body from short, jagged slits. For a moment she thought the man had killed it, but a second later the ghoul sputtered and hacked fresh blood from its lips. Despite the glare it had sent her before, she felt a sense of pity, pity that it hadn't died.
The Interrogator crossed over to the door and waited patiently—for some eerie reason—for her to move from where she sat against it. She scrambled onto her hands and knees and scuttled away as he opened the door, pausing once in the doorway to give her one single order. "Clean it up."
She looked back up at him over her shoulder and asked timidly, "Righ—Right now…?" It was a stupid question, she knew, but she felt the need to ask anyway. She didn't get an answer as he took another step outside and swung the door shut, its resounding slam bouncing over the walls until it faded away abruptly, leaving her and the heavily panting ghoul alone. Like the first few times she had ever entered this room, she hesitated—though now for a different reason. Unlike all the ghouls before—all the times before—this ghoul was still fully conscious and, as far as she could tell, still sane. That made it a threat to her being.
"You're pathetic," she heard a deep, rough voice growl. She jumped, realizing that the voice was coming from the ghoul seated in front of her. "I don't need you advocating for me," it continued, sneering at her from where it sat hunched and bleeding profusely. She pinched her mouth shut and settled a hard glare on it as she got off her hands and knees and stood up.
"I had no intention of doing so again anyway," she replied curtly as she dusted her hands off on her pant legs before grabbing the handle of the mop. She didn't say anything more beyond that single sentence as she dunked the clump of coiled cloths into the water and pushed the bucket to the edge of the crimson pool. It continued to sneer as her as she approached though she tried her best to ignore it as she set to work mopping up the fresh blood splattered around the chair. Her skin crawled each time she pushed the mop near the ghoul, knowing that its eyes were still trained on her, her stomach twisting each time the burgundy mess of cloth came within three inches of its mutilated feet.
The feeling was nothing new to her since Nao had seen this type of wound countless times before, and like those times when she tried her best to mop out the blood she found herself frustrated that the feet were so firmly planted on the ground that it made it hard to clean up. She found it was easier if the ghoul was driven to the point of insanity and she could simply run the mop over its feet without it noticing or stirring up some misplaced anger. But given that it was still the first day she avoided doing so.
Now that she thought about it, how long would it be until this one broke? She dunked the mop back in the bucket and chanced a peek at it. The ghoul was big but a bit lean, somewhat bulky looking nonetheless in its bloodied, standard-issue prison clothing. Its hands were hidden behind its back but she trusted them to be massive paws worthy of its large body.
"Are you strong?" she asked quietly, abruptly. Its livid expression dimmed as it scoffed and said,
"I'm not weak like you humans."
Her lips tightened into a thin line, neither a faint smile nor a small grimace. "…Then that's unfortunate." She turned away from it and swept the mop behind the chair, confirming her guess about its hands as it swiveled its head around to look at her suspiciously.
"Why?"
She froze, once again locking eyes with its red ones. Unreasonably flustered she stammered an explanation. "Is-Isn't it obvious? The strong ones last longer than the weak ones so it'll take longer to break you."
It grimaced, narrowing its eyes at her as it replied, "I won't break."
"They all break eventually," she murmured, turning away from it as she walked back to her bucket. "By the time I get in here, they're too far gone to even notice me." She didn't know why she was bothering to explain anything to it since it didn't really matter. Depending on its endurance and how much torture the Interrogator put on it, it'd be dead in a couple weeks anyway.
|13|
Barely even a few days had passed before Nao was called back into the interrogation room—not that it was unusual but more often than not she was called in at least once a week if the blood wasn't too bad (though of course that was because the Interrogator was probably busy with other engagements)—so the fact that it was barely over two days since she was in that room meant that there was a lot of blood and a lot of free time.
Nao paused before the cold steel door, her arm laden with a mop and a heavy bucket and her other hand poised to knock. The last time she had come she had been witness to horror in the making. She dropped her hand and leaned towards the door, listening hard for anguished screams or crazed murmurings. She didn't know which was worse: the usual torture sounds or the eerie silence she was hearing now. The door suddenly opened outward, narrowly missing her face as she stumbled back into the railing behind her, dropping her mop and nearly spilling the bucket. The imposing Interrogator stared down at her like she was an annoying child before walking away with a single command.
"Clean that up."
She said nothing as he left, picking up her mop and glancing briefly at his receding back before entering the dark room. As per usual the smell of old and fresh blood hit her like a brick wall before she saw the spreading pool underneath her feet. In the chair the ghoul sat, its jumpsuit dirtied and shredded and not even fit to be used as a rag, its chest heaving with a rattle each time it breathed. If she didn't know better she'd assume it had been mauled by a vicious animal—though in hindsight the comparison wasn't too far off.
The ghoul looked up when the door clicked shut behind her, something like alarm flashing in its eyes before they hardened in derision. "You again?" it spat. The way it phrased it made it sound like an accusation. She hadn't expected it to talk to her again, but she quickly masked her surprise and replied,
"I'm the only janitor in this place…so yeah, me again." When it said nothing else she set to work, pouring half the water in the bucket on to the floor to break the dried blood and dilute the fresh stuff. Who needed soap in this room of horrors if it was just going to get dirty again a few hours later. As she mopped up its blood she snuck glances at what injuries the ghoul had sustained this time, her lip curling up in a grimace as she spotted a handful of nails sticking out of its broad shoulder. Why did it put up with the pain?
"Wouldn't it be easier to just tell him what he wants?" she asked, wondering if it was a male pride thing or some kind of honor code. Did ghouls even have that?
"Doesn't ask," it replied, its glare having turned into a glower a while ago. "Why do you care?" it sneered.
"Not a fan of animal cruelty," Nao explained before she grimaced, wondering why she was talking to it. Or even why it was talking to her. Why was it talking to her? They never talked to her. Even the half-sane ones didn't bother talking to her—beyond the occasional attempt to bait her into coming closer for a quick meal. After hearing its answer she found herself thinking of the only question she had heard the investigator ask.
"…Did you start counting yet?" she asked, suddenly curious if it had broken in that regard. When it said nothing she felt she had her answer. Nao opened her mouth to ask it another question, but quickly shut it when she thought better of it. Talking to a ghoul—conversing with it? What on earth was she thinking? She peeked at it through the cover of her hair, keeping her movements smooth and even. It wasn't glaring at her anymore, but neither was it ignoring her. It just…watched her.
She wished it'd stop; the staring was making her nervous. She was halfway tempted to tell it to do so, but held her tongue. No more talking to it; it was just another in a long line of victims.
|13|
The frequency of her visits to the interrogation room (or rather the torture chamber) was abnormal to say the least. Evidently the ghoul had managed to become the Interrogator's favorite toy as for the seventh time in three days she stepped into the blood splattered room when before she had never once entered that room more than thrice in one day. She hadn't talked to the ghoul since it's second day in Hell, and while she was tempted to ask it if it had been questioned yet, she held her tongue. She found that if she didn't engage it, it didn't try to talk to her, unlike the first day when it had called her pathetic. She also found that its endurance was slipping; though still it had managed to keep silent when she entered when a moment before it had been counting down nonsense numbers. Today was different however. Today it kept counting as Nao stepped past the threshold and let the door slam loudly behind her.
"F-four hundred…sixty-one…four hun…hundred fif-fifty four…Four hundred—"
Nao had felt pity for the ghouls in here who had been subjected to the worst of torture, but hadn't felt one bit empathetic towards any, feeling that the information they held within them was more important. Now however, she felt a tinge of it strike her chest as she listened to it continue to count down, quivering where it sat bent forward, blood dripping from its face. The twinge was even worse so in that without the valid reason behind this interrogation, it was just senseless torture.
"Hey… he's gone," she told it, hesitant and quiet. When it kept counting down, she spoke again, loud enough for it to hear her over its voice. "You don't have to keep counting anymore." This time it stopped counting, but its quivering kept on. Nao stooped a little to try and see its face, but couldn't make out anything beyond limp black hair soaked with sweat. She sighed as she leaned her mop against the door and dropped the bucket beside it before stepping closer to it, cautious of its smallest movement—as if it would lunge at her and eat her heart if she got close enough. She crouched down before it, arms wrapped around her midsection, as she tried to get a glimpse of its face. "Before you totally lose your mind…what's your name?" It kept silent but its quaking stopped. Deciding there was no harm in it, she continued. "…If you can hear me, my name is Nao."
She gave up attempting to converse with it when it remained silent and went back to work. Each time she swept the mop by the ghoul's feet or behind its back she stole glances at injuries she hadn't seen that morning. Nails once again studded the ghouls shoulders in addition to what looked to be thick black bars protruding from its upper back. Everywhere over its body were deep, healing cuts and fresh ones dripping blood, and its feet—like all the others—were missing toes and deeply scarred.
"…You didn't look this bad when I was here this morning," she remarked, more to herself than to the ghoul as she dunked the mop in the tinted water and swept it in a long arc around herself. She heard nothing from it besides its heavy, rattled breathing as its nearly mutilated chest rose erratically. As she swept in front of the ghoul she noticed drilled holes in its legs and good chunk of flesh missing from its sides. She couldn't even begin to imagine what anyone—human or ghoul—could do to earn this type of torment and neither the circumstances that lead up to it. All she knew as she swept up the last of the blood was that given her superior's "enjoyment", the torment seemed meaningless.
One last time Nao dunked the mop in the filthy water and rung it out and one last time she looked up at the ghoul and caught her breath in a fit of surprise as she caught its eyes along with strips of white hair near its temples. Letting her breath out in a steady stream, she calmed down the staccato beat of her heart as she straightened up, watching it cautiously as its eyes continued to capture hers. "I'll…see you tomorrow..." she told it slowly as she retreated towards the door slowly, never once leaving his—its eyes until she grasped the door handle and turned away to leave.
"…Ya…Yaku…mo…" She suddenly heard, causing her to pause halfway through the doorway and look back at the ghoul in surprise.
"…What?" she asked it, her voice small even in her own ears.
He—it looked to be struggling to speak as it breathed in heavily and exhaled with shaky breaths. "M—y name…is…Yakumo." She couldn't say any of the cliché things that people say in books and the like, that a hundred, a thousand emotions filled her body, because only one emotion ran through her, one she couldn't put a name to but felt plenty of nevertheless.
"…I'll see you tomorrow…Yakumo-san," she replied hesitantly, eyes lingering even as she turned away and closed the door, sorting through the keys on her key ring for the one she needed. As the sole janitor of Cochlea, Nao had keys to every closet, bathroom, storage unit, and interrogation room there was—the exceptions to her near-limitless access being the control room and the ghoul cells which were opened via remote control. As she flipped through the strips of metal her mind began to wander—which wasn't unusual in itself given the low level of stimulation she received from doing grunt work each day.
Ghouls…had identities…names that they went by…like a human. And the ghoul inside had just told her theirs when they had no reason to. It felt to her the only information anyone in the prison had managed to get out of it—though there was a certain lack of trying on the CCG's side—and it felt to her like a certain link of trust (though she wasn't so deluded as to actually think that). Even so, as she thought she felt a certain pull on her mind and in her chest. And as much as she couldn't say that a thousand emotions ran through her, the more she thought about the ghoul in the chair and what it had been through, the quicker she came to a single idea—one that came with its own risks and one that ran against a certain psychopath. As soon as the Interrogator came to mind, she put the idea out of her head, suddenly afraid of putting herself in that kind of danger…but…
She just couldn't stand to see it—see him in pain any longer.
Dropping the keys to her side, she let her head drop until her forehead hit the door, and sighed as she waged war inside her mind. There were no pros and cons to this—at least, not any that she bothered to think up beyond similar torture as punishment should she do it and a continued sick feeling in her chest should she not.
Cursing silently to herself, she peeked around her as she pocketed the keys and nudged the door open enough for her to slip inside. Nao set the mop and bucket against the door and stayed beside it, listening for any approaching footsteps before reminding herself that no one would care about a janitor going inside a room she had access to. Stepping away from the door, she slowly approached the ghoul on tiptoe, her body rigid as she gave it—him a wide berth despite the fact that it—Him. He's a ghoul, not an object, she reminded herself as she approached his back—seemed unaware of her presence since his back was still bent and his breathing seemed even enough.
Nao wasn't sure where to start: the nails? The bars? For sure freeing him wasn't an option seeing as he was still a ghoul and someone who had gone through intense torture—so turning around and eating her wasn't outside of the realm of possibilities. The bars have to go at least. It must be uncomfortable to have something sticking out of you every hour of the day, she decided, taking a step closer to him and wrapping her hand around the bar sticking out of his broad back. As soon as she attempted to pull it out, twisting and nudging it several different ways, the ghoul moved, barely biting back a yelp of surprise as he twisted around to see what was happening to him now.
"Oh…that's really stuck," Nao observed, letting go of the bar and wiping the blood on her hands off on her pant legs. Looking around the room for a tool to help, she soon spotted the table laden with the Interrogator's torture equipment. Her eye slid past the table, but locked on the pliers sitting on top of the tray. Wondering if its morbid use could be applied to her situation, she swiped it off the table and affixed the clamp to the base where the bar met the flesh. Again she pulled, the pliers slipping a few times because of the slick blood, but eventually catching and pulling the bar free of his flesh.
The amount of force she had to use to pull it out of his flesh sent her reeling backwards into the wall when there was nothing anchoring her to him. Nao's head hit the wall hard enough to send her spinning, and briefly as she got her bearings she registered that he had been screaming all through the process. For a moment she worried that his screaming would bring the Interrogator back to the room, or a guard to see what was going on, but then she remembered how late it was and the probability of him still being here, or the guards caring enough to check, dropped low enough to relieve her mind.
"What are you doing?!" the ghoul called Yakumo yelled, twisting around as much as he could in his seat to look at what she had done.
"Making a psychopath angry," she replied meekly as she gingerly massaged the back of her head, looking down at the bar she had pulled out. Nao paled as she put a name to the thing she held in the grip of the plies. "It…It's a stake," she said as she let it drop, a metallic clang following it as it struck the pattered floor. "There's still eight more; please hold still," she informed him, grabbing another stake with the pliers and hesitantly laying a hand on his bloody back to gain some leverage before she began pulling the stake out.
"Stop…Stop!" he yelled in protest, though Nao ignored his pleas with a small apology on her tongue, believing that what she was doing was for his greater benefit. The sounds that followed were filled with squelches and metallic clangs as metal was freed from flesh and dropped to the floor; howling, anguished screams accompanied each laborious pull until his voice became hoarse and the last metal bar was extracted from his back.
Nao wasn't sure how much time had passed, she was only sure that taking out the stakes was more time consuming than she had thought, and that the stakes had gone done deeper than they appeared. She hoped the same wasn't true with the nails. The nails shouldn't be as difficult to pull out…they shouldn't hurt as much either, she thought as she set the pliers down on the table and bent down to gather up the stakes on the floor; above her she heard Yakumo's breathing slow from heavy pants. Sneaking a peak up at him, she saw sweat dripping down his face, seeping into the cuts on his face. Vaguely she wondered if the kind of pain he had borne when she freed his back of the bars was a more relieving feeling than the pain he bore during torture sessions, and the brief relief he might have felt when the Interrogator left.
"It has to feel better without them…" she started in an attempt to break the ice the silence had wrought as she collected the stakes within her hands, and walked past him towards the door. She trailed off when he said nothing. Suddenly self-conscious she continued as she dropped the stakes in the bucket and walked back to the table, "He'll probably bring more though, and I don't think I'll be able to do this twice." When he said nothing she unconsciously bit her lip as she picked up the hammer next and, standing next to the large ghoul now, used its blood stained metal claw to drag the nails out of his shoulder.
"I didn't ask you to do this," Yakumo suddenly stated, startling her before she had pried the first nail out of him. Nao jumped in surprise, staring as he lifted his face to glare at her.
Swallowing the lump in her throat, she put the claw back under the nail head. "I'm aware," she said as she extracted the thin slip of metal with relative ease, a small trail of blood spilling from the small hole. His red eyes narrowed at her as she pocketed the dirty nail and went to pry out the next one.
"…You're going to be punished," he said this time, stating the obvious.
Nao pursed her lips into a thin line. "…I know." Thin brows knitted together in confusion as he looked back at her, though Nao tried to ignore his penetrating gaze as she worked to extract the nails.
"Then why are you doing this?"
She paused after taking out the forth nail in his nail, thinking about her answer before answering truthfully, "I'm not completely sure myself." He glowered at her, seeming to want a more concrete answer. Nao sighed, dropping her hands to her sides as she looked around the room—anywhere but at him—for a more specific reason. "…I don't know what kind of ghoul you are, but I don't think anyone deserves this kind of torture," she said honestly once she had gotten down to the root of why she was undoing most of her superior's work.
Yakumo stayed silent and turned his face away from her, letting her go back to her work and watching as she emptied her pocket of the nails into the bucket of soiled water—she'd throw them away later. "I'll see you tomorrow, Yakumo-san," she told him quietly before she left. She disliked that that was the only thing she could say to him, but saying anything else or lying wouldn't do anything for either of them—not to mention there wasn't much she could say given the situation.