I'm sorry it's taken me so long to post! My life has been crazy -- I'm graduating with my bachelor's in just a month, and I've been really bogged down this semester. It may be awhile before my next post too, but in the meantime, enjoy! As always, please let me know what you think. And, as always, Inuyasha and crew don't belong to me

Kagome felt certain that she would never be able to feel safe alone in the dark again. Something occupied the darkness with her, something enormous and vaguely threatening, something that never spoke, never approached her, never identified itself in any way. She smelled blood, heard the breathing of the other… thing… in the dark. But aside from her conviction that she was not alone, the darkness denied her any distraction from her pain, from the throbbing in her dislocated shoulder, from the ache of bruised and beaten flesh. The beatings themselves were far preferable to their aftermath in the darkness; each new injury distracted her from the agony of those that preceded it. But here, nothing interrupted the pain.

Yes, the laboratory was much better than this dark, terrible place. Inuyasha was there, even though she couldn't touch him or speak to him, he was there, lying in white hospital garments on a pristine white examination table. Still. Silent. But right there. Not ten feet away.

She didn't know where he was in relation to the dark place.

But she did know that somewhere off to her left, the massive presence in the darkness waited quietly for some unknown purpose. So each time they threw her into the black holding room, she backed into the wall furthest away from it, and stayed as still as possible, wondering, terrified, if it could see better than she could. There she waited, hunched up against a cold stone wall, for her abductors to take her back to Inuyasha, to demand his revival, to beat her when she refused to wake him.

If Seven hadn't been such a braggart, she and Inuyasha probably both would have been dead by now. But like most inconsequential people striving for notice, Seven was arrogant and boastful, and had immediately revealed the Hand's strategy to destroy Inuyasha without the half-demon ever posing a threat to them.

"There, you see? That's Judgment, little girl. God's own vengeance." He lovingly caressed the syringe that hovered above Inuyasha's table, poised to strike at his unprotected chest. "That's the preferred way, of course, slow, painful, debilitating. But just to keep it interesting, we gave your old boyfriend a collar." Seven's smile was chilling; it reminded Kagome of Naraku's careless, contemptuous face.

His horrible smile broadened as he gestured toward the steel encircling Inuyasha's neck. "If he somehow managed to evade Judgment, that collar will explode. Any attempt to interfere with the syringe or the collar will cause the collar to blow. Unfortunately, so long as he is sealed, the explosion won't affect him, but it has a blast radius of ten yards, enough to kill anyone caught tampering."

Kagome wasn't stupid. Seven had released her after bringing her to the laboratory, giving her freedom enough to allow her to see Inuyasha's body, strapped to its white table. For several minutes, he'd left her slumped against the laboratory wall, trusting to his own presence to cow her into submission. She pushed herself off the white tile, past him, and lunged for the collar. If she could force the explosion, the syringe with its deadly serum would be destroyed, and she had every faith in Inuyasha's ability to free himself from his captors. Especially if she managed to bring Seven down with her.

She didn't get the chance. Seven caught her easily and grinned even more broadly. "Did you think dying would free him? I suppose I forgot to mention that his seal binds his life to yours. The monk should have told you that. If you die, Kagome Higurashi, the half-blood monster dies with you. Protect him and die, or give him up and live. Either way, he dies. Thus the will of God and the Hand is accomplished."

He twisted her around to look at her, his golden eyes burning with a terrible intensity. "You don't have to die, you know. Honestly, I'd rather not have to kill you. I've got a few too many of his memories locked up inside of me to be entirely comfortable letting you get too far away from me. Just wake him up. And let him go." Pressing his mouth to her lips, he kissed her, roughly, brutally. His fangs drew blood, his tongue threatened to choke her.

She bit the offensive organ, earning for herself the first blow in what proved to be a long series of assaults: a backhanded slap that sent her sprawling across the floor, until she came to a halt halfway beneath Inuyasha's table. Above her, one clawed foot dangled limply, uselessly. Funny. His feet had never seemed especially fragile before.

"Just command him to wake, and you can leave. All of this can be a bad dream," Seven purred to her, offering a hand to help her rise.

She spit in his face. And her first beating began in earnest.

So now she lay shivering in the holding room, shaking with pain and fear. She didn't know how much time had passed since Seven had invaded Blackbourne Estate. It could have been a few hours or a few days. Time passed strangely in the darkness.

"There is a light in here, girl. If you had the guts to go looking for it." A rumbling voice shocked her; she curled up, covering her head and ears futilely with her hands, realizing belatedly that shifting her dislocated shoulder was a bad idea.

"Grow up, little girl. I'd like nothing better than to strip away what's left of your clothes and show you what I think of a woman who's afraid of the dark." A mirthless chuckle followed the comment, landing dully on the stone walls, but reverberating deeply in Kagome's chest.

"I would give you a reason to be afraid," the voice continued musingly. "If I could, I would have done it already." More humorless laughter.

"Who…" Kagome licked her parched lips and tried again. "Who are you?" she demanded, hating the fearful whisper that framed her question.

"Goliath," the presence answered candidly. A sudden metallic clamor sent Kagome's heart into her throat, and she threw her good arm upward along the wall, struggling to rise. Frantically she searched the wall near the door for a switch. Upon finding it, she hesitated a moment before throwing it, afraid of what might be before her. Gritting her teeth, she reminded herself that the other presence hadn't harmed her yet, though it evidently desired to, and reasoned that it must be inhibited from doing so. She flipped the light on.

"Sweet gods," she whispered, collapsing to her knees.

The room was entirely lined with stone, like a dungeon, complete with chains and manacles. Across from her, some twenty feet away, the menacing creature glowered, fettered to the wall by long chain restraints. It was enormous, but its size mattered less to Kagome than the state in which she found it. Its blood pooled about its body, dripping in ruby rivulets down its arms and legs into shining red puddles. Massive hands and feet lay limply in the pools of blood, apparently rendered useless by a brutally clever trap. Each of its arms and legs were impaled with slender bladed panels. Like a two-edged sword, but lacking a point, the panels had been forced through the dual bone structures of the forearms and calves, neatly dividing the limbs lengthwise. The end of each panel was fastened with a lock to a short chain, which in turn was attached to a weighted ball.

It was a perfect prison. Sliding the bladed panels down would cut the creature's feet and hands in half, ruining them irreparably, but the heavy iron balls ensured that the panels could not be withdrawn the other way either. Captivated, sickened, and horrified by the display, Kagome gaped for several minutes before realizing that the creature being subjected to the horror was, in fact, another of Inuyasha's clones.

Though he was seated, the crown of his silver head remained several inches above Kagome's own, and one of his hands probably could have wound about her waist with room to spare. Something primitive lingered about his features, as though his face were a stone effigy of the real Inuyasha. But his eyes were strikingly familiar. "Are you Two?" Kagome asked, terrified.

A terrible anger clouded his face. "Two is Hannibal now, if he's still alive."

"Hannibal… after the Punic general?" Kagome asked, images of Carthaginian tophets briefly flashing in her mind and stirring a bit of her student's inquisitiveness.

The giant's face softened a little, his countenance shifting from anger to a surprising fierce concern. "Because he's smart." He was silent for a moment, and Kagome found herself somewhat less frightened than before. Whatever he thought of her, he obviously felt concern for the other clone. He wasn't an unfeeling monster. Of course, she remembered suddenly, Hiten had cared about his brother too, and he'd have killed her in an instant.

"They'll kill him. He won't tell them what they want to know, and they'll kill him." The giant who called himself Goliath wasn't looking at her anymore. His eyes were hooded, face downcast in an icy, silent, helpless anger.

Inuyasha had looked like that a number of times.

Kagome watched him carefully for several minutes. He frightened her, but his horrible position roused her pity. Like her, someone he cared about was being misused by the Hand, and he was absolutely powerless to stop them. She made a decision. "What do they want to know?" Kagome asked, staring at the floor, hoping she was doing the right thing.

"He blew up six of their bases. They want to know how he managed to hack into the security system, so it won't happen again. But he won't tell them. He knows even if he did they'd kill him, so there's no point."

"Could you save him?"

The big silver head snapped up. Kagome heard rather than saw it, keeping her eyes firmly fixed on the stone floor.

"If you could get out of… that… could you save him?" Golden eyes bored into her. She shivered.

"I can't get out." His words lacked conviction.

"But if you could. Would you be able to walk…?" She wrapped her relatively uninjured arm around her stomach, still refusing to look at the creature across the room. "Could you save him?"

Goliath continued to stare. "Yes," he said finally. "They didn't really damage anything."

Kagome nodded nervously. Still she wouldn't look, afraid of the intensity she could feel in the other's gaze. Sliding her hand up her tattered shirt, she reached for her bra. It was pale blue, satiny, and one of Kagome's favorites, but more importantly, it had an underwire design. Seven's beatings had shoved the wire through its cloth binding, and the stabbing at her ribs had given her an idea.

She began to wriggle the wire out from its cloth tubing, surprised when Goliath said nothing, though he continued to watch. Inuyasha would have been impatient, demanding to know what she was doing, and generally making her situation even more awkward.

After a couple of minutes, she managed to free the wire. Pushing herself painfully to her feet, she made her way toward Goliath, but kept her eyes on the floor. Slipping the wire into one of the locks of his wickedly ingenious prison, she began her attempt to pick it. The wire was too thin; she doubled it over on itself and tried again.

"Why?" For the first time, Kagome detected a note of uncertainty in Goliath's voice, and feeling a little more confident, briefly met his gaze before turning here attention back to the lock.

The question in his eyes softened them, made them more approachable, understandable. More familiar.

"Because I can't let the Hand kill any more of you." She attacked the lock more aggressively. "Because I couldn't live with myself if anyone else with that face were to die."

"I could kill you as soon as you free me. Or worse." But there was no conviction in his words.

"Maybe. You'd save me the trouble of figuring out how to get Inuyasha out of here alive, I suppose. But I don't think you will. You're worried about Two… I mean, about Hannibal. I could hear it in your voice." An unexpected bitterness crept into her voice. "I think saving him means more to you than raping a coward."

For several moments, the only sound in the stone waiting room was the grate of wire on metal.

"You're not a coward," Goliath said finally. "I think you may be the bravest person I've ever met."

The lock gave with a click, and clanged loudly when it hit the ground. "You can't have met many good people, then." She pulled the chain free of the bladed panel impaled through Goliath's leg and cupped the end of it, preparing to push it completely through and free the bloodied limb. "This is going to hurt," she warned, and carefully began to slide the plank away from her, through the giant's leg.

"Just do it already!" Goliath hissed through gritted teeth. Startled, she shoved hard on the end of the panel. It squelched loudly as it slipped from its bone-and-flesh harbor, and fell with a clatter to the floor. Blood splattered Kagome head to toe, and she closed her eyes, swallowing hard against the bile rising in her throat. Steeling herself, she moved on to his other leg.

It took a long time to pick each of the locks, partially because she didn't really know what she was doing, but mostly because she could only use her left hand, her right hanging uselessly from her displaced shoulder. How long it took she didn't know, having no watch, no window, and no clock, but she would have guessed anywhere from half an hour to forty-five minutes passed before she was able to free Goliath of the other three bladed planks. Neither had spoken since the first lock had come free. Nausea and tears threatened to overwhelm her more than once; though she'd been exposed to a significant amount of gore and blood in the feudal era, Goliath's prison was a kind of sadism she had never encountered.

When she had finished, Goliath's eyes were closed, and his breathing was shallow and broken. He sat quietly for a few moments, evidently waiting for the pain to ebb. The he drew a long, even breath, and stood carefully, testing his injured legs, smiling grimly when he found that they supported him. He turned his amber eyes to the door. With a bone-curdling roar, he swiped at it. Between his claws and his weight, the door gave way. There were no guards outside, to Kagome's surprise. Evidently one cleverly trapped giant and one battered woman weren't considered likely to become escapees.

"Let's go, girl." Easily ten feet tall and correspondingly broad, Goliath towered over Kagome. He stretched out a gore-covered hand to her.

"I can't."

He stared at her. "We're leaving," he insisted. "We have to find Hannibal."

"Inuyasha's still here. I can't leave him." She laid a tentative hand on Goliath's much larger one.

Goliath blinked. "So we'll take him with us."

Kagome shook her head. "Seven has him pretty well trapped, even better than you were. He's wearing a collar that will explode if we try to move him, and if I revive him, there's a syringe full of Judgment waiting for him."

The giant shrugged dismissively. "Hannibal'll figure it out. He wouldn't forgive me if I left you here after you helped us."

"But we –" Goliath swooped down on her, catching her about the waist, obviously intent on carrying her out of the room. The movement jarred her shoulder, and she cried out involuntarily. Suddenly she was on the ground again, new waves of pain-induced nausea flooding over her.

"I don't want to set that for you, girl. I'm afraid I'd take your whole arm off without even meaning to." He frowned in consternation. Then he shrugged again. "Well, there's not really any help for it. It'll only get worse if we leave it like that." Moving more swiftly than she would have imagined possible of such a large person, he reached for her upper arm and jerked it downwards. Kagome shrieked.

There was an odd kind of relief when the bone slid back into its rightful position. Then the pain set in. Unable to choke down vomit any longer, she was thoroughly sick on the stone floor. Little but bile came up, as she hadn't eaten since her capture, but the slimy green mass nauseated her further. She launched into a series of dry heaves that promised to leave her abdominal muscles sore later on.

Until she was finished, Goliath stood quietly. When finally she was able to breathe freely, he picked her up again, gently, cradling her in the crook of his arm, as a mother holds an infant. The blood that still oozed from his wounds soaked through her clothing to her skin. Loosing consciousness, confused by pain, the wet warmth seemed comforting rather than terrible.

Besides which, he smelled like Inuyasha, and Kagome felt a vague smile cross her lips before she slipped into a painless, clean black sleep.