Eosphoros wakes to your boot in his side.
"Hello," you say in a voice that—much like your face—is not your own; it's soft and sweet, like a cloud in spring or sugar licked from the bowl. "Would you mind answering a few questions for me?"
"I'll never tell you anything!" he says, sudden and quick as a reflex. It is an effect spoiled by the fact he splutters into coughing halfway through the sentence. A shame, really. If only someone had remembered to offer him a glass of water when he woke. Oh well. A flex of will cracks one into being in your hand – you allow him to see it just long enough to take a deep, gulping swallow. Hangovers make you a slightly different sort of thirsty. The drink slips down your throat like you're being kissed by a yuki-onna.
"Your cooperation is not necessary," you say, "just convenient."
You crouch down, dropping to your knees as if you're doing something else entirely. Eosphoros, in preparation for your interrogation, has his sorcery sealed and his body chained; he currently sits strapped to a wooden chair, unable to look anywhere but at the dull, star-iron wall opposite the door. Ruri stands behind him, in his blind-spot, a witness but not a participant. Not yet.
"I'm not sure if you understand your situation, child." Fingers feather across his jaw as you tilt his head to face you. The muscles of his neck strain against the edges of his paralysis, and you're almost impressed by the lack of wincing. The spell is a cage, and you're shoving him directly against the bars. "Do you know where you are?"
He doesn't answer.
"I thought not," you say, as if his silence is through ignorance instead of choice. "Welcome to the Underworld, and the Grigori. There is no escape. There will be no rescue. There is nobody and nothing to save you. Not even death. There is no greater torture than forcing a man to live when all he wants to do is die – and I say this in full knowledge that Tartarus is that way."
You point over his shoulder. It's not even a lie.
"I tell you this not as a threat. Not as a promise, an oath, or a malediction. It is pure, simple truth. We have questions. You have the answers. One way or another, we will get them. You may be as defiant as you wish – we have people who enjoy that. You have no power here. Every decision you make serves us and our pleasure, and they all lead to the same place."
You smile like a child. "I would advise you to give me what I want, however. Compared to my peers, I'm practically kind."
Thank goodness you're not Pinocchio. You'd have taken his eye out with that one.
"If you think that's going to scare me, you have no idea who you're dealing with."
Your laughter is a bright, birdlike chirp. "I don't care if you're afraid. Your fear doesn't matter. Half-a-dozen Fallen lie dead on the streets of Kyoto, and your soldiers helped kill them. The only reason you are still alive is that we wish to know whether your organisation knew what they were hired to do. I was there at Sodom. At Gomorrah. Abraham and Lot could not find ten innocent men, and so in God's name we scoured twenty thousand souls with sunfire until there was no longer even ash."
You draw closer, until your noses almost touch. Behind your back, your wings flare, their shadows falling over his face like the sword of Damocles. "Your God is right here, child. And she will need far more than ten before she tells Lord Azazel that we should not visit the same fate on the White Chrysanthemums."
You burst to your feet with manic speed, and start circling his chair. Your gait is unstable, sometimes snapping your heels against the stone like breaking bones, sometimes whispering across the floor like each step is a dying breath. In the thin, flickering light of the cell, your skin shifts back and forth from pale to ghostly.
"First question. Who is Nabi?"
All questions reveal an answer in their asking. But nobody said that answer had to be right.
Once again, he is silent.
"Don't be a fool, Captain." It's not his full title, and that's the point. "You broke Kyoto's neutrality, not us. One of Yasaka's prized servants is a half-full urn resting on my table, and it is you and yours she blames. Kyoto has one rule, above all else, and it has only been broken once – or however many times it took to conceive Kunou, at any rate."
Ruri's gasp is scandalised, but you snuff it with a pulse of Light before it carries to Eosphoros.
"Maybe you think of yourself as a good man," you say, with all the kindness of euthanasia. "Maybe you think there's some value in breaking before you bend, that those who served beneath you will thank you as the flesh sloughs from their bones because at least you kept your honour. And that's fine. I can admire loyalty. But ask yourself who deserves it more: your ideals, or the people who will die for them?"
You could threaten him again, more obviously. You could say that every breath he wastes is another soul spent; that you have no compunctions with inflating how many people in his organisation were aware of the contract. That the easier he makes your—and Ruri's—lives, the fewer it will cost.
But not yet.
(You would, of course, be lying. The only people in the White Chrysanthemums whose lives Azazel would demand in recompense are already dead. But that is the joy of the interrogator – to control the flow of truth both ways).
"I'll let you think on it. Don't worry. I'll be around if you need me."
You trail a hand across his shoulder in deliberate mockery of sympathy, and slip toward the door. A curl of Light silences you, Ruri, and the door – let him wonder if you're still in the room or not. Remind him, once more, that he no longer even has the power to decide—to know—if he's alone.
In the hallway, Ruri glares at you, her mouth moving without sound.
Oh, right.
You might have silenced a little more than her footsteps. Whoops. You run a theatrical finger over her lips, and when she snaps at it—a second too slow—her teeth close with an audible click.
"You never gave me a cue to step in!" she huffs. "You said you were going to."
"I am," you reply, "but not yet. He won't care about the suffering of a stranger above the suffering of his friends and subordinates, no matter how lovely her tears."
"I'm not going to cry on demand."
"It's hyperbole," you say, patting her on the head. Her ears—out and proud, just like her tails—are delightfully soft against your fingers. "You should be used to that by now."
Ruri closes her eyes as if deep in thought. Or, more likely, as if she's trying to restrain her irritation. Extensive experimentation has determined that Ruri is cute, but there are times when she's cuter, and one of them is when she's trying to pretend you don't get to her.
"You are a particularly impressive collection of half-truths and hyperbole," she says eventually.
"Thank you." Your bow is so courtly it could have been presided over by a judge.
Ruri giggles despite herself.
Straightening, you lean back against the wall, stretching more out of boredom than anything else. Your shirt plays around your waist, rising across the sheer of your stomach as you arch like a bowstring. Hell, and the territories that abut it, are hot in a way no sorcery or strength can fully alleviate; it's as much psychosomatic as anything else, a lingering curse from the lips of God Himself. You are long used to it now, but it's a convenient excuse to lose several inches on your hemlines.
(It's not as if you need an excuse, but you don't want Ruri to get suspicious. When she returns to your bed, it will be because she can't bear to stay away – you, of course, will be entirely innocent. It's not your fault that calling you just sex on legs is insultingly vanilla).
"Are all Fallen as beautiful as you are?" Ruri asks idly. Inside, you startle; you're pretty sure Sages can't read minds, but that was a disturbingly relevant question.
"Nobody is as beautiful as me," you scoff. Technically not a lie. People like Gabriel—it should explain everything it needs to that if Gabriel asked you to return to Heaven in exchange for a single kiss, you would consider it—and Lilith are more beautiful, and they're not the only ones.
"You know what I mean," Ruri replies. "I only saw a couple of people on the way here, and they were both stupidly pretty. Just like Azazel."
Excuse you? Azazel is not stupidly pretty. He's ruggedly handsome. And what does she think she's doing, noticing that anyway? You don't need competition from your student on top of everything else.
"Just like Azazel?" you ask, lips curving into a smile best described as dangerously amused. "Poor little Ruri. Is somebody nursing a crush?"
"Yes." You have a half-second of outraged shock before she continues. "But it isn't me."
You turn, very slowly, to face her. There is less menace on a battlefield than in the way you move. "What did you just say?"
"You're in love with Azazel." The thrust of her jaw is a drawn sword. "You weren't very subtle about it when he arrived."
There is a dull, wet thud. It takes you a moment to realise it's Ruri's head slamming into the wall as you pin her to the marble by her neck. Her eyes are wide with pain.
You squeeze harder.
"I will say this once, and once only: forget you said that. Forget you thought that. I will not have everything I am and everything I've done ruined by one stupid little girl who knows nothing of what she speaks."
The truth will destroy you. Mockery will bleed over awe, and amusement will replace respect. A doomed, futile affection for a man ten thousand years out of your league is something worthy only of scorn or pity. And if Ruri could see it, Azazel must have.
He knows.
You drop her just as she starts to choke, and her legs aren't stable enough to catch her before she hits the ground. Crouching before her, you press a finger to the hollow junction of her throat, and lift up until your eyelashes almost touch.
"Do you understand me?"
"What the Hell, Raynare? It was just an observation!" There's fear beneath the anger. Good.
"Then you will have no trouble observing how serious I am." Your voice is quiet and calm, like ice over some unfathomable lake. "I grant you leniency in many things, Ruri. I even tolerate your ridiculous desire to befriend me, though I think it is quite clear by now you are an idiot for wanting to. But the affairs of my heart are mine alone. You would be better off forgetting that I have one."
You let go of her, and stand. The more you're doing, the less you're thinking. "Come. I've let him stew long enough."
The door opens after a minute or two's worth of disengaging the locks and seals, and you step in. Ruri follows – you suppose she still values avenging Nabi over avenging being shoved into a wall. Eosphoros is locked into the same position, arms pinned to his thighs and fingers flat around his knees. There's a slight twitch of his neck, the limits of what his bindings allow without permission; looks like he heard the two of you.
"So, Captain," you say, "how are you feeling? Tired? Hungry? Cooperative?"
"I will speak," he says, and you smile in satisfaction, "to anyone else but you."
Your smile lingers for a second, like a man who has not yet realised he is already dead. "You will what, exactly?"
"You heard me." The bastard sounds fucking amused. "You said you had people who'd enjoy defiance. Bring one of them to me, and I'll give them what they want. Just not you."
Ruri snickers, and you glare at her. This is not how this was supposed to go. She shouldn't be laughing – this whole exercise was to help her in the first place, now that you're back at the Grigori and locked away from the investigation by virtue of a fucking Seraph after your head. Eosphoros isn't a bribe if you need them to get anything out of him in the first place.
"Don't be a fool." Your voice is as pleasant as the taste of cyanide. "They will flense the truth from your mind like a butcher preparing pigs, and if you are lucky they will let it hurt. Swallow your pride and answer my questions, child, before they make you beg for the chance to choke on it."
"No." It is less a word than an oath.
This stupid.
Stubborn.
Spiteful.
Shit.
