She was such an odd thing, the woman. She wasn't a girl; she didn't act like a girl. Perhaps it was that the only other company he had was Tamaki, and they both knew each other far too well. Kyoya didn't quite know what to make of her; she was an inverse to his world of names and backgrounds. All they had to gage her on were her actions, and those actions seemed sly and decently executed, if not particularly well thought out.

Still, some of the woman's more positive traits were shadowed with worrying ones; Her tendency to taunt the guards was one of them. Her voice would gain this brash, arrogant overtone, and-

"-come on, you fucking pussy, you coward! Weakling!"

-the absolute worst things fell out of her mouth. Kyoya had never heard a woman swear like that before. (This woman definitely wasn't an heiress.) She'd screech and pick the current guard apart until he'd beat her, lose his cool, and have to find a replacement. Kyoya deduced their survival percentage had risen with her arrival, but why? What was she hiding? Why did they value her so much?

And why, he would breathe into the still air, is her life worth more than mine?

Later, after the nth guard left in a huff, Kyoya turned to the woman and asked her why she insisted on harassing the guards. Her demeanor had again switched on a dime, and she admitted to being comforted by the fact that not a single guard was familiar with any of them or their habits.

"No one knows when we sleep," she had told Kyoya, in a vague attempt to explain. In a way, he supposed he understood, but it struck him as another esoteric response.

But it backfired one day, and badly.

There was a shift in the ward dynamic, and a previous guard had actually come to make second rounds. The woman was nervous about this, and stayed on her best behavior, but she still refused the drugged water. Kyoya and Tamaki had taken turns rationing their water with her, but that had been put to a vicious end when they were caught. Then the same man came a third day in a row, and the woman dared to make an innocuous comment to one of the others. He beat her senselessly, and stayed afterwards. That terrified them all more than anything.

Their final evening was one where the woman had made the egregious mistake of coughing up some of the water. She was backhanded, and- in a move that proved the premeditation of this entire ordeal- cuffed to the wall opposite of them and whipped like a dog. The gangster must have brought the whip recently, or perhaps was clumsy with drink, because it fumbled out of his hands several times. The woman was heaving with how hard she was crying, tugging at the chains that bound both of her bloodied wrists. It happened again; The whip tumbling out of the Yakuza's grip, skidding across the floor.

Something in Tamaki must have snapped, because he reached for the whip the same time as the gangster. Fool, Kyoya thought, why did you not grab for it sooner?

"N-no!" Tamaki half-shouted, half-begged. His voice was this horrible shadow of itself, hoarse from disuse. "Enough," Tamaki insisted, on his knees in a filthy cell and about to be killed. Kyoya ached. "Please don't hit her again. Please."

Although the woman still cried in the background, a sharp silence filled the air around the men, and Tamaki- noble, stupid Tamaki- let go of the whip to show his good intentions, leaving it in the grip of the other man. The Yakuza immediately grabbed him by the roots of his hair and threw him to the ground, and before Kyoya could move, the whip was taken in a firm grip and struck across Tamaki's face, and time suddenly seemed to freeze.

"No!" Kyoya screamed, or he thought he screamed, but it didn't sound anything like himself.

Tamaki let out a little shriek and curled in on himself, doing an animalistic scramble away from the weapon. One of Tamaki's hands stayed over his eye, the other arm helping him make a faster retreat; Kyoya's heart sank at the amount of damage he could see. There was no way it was good.

Kyoya stood on shaky legs and stumbled over to Tamaki. The gangster grabbed him, and something in Kyoya pushed himself to act. He went with the grab willingly, slammed his elbow as hard as he could into the gangster's face and used the moment to dive for not the whip, but the man's taser. The gangster regained his bearings quickly, but Kyoya was already away and out of his reach. He had managed to right his grip, and was leaning back in order to strike him.

There had to have been a soundtrack to this moment- screaming, shouting, crying- but there was nothing but white noise stuffing his ears like cotton. Kyoya's hands were doctor-steady as he aimed the taser at the Yakuza and shot. The prongs came out and snatched onto his cheek like a viper, and the man's body did a satisfying jerk as he dropped to the floor, his temple slamming into the concrete.

Kyoya had been raised around a police force his entire life. He had been taught, like all other wealthy children, the use and safety of basic weaponry. He recalled a few lectures in a criminal justice seminar mentioning augmented weapons being used by criminals. He wasn't necessarily familiar or good with any of it, but there had been nights when he could recall Tachibana sitting him down, showing him everything in his tool belt. So he knew what a regulated taser looked like. And the car battery he was holding in his hands was not by any means legal.

So Kyoya stood over him, and watched with bated breath. Watched as the man seized from the amount of electricity running through his brain, watched as he fried and slowly cooked to death. It took several long minutes.

When it was finally over, when it was all blessedly over, Kyoya shut off the taser. Despite him wanting to throw it against the wall, to watch the damned thing break into a hundred thousand pieces, Kyoya instead carefully nicked the dead man's holster and donned it, shuddering all the while. There may have been a moment where Kyoya just stood there, numb, but then he heard a quiet, "I can't see," and whirled around to face Tamaki.

It was bad. It was, in fact, very bad. The blood in the front chamber of the eye would account for the blindness, and it would only get worse if left untreated. The lid of the eye had made a valiant effort to hold on, but Kyoya could see the split in the thin layer of skin. He didn't know what to do. They didn't have any first aid, or even clean water to wash out the wound. With how dirty their cell was, infection was inevitable, and the least amount of damage would be the loss of sight. Kyoya stuffed his hands in his hair and pulled, trying to rationalize everything that had happened in such a short amount of time.

From behind them both, the woman quietly requested, "Please let me down. I can help him. Please let me help him. We need to leave."

For a brief moment, Kyoya almost ignored her. He felt angry with her, anger for goading the guards into being so high strung. But that wasn't fair; Today was entirely unprovoked, and bounds beyond what any of the gangsters had dared to do before. He forced himself to go through the dead man's pockets again for his keys, and nearly fainted with relief when he found them.

Her physical state was worse the closer he got to her, the wounds on her back weeping, the uncomfortable arch of her back as she was forced to stoop. Kyoya was glad he hadn't said something cruel, and he moved to quickly unlock her shredded wrists, catching her as she landed in an exhausted slump.

The duo made their way to Tamaki, who flinched as their shadows flickered across the wall. The woman made a number of comforting noises as she turned his head in her palms, her hands trembling but sure in their movements. She moved a palm over his eye, and just as Kyoya was about to snap about the dangers of germs, her hand began to glow. As the light grew, Kyoya's chest grew heavy with a warm, honey feeling. It was as though he had come in from the snow to sit by a fireplace, and could feel the frost dripping away from his skin. It had been so long since they'd seen anything but their room's dingy lightbulb; Seeing the glow was fascinating, but then it intensified to the point that Kyoya nearly looked away. When it faded, the woman swayed once, twice, and slowly let herself sink to the floor.