iv. writhing worms in deep soil.

BEFORE

SAKURA AWOKE TO blinding pain behind her eyes. It fluctuated around her eye sockets, flooded through her face, and set her scalp alight with pinpricks of fire. Her entire body hurt, as if she had been hit by something large, heavy, and with the force of a moving truck. She was keenly aware of the pain, even though her eyes were shut, and only the smallest twitch of her fingers gave her any clue as to what she was lying on—concrete, pockmarked with deep gouges, that was as cold as ice. Paralyzed, she could only move some of her hands and a few of her toes, but the faintest feeling of bone grinding against bone (splinters of bone, her mind told her, racing back to the CNA classes she had taken before Christmas break) made her pause.

She flexed her wrists, testing, and her skin met cold metal—and then the burning began. It raced up her arms, pooled at her elbows, as if someone had taken a white hot brand and was holding it to her skin, unrelenting in pressure. She could faintly make out the slightest clinking of chains, dragging her arms down and effectively pinning her to the ground. She could almost smell them, that distinct metallic scent, coupled with rank dampness from humidity and leaking pipes; it was strong, and her mind worked quickly to keep up with the sensory clues given to her despite the pounding in her head.

The sound of plastic dragging against concrete drew her from her thoughts. Faster than she recalled her reflexes being, she sat up, her entire body protesting at the movement. She heard miniscule pops throughout her spine and joints as she rose to a sitting position, eyes pulling open despite a thick layer of crust that had formed over them. She blinked her lashes free, first, pupils adjusting to the sheer darkness of the room. Other than a light in a corner, just outside of her range of vision, there was nothing to indicate where she was, besides the concrete flooring, and—cell bars.

Her heart dropped into her belly.

Glinting off of the only light she could see, the metal bars—a pristine silver interspersed with bronze every other bar—separated her from the dimly lit hallway leading to her freedom. The tile floor was strict and nonsensical, something she would have seen in a hospital, and though the light was awful and forced her to strain her eyes, she could make out entire trails of blood running to and from what she would assume was the exit. Some of it was dry, some of it was fresh, but there were copious amounts of it, more than enough to assume whoever had shed it had died a very quick death, or had bled freely from a vein as they were dragged out of their cells.

Standing in front of her cell, deceptively hidden from view within an alcove, was a man. She deduced it was a man from the height and stature, dragging all of her previous knowledge of Law and Order to the forefront of her mind, and his face was reflected in the bowl of water that had been pushed into her cell through a small gap in the bars just wide enough to slide it through. He was pale, paler than Sakura when she refused to go outside and tan, and his eyes were a luminous, acid yellow; she had yet to wonder if they were contacts or some strange genetic anomaly because her lungs were starting to crush her with panic, and her heart was ramping up to miles a minute as she slowly, but surely, connected the dots.

She had been kidnapped.

"Not kidnapped," the man said, as if he had heard this thought process before, and heard it often enough that he knew, intrinsically, what she was thinking before she even voiced it. "Saved. There is a difference."

Did it even mean anything different, though? She was chained up in a cell—against her will, with a captor whose eyes glowed a dangerous yellow, and wounded. The more feeling she regained in her limbs, the more she could feel blood trickling through gauze; he had tended her wounds, but they still wept freely, and the cold concrete beneath her was gradually growing warm with her body heat.

"Who are you?" she croaked. Her voice was ruined, not just by dehydration, but by an injury. Her throat was hot and tight as her voice irritated the delicate healing process of her vocal chords, and when she reached up to touch the skin there, she felt thick scabs that mimicked the shape and outline of teeth marks. They were deep, as if the monster that had almost killed Naruto had bit down and shook her like a rag doll, and the edges were ragged and inflamed. Her fingers shook as she followed the scabs all the way around nearly to the back of her neck, where they ended due to her throat being somewhat of an obstacle to being crushed completely.

The man ignored her as if she hadn't spoken. "You can't have food; the water will sustain you if you don't drink all of it at once and take measured sips instead. Eating at this stage would likely kill you, and I don't think you want to die, do you, Miss…" at that he fished out her phone, sleek and broken and shattered to pieces, but still working, and turned the front screen on. "Haruno."

Sakura's fingers caught in the scabs at the sight of her phone. Despite the stinging pain that nearly took her breath away, her eyes stayed focused on the numbers on the screen, displaying the time, and then her name under it in neat letters, along with an email to contact if her phone was ever lost. What good would that do now?

She watched as, with one long fingernail that bordered dangerously to becoming a claw, he popped the SIM card tray out and produced the SIM card, as well as her SD card. He tucked them in his pocket and, with one hand, bent the piece of metal and plastic entirely in half. The glass from the screen buckled and rained down on the concrete with individual plink, plink, plinks.

"No one is coming for you, Miss Haruno." The man tossed the remains of her phone into a trash can nearby, somewhere out of her line of sight. Her fingers clenched around the chains of her cuffs, ignoring the way her flesh steamed and bubbled and burned when she touched them. "I would suggest you accept that now, before your vain hope strikes you down."

"Let me go!" With a rush of adrenaline, Sakura rose to her feet and slammed into the bars. Those, too, made her skin burn like fire, but anger, fueled with desperation, made her immune to the pain, if only temporarily. Her entire body sagged underneath her own weight, but she dragged herself up and shoved her face between the bars, staring at the man who had become her captor. "Let me go, and I swear I won't tell a soul what happened—"

He stared at her, unmoved.

"—please," she begged, fingers tightening around the cell bars, hooking in the ones laid vertically across to keep her from sliding through them. Blood streaked down the silver poles, fresh from her burning fingers. "Let me go, let me go, let me go—"

He turned his back, flicked a switch, and her cell was doused in darkness.