"Good morning sleeping beauty!"
A high pitched voice giggles as Subaru blinks open his bleary eyes, "It's been a while since they've brought in another one!"
Waking up to the feeling of cold metal will never be a pleasant feeling, Subaru decides while straining against the heaviness in his arms to sit up. However, it proves to be a futile effort after giving up and collapsing against the floor. The right side of his head throbs painfully as he rouses from unconsciousness (he can't help the feeling of disappointment). Pressing a heavy hand against his temples doesn't do much either.
"You smell funny." A girl's voice? His vision is spotty at best, and the dim lighting doesn't help as he tries to look through the haze for some indication of the other person "I wonder what you are."
Subaru faces the direction the voice came from.
The spots in his vision are still dancing but he could at least make out the way she scrunches her nose. The deep scars running along her face and the disproportionate wideness of her crooked smile make him feel unsettled.
"What?" He immediately regrets speaking. Damn, that hurts. He runs his tongue over his cracked lips in a sorry attempt to soothe them. He doesn't remember anything after he passed out in the arena.
"Hi!" She giggles, some of her dirty blonde hair catches in her mouth, "It's nice to meet you!" She shoves her arm in through the gaps in between the bars and freezes her hand as far as it can go. It hangs there limply.
Subaru blinks. Once. Twice, and then thrice until he realizes what she wants. His eyes hover on her hand for a moment before he tries to study her face.
Keyword: tries.
It's difficult to see much of anything through the darkness, the only detail being the vacancy of her eyes and the lump of metal that catches his eye.
Something gleams under the low light just on the right side of her head. He can't make much of the design but just that it's medium-sized, maybe only half the width of his arms (but then he supposes his sticks for arms aren't a very good form of measurement). It's not sleek, but not quite bulky either. A headband? An odd accessory. How is it attached? It's only visible from one side of her head, but even only a glimpse makes his skin crawl. They never allowed anyone anything more to wear besides the plain white gown. He thumbs his gown subconsciously, Subaru doesn't remember ever changing into it (the thought disturbs him a lot less than he thought it would).
The girl seemingly impatient uses her free hand to rattle the cages. The bars shake and tremble. Tremors spilling out from the shaking bars, the rolling high pitches of someone's screaming-
The world phases around him, the air tasting more like vomit and rot then stale air. Walls grow taller, disappearing into some unforeseen horizon as the cavern stretches. Stacks upon stacks of cages, the darkness inside them morphing into loose silhouettes of something that had once been human. The cage door creaks open. Someone reaches through with their hands. Its fingers stretched wide, ready to encompass him but Subaru refuses, and in his defiance, he latches on to the bars and refuses to let go. He grips so tight his knuckles turn white, and they have to physically pry his fingers from the bars (he should have clung tighter, maybe they would have been irritated enough to kill him).
He blinks (he tries to pretend his pulse isn't galloping a 100 miles a minute).
Nothing but stale air, in a cavern with only 7 other cages.
Subaru swallows down the taste of blood that tried to climb up his throat.
"Well come on then!" She shakes the bars of his cage again, the noise makes him hold back a wince (the cage doors were always loud).
He eyes her hand again, waiting for the other shoe to drop. But after an incredibly tense and drawn-out moment, it becomes clear she wasn't going to give up on this.
Subaru hesitates, something about this girl sets him off the edge.
Slowly, very, very, slowly he carefully lifts his hand nears her.
A mistake.
The girl lunges forward, her hand snapping up to life, the tips of her fingers had sunk into his delicate flesh with lightning-fast speed. "You're so slow!" Something sparks in her vacant blue eyes as she grins maniacally. The pressure around his hand lifts as she lets go, but not before one last jolt runs through as if something had been hooked into his flesh before being pulled out.
A sharp jolt of pain stabs right through his hand, he hadn't even had a chance to register what had happened, let alone react.
"What the hell-!" The words die in his throat, watching in muted horror as she brings her hand to her mouth and sucks her fingers dry of the blood, maintaining eye contact the whole time. He doesn't miss the way something had glinted at the end of her fingertips, something black, and curved.
She laughs.
Not just any laugh, a full-body laugh that has her jerking backward and her head rolling around. A laugh with the kind of annoying pitch that burns against your ears, and leaves you with frostbite at the same time.
She jerks her fingers out of her mouth with a loud pop.
Subaru thought it was impossible for her smile to get any wider. He thought wrong.
"Oh, I know what you are now." Subaru cradles his injured right hand towards his chest, drawing in harsh breaths. She falls still for a moment, her eyes boring into his like she's looking for something before pulling away with a satisfied hum.
"You're funny, number one." And then she drops against the floor of her cage and laughs, hysterically.
Number one? Subaru's mind jumps from question to question, who is she? What the hell happened to him, how did he get here? And what the fuck?
Like what the fuck.
Honestly, what the fuck? His head hurts, and now his hand hurts, and he does not have the mental capacity to deal with this.
His right hand is sticky with blood now, and the cold sweat building on his skin doesn't make him feel any more comfortable. Subaru tries not to dwell on what she said or the thoughts rampaging through his brain as he watches her drop to the ground jerkily as if her body wasn't made to move with human limbs.
She lets out a soft giggle that sounds almost... normal. Like the kind of laughter he used to hear when he could walk outside before he was here and he'd catch people loitering near cafes, or storefronts. His heart twinges at the reminder of the world outside, but he doesn't let his mind stray too close to the thought (he can't afford to).
Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies
It's been some time since their... interaction if one could call it that.
The girl hasn't moved in a while simply sprawled across the floor of her cage quietly humming a tune that he could barely hear. It's a nice tune that makes pure, unadulterated exhaustion seep through his body that drops against the cage. Some of the tension slips but not all of it away once he realized that yeah, he's here again. Stuck here in another cage, perpetually waiting.
Waiting for the next thing he would have to suffer through, waiting for the next phase of his life, waiting, waiting, waiting, and waiting.
Maybe he should be a little more panicked or terrified at what they were going to do to him after the stunt he pulled.
But he's not.
Here he is staring at the ceiling of his cage with nothing but apathy and unwilling to sleep. Even as he curls into himself trying to get comfortable he doesn't let himself relax, not that the sharp throbbing pain in his bleeding hand would let him relax anyways.
It's a testament to how dark the cavern is when he closes his eyes and barely notices a difference. This place is awfully quiet, the girl's humming aside. Just him and his thoughts to accompany him.
The cavern they used to keep him in had never been quiet. There was always something. Some noise that kept the place occupied. Maybe the person in the cage next to him would shuffle around in the cramped cage, their bloodied gown rustling as they tried to get comfortable. A couple of rows away, somebody would be hacking with blood and spittle flying from their lips as they heaved out what little contents they had in their stomachs. The person right across from him would make a desperate whine in the back of their throat, body randomly spasming as their lungs cried for one last gulp of air before they collapsed. Body crumbling to the floor of their cage dying in a pile of their own vomit.
It would be days until the body was removed for the next.
Has the girl next to him been in that cavern?
She's gone deathly still in the past couple of minutes which somehow strikes him as odd. She doesn't seem to be the kind of girl to be still like that. Frozen on death's bed, as if her body could no longer cooperate with her.
Subaru doesn't like this.
He doesn't like being alone with his thoughts. He doesn't like how his mind always seems to take a turn towards the worse no matter how hard he tries to steer it away to something else. Everything he thinks always seems to lead to some deep rabbit hole. Even the strange, hazy-like apathy that's wrapped around him doesn't seem to want to shield him against the dark corners of his mind. But then again nothing does these days.
He's forgotten what it was like in his short time outside, and his long captivity in The Mine. He's forgotten what it was like to be trapped with nothing to keep him occupied but the hunger and the aches that never seem to want to disappear. The intervals between events always felt long yet so short.
A long arduous wait for the next session, and yet when they pulled him from his cage the wait wasn't long enough.
Just at the base of the neck, his hair stands on end.
He's waiting. Waiting for an innumerable amount of things; his next mental spiral, the next checkup, the next surgery, the next planned schedule they have for him, the next punishment, or the next phase.
The list goes on.
He can't bother to keep track anymore.
There's the girl in the cage next to his with unseeing eyes and hair as unkempt as his, making him feel like he's not supposed to be here. The tangled web of her hair and the painful stretching of her face when she smiles the smiles that don't fit leaves him feeling uncomfortable.
His right-hand aches dully now. He compartments the pain in with the rest.
Minutes tick by, or maybe hours. He's not sure, but he is fairly certain that the girl next to him isn't actually asleep as he originally thought. She's still, like a puppet. Her breathing is perfectly steady; nothing about her seems to give it away. Must be some kind of innate intuition, but he guesses it doesn't really matter, not anymore at least.
(The small details like this used to matter, back then. When he hoped he could claw his way out, he doesn't have that hope anymore.)
At the very least, Subaru isn't the least bit surprised when she suddenly jerks up with her whole body launching upward so fast Subaru could feel the wind. Subaru glances at her with a tired eye. Her face is pressed against the bars of his cage with the hot steam of her breath barely visible in the darkness.
Yep, still weirdly creepy.
"You're not gonna talk to me?!" The skin on her face looks stretched to its limits, "Ask me anything?! You know you can ask me anything?!"
"No?" Subaru's injured hand twitches as he watches her with almost tense apprehension. There is a lot he wants to ask her like why she called him Number one, but the questions all die on the tip of his tongue. Something about her makes him nervous, a creeping feeling building in his gut that tells him he won't like the answers he may get.
She taps her fingers against the bars in response. Tilting her head left at an almost impossible angle as she pouts.
"Really?!" The girl drops her head, her face no longer in view, somehow that only unsettles him more, "What about my name?! Do you wanna know my name?!" She jerks up again, a smile stretching across her face.
She reaches out to grab him again. She's fast, Subaru notes as he just barely manages to retract his legs back towards himself in time to catch the light of something just at the tip of her fingers. But whatever it is it vanishes as soon as her hands come to a standstill. Fingers flat against the floor of his cage and tapping in an almost steady rhythm if it weren't for the erratic changes in tempo.
Subaru's shoulders tense, as he keeps a wary eye.
He doesn't offer her a response.
"Celeste." She chirps anyways. "It's the only thing they let me keep."
Something about her voice feels cracked, like the broken glass of a picture frame.
Her smile only becomes more and more wrong the wider it gets like she doesn't quite know what to do with her mouth. It opens and closes like she wants to say something but, in the end, she's decided against it. Content to just keep it closed and hum a happy tune.
Her vacant eyes never leaving his as she seems to come to a standstill, her hands pressed flat on the floor of Subaru's cage.
Subaru is left staring at her eyes as she stares right through him.
Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies
Celeste likes to sing.
That's one thing Subaru has learned from being trapped here for however long. He has no idea how long he's been here which is not surprising. The only way to tell time is the occasional meal drops of nutrient bars but that must have been hours ago. Since Subaru's stomach is aching more painfully now.
The sad thing is that there's not even any water left from the bottle they dropped off to stave off the hunger pangs. He picks up the small bottle. It's cool in his hands as he rolls it over while he lifts his head to watch Celeste wave her fingers in the air to conduct an imaginary orchestra only she could hear.
Her eyes are closed in an almost serene expression as she hums.
Her voice carries a soft touch to it as it reaches for the high notes. She starts quietly at first the notes only moving along leisurely with an almost joyful tinkling. Her mouth stretches into a smile, that's so unlike all the other ones he's seen before.
It looks right, like it fits on her face, and not stitched onto her skin.
She starts humming louder bringing her fingers closer towards the top of her cage so that she can almost brush the metal. Her arms move on time to the melody before they flourish when her singing starts to swell. Subaru could almost imagine the orchestra she was conducting; clashing drums coming together to synchronize the rest of the instruments, the violins drawing out long beautiful notes to meld together with the flutes, the deeper tones of the cellos and violas as the song accelerates.
Notes leaping from one another in a beautifully fluid sound.
She has a beautiful voice.
Had she been a singer before she got here?
What had her life been like before she came here?
Had she been stolen away from her home in the dead of night? Robbed from her parents in front of them? Or did she just wake up here with no recollection of how she got here like him?
Did she go through the same agonizing process that he did?
Despite how happy the song seems, there's something inherently sad about it. Or, well the way she sings it. Some of the notes she hums a little too long as if the notes are standing on the edge of something. Her voice a mere second away from teetering to the edge and falling into the unending abyss.
There's something inexplicably sad about her.
A tragic story that was written in the lines of her face, and the shadows across her skin. It makes his chest tighten with a cold feeling, but ache with sympathy too. He could only imagine what she must have gone through; what had they done to her to make her become like this? How did her eyes become nothing but an open door to her nonexistent soul? Open windows to a mind gone and shattered.
A person who could no longer endure what they had put her through.
How long?
How long until he becomes like her? How long can he survive in this place, he had gotten lucky last time, didn't he? For some reason, they pulled him out to work in The Mine instead of letting him rot away like all the rest. Subaru got out of The Mountain out of sheer luck. If they hadn't pulled him out would he have ended up like all his neighbors? Glassy eyes staring at something far beyond the world as their breathing became harsher and harsher until they finally gave up. Unable to bear the weight of what didn't belong to them.
If he was still there, would he have died like them too? Or die on the table because he could not find the will inside of him to survive?
How long does he have here? How long until the things they put inside would kill him? How long would he be able to survive on the table this time? How long does he have to wait for whatever punishment they must have planned for him?
Quietly, Subaru pushes himself up so he's sitting and draws his body closer himself.
His hand still throbs, but not badly enough that it stops him from opening his mouth.
His voice is muted as he speaks, "How long have you been here?"
He's not sure if she could even hear him, but she blinks a long slow blink before the smile on her face evaporates. Her pale skin flakes off from her cheeks as she rolls onto her side to move away from him.
But she doesn't turn away fast enough.
Subaru catches her face twisting into an emotion Subaru doesn't recognize (but he supposes he will eventually).
She doesn't grace him with a response.
Subaru doesn't ask again.
Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies
Surprisingly Celeste doesn't talk much.
Despite their rocky... introduction would lead him to believe, she's not all that talkative. For the most part, all she does is hum and sing with the occasional interval of silence.
It's the opposite of what Subaru expected of her which was talking nonstop or trying to get him to join in on a conversation.
So he's surprised when he hears her talk to him, "Hey, Number one?"
Subaru hesitates for a moment, his left hand still tracing the scabs on his right before he lets it drop to the floor. He's unsure if answering this would lead to him getting injured again. Other attempts at holding some semblance of a conversation with Celeste have either led to her trying to grab him through the bars, or having her just simply shutting down and turning away.
"Yeah?" He runs his tongue over his lips thankful that at least this time the cultists dropped off a water bottle.
Celeste doesn't respond right away. She must be mulling over whatever was bothering her because her humming dies down enough that Subaru has to strain to hear it.
"You're the only one of us who's been outside other than Number 6." She says finally. Eyebrows furrowed a little bit as if she can't quite wrap her head around it. Hands reaching towards the ceiling of her cage fingers stretched to their limits as if she was trying to reach for something intangible.
Subaru frowns at the last part but doesn't comment. He's missing so much information but trying to wheedle anything from Celeste is like trying to pull out a loose tooth; difficult, painful, and wholly unsatisfying.
"I guess." He drops his head back against the cage bars, even if it is uncomfortable he doesn't want to move any closer to Celeste. Her erratic behavior still sets him on edge.
"Is the sky still blue?" Subaru blinks, his mouth hanging slightly open caught off guard and shocked into a stupor.
He snaps his mouth closed and turns away from Celeste's direction, and staring at the walkway that separates their row of cages from the one across from them. Cage Number 6 stares back at him bleakly, it's inhabitant missing but apparently must still be here under the thumb of Petelguese, somewhere.
It takes a while for him to muster the strength to respond. The cold metal that's pressed against his back seems to be sapping away his energy as he closes his eyes and lets out a quiet sigh.
He could imagine being outside right now. He's older and has a beautiful wife and daughter. They're both a little short and while the mother has dark blue eyes, his daughter has bright green eyes that shine like emeralds.
His daughter's blond hair finally cleaned out from all the grease and dirt it collected from playing outside. Maybe tied in a neat little ponytail that would swing behind her, as she steps outside with the grass tickling her feet because she says it's her favorite thing ever. She told him it was better than the carpet back in her room, and the sun was so much brighter than she thought it was. He could imagine her body framed by the vibrant blue of the day and the edges of her face haloed by a white natural glow.
Maybe she'd reach out towards the sky with her hair splayed around her on the grass while she traced over the shape of the clouds with her thumbs, and tells him what she thought they all looked like. Maybe she'll look him in the eye with admiration, and be able to believe in that image of him he tried to live up to.
"Yeah." He says quietly "It is."
He wonders if he'll ever get to see the sun or clouds ever again.
Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies
They're carting in something again Subaru notes dully as he watches the doors swing open with mild interest.
Two cultists keep the double doors open as he listens to the sound of wheels echo outside. It's probably a transport cage from the sound of it, light and scratchy.
A couple more beats pass as the cart gets closer until it comes into view as it gets pushed in.
The transport cage isn't empty (he feels cold).
A lone prone figure lies on the floor of it, their auburn hair a tangled mess as Subaru watches them park the transport cage in the center of the cavern. Their face is turned away from him.
Another one.
One who hasn't been through the suffering yet. They're not skinny enough to have gone through everything yet. There's also a distinct lack of scars on what visible skin he could see. Skin that was too tan to have lived a life inside this wretched place.
It makes him feel worse realizing he was going to watch this person deteriorate in this place. Would they cry? Would they come back from their first time on the table dead?
Another one.
There are so many.
So, so many.
Stacks upon stacks of cages flash through his mind, the countless bodies trapped inside never having to see the light of day ever again. Bodies stacked upon each other when they were being cleaned out. Faces slack-jawed, chunks of their flesh dropping off to the floor as they were carted by.
(He shouldn't be surprised.)
Celeste stirs to life from his left. Her bones cracking loudly as she shuffles onto her knees and scoots over to the front of her cage to get a better look at the newcomer. They're curled on their side in a fetus position. Backside facing Subaru.
"Oh, that's not Number 3," Celeste says out loud scratching at the floor outside her cage to get closer, "Whose this?" Subaru twitches at the mention of Number 3 but stays quiet, the cultists are returning. Their footsteps echoing just outside the cavern, Celeste jerks her head towards the doorway, her eyes widening just a fraction of a second before she's scrambling into the back of her cage. Legs flailing outwards as her palms slap against the cold metal to haul herself away from the main walkway.
Subaru hesitates for a moment before following her example.
One of the cultists carries in a pair of keys and unlock the new captive's cage. The other one hooks his hand into their shoulder and hauls them out, letting their long auburn hair splash against the ground while the last guard opens the cage across from Celeste.
Cage number seven if Subaru can count correctly.
They unceremoniously dump the captive into the cage before locking it. Their body hits the floor with a loud thud, falling flat into an uncomfortable position, their left shoulder pressed into the ground, head rolling against the ground. Subaru winces in sympathy when he hears their chin smack against the metal.
The cage door closes with a loud crash (he's being pulled out, he doesn't want to go back there, he doesn't want to, he doesn't want to, he doesn't wa-).
His eyes snap back open, his breaths barely making past his lungs as his eyes scan the cavern rapidly.
The cultists already left.
He slumps against the bars, the tension falling out of his limbs. A quiet sigh of relief escapes his lips as he gets his breathing back under control.
Celeste clambers back to the front of her cage and smooshes her face against it while clawing against the stone floor outside. The sound makes him cringe, his face contorting at the high pitched noise as she attempts to get closer to the cage across from her. If she did the same thing when he was knocked out how did he even sleep through it?
"Hellloooooo! Wakey, wakey!" Celeste calls out. She slams her palms out on the walkway as loud as she can before she rams her head against the cage. Subaru tries not to wince at the noise. "This one is no fun, come on!"
"Celeste." He says tensely, hands gripping his arms. She whips around so fast Subaru could almost hear her neck snap "Please stop that."
She breaks out into a wide grin again, her head tilting as she retracts her arms back into her own cage, "I like it when you say that!" She beams.
"What?" Subaru stares at her blankly.
"You know, my name!" Celeste moves further into her cage so she's sitting right across from him. Dropping her chin onto her hands as she gives an almost pleasant smile, "Nobody here calls me that anymore," she laments, "not even the people I ask!"
Subaru's shoulder tenses as he watches her smile morph into a pout before she makes another lunge for him through the cage bars. The metal rattles from the sudden impact as Subaru draws his legs towards himself much more tightly.
He eyes her fingers wrapped around one of the bars"...And what do they usually call you?"
"MS-02." She states matter of factly staring at his face with wide eyes. "But do you wanna know a secret?" Her voice drops a couple of octaves as she lowers her own body, her mouth hidden behind her hands like she really was about to tell him something she shouldn't be.
Subaru glances away to the prone figure in cage seven.
Celeste unnerves him because if he looks too long at her face he'll see the person he might become in her round empty eyes. She's a reminder of the things he never wanted to be a witness of. An existing legacy of someone who couldn't bear the weight of what sits inside her; a reminder of what this place does to people like them.
Celeste was destroyed by this place.
"Ok." How long until he breaks? Cracking from the inside out, as the last pieces of himself morph into something he can no longer recognize. If he catches a glimpse of his reflection will he recognize the face that stares back?
Celeste pulls away, rocking back and forth with her hands clasped around her own feet. She seems to mull it over, teeth sinking into her bottom lip. "They used to call me Canary!"
Something glints at the tip of her fingers before there's a quiet little plip like a drop of liquid hitting the floor. A moment later, Subaru realizes its blood. From the small amount of light that filters in from the double door entrance, he could see the small shine of the red liquid, dribbling down her feet from where her long black curved nails had sunk into them.
Subaru jerks his head up back in surprise, his eyes landing on her face.
The same vacant blue eyes and a too-large grin. She tilts her head to the left, her eyelids fluttering closed, "They used to call me Canary because I could sing." Then she goes still and laughs.
A full-body laugh that has her hands release their hold on her feet, and her head tilting backward. She snorts, and giggles before leaning forward slamming her forehead against the bars hard enough that Subaru could feel the vibrations from where he was sitting. She reaches into his cage again, her nails scraping against the metal floor almost desperately before she stops as suddenly as she had moved. "You know you remind me a lot about Number 6!"
"Number 6?" Subaru can't take his eyes off her face. Even with the details shadowed away from view, there's something about the way her smile is contorted now that seems so different from before.
(He realizes later that the smiles she gives felt wrong because they weren't happy smiles. They're twisted, laced with something she shouldn't have to have experienced.)
"He used to call me Celeste too." Her eyes are distant, arms hanging limply at her sides as she stares at a spot just to the right side of Subaru's head. "He doesn't call me that anymore." Almost absentmindedly she runs her hands over the metal headband on the side of her head as if she were in a trance. "You two are very alike." She breaks out into another wide smile her eyes shifting to his as if she were looking deep into his being.
"S'okay you'll meet him eventually! He's really nice! He's like you! He talks to me! Like you! Nobody ever talks to me anymore!" She laughs that empty eerie laugh, her vacant blue eyes staring hard enough to make shivers wrack his body.
The right side of his head burns from her gaze.
Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies
The double doors swing open, white light floods the cavern again and the metal cages reflect harshly.
Subaru's eyelids sting as he blearily blinks them open as he drops a hand against his eyes. Even in the safety of his hand the light still stings.
No matter how many visits the cultists make the sting of the sudden brightness will never be something he could ever get used to.
Something's being carted in, the wheels scuffling against the stone floor as Subaru cranes his neck to watch their shadows stretch across the hallway outside from the small window on the door. It doesn't sound like a transport cage, whatever their carting in sounds too small and light to be one. There's low murmuring going on the walkway, but Subaru doesn't manage to get his eyes to adjust to the brightness fast enough, he only gets to see them leave. Their shadows vanish down the hall along with their footsteps.
At first, he thinks maybe their back again to draw his blood for whatever reasons, but if that were the case then they wouldn't have left. His lips tug into a frown as he pushes himself into a sitting position after so long of lying still and drawing mindless figures in the air.
It's definitely not a transport cage.
A single metal table with medical supplies? Why would they need that here? And now? That's what the physical examination room is for, right?
Subaru looks over to Celeste hoping maybe she could glean some information for him but something tells him that he'll find out soon enough. She's frozen still, eyes staring at the table, mouth hanging slightly agape as her fingers began tensing and relaxing almost rapidly.
She turns to face him.
"Goodbye, Number one." Something crawls against his skin, a chill settling in his bones, "Maybe I'll see you again."
When she smiles this time it feels just as empty as the cages.
The cultists unlock her cage. One pins her down while the other has a large syringe filled with a viscous black substance. The cultist injects her neck with the mystery fluid and they both sprint out of the cage.
And then she starts screaming. Subaru scrambles back, back pressed flat against the metal. She tilts her head to the right, her face drawn so tightly it looks painful. The tips of her fingers are growing longer, and longer, shifting into something black and curved.
Talons, he realizes now that he can see it. In one swift motion that registered too slow with Subaru, she lifted both of her hands and slammed the talons into the side of her head, screaming all the while. They've sunk into the side of her head, her eyes roll around wildly, blood dripping from the open wounds as she violently pulls. The sound of her skull cracking horribly and her flesh tearing loudly as she gurgles.
He can't take his eyes off her.
Celeste starts laughing again, her head tipped back as her shoulders shake almost hysterically. The noise she emits sounding trapped beneath a sob and a scream. Voice grating against Subaru's ears as she throws herself against the cages over, and over, and over again.
Head slamming against the cages like she's trying to stop something. Each time she hits the metal it rings in time to her anguished screams (each time the metal rings Subaru is reminded).
Her talons scrape against the cage, her body thrashing wildly.
She doesn't stop moving even lying on the floor in some kind of desperate laced agony; she tries to pick herself back up slowly and awkwardly. Her fingers cracking as she struggles to push herself up on nothing but skin and bones. Each hollow crack of her body tears at his eardrums and leaves them bleeding for silence.
Subaru's blood thunders in his ears, as he listens to the bones in her body fracture (something inside of him claws under his skin).
He would have been convinced that she was crying, but she's not.
In what must have been in a fit of desperation she throws herself against his side of the cage and Subaru can see her completely. Something about her changes, like she's woken up from a long dream. Her blue eyes suddenly possess some sort of sharpness that pierces through Subaru's very soul as she lets out a choked noise that comes out like a half-scream and half-sob. Talons scratching against the floor, the metal scarring under her as she reaches for him.
Her smile seems fractured this time the flesh across her cheeks rotting at an almost accelerated pace. She makes one last lunge towards him and hooks her talons into his hands, an action laced with something akin to a kind of desperation that he's sure he's seen before.
He doesn't dare move as if he's dazed into some sort of hypnotized paralysis the feeling of her rotting flesh rubbing against his skin feels too hot and yet too cold at the same time. Her scars become more prominent when she rots, he realizes. They no longer fade away into the color of her skin but turn an almost pale beige against the dark color it was turning into.
She claws at his arm, her smile is gone now, her voice turning into a shrill unbearable pitch (he feels hot, something burning in the deepest part of his gut that screams from the place he's buried it).
This close to her with only the bars separating them, his eyes could trace everything about her. The smooth flat ridge of her nose, the perfectly arched shape of her blonde eyebrows, the prominence of her cheekbones, and the sudden brightness to her blue eyes.
She had been beautiful once, and she could still be beautiful if her hair could be washed and brushed. The flesh of her cheeks was no longer there revealing rotting yellow teeth. Subaru is left to stare at her face as she lets go, as her bones start cracking again. It's the only thing he can notice about her being this close; the feeling of missed opportunities and a life that could have been.
And then she stops; her body dropping the floor along with his now ruined hand.
He doesn't even notice the fresh blood spilling from his mauled arm.
And suddenly, sad songs are not sad enough
Heyo!
Hopefully, you guys enjoyed this chapter! I'm new to the site so I hope that this gets formatted correctly and stuff like that.
I don't know if I'll have a schedule for posting just because sometimes I can write like there's no tomorrow and sometimes I can't finish a single sentence haha.
I plan to have Subaru suffer a little bit more before we get to the main part of the story. :)
Until then!