February 21st: Picture - 100 words - One of your characters carries a picture in their pocket. Someone sees it.
"I didn't expect you back so soon," Shen said, his voice soft and oily. A flick of his fingers lit the lamps in the room with low flames, illuminating where he stood in the darkest corner. Chiaotzu spied the gleam of his crowbar beneath the overhang of the counter and cursed softly to himself. If only he could get it, if only he could reach out his hands. If only he could move his hands at all. His fingers were cramped, squeezed tightly together, and he was unable to so much as twitch them. Shen knew the conduit of his powers, after all, and was clearly not willing to be caught out again. "Did you come back to save the girl?"
Twisting guilt. No. He hadn't. He'd come to save a kami-damned crowbar. An unthinking hunk of metal. "Is she safe?" he managed to say. With each breath out the bands around his chest cinched just a little tighter. Something creaked, then cracked in his chest, another sudden snap of pain. If he wasn't careful he would run out of air completely, and he had no doubt that Shen would watch with a smile on his face as Chiaotzu suffocated.
"Perhaps." Shen made a dismissive gesture with one hand, keeping the other pointed at Chiaotzu. "Does it really matter?"
Chiaotzu gritted his teeth. Aware that his feet and hands were tingling now, his circulation cut off completely. Taking shallow panting breaths to prevent the bands from totally restricting his air was making him light-headed. He would faint soon. Then Shen would kill him.
"Where is he, Chiaotzu?" Shen leaned forward into the light. The shrewd shifting of his eyes in the dark reminded Chiaotzu of a giant malevolent snake.
"I don't know who you mean."
"You stole him from me. I want him back." Shen's fingers twitched. A rope of his energy wrapped around Chiaotzu's neck and squeezed. "He doesn't belong to you. He's mine."
"He doesn't belong to anyone," Chiaotzu said. His voice was a breathy wheeze. Blood was pounding in his head, so loud he could barely hear himself think. The beat was regular, at least. If a little frantic. "You won't get your…" A gasp, pain as Shen's power tightened around his neck. A hard swallow and forcing the words out, "...c-claws into him again."
Fuzzy grey started to blur Chiaotzu's vision. He could barely see Shen's face anymore, the lines seeming to draw together into a horrifying mask. He was going to die. Shen was finally going to kill him. But at least Tien was safe. Ino would keep him hidden. In time, he would move on. He'd be free.
The rope around Chiaotzu's neck loosened. Air rushed back into his lungs. Cool and dusty. He retched and coughed, the rush of blood to his brain making him dizzy. Bleary eyes and tears streaking down his face, he looked up at Shen. Not understanding. Stomach turning over when he saw a piece of paper in Shen's hand and the crooked little smile on his face.
"I've been waiting to find you for years." Shen's free hand turned over and beckoned, his telekinesis pulling Chiaotzu to his knees and then scraping them forward on the rough stone so he was kneeling in front of him. Disgust pulled Chiaotzu's mouth into a grimace, his muscles straining against the forced movement. "I've wondered what I would do. What I would say." His eyes burned into Chiaotzu's. The paper in his hand fluttered as he shifted it around. It was yellowed, worn away in the corners. At the bottom, the ripple of water damage warped the edge. "What I'd show you."
"Get it over with," Chiaotzu said, keeping his tone flat. The struggle for his breath had really drained his energy, and he had no interest in squirming under the thumb of this monster anymore.
Shen smirked. Brandished the picture. Chiaotzu's heart broke as he recognised the lines drawn there. The smiles running off the sides of faces, the squeezed in features, the arms criss-crossing in a helix. One of Tien's drawings. From the long long ago. When the world had made sense. "I found this beneath your old bed," Shen said. With slow, purposeful twists of his fingers, the paper crumpled, then tore into thin shreds. "He tried to hide it from me, but I found every scrap of you and purged it from his mind."
A scrap of paper fell to the ground between Chiaotzu's knees. He looked and saw the three irregular eyes of Tien's self portrait, the one on his forehead so big it took up most of his face. When he looked back up at Shen, he was vaguely aware that he was smiling. A soft, almost gentle smile, that had taken the tension from his body. Shen looked unnerved by this, his smirk fading and bushy eyebrows drawing together. His hands dropped ever so slightly. And Chiaotzu's smile widened, just a hint.