Cold, after a some time, ceased to feel cold anymore. A painful, dull blanket made his bones feel as if they were made of lead. Straw and canvas separated him from the frozen earth, blocked him from drafts, and gave some hint of protection from other elements.

Sleep never really came, because a long time ago he suspected he'd begun dreaming and never stopped. Even eating cold food didn't seem to make him stop dreaming, even if he knew he was awake, and sleep perhaps occurred between meals. But never rest.

Mithril had offered him so many creature comforts that he'd lived without for most of his life, and now that they were gone, something felt… right. He had begun to feel like Kashim again, rather than pampered, rigid Sousuke. (Although that was probably from his dream-state.) A lot of the time, he seemed to see scenes of his entire life flicker on the gray wall before him like a mind-encompassing film reel, but even in his hallucinations, he could change nothing.

The entire time, a man's strong, cruel voice walked through with him, one step at a time. It called him by his old name and told him how weak and stupid he'd become within the smothering ranks of Mithril.

Very late in his dream, possibly hours ago, there had been a stirring in his mind that he hadn't felt for five weeks after he was thrown into isolation.

He felt awake.

He began to feel the cold again, and the ache in his bones. He could smell frozen waste and filth. A draft from a corroded pipe was blowing the dirt and straw into a tiny dust devil across the room.

He noticed himself blink.

Some kind of rigid, disciplined awareness stirred next. He didn't know how long it went on. His eyes began to re-examine the room he laid in with renewed curiosity, and maybe a sense of urgency. There was no telling why – he was only as good as his instinct made him, and so he began making sure every single muscle worked, no matter what shape it was in, and without question. It was what kept him alive in situations like these.

A sharp, blinding pain in his right elbow suggested a broken bone, or worse, a shattered one. He couldn't think about it yet. The pain of deep breathing was probably a broken rib or two. And he had a splitting migraine.

So much time in solitary had done nothing serious to him, he didn't think – not beyond a few badly mended bones, anyways. Solitude was such an awful punishment to inflict on the masses, but Sousuke had spent a lot of quality time in situations of radio silence or worse. He found, in all that time alone, that sometimes he quite liked himself in spite of his own insecurities. He had some discrepancy with his personal decisions, but he could not question the circumstances under which he made a good deal of those choices.

With detail, his mind crossed a great many topics that took up more time than he would have given them ordinarily, and by simple accident he allowed himself to sink back into them, away from the world of coherence and lucidity that he'd tasted only minutes before. It couldn't be helped – especially since he knew there was no guarantee that he wasn't just that much crazier, rather than that much saner.

But he also came awash in a mass of pictures he didn't recognize. They weren't memories. He could put no sense to them.

A light shone suddenly in Sousuke's eyes, and he knew instantly that it wasn't a figment of his imagination. It practically burned his corneas.

The air vibrated, and he honed in on the speech pattern. He'd heard nothing but iffy Mandarin, Cantonese, archaic Korean, and a handful of more localized dialects, so to hear delicately accented Japanese suddenly – in that voice – he must have been dreaming.

His conscious mind had been shoved to a dark corner for a long time now, with no sound or warmth to bring him forward. When both were offered, the world around him began to come into tiny focus, as if he was looking out through a keyhole.

On the other side of the door was Gauron, which meant he was already dead.

040

Sousuke's face was pallid and lifeless. But he wasn't dead. Death had a way of pulling the flesh back and exposing the empty mouth, dulling the eyes and baring the teeth as skin dehydrated and shrank away. He would know.

But not so with the face beneath him. It was filthy, pasty white, unshaven in spots. His hair line was erratically cropped in places, covering what looked to be healing injuries to his skull. No – incisions. His brain seemed to stall at the concept. Gauron's eyes narrowed, and he ripped the filthy shirt wide open, exposing more wounds just like them across his chest as well, symmetrically dotting his skin.

They looked suspiciously familiar.

They looked like the marks Chidori would have had, if they'd held on to her just a little while longer.

"Shit," he hissed between his teeth. He hadn't been expecting that.

A thin, raspy breath shuddered within the lungs beneath him, then words. "They know," the young man whispered between cracked, bloodless lips.

"Kashim," he said irritably, "I'm pretty sure you don't even know."

Sousuke's thin frame shuddered, and he tried again. "Don't use it."

"Shut up for a minute," he snapped.

"Gauron-"

"I said shut up," the other man bit off again, digging through his bag. "Stay unconscious for another five minutes, would you? It would make this so much easier."

The words Sousuke tried to form next were unintelligible; Gauron ignored him for another minute before he couldn't take it anymore. He clamped a hand down over his mouth. "Shut up," he snarled in a low voice. "If you'd like me to bring every poor bastard with a gun running down here so I can kill them, then by all means keep talking. But – look at me Kashim," and here he met Sousuke's gray eyes and held them until he saw a bit of comprehension in them, "we'll figure this out when we get out of here, and after that I'm going to deposit you in Kalinin's lap so I can see the look on his face – but before I get to see that face, I have to get you out alive. So be quiet."

Sousuke held his gaze for another minute longer, then nodded once. His chest rattled with a sigh, and he went limp again.