[-Chapter Fourteen-]

"You've held up rather well, Hikari."

Aku's voice was quiet. It seemed to echo from all around me, but I stared out of the bars of my jail cell until I could just see him with my one good eye. He was leaning against a wall, probably. I could make out flashes of his eyes that were well above the ground. A bit of moonlight painted the edges of his silhouette silver. Thump. Aku didn't move, but there was a strange sound coming from his general direction. Sort of a muffled sound, like he was tossing something up and down in the palm of his hand. It was too dark for me to see it well.

"How are your rations? Up to your expectations?"

In a corner, untouched, was a beautiful loaf of bread and some of the clearest water I had ever seen in my life. Ever since the Chen-Li took Aiko, I had been living in a daze. If my father came to visit me, if my mother fell at my jail cell, weeping, I had no idea. I stared at walls, counting patterns in the stone bricks. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 makes a shape. Twelve through Fifteen makes a line. Squeaking door marks another jailer, taking away my untouched food and water from the night before. There were no vivid hallucinations, no images of Aiko crying at me in the corners. Just me, my thoughts, and patterns in the brick.

At night, they said I screamed. I screamed and I thrashed, but no one dared come in and touch me, or try to wake me. Afraid to aggravate the bandages, they said. As if the bandages covering half of my face were the real problem. I heard their whispers, knew what they were saying about me. Hikari: the girl possessed by dark spirits. Well, good. Maybe the dark spirits would be able to help me. I had never before realized how exhausting emptiness could be. All day I sat still. I counted, I crouched, I shuffled to a corner, and I ignored the world around me. I shut off my emotions. Yet every day I woke up feeling more exhausted than the day before.

That was my new reality. No anger, no passion. Nothing but apathy and exhaustion.

Thump. Oh, yes. Aku.

"I suppose we should order the bread with a few more maggots and the water with a little more dirt. A little closer to what you're used to, perhaps?"

I stared. A strange buzzing filled my head. It vaguely hurt, but I resisted the urge to press my hands to my temples. Even pain was better than nothing at this point.

"You used to be so cocky." He waited a moment, as if expecting a sharp retort. "You were going to defy the odds; you were going to put me in my place. Well now I've put you in yours, you little bitch." Another pause. Then his tone grew more feverish. "Your sister is gone, your mother is crazy, and your father is a miserable man."

The louder his voice rose, the more the buzzing in my head increased. Soon it spread to my chest and my limbs; the strange buzzing became a thrumming in my veins that I had known but could not name.

"And what of our beautiful Miss Hikari?" Aku's voice was back to normal, almost. I could hear the storm that was waiting to erupt. He took one step towards me, and then another, into the moonbeams before my cell. It threw his features into a strange angular light. Dark shadows, strong eyebrows, and cheekbones that bent in unnatural ways. They said I was the girl possessed by dark spirits, but clearly no one had looked closely at Aku.

Something in his eyes called me to him and my body responded, uncurling from the corner. My limbs moved of their own accord, settling into a standing position. I was toe-to-toe with the head of the Chen-Li. I should have been feeling a million different things in that moment, but all I had was exhaustion and a strange humming sensation in my muscles.

He moved before I would have thought to react. Aku reached through the bars. With a single harsh movement, his hand snatched at the bandages surrounding my face and ripped. Pain tore through me like a bolt of lightning; I felt like my head might split in two. The bandage slipped between his fingers to the ground between us, taking pieces of my newly formed skin with it. Aku was staring at me with a wild gleam in his eye. I tried to remember: had I hissed? Cried out in pain? My body had jerked; I could still feel the rough muscle memory.

"She is broken. Scarred. Nothing." The pulsing in my veins grew stronger. I struggled to remember what it was called. "And it seems that you have lost your voice, my dear."

Within the blink of an eye, Aku's hand was wrapped around my throat. He used his one arm to lift me off the ground. I reflexively grabbed at him to try and pull him off of me. My resistance brought a smile to his face even as the air in my body slipped away.

"Or perhaps not." He released his grip and I collapsed to the floor, gasping. I knew his fingers would be imprinted on my throat within a few hours. My body could not seem to get enough air: it coughed, it choked, it wheezed. That silent power urged me to my feet again, but I refused. It did not matter what Aku did to me. Nothing mattered. Nothing.

"Make no mistake, little sparrowkeet." Satisfaction rang out strong in his voice. "You may think you have lost your voice. But in seven days' time, when your sentence is commuted… I will teach you how to sing a beautiful new song." He turned and walked away, leaving me on the floor. The thrumming left my muscles. A bitter taste remained in my mouth.

At long last, I recognized the thrumming. It was something that only Aku could draw out of me. It was rage.

"Hikari?"

This voice was familiar. Father. My body did not react. There was no surge of joy, no desire for contact. Just the emptiness I had come to accept in my life.

Two sets of shuffling footsteps. Well, he's brought mother.

My parents settled to their knees in the dust before my prison cell. I looked at them, not really curious. Dad seemed to be okay: there were new hard lines around his face and his eyes were darker than before. No more blue sparkle. Just those hard blue ice chips that looked out with determination and hatred. I wondered, briefly, what he saw in my eyes. Were my golden eyes hardened into chips of amber? Hazy like the harvest moon behind the clouds?

The steady drip, drip, of water clued me in to the weather outside. Both of my parents were soaking wet—that marked the fifth straight day of rain. Before, I would have wanted to know whether it was a monsoon or simply a steady rain. Now I settled. Rain. The storms were getting worse.

The sun almost never shined for more than three days at a time. It was always one severe storm after another. No one could explain why the elements were so turned against us. It was not my place to wonder about such things, anyway.

I looked at my mother. Aiko's face stared back at me, aged just a little. Still those perfectly round doll's eyes, the soft skin, the long eyelashes, the dark hair. Even as I looked at her, her eyes looked right through me. Aku had mentioned that my mother went crazy. I saw the evidence for myself. She said nothing, acknowledged nothing. Mom could have been sitting in a sunny corner of our kitchen for all the awareness she was showing. It should have hurt me to see my mother like that. She had always been a wonderful woman, taking care of Aiko and myself until I was old enough to work a job. But my heart was empty, so I felt nothing.

"Hikari, we have come to talk to you about something."

I just stared at my dad. We? My mother did not count as a person anymore. She would not be discussing anything. And what could they want to tell me that I did not already know?

"Arisu has officially been declared deceased."

Arisu. Deceased. Those words should mean something. Then it clicked in my mind: Arisu was dead. Oh. But I already knew that. Just because the Chen-Li decided to make it official did not mean anything to me. Arisu had been gone for a long time. I couldn't think about her; I already had too much on my plate.

My lack of reaction worried my father into speaking further. "Makoto has not been back to town yet, honey."

Makoto. The word sent the dull remnants of passion through my system. It was not even enough to make my heart race.

"We didn't want you thinking that your friend had left you." I couldn't deal with this discussion anymore. I rocked backwards, away from my parents, and then walked to the side of my cell where I felt closest to the sun. In my weeks of imprisonment, three things had been constant. First, apathy and exhaustion. Second, temporary rage when Aku was around. Third, the pull of the sun. Even on rainy days I could feel it, calling to me with its energy.

There were many things that I did not care about.

I did not care about myself.

I did not care about jail.

I did not care about Empress Koori, or about my looming punishment.

But my punishment meant that I would be set free afterwards, with any luck. Free to be outside, and feel the sun on my skin again. In a world without Aiko, nothing else seemed to matter.

My parents left after a few moments of my silent distance. I should have felt bad. They had already lost one daughter, and my behavior was robbing them of a second. My father would soon be all alone to care for my mother. I was a selfish and terrible person. But I would be able to feel the sun. And that was all that mattered anymore.

A/N: Hi guys! I'm sorry for posting this on a Thursday, but I tried to upload it on Wednesday morning and the site was not giving me any love. Boo!

Tainted- Japanese? That sounds really cool. Even though you only know a little. I *love* world languages; they're so interesting! And this new layout is awesome, I agree! I'm really excited for the image feature (whenever that will be in full effect)

Dave and Bob- Well hi there! Thanks for reviewing ^_^ And for your wonderful words about this story, they really mean a lot to me! I hope that I will be seeing you again, whenever you next have a spare moment.

Remember, any questions that you have, I will do my best to answer unless they contain spoilers! Next week, everyone!