Chapter Eight | Rime
Sitting across from a man bound to an indestructible, conjured chair brought with it strange feelings and questions. Confusion, because how on earth had Harry gotten here? His life was in shambles and pointed only towards an impassable fog, which was astounding considering the fact that it had already been directionless, yet somehow still clung to a pale imitation of sanity. Now? Well…
Excitement was another thing. The knowledge that before him was a puzzle to be cracked. Kijima Shiki. The name rolled off his tongue as though begging to be spat out, so unclean as to be unspeakable. It was a name no longer fit for man, instead a moniker for some macabre construct akin to a beast. A golem fashioned of dead flesh, great ragged chunks of it sewn together with catgut and lathered with tallow, rendered from whatever pitiful hunks of meat remained of the creature's victims.
It was a name that tasted of decay. Of poison and lies and a recklessness that had long since passed into the realm of insanity. It was a name tied to a soul so mired in blood that even its silhouette was twisted beyond recognition. Kijima Shiki was a monster, and Harry wanted to know if he was a monster who owed its creation to the CCG.
Interrogator.
Harry knew interrogators. A kind word for people that were anything but. Lestrange had been an interrogator, and for all her madness she only came out the more creative for it. She'd been known to keep people alive for weeks just for the sake of entertainment, whatever information Voldemort needed from them long since confessed. A madwoman she was, but because of that she knew exactly how to bring someone to the brink and slowly let them down from that bloodied precipice, only to yank them back up and inflict the most painful of sisyphean toils.
This man was no different. At least, the colour of his soul tasted of the selfsame rot that tainted Harry's palate when he had spoken Bellatrix's name aloud.
"Renervate."
Kijima's breathing hitched for a fraction of a second, and Harry could hear as his heart trotted along at a steadier beat. He rubbed his bindings together, no sign of the usual scratch of rope, not with said rope wrapped in charms.
"I know you're awake."
Two beady eyes flashed open, though they could hardly be called such. Those harsh, frigid things boring through Harry were more akin to marbles that had been smashed into a slab of raw beef. Kijima frowned as he looked throughout the tent, obviously confused by the eclectic choices of decoration magicals were so fond of.
Or maybe it was the stuffed dragon's head looming over Harry's shoulder. The Blacks had a knack for all things gaudy, but in this instance he was content to take full advantage of their bloodsoaked pastimes.
"Oh. That?" Jabbing a thumb over his shoulder, Harry smiled at the man. "My godfather's family nabbed that beautiful creature sometime back in the eighteenth century. Hebridean Black. They couldn't help themselves, seeing as they were the Black family and, well, you get the picture."
Waving a hand lackadaisically and crossing his legs, a lazy tut echoed from Harry's lips. "Enough about me. Tell me about yourself."
All Kijima did was glare.
Sighing, Harry pointed his wand at the man. "Please, it's a lot easier on both of us if you just talk."
The man snorted, his grotesque lips pulled upwards in what could just barely be recognized as a sneer. "There's nothing you can do to me, and you know it. Honestly, with a face like mine would you expect anything else?"
"Now, now…"
Again that unfamiliar, frigid confidence washed over Harry. His wand spun between his fingers with practiced ease, and Kijima couldn't help but watch.
"...you're awfully calm for a man who just laid eyes on a dragon for the first time in his life."
"A dragon!" Scoffing, Kijima shuffled in his seat, shoulders straining against his bindings to no avail. "Now I've heard it all."
"Yes. A dragon. And I-" Harry gestured lazily to himself. "-Am a wizard. Would you like to see a magic trick?"
Not giving the man a chance to respond, Harry conjured a mirror immediately beside himself. An elaborate, brass filigree'd mirror that had trundled straight past garish and into territory that could be best described as violently lurid. Kijima had barely a second to react before he was swiftly transfigured into a bulldog, the stitch-marked scar that split his face appearing as a strip of furless, reddened flesh, flanked on both sides by dense – yet no less short – coats of red and white.
The dog that was Kijima barked once. Twice. Three times, as its drooping, beady eyes widened to dramatic effect. It looked down at its paws, all but one of them stuck deadfast to the chair beneath it. It stared and it stared, dumbfounded, before letting out another bark – stricken with horror and confusion in equal measure.
Harry let the man wallow in his despair for a minute or so, watching as his legs flexed uselessly and one, solitary paw scratched against wood that, no matter how he tried, remained unmarked.
Another flick of the wrist and Kijima was returned to his normal, hideous self. He wore the same expression, a remarkable thing considering his rapid change in species, but that was neither here nor there. Harry had questions, and he wanted honest answers to them. Not the vague, confusing knot of psychosis that was legilimency.
Perception was everything, and wrapping your head around someone else's senses, emotions, their worldview – especially one belonging to a man as unfailingly cruel as Kijima – was so hilariously inefficient and downright brain melting that it could only be relegated to a last ditch effort. At best it would give Harry an undiluted taste of the man's thoughts and feelings, but sorting through it all while he was still wrestling with the question of his own existence would be an exercise in madness.
"So? How are you feeling? Still a skeptic?"
Kijima frowned in a way that made Harry look back with both discomfort and nostalgia on his memories of Moody. If everything in Mad-Eye's life that could go wrong, did go wrong, he imagined the horrifying amalgam in front of him would be the end result. A patchwork man that drank poison and breathed fire, and in his heart's stead lay a coil of thorns, each and every one of them a cruel, barbed thing that supped on blood and blood alone.
Past those eyes, those cruel eyes that had just a moment ago been boring their way through Harry with a confidence unmatched by any but the most crazed fanatics – past those eyes, Harry saw fear. In an instant he had torn Kijima's worldview apart and all but made himself into the man's own, personal god, with all the spite and malice such a creature would be known for. The difference in power between them could not be measured, with one trapped and as painfully mortal as any other living, breathing thing, and the other holding within one hand the means to unmake reality and fashion it anew.
"Tell me about the CCG."
Kijima's open mouth slammed shut, and the fight in him returned with muted vigor. He couldn't stop his gaze from flickering down every so often, lingering on the innocuous length of holly dangling from Harry's fingertips.
A miniature shower of sparks emanated from his wand, a bright yet no less deep red, identical to the vicious stain that would sweep like spilled ink across a ghoul's eyes.
"Shy? You don't strike me as a timid man, Kijima. You were so enthusiastic in that alley. Where's that fire gone?" Harry tapped his knee as he spoke, the laziest of smiles gracing his features. It was wry, barely there at all, and in its absence his malice could be found.
He detested the man in front of him. A torturer. A villain. A melting pot of the worst humanity had to offer. In Kijima, Harry could see all the wrongs that he had battled his entire life, until ten years ago when he had given up entirely, resigned to a directionless existence as a homeless wanderer, someone who preferred the fleeting company of strangers. People who he had forgotten the moment his eyes left theirs, faceless masses of flesh and bone, only another silhouette to be cast aside at the many, many crossroads his travels had taken him to.
Magic spoke to him the longer he stared at the man. It told him one thing.
Kijima was hate personified. He had no justification for his hatred. He had no fear. Within him was the drive of an opportunist, one allowed to take out his hate on those considered less than animals. He didn't hate ghouls in particular, he had no drive to see them stricken from the earth as Mado did. No, this man saw them as a means to an end, with that end being his own personal entertainment.
Kijima hated the world, and so long as he could inflict cruelty upon a thinking, feeling thing, he would be content.
Harry didn't know how he knew this, instead soaking in those wordless whispers as he took in the very essence of the man. Like Yoshimura, he could somehow perceive his being - the sensation like what Harry imagined someone with synesthesia would experience. Indescribable, to have one sense draw on another with such intensity. Because how could he describe the taste of the setting sun? How could he put into words the scent of birdsong?
Harry couldn't. The only thing he could do was listen.
"What does an interrogator's job entail? And please, do try and answer. It's a pain tampering with someone's mind and I'd rather not go through all the trouble."
The glare Harry received was vicious, but all the same it was resigned. He'd won.
"Mostly torture, but that suits me just fine," Kijima stated, his newfound grin bloodthirsty, though it lacked the fervor he'd had in the alley. "We study them. Ghouls. Got hundreds of them locked up like a zoo, every single one of them trapped behind glass and doses to the gills. You can think of them as informants, and I'm the person who encourages them to tell us what we need to know."
"Is your work common knowledge in the CCG?"
"Yeah. It's not clean work, so it's real bastards like me that take to it, but nothing is clean when it comes to ghouls." Turning his head, Kijima spat on the ground. "No one gets up the ranks without thumb screws or throat slitting. Anyone who says otherwise is a coward, a liar, or both."
"So you have carte blanche?"
"As long as I don't kill them then I can do whatever the hell I want with them. It's practically therapeutic, having a punching bag that actually bleeds."
Harry nodded, unsurprised. "Where is this prison?"
"Why should I tell you? I'm dead already, aren't I?"
"Because you'd be saving yourself a lot of pain," was Harry's truthful reply, slow and measured. "Trust me when I say that the sensation of someone tearing through your mind is second only to a spell purpose-built for torture."
A grin split Kijima's face. "Now you've got me interested."
Sighing, Harry raised his wand, a frigid nonchalance taking over him. He could almost feel as his heart froze over, crackling hoarfrost suffusing his being. A puff of mist trickled from between his lips, almost imperceptible as it faded into nothingness.
"Legilimens."
With the force of a bullet punching through bone, Harry speared Kijima's mind with neither flair nor finesse. A scream split the air, and with hooked claws he drew the location of the prison from Kijima's mind with a ferocious efficiency born of strength, and not the dexterity that coloured Snape's magic when he had inflicted the same pain upon Harry. The word Cochlea echoed in his mind, a spiral that funneled to the bedrock that had been hidden in plain sight, nestled in the heart of Tokyo.
The prison was immense, the vague images of it gleaned from Kijima's thoughts barely holding a candle to what must be a facility twice as large as Azkaban itself, an already nightmarish monolith of obsidian and basalt that stood stalwart against the crashing sea. And where Azkaban advertised its strength with sheer walls and the persistent miasma that hung over that blackened stone, a miasma that could only come with the aberrations known as dementors – Cochlea was a quiet dominance, an unwavering insidiousness in its secrecy.
It was a haven for the powerful, the gulags and detention centres of every military might packed into a spool of thread that, the deeper you journeyed within, the greater of unnamed horrors you would find. Donato Porpora – the ghost that tortured Amon's conscience – thought of Cochlea as home. He was treated quite well in fact, given just enough meat to be content, and offered plenty in the way of reading so long as he continued to aid the investigators as they hunted increasingly more dangerous ghouls.
Harry withdrew from Kijima's mind with a shake of the head, stunned by the clinical depravity of the entire facility. It was methodical and unfeeling in only the way a machine could be, paying no heed to the extended torture of those it held prisoner so long as they were a valuable source of information or entertainment. And entertainment was its purpose for Misaka, the warden of Cochlea, someone who inspired fear in even Kijima.
He stood, looking down at Kijima as thin sheets of ice shattered along his joints, falling to the carpeted floor with a hollow crackle. Fog billowed from Harry's lips, and he shook his head, pulling back on the magic that threatened to pour off him as though a flash flood. It seemed that whatever strange elemental magic ghouls were sometimes known for had already settled in his veins.
Could Rize control ice? Or was this all him?
Harry wanted to reach out and plunge his fingers down Kijima's throat. He wanted to fill the man with ice and watch him shatter from the inside out. His lip curled, teeth bared in unadulterated fury, and as mist pushed from between those teeth in sharp gusts, synced with his every breath, he watched as Kijima writhed from the aftershocks of legilimency conducted with the same grace as an icepick lobotomy.
Gripping Kijima by the chin, he wrested his face up, staring into his eyes. Harry could feel the man's flesh bruise beneath his fingers, the bone under that began to creak. "Interrogator," he hissed. "A state sanctioned torturer. Does it pay well, what you do? Do you find your job gratifying? You strike me as the kind of man that wakes up at seven with an eager heart, excited to head to work and crack a few skulls before lunch comes around. Oh…" Tsking, Harry shook his head. "I don't know why I'm guessing. I know you love it. You love it so much that if you hadn't become an investigator you would have been locked away a long, long time ago."
Letting go of his chin, Harry crouched, head cocked to the side. "I'm going to take a look at this prison myself. Your memories of it are too… muddled. So much red in a white-walled labyrinth, it must mean you and your coworkers are very busy."
"What are you?"
"What am I?" He looked himself over, arms spread. "I'm still figuring that out myself. In fact, I think I'll have a good picture of who I am once I've seen the CCG, warts and all."
Humming, Harry squinted at Kijima, at the way sweat dripped down his scarred face, or the manic, animalistic fear in his eyes. He wondered if that was the same look that Kijima's 'informants' wore when he took to them with a chainsaw, watching in glee as their limbs grew back only to tear through them again, and again, and again.
"I was told a short while ago that I looked like someone who couldn't stand injustice." He looked away, frowning at the magic that surrounded him. It could be seen in the shimmering trim of the carpet, or a painting against the far wall that had never once spoken a word to Harry, instead choosing to glare at him any time he passed it by – the half-blood who killed the greatest and worst thing to ever happen to the Black family. Now though, the woman in the frame looked at Harry with a glint in her eye. Something curious, yet no less perturbed.
"It's true. Or, it once was. For a long time I couldn't bring myself to care about the world around me, about the people who lived in it. But now… now I'm starting to feel that anger again. I'm remembering what it is to see people like you inflict suffering on the world and feel like I need to do something about it." Sighing, Harry cast his gaze to the ceiling, that bizarre pitch of fabric that spread further and wider than any tent ever could. It was magic, plain and simple, and yet for so long it had felt completely and utterly mundane. "But I'm a different person now. I'll never be Harry. Not again. Not the way people remember me."
Standing, looming over Kijima, Harry gripped the top of his head with a clawed hand, fingers digging into his bare scalp. "I'm starting to think I'm the kind of person that won't shy away from violence." He leaned in, looking the man in the eye. "What kind of person do you think I am?"
Kijima opened his mouth to speak but no words came out, instead a mist rolled outwards, unfurling like a carpet. The capillaries in his eyes popped as each and every cell in his body began to expand, bursting open one by one. Slowly but surely his skin began to grow stiff, an inky black inexorably swelling across his face as a wave would the ocean. He froze from the inside out, brain swelling against the confines of his skull and his lungs captured by frost, its jagged edges scoring the gangrenous flesh it branched off of.
Standing back, Harry looked at the statue he had created, trapped forever in a rictus of agony. He took a deep breath, glancing to his right to lock eyes with the painting that had been his silent detractor the moment he'd left Britain. The woman painted upon its canvas studied him with a new light, something that wasn't accusatory. No, this look was pensive. Thoughtful. Impressed.
He didn't move, not until the figure gave him a curt nod and turned away, disappearing from the frame to some unknown place. Grimmauld, presumably, but Harry had no way of knowing.
Turning back to Kijima's corpse, Harry's nose twitched with distaste. "I think your friends might be worried about you," he muttered, visions of blood-stained tile and the muted hum of a hundred screaming prisoners echoing in his mind. "I'll put you back where you belong."