70: it's been too long*

それは長すぎる


She stands frozen, staring down at the man secured to the metal chair by manacles of steel to keep him locked in place.

The room is white. Plain. They are all white, plain. Every room looks like a mental asylum holding cell, but nothing is soft and padded to stop the insane from hurting themselves. Everything is all hard edges. The man, with his dark hair, is the sole spot of colour in the emptiness of the room.

Him, and she.

Tufts of dark brown fur matching the hair on his head curves over the top of his ear. He breathes heavily through small sharp teeth that belong more to a deadly animal than a man in his humanoid form.

He wears the criterion So Fu prisoner uniform. White pants, white shirt, and white shoes with no laces, to eliminate the possibility of prisoners committing suicide by hanging themselves with their shoelaces. She thinks it might have happened before, to draw So Fu's attention to the fact of its possibility. So Fu learn from experiencing, from anticipating the passing of the most obscure futures and preparing for any eventuality.

Trainees like she used to be wear the same shoes. The same white shirt. The same white pants.

His clothes should be white, but they are stained brown with dried blood. She wonders how much blood he has lost. There is hardly a spot of white left on the uniform. He is tall, and wiry, but after being kept on a barely-sustainable diet for the last two weeks, he is now long and skinny. A twig that was once a strong, sturdy branch, reduced to breaking bone that crumbles to dust at a single touch.

Electrodes are fixed firmly in place at his temples, and one is stuck on his pulse at his neck. The white wires of the conductors coil down, trailing along the slippery floor before doubling to the back of his chair, where a small machine is strapped to it. Her eyes follow the wires to the machine, then back to the man manacled to the chair.

She manages to suppress the jerk of surprise when the door behind her shuts with an echoing click behind her, Yamato leaving her to her mission. The prisoner does not stir at the sound of the door closing. She doesn't know if it is sleep or unconsciousness that keeps him oblivious to the sounds of the small white world around him.

She recalls the smirk on Yamato's face before he turned away. He thinks she can't do this. She knows he knows that this reminds her of his own little session with her that resulted in white hair, broken wrists, bloody eyes. Her lips twist.

Who would it have been better to kill Akira for what he did to her, or Yamato for breaking her?

Yamato will be watching her. He is in charge of missions like this. He will be watching her to make sure she goes through with her mission.

Her mission. Her mission. Her mission.

The words bounce back and forth in the caged walls of her skull. Even Kuniumi cannot stop them, does not try to. Kuniumi knows it is futile to try.

This is not a mission she is supposed to do. This mission is not supposed to have landed in the pile of folders that hold all the information about all the pending missions she is to be sent to. She is not supposed to receive torture missions. Those go to Yamato's trainees, and she is not one of his.

Kill yes. Torture no.

She doesn't know why there is a difference. She does not know why killing is easier than torture. When she kills she can do it remotely. From a safe, far distance. She does not need to see the eyes, hear the voice, feel the blood. When she kills she can do it without associating a face to a name, a past to a face, a story to a past.

But torture is different. Torture is about finding that story, that face, that past, that name.

It doesn't make sense to her why that tiny fact makes all the difference.

She steps forward. Her feet patter on the slippery white floor as she takes another. Another. Another. In ten short strides she comes to stand before the man, the Ayakashi, the Tanuki, brought in from his containment cell for torture. He does not look up at her. She decides that he is unconscious.

There is nothing to be had from this. Torture is not an effective interrogation method. Waterboarding, electrocution, blood-letting, beating. Anyone will say anything to make the pain stop, be it lie or truth, and it is hard to determine which of either is right without having to waste resources trying to ascertain the truth. But Yamato said that she should

"Remember," a smooth voice speaks in her ear, riding the crackling wavelengths of the subtle earpiece she wears hidden as pearl earrings. She does not know who is on the other end of the line, only that it is a man. The fact of who speaks to her through the comm device makes no difference. All the Agents are the same, monotonous in their rigid loyalty to So Fu. "You are to act like you want answers out of it. Trick it into thinking it is being interrogated."

It. It.

It is a man. It is an Ayakashi. It bled for So Fu's hatred of the Ayakashi world. Labelling him as 'it' is a pathetic try at dehumanizing him so that they feel nothing when they break him to pieces.

Is that why they dressed you like this? Kuniumi asks. To make him think you belong to some official organization?

Kuniumi refers to the dark maroon pencil skirt she wears, the white blouse under a neat, smart navy-blue little jacket, the black heels that make her look taller, older, more mature than the seventeen-year-old girl she is. To conceal her white hair is a black wig with long ringlets that are too shiny to be natural.

She feels like she's a little kid play-dressing in her mother's clothes. Except her mother – she's dead.

On her nose is perched a pair of slim, black-and-white glasses. The lenses are cameras so that those who assigned her this mission can monitor her through her own eyes, see what she sees.

But they will never see the blood that coats her hands, that makes it hard to walk on the pretty wooden floor of the brand-new apartment she was given as part of her promotion to Level 1 Agent. She is the only one who can see the blood. That is how she knows that her mind isn't whole, isn't unbroken, isn't enough to pass for sane.

Sometimes the blood weeps, dripping to her feet. Sometimes she slips on the blood she steps on. Sometimes she wants to fall and knock her head on something hard enough to kill her, but she never does. Her reflexes have been honed to perfection. Even without coercion So Fu keeps her alive to do their bidding.

Maybe.

Smart. Any who come searching for him will not think to look behind the cracks and glance at the shadows So Fu leaves in its wake.

She turns on her heel and goes over to the small machine, keeping a watchful eye on the Tanuki. He does not move at the sound of her walking about. He remains prone in his chair, hunched over; breathing trying to around the blood she can hear sloshing in his lungs, seeping in through the holes his broken ribs have punctured in them. Until they're fixed, reset in their places, the wounds won't heal.

She stares at the various buttons and circuits of the machine, all the plain colours and lines that meld together to create the power-source for electricity that will fry the Tanuki's nerves and muscles and body tissue if he tries to not say anything. All it will take is the slightest pressure to the red button clasped tight in her left hand, given to her by Yamato before he exited the room. In her right hand is a pad and pen, more to allude to her imagined status as an 'official agent' on 'official business' for an 'official governmental body' than anything else.

She lifts the paper, clicks the pen, and scribbles on it. She makes sure that she looks through the glasses at the paper.

オンになっていますか

"Yes, it is on." The voice crackles in again. "Press the button to activate the electric shock whenever it does not give you a satisfactory answer."

何が満足のいく答えとみなされますか

"A good answer from it will be anything to do with the contract it flew in from Okinawa to make with Fujikage Media House. What it says in response to your questions does not matter. We already have all the answers we need."

実際の尋問がない場合、なぜこれが起こるのですか

"It tried to escape yesterday. This is its punishment. Beyond that is none of your concern."

That explains his ribs, his lungs, the blood. She presses her lips tight together in irritation. They want and order her to kill and torture for them, yet they don't give her enough to go on, enough to know why she must do this. All she has on this Tanuki is his general information.

Name: Kahori Saeki

Race: Japanese, Tanuki

Age: thirty-two

Weight: seventy-eight kilograms

Height: one hundred and eighty-seven centimetres

Occupation: building contractor

Basic minimums that do not tell her what his role is in providing for his Clan, why and how he was captured, what connection he has with Fujikage Media House, and why any of it why he is important enough to So Fu that they found and took him in.

Because So Fu is not a world like Ayakashi are. There are not enough Agents to go around picking off any Hengen they meet on the streets. So Fu is smart they go after those Hengen who matter, not low-level fish who barely make a ripple in the water.

That is what they do. Feed with little bits of information, just enough to keep you curious and wanting more.

She makes a little grunting sound at the back of her throat in acknowledgement of Kuniumi's words, just quiet enough that the microphones covering this room do not pick the sound up. Her hand lifts to brush over the faint, bumpy ridges of the scar on the back of her neck. Every mark of injury she has ever received since she made her choice has healed, but this one was done before that. Before she made her choice and the change started on her body. Right when she first came to So Fu. Right after her first attempt to escape that ended in blood spilled over a white floor as punishment.

Planted just beneath the skin is her kill chip.

She can feel its tiny, electric currents thrumming with cybernetic life, ready to blow her head to bits if she intentionally makes the wrong move, or forcibly subdue her if she tries to kill herself. The electric humming never ceases. It is the unheard that follows her into her waking nightmares, in her black dreams, stalking her and reminding her of its poisonous threat whenever she finds herself alone in her white world.

She taps her finger against her nape once, twice. There is a little bump there.

She drops her hand to her side, staring contemplatively at the trapped Tanuki. His teeth are sharp enough to tear through skin, muscle, right down to bone. His claws are long enough to permanently maim, to puncture through lung and heart. He is weak now, but his anger and hurt will give him strength.

If only he was free.

What are you thinking? Kuniumi asks, stirring restlessly against the sudden wall she throws up to cage Kuniumi in, away from her thoughts.

Her lips twist again, pulling back over teeth. She looks savage, inhuman, capable of ripping out a man's throat with her bare teeth. She pushes the glasses up to rest in the artificial curls of her black wig. In her mind's eye she is not looking at the Tanuki, but down at the body bag that held the small corpse of Mizushima Theia, adopted daughter of Mizushima Kichi and Nishio.

The Tengu man and woman she killed in Rikuto's place to save his life.

The Doctor always requests that dead Hengen bodies be delivered back to him. He always wants one alive. It sickens her to think that the child once known as Theia has been kept prisoner by the Doctor. She doesn't know what he did to her. She doesn't know what he does to any of those brought back to him alive by Agents. All she knows is that three days ago she was assigned corpse-disposal duties, and it was Theia's body she was supposed to send to the incinerator.

But she wasn't able to do it. She couldn't simply throw in her body just like that, with the snap of So Fu's fingers that had been dictating her every move for two and a half years. After having her parents shot right in front of her eyes, after being through whatever the Doctor had done to her, Theia deserved better than an incinerator.

Pai did the only thing she could.

She took the body away, away from the building full of So Fu Agents, like a hive. She burned Theia's body on a pyre she suffered dozens of scratches on her hands to build, and scattered the ashes to the wind over the forest outside the city. She would have prayed for the little girl's spirit be delivered safely to her parents, but she didn't. She has no right to pray after all she has done.

She doesn't even know if there would be anyone listening if she did pray.

She swallows thickly when bile rises up in the back of her throat, tearing her attention away from the little girl's cold dead body on the pyre as the flames licked up her prisoner's uniform, dirtied beyond anything that could be considered a shade of white.

You always know what I am thinking.

"Momozono-san, put the glasses back on."

You are blocking us out. Kuniumi is agitated, shaking in anxiety, touching the walls building between them with her searching, invisible fingers. What are you planning? Why won't you let us see?

Why? She snaps back cruelly, her heart so broken and bloodied and bruised that she wants to get someone angry enough that they beat her black and blue so that she has any other pain to think about other than the beating of her heart. Why are you so worried? Don't you trust me?

No. She replies bluntly.

Aw, she growls. I'm hurt.

"Momozono-san, put the glasses back on now."

You have changed. Killing the Mizushima's was your final straw. You can no longer be trusted with yourself.

There is truth in that, truth she cannot deny. Maybe that is why she has been given a torture mission to carry out now. She has been taking unnecessary and dangerous risks in the last four missions since the Mizushima's. Maybe So Fu has noticed. Maybe they realize enough to pull her back now before she dies on a mission. They cannot afford to lose Agents. The only reason she has not died yet is because of Kuniumi.

For that, she hates Kuniumi.

For that, she is grateful to Kuniumi.

Tell us what you want, Kuniumi murmurs soothingly. Ice dribbles down her spine, a frigid breath of winter wind blowing across her cheeks. We'll give it to you. Do you want to not hurt? We'll take the pain away. Keep us here; don't push us out, Bibari.

Leave me to my pain, Kuniumi. She replies slowly, gulping as starts writing on the paper again. She can feel Kuniumi suddenly recoil from her, as if hearing her say such a thing is not something she ever imagined happening. Leave my pain to me.

メガネが面倒です。注文通りにします。

There is a lengthy pause as she waits for an answer. She continues to stare at the Tanuki seated before her, idly taking in the coarse texture of his hair, the way fur lines his nape before disappearing down beneath the hem of his shirt. Even as she does that, in her mind she adds on to the wall blocking Kuniumi from seeing her thoughts, her intentions.

It is not long before she cannot hear Kuniumi's voice.

She would do this all the time, just for the sake of some peace and quiet in her own mind, if it didn't mentally drain her so much. Already she feels herself weakening. It is becoming hard to stand without her legs wobbling. Her arms are leaden weights at her side, her legs shake, knees knocking, but she stoically fights against the abnormal exhaustion. She needs to keep awake long enough for her plan to follow through. If she faints for no obvious reason she will be taken to the Doctor for testing.

He will poke, and prod, and tear through her until he finds out every little secret she holds dear, few as they remain. But she can't let him find out about Kuniumi. If he does, if he realizes who Kuniumi really is, what she can do with the black power Kuniumi lets seep into her, he will never let them go. If So Fu ever finds out what she and Kuniumi are together, everything will end.

"Fine." A curt answer finally comes through the earpiece. "You are permitted to keep the glasses off. But be warned not to try anything out of order. There are security cameras in the room. You are being watched."

I am always watched.

She nods. She stretches out her hand and drops the pen and paper to fall on the floor. It strikes the white surface, a loud clattering sound. She watches the Tanuki jerk slightly at the sound. A strange, hesitantly expectant sensation curls in her stomach as the chains of his manacles rattle when he raises his head, staring in confusion around him with eyes marked by death, tears of blood from open cuts drying on his gaunt cheeks.

Good.

He is awake.

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