[To Hayame, the pain and the screams might last for three hours, for three days, for three weeks... she loses all sense of time, only able to focus on a single second at a time, surviving that one second without giving the demon what he... No, once the bit had been shoved into her mouth she lost the ability to hold back her cries with a closed, grit jaw, and once his shadows began to tug her damaged optic nerve out of the scar tissue she lost the ability to hold back the natural pain response of a mortal body, tears hot and shameful springing to her eye.
To her eyes. "Sebastian Michaelis", "Gabrial Lactance", whatever his true fucking name was... He got exactly what he wanted.
But it isn't actually three hours, or three days, or three weeks. Set begins to search... but when Hayame loses her desperate battle over her next foe, the poison (drug) the demon stabs into her body with a last little smirk and a mockingly sweet sweet dreams, the entire mountain goes dark. The sky is starless, moonless. The snow storm dies without even a whimper of a howl. Everything is silent. Everything is still. There is no resistance to Set's search, because there is no one there. No one except for the humiliated, violated fragment of her soul that he managed to claw free with a curse bestowed by a goddess of peace to help a husband understand the damage he has wrought.
As Hayame('s body) is dragged mindfully through Kowloon, through Springstar in the dead of night in a careful way that will leave no evidence at all that she had viciously fought against her restraints and what had been done to her... that fragment quivers in Set's arms. Without conscience, without true existence apart from the whole it can do little else, born from pain and and pain alone, but it is there with him in the dark of the caves, filled with the sting of the needle, the burn of the scalpel, the indignity of her capture, the panic of helplessness beneath the bindings, and the sadistic reminder at the end that she will never be allowed to die. She will only lose everything.
... The caves stay dark for a long time.
But then the fragment that had been a part of her pain begins to struggle to be free, to heed the call to rejoin the whole that it had come from. Even if it may be comforted, being not-alone among the cries of other woman suffering, women who were allowed to cry... It yearns to drag itself sickly and weak through the tunnels, deeper, deeper, and deeper still...
And if Set takes it where it wishes to go... then he has his "guide", one that will take him through the confusing paths and rocky terrain into the deepest recesses of the mountain where Hayame curls in a silent, shame-filled heap, her face hidden in the clutch of her hands and the rest of the world shut away. ... But the god of war hasn't been "the rest of the world" since the dryad had bound them.
Perhaps, in her despair, she has forgotten.
Or perhaps, in the wake of a demon's manipulative, exposing whispers, she has come to doubt every bond that she has ever made, filled with bitterness and new distrust for those who could not or would not rescue her from ambush and pain. ... Perhaps it hadn't taken much encouragement at all for her to start to think that Set would hear who her "opponent" had been...
buckles up!!!!
To her eyes. "Sebastian Michaelis", "Gabrial Lactance", whatever his true fucking name was... He got exactly what he wanted.
But it isn't actually three hours, or three days, or three weeks. Set begins to search... but when Hayame loses her desperate battle over her next foe, the poison (drug) the demon stabs into her body with a last little smirk and a mockingly sweet sweet dreams, the entire mountain goes dark. The sky is starless, moonless. The snow storm dies without even a whimper of a howl. Everything is silent. Everything is still. There is no resistance to Set's search, because there is no one there. No one except for the humiliated, violated fragment of her soul that he managed to claw free with a curse bestowed by a goddess of peace to help a husband understand the damage he has wrought.
As Hayame('s body) is dragged mindfully through Kowloon, through Springstar in the dead of night in a careful way that will leave no evidence at all that she had viciously fought against her restraints and what had been done to her... that fragment quivers in Set's arms. Without conscience, without true existence apart from the whole it can do little else, born from pain and and pain alone, but it is there with him in the dark of the caves, filled with the sting of the needle, the burn of the scalpel, the indignity of her capture, the panic of helplessness beneath the bindings, and the sadistic reminder at the end that she will never be allowed to die. She will only lose everything.
... The caves stay dark for a long time.
But then the fragment that had been a part of her pain begins to struggle to be free, to heed the call to rejoin the whole that it had come from. Even if it may be comforted, being not-alone among the cries of other woman suffering, women who were allowed to cry... It yearns to drag itself sickly and weak through the tunnels, deeper, deeper, and deeper still...
And if Set takes it where it wishes to go... then he has his "guide", one that will take him through the confusing paths and rocky terrain into the deepest recesses of the mountain where Hayame curls in a silent, shame-filled heap, her face hidden in the clutch of her hands and the rest of the world shut away. ... But the god of war hasn't been "the rest of the world" since the dryad had bound them.
Perhaps, in her despair, she has forgotten.
Or perhaps, in the wake of a demon's manipulative, exposing whispers, she has come to doubt every bond that she has ever made, filled with bitterness and new distrust for those who could not or would not rescue her from ambush and pain. ... Perhaps it hadn't taken much encouragement at all for her to start to think that Set would hear who her "opponent" had been...
And then Set wouldn't come.]