Post by Kohara Hi-to on Oct 18, 2013 15:13:14 GMT -5
You're a fool. A lone man admonished himself, unable to voice his protests, unable to shout or scream or anything into the darkness of the sizeable wooden hut he found himself seeking solace in. The irony of the situation was almost laughable; that he'd find himself here, in the rukongai, dying a slow but pitiful death when he was so close to home. So close to handing him in.
It made him sick to his stomach.
A sharp gasp filled the space of the wooden shack, and a clammy hand reached out to grab onto the closest thing it could find- a splintered and cracking wall board. It creaked and protested under the sudden weight, and with a final groan it gave way, breaking and taking the weak frame of a man with it. His stomach lurched as the vicious claws of nausea crawled up his throat, but he refused to be sick. The sharp snap of the wooden boards had already been enough- his cover was blown. It wouldn't be long now.
In our last moments in life, it is often said that your life flashes before your eyes. Like a film strip, replaying the most impactful events of your own personal memories for you to remember on your death bed, but the man never saw any of that. Instead, all he could feel were the dying flickers of his senses, reaching out, grasping, hoping for somebody to come and find him. A wandering Shinigami, a village local, anybody. Anybody but-
The door handle turned. His breath hitched, causing his already pounding heart to lurch into his throat and the sweat to bead above his brow anew. And yet there was still that naïve, hopeful part of him that hoped the real reason he found himself in the situation wasn't so frightening.
He so desperately hoped that very reason wasn't standing just outside that door.
But of course, even in our most dire hours our hopes are never answered, and when the door opened and cast a beam of sharp light across the dust cabin, he knew. He knew.
He was already dead. His heart just hadn't stopped beating yet.
"You keep running as if I'm going to strike you down at any second," Hi-to mused, and the door shut quietly behind him with a faint click, shrouding the room in low visibility once more. If anything it only served to keep the two hyper aware of each other, the sound of breathing, the creak of footsteps- it was all a pretence. The man knew he was going to die and yet the other still sought him out. It was infuriating and humiliating.
He knew better than to think the other would kill him with such an obvious assassination. He was too crafty for that, too sly. Kaido was a skill created to soothe and heal- not implant malignant diseases and destroy the nervous system. It was truly an acquired art. Even those who had been killed internally with poison would have their secrets revealed upon an autopsy, but to kill a being with their own cells...that was the secret. And Kohara Hi-to had a lot of secrets to hide.
"You work for the god damned Sixth," The man breathed, fingers clawing nervously at his clavicle, as if he might be able to reach beneath the skin there and relive the building tension. "You really think your Captain or subordinates won't notice what you're doing?" The words were spat out like poison, typical of a dying man needing to get the last word in. Hi-to had always found it odd how you could tell what a person was truly like only when in the face of death, and despite their namesake Shinigami were no different. And this man was a coward, clinging to his pride as if it was all he had left. He may have lost the battle but he refused to lose his dignity.
Hi-to made a sort of humming noise, non committal and completely unconcerned with the man's accusations. He'd been discovering how to use Kaido through unconventional means for a while now, but with no internal bleeding, blunt force trauma or even outside marks, it would appear nothing other than a natural cause of death. A heart attack, a stroke or aneurysm, or even cancer.
Nobody knew he could use Kaido at even the most basic level, and the last thing they would be thinking of this man was that he died from another's hand. They'd probably wonder though, but with the Third only capable of curing injury, they'd likely write it off as disease. It truly was a prize he'd found when he'd started practicing this art. Why the Third stopped at only healing was forever beyond him. It was a waste.
"You just couldn't keep your nose out of things that don't concern you, could you?" He could see the outline of Hi-to's shock of red hair as he moved around the cabin, his light weight almost noiseless across the moss eaten floor boards. Truth be told, he red head didn't need to make a lot of noise. The other was doing it for him, and a sudden sharp pain had him hitting the floor with his knees as violent shudders and coughs wracked his body.
"Humans call it a 'malignant disease'," Hi-to clarified, and the other could only see his captor's sandals from his writhing position on the floor, twisting and turning, trying vainly to open up his throat to simply breathe.
"Your cells malfunction, and begin eating your body from the inside out." Hi-to continued, lowering himself to a low squat to observe the fruits of his efforts. "They multiply until your nervous system is compromised and you die. It's normally a slow process, but Kaido is based originally upon speeding up cell growth for regenerating wounds. Outside factors won't be taken into account, even if the Third press for an autopsy."
In the end, Hi-to had placed himself along the opposite wall, seated comfortably on the dusty ground with a forearm propped up on his bent knee. This, of course, was his first time using Kaido as a means of assassination, and he marvelled in it's use. Even when his victim could no longer speak and the shivers slowly died down, he continued to watch him, mind reeling with the knowledge that perhaps, he'd just discovered a monster. In himself.
It seemed the perfect combination, working for the Sixth's authority while diverting attention away from his true abilities. Underestimation was a wholly underappreciated advantage to have, and the more and more he discovered, the less he found himself able to stop. Or rather, had been wholly unprepared for somebody finding him.
This man, from a division Hi-to never cared for, had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Technically what he'd seen hadn't been a crime. He'd been neck deep in an autopsy, the cut up Quincy open on a table between them, organs dissected and ligaments torn. But the seed had been planted, and he'd seen something that could lead to something else, and he couldn't leave knowing what he did.
And here they were. It had all started when Hi-to had grabbed his wrist, running an instantaneous biopsy and he could feel it probe his cells, and he could still remember the dropping feeling in his gut as it latched onto his flu like symptoms he'd been feeling for the better part of a week. All it had taken was a simple touch, a simple press of Hi-to's palm to the man's breastbone and they were running, starting a game of cat and mouse that inevitably brought them here. It didn't take a genius to figure out that the red head didn't want him knowing his personal, covert operations, but he hadn't stopped long enough to reach a peaceful conclusion through questions and answers.
Shunpo was their weapon for quite some time, him, trying to circle around long enough to open a senkaimon, and Hi-to to make sure he had him where he wanted him. In the end he'd lost that, but in his haste, he hadn't been able to reach Seireitei as he'd hoped.
Instead he'd found himself here, in the 2nd Rukongai district's outskirts, his body starting to fail him and only an abandoned shed for closure. But it was pointless, wasn't it? He knew the other was hot on his trail, knew he'd spew the information if he could.
The man finally died around 5 minutes later, eyes staring blankly into Hi-to's own as they glazed over in a grotesque haze.
It wasn't a pretty 5 minutes. The shallow noises of agony wailed quietly through the stale air between them, and Hi-to could only watch, his own body coming down from it's own adrenaline high: the thrill of the chase it seemed, was finally leaving him. It wasn't that he particularly liked having to kill the man, but the alternative was unacceptable. What surprised him though truly, was that he wasn't shaking, wasn't manic, or truly felt any remorse or panic over what had transpired here tonight. It had all happened so fast. A man had found what he shouldn't, and he'd done what he had to in order to survive. It was the natural way of things in their world.
There was no way they'd be able to link him to this. It was that comforting thought that brought him to his feet, releasing a slow breath and willing his shoulders to lose their natural lines of tension. He absent mindedly wished he could perform acupuncture on himself, rubbing the tense muscles in his biceps from where they'd stiffened up in the cold rain of the material world. He let those arms reach out slowly, brushing the steadily cooling body of his subordinate and reaching out with Reiatsu, probing, feeling for any trace of his own. There was nothing detectable. It seemed to join his own and fade with death, and with hindsight, he'd only had to infect one cell, but to infect him to this point had been quite a push, draining on his reserves and flooding the now corpse with his DNA.
It's over. It's done.
You assassinated an innocent man tonight. He could hear Hyperion's whisper caress his ears as if he was out here, folding his wings around him and smothering him with that should have been a guilty conscience, a sense of camaraderie. He felt neither, and nobody knew that as well as his blade did. But there was no mockery from the phoenix, only a state of fact, and Hi-to finally allowed himself a small huff breath that wasn't quite a laugh, nor a sigh of relief either.
"Yeah, I work for the Sixth." He murmured, confirming what the man had sneered earlier. "But you'd be surprised how much I've gotten my hands dirty while working for the justice Division."
*****
1827 words: 36 GP
