Chapter Text
Awareness sluggishly returned to Aoba. He twitched his body and rotated his eyes in their sockets, trying to get a bearing on his situation.
His hazy vision was awash with red and spots of black. He tried to stretch his muscles and failed, feeling as if a weight was pressing down on him, holding him in place.
Softness caressed his skin, and Aoba became suddenly very conscious of his nakedness. Satin sheets and a firm comforter were beneath him. For all his dulled sight and hearing, Aoba felt everything.
Sounds entered Aoba’s cognizance, and he began to notice clinking and shuffling, sounding muffled as if his ears were filled with cotton. A dull thud pounded into his eardrums, making his head throb with pain with each beat.
His vision refused to sharpen, so he was left adrift in a blurry world of color and darkness. His arms were laid straight at his side but they may as well have been amputated for all the use they were to Aoba right now. His muscles felt like jelly.
Where the hell am I?
Aoba thought back, tried to focus his dazed, foggy memory, and lights and pounding beats came to his mind.
The club. I followed Koujaku to the club. And then…
And then what? His most recent memories refused to rise from the murk that was Aoba’s brain.
The clinking stopped. Footsteps, impossibly quiet and light, approached him.
His view was filled by a horribly familiar face.
That’s right. Aoba remembered with a jolt. I met him outside the club.
He remembered speaking with the strange man, but still couldn’t recall how he had gone from outside the club to...wherever this was.
The blonde man kneeled next to the futon Aoba laid on, and turned the prone man’s head towards him.
“Ah, I see you’re awake. That’s good, I was worried I’d have to inject you with a little adrenaline, which I’d hate to do. Mixing dangerous chemicals is quite unsafe.”
Aoba tried to lunge for the man but barely managed to lift his head, which quickly thumped back onto the pillow under him.
“I wouldn’t bother trying that.” The man’s voice somehow slithered its way into Aoba’s mind, strangling him with fear. It unnerved him, making him wonder if this is what it felt like to be a victim of Scrap.
“It’s my own concoction running through your veins.”
Aoba opened his mouth, prepared to scream, to stop this man, to say anything, but was quickly silenced by a gag harshly stuffed between his lips. The man wrapped a length of, is that gauze, why gauze?, around his mouth, holding the wad of, what was likely, more gauze in his mouth.
Aoba’s jaw stretched painfully around the mass forced into his mouth. The cloth soaked up his saliva and made his tongue feel dry and itchy.
“I was warned about your unique abilities, Aoba-san.” The man smirked, but the expression didn’t touch his eyes, which continued to glitter with warmth and laughter. The look wouldn’t have been out of place on a father whose child had just done something naughty, but amusing.
“I don’t think I ever introduced myself to you, Aoba-san. I’m sorry, that was rude of me. My name is Ryuuhou. It’s truly a pleasure to meet you.”
The man’s, Ryuuhou’s, eyes danced with honest joy, and Aoba believed he was truly pleased to meet Aoba. Pleased to have him drugged and immobile on a bed at an unknown location.
“You have beautiful skin, Aoba-san. Not a single blemish. A smooth, white canvas.” Ryuuhou ran a hand across Aoba’s stomach as he spoke, sliding across his navel, thankfully avoiding his groin, and stopped after feeling the skin of his inner thighs.
“I believe…I’ll start here.”
Ryuuhou removed his hand from Aoba’s leg and leaned away from him, reaching to something outside of Aoba’s vision, and he had no strength to turn his head.
“I refined the drug inside of you for occasions such as this. When my canvases are not as willing as they should be to receive the gift I give them.”
What is this psycho talking about? Aoba thought desperately. He tried to move an arm, a finger, a single muscle, but none responded.
“I find it very sad that Midorijima seems to have lost much of my proud art. Electric needles are effective I suppose, and relatively painless if you wish to cater to such a thing, but it is not art.”
Ryuuhou’s hand returned to Aoba’s field of view, and he felt a spike of nausea rise in his gut. He was holding a needle; long, thin and stark white, that was threaded with a thick string. He also brought with him bowls of ink of many colors, and placed them at Aoba’s bedside.
“You see, it isn’t beautiful for there to be little or no pain. The person has no appreciation of the art upon their skin if they cannot feel it as it sinks into their body and stains them for eternity.”
Aoba felt helpless, weak, and hated the feeling. He wanted to scream, to move at all but could only lie back and choke on gauze and wait for Ryuuhou to begin his work.
He lifted the needle and dipped the string attached to it into a bowl filled with dark red ink. He let the excess drip off before plunging the string back in, repeating the process until the string had absorbed a sufficient amount of dye.
Just do it already, Aoba found himself thinking. The waiting has to be worse than the actual thing. He’d seen people getting tattoos at Mizuki’s parlor, and they came out of it no worse for wear. How much worse could this be?
Ryuuhou pinched the skin of Aoba’s thigh and pierced the needle through the surface. The initial stinging pain wasn’t bad until the needle continued to push under his skin, poking out again near his knee.
No welled up at the wound. Ryuuhou hadn’t pierced enough layers of skin to garner blood. Still, his thigh was wracked with unbelievable pain, worse than his headaches, worse than a broken bone.
Then Ryuuhou pulled the needle through, dragging the ink soaked thread underneath his skin.
It burned. Aoba’s throat throbbed with a need to scream but nothing came out except a choked gag. He tried to jerk his leg away, anything to get away from the pain and the man that was causing it, but his leg remained frustratingly unresponsive.
The end of the thread emerged from his skin, but the burn remained. It felt like a scorched wound that had burrowed beneath the surface. Still, the relief from the tugging and the scraping was close to ecstasy to Aoba.
The relief didn’t last long. Ryuuhou pinched a new bit of skin and reinserted the needle.
Again, Aoba felt the burning itch and the terrible roughness that felt like shards of glass dragging against his nerves. The underside of his skin that was already rubbed raw flared up when the needle and thread crossed it while creating a new line of ink.
The process continued. Aoba’s thigh was pinched and dyed until his leg felt like a quivering mess of useless, scorched flesh. Finally, finally, Ryuuhou pulled away and wiped at the sweat on his brow.
“I suppose that’s enough for the first session. I’ll let that ink sink in for a while before starting the second run. It will likely take four or five sessions for the ink to fully take. Then I’ll need to do the detail work. Isn’t this exciting, Aoba-san?”
Tears spilled from Aoba’s eyes.
~*~
The ‘detail work’ was worse, if that were even possible.
After the fourth pass with the needle and string and dye, Ryuuhou adopted a satisfied smile and declared the frame of the tattoo complete.
He’d also said the frame for the first tattoo was complete, and Aoba was again wracked with silenced, fearful sobs.
The details were added by a stick that smelled of wood. Ryuuhou covered the stick with the same dark red ink and rubbed it in colored sooty substance.
He inserted the needle where Aoba’s skin was dyed dark and rubbed raw, prodding the already sore wound and making Aoba shut his eyes tight and whimper, the only expressions of pain he could manifest.
The stick was twisted, prodded, and probed under Aoba’s flesh to create swirling, undoubtedly beautiful designs.
Aoba didn’t know if he’d been subjected to this for hours or days. The pain blurred his sense of time and everything else. His world was pain and nothing outside it seemed consequential.
He willed himself to pass out, and nearly did so in between ‘sessions.’ But the needle and the burning always returned to bring him back to reality.
He wanted to sleep for an eternity. He wanted to die. Anything to escape this world with nothing in it but pain, pain, pain.
After some time, it could have been five hours or five days for all Aoba knew, Ryuuhou pulled away and admired his finished product.
“I wish you could see yourself in this moment, Aoba-san. You are brilliantly beautiful, stained so radiantly and so wretched with pain.”
Aoba didn’t feel beautiful. He felt hollowed out and violated. He felt limp and useless. He hurt.
“Do you know what it is? Would you like to know?”
Aoba heard the elation in his voice. It was the same tone he used as he praised Aoba for the tears that streamed from his eyes and delighted in his pain.
“It’s an amaranth globe. Do you know what amaranth represents in the language of flowers?”
Aoba didn’t want to hear any more, didn’t want to know all the ways in which his body had been perverted and toyed with.
“It is a hearty, undying flower that continues to survive even in harsh conditions. It is a flower that speaks of unchanging friendship.”