Chapter Text
Kagami’s had his hands tied for the last three days.
His arms have gone completely numb, twisted back too far, his wrists lashed to his elbows. Spit has soaked into the gag tied around his head, a ball of fabric shoved in between his teeth and pushing his tongue back far enough that he can’t swallow without almost choking. His nose is plugged on one side and every time he breathes, snot shoots back to block his airways.
Three days now: that’s how long they’ve been walking, or rather, dragging him along through the woods, holding him by the upper arms and practically throwing him forward as he fights them at every step.
It takes a lot of stamina to put up a struggle for three straight days, so by day three, Kagami’s worn out enough to finally think past being infuriated and his impulsive attempts to escape by brute force.
He hasn’t helped his situation by being this difficult, honestly. They’ve taken basically everything away that could’ve been of use to him if he’d actually cooperated and schemed up a more subtle escape plan. All his worldly goods had been left behind in his home, no knife, no money, no food, no coat. They’d even taken his shoes after he’d kicked them too many times on the first day, having refused to stop thrashing. Now he almost wishes he had stopped, even if it would’ve meant throwing away his dignity. At least he would’ve had something on his feet to protect them from the rocks and branches they trudge through as they travel the long, winding, and sometimes practically untraversable path through the woods.
Three days. He hasn’t stopped struggling in three days.
His captors seem relieved when his thrashing and enraged screams die down at long last. Kagami hangs his head, glaring at the ground, at his dirty sore feet, and keeps pace as they lead him on.
He looks around them for any landmarks he can try to stake in his mind, up into the treetops at the sky, the leaves glowing yellow and emerald as the sun shines down through them, only a spattering of light making its way through the canopy all the way to the forest floor. The light dappling Kagami’s face makes him squint. Every direction looks the same. Tall thick tree trunks, cedar and beech, towering oaks, a forest floor of dirt and dead leaves, sticks, and fallen logs. He stares around him, but it’s too late in their journey for him to try to remember their path so he can find his way back.
A distant bird cries through the early afternoon, the gentle breeze making the trees above him whisper.
He’s not sure where they’re going exactly. They’ve made quite a bit of distance through the wilds outside the village limits, and when they reach the last outpost, they start climbing.
They walk practically all day, every day. They make camp each night when the sun has set, lay out a mat to sleep on and make a firepit out of stones and branches, and they tie Kagami to the base of a tree while they eat. There are only two men with him, so it’s not impossible to think that he might’ve been able to fight them off at full strength, but his chances went down with each passing day as he grew tired and hungry.
His next thought is to make an escape at night, disappear and make it as far from them as he can in the darkness, but they’re onto him, and smartly switch off every few hours and keep watch while the other sleeps. Kagami’s tried to pull his hands out of his ropes, squirm and contort himself or grab something with his foot to try and cut the rope with, but if they catch him trying, they rough him up.
He’s always been an incredibly slow and stubborn learner.
Nose blowing blood bubbles every time he breathes, Kagami looks up at the starry sky, head laid back against a tree trunk, and thinks of home. It looks the same as it does from his window.
He’s fought so much that they stay alert and don’t take their eyes off him for a moment, especially after his first couple attempts to break away from them and run blindly into the wilderness. Who knows what his plan was there; maybe outrun them, however impossible that would be with his arms tied, then hide until they give up looking for him—
They don’t even leave him alone or untie him so he can shit in the woods. Having another guy hold your dick for you so you can pee because your hands are tied is just another humiliation in this already very humiliating situation.
Kagami stands there silently, clamping his teeth tight on the ball of cloth in his mouth, and ignores the breath in his ear, glares at the ground and the puddle of pee mud between his feet, tries to think about something other than where he is and what’s happening—
“I bet you like that, don’t you.”
Kagami thrashes and screams in rage for the rest of the day. They don’t even hike his pants back up for him.
By day four, the hunger has really set in, and he’s completely exhausted himself struggling. His stomach has caved in and his entire body feels feeble and shaky, black spots clouding his vision when he moves too quickly, the head rush nearly enough to make him pass out.
They haven’t taken his gag off to feed him, but to make him drink, they dunk his head in a creek until he’s thrashing and floundering. When he comes up, he can’t even cough with the gag in, forced to choke and flail on dry land until he can eject the water from his nose enough to breathe. Kagami tosses furiously, dragged on, a stumbling dripping mess. He glares viciously, eyes leaking as he sucks on the soaked fabric jammed in his mouth, drawing the water out so he can get a drink.
It’s just as well that they won’t take the gag off, because the first thing Kagami would probably do is spit at those fuckers, start cursing them and their families and their kids and their mothers— holler up a storm, scream for help— god, help—
His body’s beginning to fail him. He feels so weak, limbs shaking, vision blurry. He’s never even gone close to this long without eating before, can’t remember if he’s even skipped more than one meal in a row. It probably hadn’t been very smart to fight them this hard up to now. He should have saved his energy, tried to stay alert so he could see where he was being taken in the hopes of being able to find his way back again later when he made his escape. He should have bided his time, but his hatred and rage burnt hot and he’d fought and fought until his body gave out on him and all it can do anymore is barely remain standing and take one wobbling step after another, going where they lead him without protest.
He thinks he knows where they’re going now. He’s seen through bare patches between the tree branches, out into the distant sky. They’re facing the mountain ridges that crest the horizon.
The breeze cools his face. Insects sing in the trees, scattering in front of him. When he looks up, the wings of the dragonflies glinting in the sun look like jewels, zipping above him. He wonders how long they’ve been walking. He doesn’t remember such beautiful sights on the first days. He’d been fighting tooth and nail, not paying attention to a thing but getting free. When he’s too tired to fight anymore, the forest is quiet, sun shining through the trees as always, oblivious to his plight.
He thinks he loved this woods once, when he was a kid. He can see that mountain range from his house. Home seems so far away now.
Day five is spent climbing. And day six. On the seventh night, when they stop and tie him to a tree trunk, they take his gag off. Dried spit and snot has encrusted it to his face so tightly that it feels like they rip his skin off when they pull it away. Kagami coughs and heaves as the wad of cloth is yanked out of his throat, saliva flooding his mouth—
Before he can open up to yell, one of them jams some mashed-up food in his mouth, and the other plugs his nose so he’ll swallow. He thinks it’s cornbread and deer jerky. He doesn’t spit it out, choking it down with watering eyes. He’ll need the energy for the next part of the hike and they don’t want to have to carry him. He’s already starting to really flag and they’d had to spend most of the day prodding him onward when he stumbled, getting too weak to walk.
They’re still going up then. He wonders if they’ll make it to the top.
He has a lot of time to think now that he’s too bone tired to do anything but what they tell him. He wonders what they’re going to do to him once they get wherever they’re going. Maybe just leave him. He’s lost anyway, helpless on his own in a sense.
Or are they going to kill him—? Cut his throat. Disembowel him so birds will come pick his innards. Smash his hands and feet with rocks so that he can’t walk and can’t catch food when they leave, dooming him to slow starvation. Any number of unspeakable things. There’s no one out here to stop them from doing whatever they want to him when they get there. There’s no one to stop them killing him. Oddly, the idea doesn’t frighten him. It should, but his heart is so numbed by exhaustion that what’s coming doesn’t fully phase him.
By that thread of logic, there’s nothing stopping them from ending him now, so there was little point in walking him all the way out here first if that had been the plan all along. Especially considering how much he’d infuriated them in the first few days, kicking them in the knee caps, flailing and thrashing, making them practically carry him and wrestle him bodily into the woods. They could’ve killed him then if that was what they’d come here to do. They must not be supposed to kill him, but what are they supposed to do? Where are they taking him?
Are they going to drop him on the mountainside, lash him to a tree and leave him to die of exposure? Cut his leg and wait for a wolf or a bear to come eat him alive? Roll a rock onto his back and let him suffocate slowly as his ribs collapse? He understood bringing him far away from town, getting put out into some remote location, but it couldn’t be as simple as taking him too far to find his way home and then leaving him be, could it? How will they finish the job.
His sentence is technically just exile, but he figured a certain someone didn’t want him coming back—
Kagami’s blood burns, dark and hateful, a simmering sense of bitterness that flares hot in an instant. They’d better hope he never comes back.
Two more days and they’ve made it a good ways up. The forest has become peppered with boulders that must have rolled down from the cliffside. He can see snow on the high peak above them as they trudge ever higher. His feet are aching and tender from bracing them on the bed of needles lacing the trunks of the black pines that dot the hills.
On the tenth day, they’re almost to the top. They’ve left the tree cover, and the direct sunlight is so intense, reflecting off the bleached rocks and the ice cap glimmering in the distance that he has to squint his eyes almost shut. The slope is unforgiving and steep, huge rocks winking out from the sand and gravel and the short stubby grass that’s managed to take root. There’s snow on an adjacent peak, but the air that ruffles Kagami’s hair is still comfortably warm, the sun beating on his burnt shoulders and neck.
They climb and climb until at last they reach a flat area to rest. It’s too steep for him to try to run without risking slipping and breaking himself when he falls and slams into a tree trunk far below, so they let go of his arms for the first time in what felt like forever.
Kagami turns back and takes a step. He stares out over the skyline, the valley below, face slackening in wonder.
They’ve climbed so high. He can see farther than he thinks he’s ever seen before. From his house, he’d always thought the snowy mountain ridge cupping the eastern skyline was the perfect view, but he hadn’t considered the view looking down. It’s as though he can see the whole world. The forest is a glittering sea of glowing green, beaming in the sun, the individual treetops impossible to pick apart from so far away. The towns are a sprawling mess of tan and red dots, a tiny smudge of roofs and roads. He might even see the ocean beyond that, a sparkling strip of crystal blue along the horizon.
What amazes him is that he can see the clouds moving, puffy white just above him, blown by the gentle wind. If he sits perfectly still long enough and watches, he can see them changing ever so slightly, taking new shape. When he looks down upon the valley, the large billowing shadows cast by the clouds above creep slowly over the hillside, turning the trees below a dark emerald green. The sun follows behind when they pass over.
The view is breathtaking, and for a moment, just a moment, his heart is still and his raging mind is quiet, held in a trance by its beauty.
He’s so enamored that he doesn’t react when footsteps approach him from the side again, when his arm is taken in a rough grip, when he’s made to tear his eyes away from what he realizes a moment later will be his last look at the world he knows.
What happens next makes his stomach drop.
He’s turned towards the mountain wall, towards the pile of stones lining the flat area they’d stopped to rest at, and sees that they have moved the large stones aside together, underneath which was a very old, very dirty set of what looked to be a crude set of cellar doors, set into the slope on a slant. The iron rings are rusted, and one door is already open and waiting.
One of them is holding him by the arm, but Kagami just stands there and stares, it’s like he can’t react, watching as the other man heaves the second door up, yanking it on hinges that are practically rusted into place. It falls with a heavy slam, revealing a gaping black expanse, the inside of the mountain, so dark that it’s as if they’ve laid a black cloth over the opening, an impenetrable abyss.
And it’s then he realizes his fate as he’s heaved up by his arms and thrown towards the mouth of the cave. He screams, kicks his legs out to brace against the sides of the doorway. He can see in now. There’s another boy in the cavern below, watching from inside an iron cage, squinting up at the light. Kagami’s body, weak and trembling from hunger a moment ago, gets a charge of adrenaline, fear like he’s never experienced giving him strength past what his muscles should be capable of. He fights going through those doors like it’s the furnace of hell.
He hangs onto the doorframe for as long as he can as they try to push him through, stares down into that black pit, a dark hole for him to die in, but they hit and punch him until he finally balls up and then they throw him through the hole like a sack of potatoes.
He hits the ground hard, tumbling and flipping as he bumps his way down a little rocky slope and onto the cold unforgiving stone floor. For a moment, he can only lay there and groan, processing the painful impact. He’d managed not to whack his head, but his sides and arms and hips feel bashed to bits.
Kagami scrambles up as quick as he can, rolling himself onto his front and struggling to get his knees under him. It’s hard with his arms tied back, forcing him to flail and kick awkwardly. Eyes wide, he stares up at the square of light cutting into the abyss. One of the men crawls in after him, slow and careful on his trek down, sliding over the loose stones. The other boy just lays there in his cage, looking bored and hateful.
He manages to push himself up, breathing in and out through his nose to ready himself, hard puffs of air sucked back and forth in quick succession as the man approaches him, footsteps echoing in the dark. Kagami winds up, preparing to be struck, and flinches when a sharp rock is tossed towards him, clattering on the ground in front of him. Then a rough hand is wrangling him by the hair, wrenching his head forward and pulling at the knot nestled there to take off his gag.
Kagami spits and bites the second he does and gets hit in the side of the head with a coiled fist. He’s sent sprawling backwards, legs flailing up as he goes sliding across the gritty cave floor. It takes him several long seconds to right himself, panting, ears ringing, disoriented by the blow. He can see the guy climbing back up through blurry vision, can see their legs as the two of them stand around and heave the doors up.
No, he thinks helplessly, but can’t find the breath to speak, shout, scream at them not to close it. The other boy has sat up to watch, but his expression doesn’t change, a blank unphased mask as the doors creak on their hinges. He just stares up into the square of light above them as it shrinks for a moment, and then is suddenly clapped out completely as the doors fall into place with a bang—
Kagami heaves for breath, blood pounding in his ears, encased in utter darkness in an instant, listens as he hears the drag and slam of heavy stones they tow onto the doors from the outside, piling them up and barricading them in. It seems to go on forever.
And then it stops.
Kagami sits there on his ass, head starting to spin with a sense of panic, a flicker of dread in his gut building into an overwhelming tidal wave. He can’t see a thing, not even to tell for sure which way is up. He can’t see and he can’t hear anything over his own raspy breathing. As much as he strains his ears, all that he can make out is a gaping void, the rush and roar of his pulse—
How is he going to get out of here. He’s going to die here in a pit. Rot underground and waste away till he’s just bones. Just dust. Kagami felt his blood boil in an instant, fury overtaking the absolutely paralyzing sense of helplessness. That fucker meant for him to die here, just because—
Before he knows it, he’s screaming.
He roars and screeches, kicking out and thrashing around on the ground in his rage. His cries echo in the blackness, bouncing back and striking him from all sides, almost too loud to comprehend. He doesn’t know how long he lays there and tosses, straining at his bonds and howling. It rings in his ears, his screams of rage battering the walls and amplifying until they seem almost animal-like— the violent and anguished wail of a beast.
He flails and rolls until he’s too tired to struggle anymore with his arms tied, scraping and bruising himself up on the hard ground, hollering and throwing himself around in the dark. He pulls himself up and just sits there and screams as loud as he can, body collapsing forward, the cave rattling with his furious shriek.
He stops abruptly. Maybe because it was just too loud to bear anymore. Maybe because he knows this is getting him nowhere. Maybe he’d just screamed himself out.
It takes a long time to die down, echoing back and forth, ringing in the open space. He sits there panting lightly, stomach sore and throat screamed raw. The reverberations are rattling his bones even as they grow quieter, vibrating in his chest. It doesn’t even sound like his own scream anymore. He sits there and listens to the ghostly echo of his howling and wailing, listens till it disappears.
And then absolute silence falls.
At first he sits motionless in the darkness, and the anger having left him, fear starts to take hold. For a long time he doesn’t move an inch, heart pounding, feeling almost as though the incredible weight of the blackness is crushing the air out of his lungs. Being completely unable to see or hear is an incredibly terrifying and vulnerable experience.
As he sits there, breath frozen in his mouth, he eventually manages to calm himself enough to think straight. Don’t— don’t give up just yet. He has to keep his head. He’ll need it to get out of here— he is gonna’ get out, he can’t accept anything else. Not yet.
He closes his eyes even though he can’t see fucking shit and forces himself to take full breaths, fill his lungs to the top and then hold it for a moment before letting it out slow. He clenches his bound hands and makes himself sit still and breathe until the panicked drum of blood in his ears starts to subside ever so gradually. Think about anything but where he is, anything but how hopeless this situation surely is, let himself believe that there’s a way out, if he can just think to find it. There’s always a way.
Eventually, sitting there in the silence, he can think past the misery of his situation and can make out the distant drip of water, a soft echo that makes him think of an underground lake, condensation gathering on a stone ceiling and dripping from stalactites hanging like icicles. The air is still and bottomless, and it’s this utter stillness that makes him wonder how deep the cave goes.
Soon he realizes that it isn’t completely black in here either. His eyes eventually adjust and can make out the little shafts of light shining down into the depths through small holes and cracks in the ceiling. He can actually see quite fine, at least in here, well enough to make out that he’s sitting on the floor of a high-ceilinged cavern. Large boulders crop up near where the closed-off mouth of the cave slopes up, but the other walls are smooth, made of grey and brown stone.
It takes some time to shimmy himself over to the sharp rock he’d been left, manage to get it into his hand and then contort himself enough that he can try to pluck at the ropes with the pointy tip of the rock. Pressing himself back against a boulder, he struggles and rubs his bonds on the rough edge. Holding the position is tiring, and the rock slips from his palm a lot, clattering to the ground. He has to stop frequently to get his breath and curses in frustration, a hissed whisper.
At last, arms trembling from the effort, he manages to grind away a strand of the rope. He can feel the frayed edge if he twists his hand. He yanks and pulls, almost working himself up into a frenzy again as he struggles to free his arms. When a rope snaps suddenly, he just sits in surprise for a moment as his shoulders flop forward, laying utterly limp for a horrifying moment.
He excitedly tries to untangle his wrists and bring his hands in front of him, shakes his bonds off and stretches and rotates his arm in the socket, feels at his face, practically slapping himself as his hands move clumsily, heavy and uncoordinated as the blood rushes back into them. He balls his hands into fists, unballs them and rubs at the creased sore skin where the rope had bit in. Free, finally, in some small way—
He’s free to wander once he stumbles to his feet, arms flailing stupidly to steady himself when he sways. The first thing he does is walk to the cave mouth and try to crawl up to the doors, scrambling over the gravel, rocks clattering down the slope as he uses his feet to shove himself up.
Gritting his teeth, he puts his hands up above him, feels along the seam of the door, tentatively tries to insert his fingers and feel outside. He braces his shoulder against the wood and pushes his weight against it, tries to steady his feet under him, setting loose a hail of pebbles, skittering down beneath him as he slams his back on the doors and tries to shift them. He doesn’t try for long, probably because he’d already known he wasn’t going to be able to get out this way. It’s like pushing against a boulder.
He sits there and pants, feeling dazed this time instead of angry, or even hopeless, and then carefully slides his way back down, the gravel digging into the soles of his feet.
Catching his breath, Kagami looks up above him, squints at the little pinholes of light and then stares around the cavern. He pushes his hair back with his dirty palm and coughs once when he breathes in a lungful of dust. He’s coated in the stuff. He looks up at the ceiling again and then flinches, eyes watering. He digs his hand into the corner of his eye when a piece of dirt pelts him. Must’ve been all the screaming dropping silt from the ceiling.
He pulls his shirt up over his nose and tries to cough as quietly as he can. The way everything echoes is eerie and unsettling, and the unearthly stillness pulls the breath from his lungs, makes a normally noisy and heavy-handed boy sit quietly, curse into his palms in a whisper.
This isn’t the only room. Now that he looks, he can see the gaping blackness towards the back of the cavern where it tapers off and leads on, the ceiling lowering to maybe a little higher than the ceiling in his home.
‘There’s tunnels—’ he thinks with a sort of detached numbness as he gets up and shuffles towards the dark hole in the wall, drawn to it like a portal to an endless abyss. He stares into the blackness and feels his heart zipping back and forth, his stomach fluttering.
He can hear running water. At some point he’ll have to go in there and look for it if he wants to survive a little longer in here. He swallows, feeling weak on his feet.
He’s got no idea what he can possibly find to eat down here, and knows he wasn’t meant to find anything. Exile or not, in being thrown down here, he’s been sentenced to a slow death by starvation.
… Can he eat… rocks?
It’s as this tentative and half-delirious thought flits through his mind that he turns, and is almost startled by the sight of the cage.
He’d forgotten it was there for a moment. Forgotten he wasn’t alone.
It’s made of metal of some kind, steel, maybe iron. The bars are thick, the gaps between them large enough to stick his arm through perhaps, but certainly not wide enough for his head. It’s not exactly a tiny enclosure, quite large for a cage, appropriate for a sizable dog, but it’s small for the boy crammed inside it.
Kagami can see that he can sit up straight, but not stand. He can lay down, but not fully stretch out his legs in any direction. He looks chafed about that, shifting every so often on his back, knees up, clearly uncomfortable having to squash his very long and lanky body into such a tight space.
When he sees Kagami watching, he stops, and very casually puts his arms behind his head and props one foot up on his knee. He’d almost look pleased to be lounging there, lazy as a bone, if not for the sour disinterested look he’s shooting Kagami.
Approaching a ways and stopping short a few yards, Kagami calls out to him. “Hey,” he greets.
He’s definitely another young adult, which maybe shouldn’t make Kagami feel the degree of instant kinship that he does. There’s a feeling of being in the same boat, another kid trapped down here together, facing the same struggles. It’s possible that he’s even the same age as Kagami.
It’s not that Kagami has much of a plan of what to do next or is in a rush to get somewhere. Plus, he feels pretty bad for the guy. He looks so pitiful in there. Who knows how long he’d been down here before Kagami got tossed in, sitting completely alone, hour after hour.
He’s been in here a while, Kagami can tell that much. He smells even worse up close.
Who knows how trustworthy a complete stranger is, especially one who’d ended up with the same fate as Kagami, if not a worse one. The punishment is meant to fit the crime, after all. He’s got no idea who this person is or what they’ve done and what they’re capable of, and who knows how naive it makes Kagami to assume they can trust each other just because they’re both equally fucked, but even a stubborn ass like him who likes to do everything on his own knows that it’ll be better for both of them if they put their heads together to figure a way to survive and eventually escape—
He doesn’t answer.
Kagami doesn’t get any closer, but he squats down to his level, peering in at him.
“Hey,” he says a little louder. “You. Who are you?” Folding his arms across his knees, he furrows his brow and squints in at him. His hair and eyes are dark. His clothes are pretty dirty, and his skin is brown.
Mostly what stands out to him is that this kid has really long toes. They’re like monkey toes almost.
“Where are we, do you know?” Kagami tries, confused with being stared at so intently, yet completely ignored. Another long pause. The silence feels almost petulant. “How long have you been here?”
The kid’s eyes are open and he’s staring right at Kagami, but his lips don’t even twitch.
His dark gaze hits him like a strike to the chest. He’s felt it once before.
On his first hunt at fourteen, Kagami had seen a wolf on the hill. Met its eyes and felt all the hair raise on his neck before it disappeared into the pines.
This guy’s eyes hit him the same. It’s like looking into the soul of a beast.
“I’m Kagami Taiga.” Kagami was starting to feel uneasy, a little bit miffed at the open scorn in his face. He’s making the first move here, trying to talk to him, and he’s just going to sit there like a lump and goggle at him?
“Maybe you know me?” he wonders. Most everyone did, by the end of that uproar back home.
“You from Seirin country?”
Wolf Eyes doesn’t say anything. He just stares at him impassively. Kagami purses his lips and feels his temper flicker. Is he stupid or something? Can he not understand Kagami? Maybe he’s not from Seirin. Maybe he speaks something else. Maybe he might even be deaf; he hadn’t made a peep earlier when Kagami had thrown his very long and very loud tantrum— which, honestly he feels a little embarrassed thinking of now, it having completely slipped his mind that he had an audience.
“What,” Kagami mutters. “Hey, what’s your problem,” he demands.
Monkey-Toe Shit-Breath just keeps staring, and it’s then that Kagami realizes what rubs him so wrong about this guy, because his upper lip lifts ever so slightly at the corner in an ugly sneer, his dark eyes piercing into Kagami’s, hooded and lazy.
He’s not staring. He’s leering his ass off.
“You got somethin’a’ say?” Kagami demands, voice starting to color with heat, echoing sharply and rattling in his ears.
Jerkface holds eye contact with him for a long time, but he says nothing, and after another dirty look, he shifts suddenly, turning over to look out the other side of the cage, cushioning his head on his folded arm. His monkey toes pick idly at the bars.
Kagami sits there and stares for a moment, shocked into silence at the rude dismissal. His blood burns hot in an instant, and he gets to his feet. “Fine then,” he snaps, overcome with a tremendous urge to kick the guy’s cage as hard as he can.
He’d do it too, but they took his shoes away on day one. It feels so long ago now.
‘Starve alone,’ Kagami thinks furiously, head full of steam. ‘See if I care.’
Huffing like an angry bull, he storms off blindly a few steps down the black tunnel, needing to throw his hands out in front of him almost immediately when visibility drops from dim to pitch blackness.
His pride won’t let him turn back even though his knees are going to start knocking together at any moment. For a second he stands there in the dark, listening to the far-off sounds of running water, and then puts one hand out in front of him, a little ways from his face, and runs the other along the cave wall, skirting it closely.
There won’t be any wood down here. It’s not as if trees could grow underground with no sun, but this would leave him with no wood for a fire, not that he knew how to make one anyway, but a torch would’ve been nice. Not to mention how much he’d like to warm his chilled fingertips and toes.
He explores as far as he dares without a torch of any kind. Kagami figures that it was about midday when he was thrown in, so he guesses that there’s a few hours of light left before nightfall would turn the cave utterly black. As things stand, he can’t see his hand in front of him, no matter how close he brings it to his nose. There’s no difference whether his eyes are closed or not. He breathes through his mouth, wet and raspy, heavy panting coming quick and forced as he shuffles his feet forward, sliding them in front of him one at a time to feel for obstacles.
In the blackness, his imagination conjures up huge hulking beasts, cave hermits, sinkholes, and skeletons. At any moment he’s sure his hand is going to touch something repulsive, or that he will find himself trapped somehow, unable to find his way back to the first cavern. If he could light a torch, then maybe venturing this far wouldn’t feel so scary.
His hand scrabbles for the wall and meets nothing suddenly, and a powerful wave of raw fright hits him like a club. He plants his feet and flails for an anchor point, slaps his palm to a jutting ridge of rock, cool and damp against his clammy flesh. A shuddery breath passes his lips.
His eyes are open wide, straining for even a pinprick of light, the reflection of a pinprick, anything he can make out, but it’s nothing but black static. He can’t even see himself. He should probably turn back before he gets lost. He can come back with a torch.
Kagami stays there and rests until he can calm his rocketing heart. Takes another few steps, feels around to try to figure the reason he’d lost the wall so suddenly, and finds that the tunnel took a sharp bend, maybe a fork of some kind.
He walks slowly and cautiously, hand flush to the wall, gathering condensation on his fingertips as he drags it along. His steps are starting to echo ever so slightly, slapping against the damp stone, and every so often he stops to listen to the distant drip— drip—
He follows the right wall with his hand and doesn’t leave it, inching through the dark with only his own breathing as company. It’s awful, the pit of utter dread in his gut. He’s shaking all over. It might be the scariest thing he’s ever done.
He’ll go back, he tells himself when he feels he can’t go forward, when he starts to tremble and practically wheeze through a chest and gut knotted up too tight to breathe. He’ll go back soon. Just a little farther.
“Ah!” Kagami yelps, the cry echoing down the corridor in front of him, ricocheting into the distance until it almost sounds like someone is calling out to him. He slaps a hand to the top of his head. Something cold had struck him. His hand comes away wet. A drop from the cave ceiling.
“Fucking shit,” he breathes. The dark is getting to him. It’d be so easy to go mad down here.
He’ll just have to get out before that happens.
There’s no reason not to keep going except for fear and time. He’d planned to get back to the main cavern before nightfall, but he’s not sure how long he’s been down here anymore, and it’s not as though he can get lost if he sticks to the same wall and then goes back in the same way. So Kagami keeps going, shaky step after shaky step, walking blind.
Actually…
Kagami stops, squinting. He can hear the running water again, a beautiful hollow echo. He thinks he’s going towards it. And what’s more is that he can actually see. No colors, no features or anything, nothing useful, but when he holds out his arm and waves it, he can tell something’s moving in front of him— a subtle shift from utter darkness to a slightly less impenetrable black, able to differentiate the variating shades.
‘Is that…? Hang on, where’s that light coming from?’
He makes his way forward with renewed energy and a little spark of hope. Maybe there’s another cave pocket up ahead where light peeks through. He might’ve even come upon another exit.
As Kagami walks, the staticky blackness starts to gradually lift, revealing the shadowy outline of the tunnel walls, the grey stone of the path under his feet, hollows in the wall and the ceiling, dark holes that seem to Kagami like the great eyes of some massive skull.
Just as he’s excitedly thinking that he’s able to make out his feet beneath him, Kagami rounds a bend and lets his hand fall away from the wall as the tunnel opens up. He’s found another part of the cave with a lot of sunlight, and it’s easy to see why.
He stands there and squints, feeling like a bat that’s come out in the day, shielding his eyes as he tries to get a look at the ceiling to the cavern. There’s a large opening far, far above him.
The walls of this part of the cave aren’t sloped, they curve, arcing up towards the hole like a dome, so there’s no way for him to climb up there. He vaguely wonders if he could use his rope bonds to create a grappling hook with a stone or something and try to throw it out the hole and see if he can anchor it on something and pull himself out. Maybe he can pick up and carry stones to this room and stack them in a pile, see if he can make the pile tall enough to get to the top. He wonders how long that would take, if he could last that long without starving first.
For now though, he stands there in the light, staring up at the hole, a round awkward shape, and enjoys the light, even though his eyes hurt like he’s staring directly into the sun. He can see the sky. A cloud passes overhead, and he can tell the wind is blowing, because he can make out a bit of grass swaying. He doesn’t know how far he’d made it, walking underground, because he doesn’t remember seeing long grass on his climb up the mountainside.
When he at last tears his eyes from the beautiful, beautiful sight, a glimpse of the outside world, he surveys the cavern he’s found. Small to medium sized boulders of grey rock like the cave floor ring the walls. It looks like the rubble left behind from an avalanche or a rockslide, shattered pieces of stone. The pieces towards the edges look sharp and rough, but the stones closer to the center of the cavern, beneath the hole, these are worn smooth, and now that Kagami’s looking, he can see that moss has grown on the rocks beneath, clinging there in the patch of sun, a soft warm carpet, the ideal place to rest his weary head.
What he realizes next is that he’s come to part of the underground river. Well, he says river, but as he walks over to inspect it, the water doesn’t even come to his ankles, little more than a sheen of water cutting through the ground, just enough to trickle steadily over the rockface and seep off into the blackness down another tunnel.
He stumbles to it and scrambles to put his hands in it, tries to gather some into his cupped palms and lift it to his face. It seems clear, and he’s thirsty enough to risk how sick it will make him if it’s not. He slurps the moisture out of his palms, and when that’s not enough, he sticks his face down onto the ground. He’s so thirsty that he sucks at the ground like a dog from a puddle, tongue out to slurp up the flow of water off the bare rock, chokes and coughs as his nose goes just under the shallow surface.
When he's knelt there until his knees ache and his belly is sloshing with water, he splashes some of it up onto his dirty arms because he might as well. His face too, and his neck and chest. He splashes handfuls onto his face to cool his head, flinging his sopping hair around, gasping and snorting when droplets of water run and drip from his bangs to his nostrils.
When he ceases drinking and bathing, the sky above has gone purple and gold. He drags his aching bones beneath the patch of dusk and rests there on the patch of moss. This will be the perfect cavern for him to live in while he’s here— and if he can’t escape, it’s the perfect place to stay as he dies.
Kagami stares up above him, throat tightening, and thinks of home.
And for a second, he feels utter despair as the thought strikes him that he will never, never get back home. He’ll die here and leave a pile of starving bones. Absolute hopelessness crashes through him like a wave on the beach, but it recedes in time.
He takes a deep breath to ease the ache and shifts on the rocks, the thin layer of moss only serving as the most meager comfort. He finds he’s so exhausted after so many days spent fighting every second, staying up all hours of the night in the woods to try and wait for the perfect time to escape, he’s so bone-tired that the cold hard floor isn’t enough to keep his eyes from drooping. He’s too tired even to think of tomorrow’s tasks, what his ultimate fate will be if he fails to forage enough to get by.
He does pull his knees up as much as he can and wraps his arms inside the hollow he creates there, keeping them close to his middle. As night falls, his prison of stone feels cold. The sun has gone down completely and the burnt sky has lost its glow, but it isn’t as dark as he thought it would be. He can still see fairly well, laying in a ring of silver moonlight within a dark shell.
As he lays there and listens to the distant dripping, Kagami stares above him for as long as his eyes will stay open.
He can see the stars, little cold pinpricks shining down through the purple night. As utterly indifferent to his fate as he would be to that of a speck of dust.