Warnings: Some very explicit handling of body parts that should not be handled unless not doing so would result in death. And blood. Lots of blood. And death. Lots of death.

If stars had souls, she mused, they would be silent, sharp things. They would chill the way ice chilled when already-numbed fingers gripped a chunk underwater. They would burn the way skin burned when flesh had already frozen until it knew not how to freeze further.

Souls of fire flared and threatened, waved warningly and snapped at too-close reaches. Souls of water wove and pushed back, grabbed and dragged and filled trespassing lungs. Earth roared full and hollow, rumbled and crushed and ground apart, wind whistled and howled, gently caressed and barreled through and viciously tore and shredded. And lightning screamed violence, temperamental and glancing, furious and piercing and entirely devastating. All the souls she knew were hungry and violent and utterly, utterly lethal.

But stars- stars merely watched. Silent, eternal. Reassuring, in a sense, and yet rankling in another.

She knew the touch of the other souls- had touched them with her own two hands, had snuffed out a number that her masters kept a count of, had even created a few, weak little things that had been snatched away and poked and prodded and mauled until they’d dispersed in flimsy, aching wisps of agony. Star souls, she supposed, might simply be those of greater beings. Even she could tell that those that grasped and clung at her, at the world around her, were nothing but the refuse. Bottom-feeders, scum. Insects and vermin, vultures and leeches. Certainly none of them could possibly own a star soul. Besides, they too were creatures of flesh and blood and death.

Or perhaps star souls didn’t exist at all. Perhaps they were mere light. Perhaps the closest there was to a star soul was something touched by the stars’ light. She’d never seen anything star-touched before. The forest was gilded by them at night, but lost the next morning. Then again, she supposed she’d probably seen little of the world, too little to make such a judgement. The ever-expanding tunnels and the strictly watched borders of the facility’s grounds told her so.

If she had to compare them to what she had seen, though, she supposed that, perhaps, the strange, blood-covered, still-bleeding man that had been shoved into a corner of her enclosure might do. His hair certainly glistened as if so, and never was lost to even the lethargic, fetid torchlight that sputtered weakly whenever the handlers made their rounds.

Like the stars, he did nothing but watch- except his watching was selective in nature. He watched the handlers, never responding to anything said or done to him. He watched the other cells, far away on the parallel sides of the large expanse of flat, cold stone that served as the main location of her routine subjugation, watched the thick darkness from which chains and emaciated limbs occasionally poked out when the handlers brought dim torches to the eternal darkness.

He watched her.

He watched what black shapes he could make out of her own chains and emaciated limbs. He watched the way she’d give in to discomfort every few hours and shift the slightest millimeter before returning to statue-stillness once more. He watched the way the handlers would occasionally pass over her by when dropping by to ensure he was alive and bestow a few crumbs of stale rations and rotten something to keep him that way. He watched the way they’d push her own meagre meals to her with a pole, the way she’d slowly, painfully stretch out her neck towards the shallow, barely-not empty, reeking bowls and painstakingly lick and scrape the bottom clean, dry tongue and unnaturally long teeth flashing.

(Though she’d never been taught the meaning of the word- and there’d never have been any reason to feel it before in the face of her masters, her owners, in all its pointlessness- something foreign and instinctive curled up and cringed in humiliation inside her at the recognition of what kind of image she must make to the stranger.)

It was the second time they passed over her when doling out their portions of scraps that he approached her for the first time. He’d pushed himself up from his position on the floor by the bars of her enclosure and padded over slowly, surprisingly nimble for all the time he’d spent on the ground. Crossing the twenty or so feet of open ground, he’d barely hesitated before cautiously placing a foot down into the territory of the dark seal inked into the cold stone floor, and then another, and another.

It didn’t respond, of course- it was drawn to contain, rather than keep out, and was solely synchronized to her chakra signature. For him to step into its area of effect was something that took guts, though, she could acknowledge that. Being in the range of the seal meant being in range of her. The handlers never dared to do so. Not for a long time now, and not without at least three different forms of self-insurance.

She’d watched him directly for once, eyes slitted. Her eyes had a tendency to glow from the pattern her chakra was forced to flow through her meridians in her shut-down cycle, and while the intimidation factor was usually appreciated, she hadn’t fully opened her eyes since the stranger had first been deposited in her enclosure. No need to inform someone dangerous enough to need the containment measures her enclosure afforded exactly where her head was, not when they were stuck in the same damnable cage together for the foreseeable future, and not when she couldn’t move. Her abilities of sensing were sufficient to keep a decent watch on him, but that was the extent of her abilities in self defense in her current state.

The stranger had come to a halt just an arm’s length away. Unhurriedly, he’d lowered himself down into a crouch, popping joints belying the previous fluidity of his movements, and then just as unhurriedly extended an arm towards her.

She’d silently bared her teeth, tilting them up to let the barest shreds of light catch and slip over twin upper rows of triple cuspids and bicuspids-

-and paused. Blinked.

The moldy crust of bread didn’t disappear.

A voice hoarse from disuse but still surprisingly smooth broke the thick silence that always blanketed the empty space when not filled with pain and fear and death. She might have flinched from the suddenness, she imagined vacantly, if she had not lost the instinct long ago.

“Sorry. It’s not much, but I imagine you need it more than I do.”

Allowing her eyes to open fully, she stared at the stranger with his hand in her face and a flickered smile on his own blatantly. He gave no sign of disconcertion towards blazing gold and purple rings, merely lifted the offending limb an inch higher, and inch closer, as if to make it easier for her to reach.

This stranger- was strange. The first words out of his mouth had been to her.

Had been an apology. Like he thought she was an existence important enough to have an opinion of him that he cared about. Like she was an existence capable of independent thought in the first place.

She’d never been formally taught language in any way beyond commands, most of which didn’t even need her comprehension in the first place, given her command seal. She was no fool, though. She’d come to comprehend the tones and fluctuations her handlers used, the difference between a word and a scream, a meaningless noise and a meaningful one, if only out of survival necessity. She’d certainly never spoken herself- she was not permitted. She was talked at, never to. It simply was not how the world worked.

And yet this man had. He’d looked at her, made meaningful sounds at her, and she- what? What was she supposed to do?

The crust bobbed, enticing, up, down, steadied.

She looked at the strange man.

He looked back, unwavering, unhostile. A sliver of star-silver struggled to outline a stray strand over his forehead.

She’d played this game far too many a time with a bored guard. But, perhaps…

Slowly, ever so slowly, she dipped her head lower, outstretched her neck towards flattened palm, bearer of a morsel of relief, and painstakingly licked up every crumb, dry tongue and unnaturally long teeth flashing as she just as painstakingly ensured they not break skin, even as she deliberately traced dangerous ivory in warning over calloused skin.

The stranger flashed surprisingly large canines himself when she finished, somehow warm and entirely devoid of the vaguestly malicious intention.

Inconceivable.

She drew back, retracting her neck from such a vulnerable exposure more out of uncertainty than wariness. She did not understand this stranger. He was not afraid of her. Granted, sometimes the occasional small animal she was sicced on unwittingly stared back at her in the moments before she ended its existence. Humans, however, were generally not so unwitting, and much more easily frightened by unnatural appearances. While she’d learned not all were as perceptive as her in the dark, there was no way the man had not felt her fangs.

Seeming to understand her state of mind, the stranger shared another smile at her, softer than she’d ever imagined anything could be, and backed off, turning his back to her and returning to his position by the bars. She stared after him.

Out of every example of behavior and body language she’d witnessed and catalogued to herself in her short life so far, she had never seen anything like that.

Greed, anger, hatred, resentment, reluctance, fear, pain, desperation, even expectation and disappointment, she knew those emotions, knew the way they were worn. That thing, no, things she’d seen in the stranger’s eyes- she could not identify them.

The first day-cycles the stranger had taken up residency with her, no handlers came for her. No tests, no conditioning, no additions to any of her seals. It was unusual, to say the least. She’d warily observed the stranger the first two days before returning her focus to energy conservation. She would take her breaks when she got them.

The stranger had arrived in a tumble of dead leaves and mud and blood splatters in equal measure. They’d tossed him in like so much refuse, and he’d laid there, sprawled out, wounds still sluggishly weeping, for so long that she’d begun to wonder if there were such things as corpses that never finished dying. She was relatively sure he wasn’t meant as food. Her masters fed her a variety of raw meat more often than not, usually stiff remnants of vermin from obscure corners of the facility, but had made exception for human bodies. Ninja bodies were usually valuable assets in some form or the other, but many often modified themselves as precautions, so she was instructed to let them be. It was just as well- her masters might have thoroughly impressed upon her her place in the world, but she still found the idea of eating humans rather revolting. They were disgusting enough when alive.

The stranger had stirred at long last at least a full day later, though it was often difficult to tell the time of day in the underground facility. He’d dragged himself over to the wall, propped himself up, appeared to take inventory, tended to his still-seeping wounds as best he could, and begun his watch.

Approximately a week after the stranger had been dumped in with her, some of the handlers finally came by for a routine checkup and maintenance on her enclosure and its seals. The little she’d seen of them up till then left her with the impression that something must have happened to the outer security measures again. They would murmur to each other quietly when far enough out of earshot of her cellmate, shooting wary glances at him, uneasy and flustered, and rush through the chores necessary to keep the two of them just alive enough to be useful.

Several more days passed, and then there was a sudden spike in attention given to her contract and command seals. The handlers finally came for her with purpose, activating a plethora of containment seals before pouring into her enclosure in the familiar abrupt flood of efficient subduction. Heavy shackles jangled and clattered across stone from sudden slack, ink and chakra hissed as they receded and were reapplied. A pair of handlers drew weapons and backed the stranger further into his corner as they waited for their fellows to get what they’d come for.

She didn’t struggle- couldn’t, really. Her body was stiff and strained from the extended period she’d spent kneeling, knees braced, ankles bound together, neck lashed to the center of the containment seal she knelt in and forcing her to arch her back in an attempt to touch her forehead to the ground, arms pulled towards the walls with enough tension to nearly dislocate bones and bring to mind gory images of flesh giving in and limbs detaching from other parts of her. Dozens of seals, carved into the ground, the walls, the ceiling, the bars, the chains, even, and especially, her own emaciated flesh, suppressed every last shred of chakra in her system and bound her own will, to the extent that she couldn’t even twitch without a command.

He’d watched then, too, the stranger. He couldn’t have done anything, though the possibility never even occurred to her until years later, when he’d confessed regret for it. The introduction of sudden light was blinding. By the time eyes adjusted, several lamps and torches would be taken away to throw them off kilter again. It would become murkily dim, even with the dirty orange glow of the handlers’ lanterns, and at least a half-dozen handlers had closely surrounded her at any point throughout the process, but it would have been easy enough to catch glimpses of her skeleton-thin body knelt on the floor between their legs as they’d darted back and forth. She vaguely remembered a short, muffled rebuke and a dull thud, possibly marking a brief protest of some sort from him. She’d had no idea what it could have been- an attempt at escape, perhaps.

They’d half-dragged, half-carried her form from the enclosure, so light that it was easier to do the later than the former. Thus had commenced a day of excruciating pain as they’d grafted pre-drawn modifications into her seals.

She did not scream. She’d gotten over that stage a long time ago. Beyond the fact that it was utterly useless, it also detracted from her ability to receive and ride out the procedures. A too large gasp after a scream might expand her lungs too far, push her chest into a scalpel at the wrong moment, clip an artery against something else sharp or pointy.

Due to the various modifications she’d undergone, it was physically impossible for her to sleep, so sedatives were useless. The next best option was paralytic poisons, and those often made her partially suffocate, over and over, for hours on end, as long as her masters needed, and she really would rather avoid that.

Pain was the norm- it never really left her. With time, she was conditioned out of reacting to it until she no longer needed to be commanded against her instincts, because such things were irrelevant. In battle, she never flinched, was never deterred from sustaining an injury in order to land a debilitating blow. Under her masters’ meticulous efforts, she was lax, pliant and silent.

Anything for the sake of survival.

Everything for the sake of survival.

Nothing for the worth of survival.

Many hours later, she had been deposited into the center of her main containment seal, resecured, and left as quickly as they’d come for her.

The stranger had made no moves during her return, so far as she could tell. Considering the level of disorientation her aching body had been subject to at the time, that wasn’t saying much. What she did know, on the other hand, was that he’d wasted no time approaching her the moment the handlers had retreated. There was no bother with careful demonstration of neutral intent, just a direct, swift approach.

She’d bared her fangs again, perfectly capable and willing to use them, and choked on the jerk of the inked marks around her throat. The stranger had paused briefly to eye the black lines, but it was likely too dark to make anything out well, and a moment later he resumed his approach, though slower this time. She’d hunched over lower, muscles bunching in tense, useless anticipation, flashed the whites of her eyes in warning.

The stranger had again came to a stop just an arm’s length away. Again he’d crouched. Again he’d reached out, slowly, slowly, lax fingers inching ever closer- she didn’t know why he’d bothered, it wasn’t like she could have done anything regardless-

A snarl had ripped through the seam between the rows of her teeth, the first noise she’d made in his presence, low and guttural and yet still somehow echoing childweakvulnerableprey in its pitch.

This time the stranger had fully froze. She’d flinched, snarled again, mind a whirlwind of confusion. He froze, like her prey did, like her targets did, but he didn’t smell like fear, he wasn’t afraid, why wasn’t he afraid, he had to be afraid, everyone, everything, was always, always-

“Hey,” a whisper breathed, a brush of rough cloth against hewn rock, “hey, hey, it’s me, just me.”

The stranger had spoken as if he was not a stranger, was not so very strange, was familiar-

She had perfect recall. She did not know him.

She’d lowered her head and hunched her shoulders as if she’d had the hackles to raise in defense- but she’d been in shut-down mode, so the effect was lost. Undeterred, the hand extended until it was a mere inch away, and hovered, so close that she could feel the faintest brush of warmth emanating from it.

He didn’t touch her.

He certainly wasn’t afraid, or even uncertain in his actions. It was almost as if he was waiting for something. What, she had no idea.

“Are you alright?”

One curled side of her lip twitched, wavering, confused at the use of the word. Alright then, some guards would sometimes say to another in concession of something or other, but here it was being used as… a state of being?

Somehow seeing her bafflement through the gloom, and perhaps guessing close enough at the cause, he repeated, “Are you hurt?”

Now there was a word she’d never heard before. Unable to help herself, she tilted her head slightly to the side at the unfamiliar string of sounds, trying to decipher it. She’d learned that sometimes one could guess at meanings from shared parts of different words.

“Injured? Wounded?” An unfamiliar emotion shaded the pronunciation. “I smell blood.”

Ah.

Well, she supposed it counted. However, her cellmate was not one of her masters. He did not stand in the chain of command. At the same time, no one outside of it had ever asked a question of her before with the expectation of a reaction. Was she supposed to respond?

A few seconds of deliberation had concluded with the decision to simply stare and wait and see. The scent of her blood should be an obvious enough answer, anyways.

She stared, and he stared back.

The hand continued to hover. (A threat? No, the lines of tension in the muscle were all wrong.)

Many long minutes passed before he opened his mouth again and asked-

She blinked.

Blinked again.

“Can I touch you?,” he’d asked.

What kind of question was that?

There must have been enough light that day for her eyes to reflect enough to illuminate at least part of her face, because this man was uncannily good at understanding her thought process. His own eyes never left hers.

“Your forehead. To check for a fever. We don’t have any supplies, and this cage is sucking the chakra right out of us, so there’s not much we can do about anything, but it would at least be good to know if your body thinks it’s in bad enough shape to shut down.”

Well, as ever, she could growl and snarl all she wanted but there was no denying she was pretty much helpless at the moment.

“I wanted to get your permission.”

Permission? Hers? Give it?

Permission was something that belonged to the masters. She did not have any. She did not have the right to give it.

“May I?”

And yet this man was asking her for it.

How did one give another permission? She did not know how to, even if she’d wanted to.

She shifted her gaze back to the man’s face from where she’d let it drift to the hand, and suddenly, it didn’t seem to matter.

Practically everything about the stranger was strange and could not be measured by what she knew from watching the masters, but was that so bad? She did not know if there was a word for it, or how to properly phrase it, but something of the same family as that burning displeasure that dragged down her masters’ expressions after she gave less than satisfactory results swirled in the pit of her stomach when she thought about the world she knew, the world she lived. She might not understand the stranger or his ways, and she might not be naive enough to think there could be no worse possibilities, but there was at least a chance that things could be better.

She didn’t know how to give permission, or speak responses for that matter, but there were other ways to give answers. Obedience displays were hardly unfamiliar to her.

Gathering what strength her exhausted and weakened body could afford, she moved against the drag of her restraints and slowly, gingerly, pressed the crown of her head into the hovering palm.

It was a display of submission. The crown might be the hardest part of the skull, but the head was the center of most senses and one of the most glaringly vulnerable vital points, connected as it was to so many others- two major arteries, both lungs, the spine- and encasing one of the two most essential parts of the body.

I put my life in your hands, the gesture said. If you wished to kill me now, I could do nothing but accept it.

Not like she could’ve done anything otherwise anyways, but that was nothing new, and he’d done nothing to take advantage of it so far. Might as well make it more or less official, and make certain he was aware of it. Cornered creatures did stupid things, more often than not.

The man made a noise in his throat, something surprised and entirely comprehending. Now that he was so close as to be touching, she could somewhat understand why. Beneath the veritable cloak of blood and infection that hung in the air around him, the scent of freshly fallen foliage, sun-baked riverstones, earthy wilderness, and wild beasts of the hunt brushed her nose. He was a creature of the wild, and not the kind she chased into the ground. He was a hunter- a hunter of the forest.

Her kind was not completely strange to him, then, even if he was to her.

Calloused fingers threaded through limp drapes of hair, seeking bare skin. She forced herself not to twitch at the sensation as they parted the strands, stilled, and tried to measure her own temperature against the not-quite-as-warm-as-she’d-thought-it-would-be hand. Was that a bad sign?

The man hummed a thoughtful noise. “I’m afraid I’m no medic-nin, but I’m pretty sure you don’t have a fever. You do run a bit on the warmer side, though.” He withdrew his hand and offered another of those curiously warm-feeling smiles of his. She merely blinked once in return.

Making as if to get up, the man suddenly winced mid-rise, shot a glance at her, and smoothly slid into a seat on the ground instead. She blinked again, slightly thrown by the unexpected display of split-second decision making that could have only been born of years’ worth of life and death situations. Not a civilian type, then. She’d guessed as much, but this was irrefutable proof. She wasn’t sure if the lack of concern in their proximity was a show of confidence or something else she didn’t understand.

The sharp tang of flowing blood- the old, dark kind- stung the air. He’d reopened his wound- or rather, it had never closed properly in the first place.

She shuffled trussed limbs in an attempt to lean closer for a better idea of the wound. She was curious- from the amount of blood he’d been reeking of since arriving, he should have been long dead. The man noticed. Inconceivably, he maneuvered himself for her inspection, baring the glaring weakness to her without trepidation.

Leaving interpretation of the gesture for later, because she was starting to get the idea that there was really no point in trying to judge him by what standards she knew, she leaned towards the large gash in his left side and sniffed. She filed away the faded influx of scents as they poured out at her, systematic and automatic, searched deeper within the cloying stench of traumatized flesh-

An anticoagulant. She’d suspected as much. It was still a wonder how he’d yet to die from blood loss, though. Sitting so still probably had something to do with it.

For a second, she considered attempting to heal the injury, then dismissed the idea. It would have to wait. She was too weak as she was now to consume the pollution to both his flesh and chakra network as well as regenerate the injury. It was too large, and a serious infection had set in. If she was released from her shut-down mode into at least standby, she could probably deal with the infection, but the semi-shut-down she was under from the holding seals restricted nearly all movement.

Plus, she had no idea how the man would take the idea of her licking the wound. Even she knew it was hardly a normal thing for humans to do.

Flicking reflective eyes back to the man’s face, she blinked slowly at him, trying to imbue meaning into the gesture.

“Pretty bad, eh?” He chuckled ruefully. “Teamwork is a wonderful thing, except when it trips.”

So he’d had comrades. Someone had made a mistake, and he’d paid for it. Part of the reason why she had none, probably. They’d designed her to be a weapon. A kunai did not need to come in two pieces.

A kunai only needed a wielder.

A huffed grunt escaped her cellmate. He shifted the strips of cloth he’d torn from his pants tentatively, slipping one hand beneath the blood-drenched makeshift bandages, and gently poked around, adjusting whatever he’d stuck under to try to staunch the bleeding. They’d taken whatever gear he’d had and stripped his upper body. Standard procedure. He was lucky they hadn’t taken his pants, too- probably didn’t want him to get hypothermia too quickly.

It would be a bad idea for him to try moving again. He seemed determined to do so regardless. She had no idea why- there was nothing to gain by sitting by the bars. It was easy enough to hear when any masters came visiting, watching from the bars would only give a look at whatever form of light they brought with them. In fact, she was relatively sure it might even be a bit warmer towards the back of the cell, if mustier, due to the lack of disturbance to the air.

Perhaps it was her presence? He might not be afraid of her, and didn’t even show much wariness, but that did not mean she did not disturb him. Humans tended to be unsettled by silence, and the only noise she’d made so far were a few threatening growls. But then he’d been silent up until now, too. He’d also given her some of his own measly rations, so she didn’t think he was much put off by her overall.

Unable to pinpoint a reason for his behavior, she decided not to bother to think more on it either when he made a move to rise again. She let out not-quite-a-growl, void of threat and merely negative in tone. Her cellmate halted mid-motion again and turned his head towards her in vague surprise. Eyeing her contemplatively, he made a move as if to get up again, though readily halted when she made the noise again.

He stared at her.

She stared back.

Huffing out a wry sound of… amusement? he lowered himself back to the floor again, fully facing her. There was less than a foot of space between them.

“Can you speak?”

She blinked at him.

He made the warm expression.

She growled her not-quite-a-growl.

“But you can understand me.”

She blinked, and tilted her head. How to give answer to that?

She tried a different noise, lower than her throat, drawn out and thrumming and echoing in her chest in a way that was both foreign and natural.

This time it was he who blinked.

“Are you… purring?”

Another foreign word. She tilted her head again, and it seemed he could understand the uncertainty in the gesture now.

“Ah, well, err. Are you related to cats, felines, in any way? It’s a type of noise they make.”

Well, she was nothing quite so domestic, but she supposed the answer to that was a yes.

She purred.

“Huh. What a coincidence. I’m related to canines. Wolves, dogs, the like.”

She blinked. Where was the coincidence? She did not see it.

“Oh, but I don’t mind that you’re a feline. I personally think big cats are pretty awesome, too. Not to mention dangerous as hell if you aren’t careful. Gotta respect that kind of lethality.”

An opposing relationship, either antagonistic or competitive in nature. Seeing as she had no interest in it and her cellmate didn’t much care for the expectations impressed by it, irrelevant and inconsequential.

“So.”

A head tilt.

“Damage to your vocal chords?”

A not-growl.

“Hm. Not allowed?”

She hesitated. There was more to it, but…

A purr.

“Well, no one’s watching right now.”

A blink. Did this mean blinking was the universal ‘other’ response now?

Her cellmate blinked, too, suddenly, as if having realized something.

“Oh. Uh, this sounds a bit far-fetched to me, but you do sound kinda young, so… do you even know how?”

She blinked in surprise even as she purred in confirmation. He was a sharp one.

The look on his face almost looked as if he wanted to let out a string of curses, if she was right, but he kept it in.

“Well, I suppose we kind of are having a conversation. Managing one.” He tacked on a swear word at the end after a thought without so much as a shift in pitch. The next question was entirely expected.

“So how long have you been here?”

She simultaneously tilted her head and blinked slowly at him. He knew she couldn’t answer that- it was not a yes or no question.

“Ah, right.” He flashed that warm twist of the lips again.

She let the air escape through her nose just roughly enough to be audible, then flicked her gaze from him to a back corner of her enclosure, then back to him. It would be easier for him to prop himself up in the joint of two walls than a single one.

He followed her gaze. “What’s up? Something back there?” He made as if to get up again.

She not-growled, but this time it wasn’t enough to stop him.

He pushed himself fully to his feet, almost stumbling as he took a first step. She growled properly this time, a confused mash of warning and something approaching irritation. It was not enough to get the full meaning across this time, either.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.” He shuffled past her and began to trace the perimeter of her enclosure with practiced steps. She knew it was unusually large for a simple cell, and wondered for a second if he knew what kind of thing she was. Probably not. The extensive seals used on her were likely really obvious signs of at least something, but that lack of awareness, along with the confidence born of being a predator, were probably the origin of his lack of both instinctive and conscious trepidation of her.

He made a full circuit of the space before padding back to his original place by the bars. He was definitely physically fit, as well as accustomed to pain, but that didn’t completely prevent his breathing from coming just a bit faster, just a bit rougher. The wound in his gut was nothing to brush off. He slid to the ground and grunted, tilted his head back to rest against the wall and just breathed for a second before tilting it to glance in her direction again. She’d fallen silent once more.

“I think I’m gonna take a nap.” He let his eyes drift closed. “Wake me up if anyone comes to say hi.”

It was the next day before her cellmate woke again, and this time he was the one they came for. He’d let them take him without struggle for the most part, though he did test one of the guards’ grip on him and got his ears boxed for his trouble.

They brought him back half a day-cycle later, dripping blood from a dozen new wounds and wheezing slightly, and threw him carelessly into her enclosure, more concerned with getting the seals on the bars reactivated. A cursory round of wary looks shot in her general direction and they and their flickering torches and lamps were gone.

She opened her eyes and stretched her neck forward, nose twitching. The sickly sweet scent of that drink the guards and masters favored clung to weeping red. She remembered a time when they’d run low on antiseptics and had resorted to the drink that stung the same way, and the feeling she sometimes felt when self-aware enough at the end of a recalibration session trickled through her. They still wanted him alive.

But it was strange- she’d never realized that emotion could be felt for anything besides her own experiences.

Her cellmate laid prone where he’d landed until the guards’ footsteps and firelight had faded, then began the ordeal of peeling himself off the stone. He grunted and huffed a bit, but never gave away any of the usual signs of pain.

In fact, when she thought back, she’d yet to hear him cry out even once. It struck her again- this was a different breed of human, one driven by something besides just hunger or fear or pain. She was beginning to think she rather liked this kind of human. She certainly preferred it to the other in terms of company.

Shoving himself up against the wall, he panted for a few minutes. When his breathing evened out, he broke the silence once more.

“Hey,” he murmured, voice tired and raspy. The small noises of swallowing (probably blood) sounded exponentially louder in the still air. Equally tired eyes slid open and drifted towards the shadows that draped her.

Level rings of purple and gold held them.

“Why are you here?”

She tilted her head. Blinked. The answer to that was a bit complicated to convey.

Apparently her cellmate realized that without needing prompting. “Right. Bad question. How about this- do you want to be here?”

Want? When was the last time she was allowed to want something? The not-growl very nearly was one. She might be resigned to her place now, but that didn’t mean she was here of her own volition.

He chuckled sardonically, entirely undaunted. “Okay, that one was a stupid one, I know. But I had to ask.”

Silence settled on them once more. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed when he broke it again.

“If you could leave this place… where would you go?”

She stared at him. That… well, she’d never thought much about it. Not since… There was nowhere she really had to go, and nowhere for her to go. She had nothing to go to, and no purpose beyond that which the masters deigned to give her. Her purpose was to serve.

He seemed to take her stare for what it was. He studied her, full expression hidden in the dark, though she could make out vague forms and shapes.

“I’m going to leave this place.”

She blinked. He sounded so confident, so sure of his own words. How could he be? There were no gaps in the containment measures, and the exterior defense measures were formidable in their own right.

He grinned, the least smidges of light catching on canines. “My team is pretty good, you know, even if one of them isn’t yet dry behind the ears and is still too clumsy for his own good at the worst possible times. They’ll come. They’ll come, and they’ll make it through, and we’ll leave together.”

He tilted the grin into the warm expression.

“Will you leave with us?”

Leave? With this man? Actually, she didn’t really mind the idea, but- leave? It was impossible to leave without permission. One only left on a leash. Not even the dead ones ever left.

And yet here this strange man was, foreign in body language, unafraid where all others had despaired, bearer of unknown emotions.

And he was saying that it was possible.

He had not been wrong so far, and while that really wasn’t much to speak of, he looked at her, and spoke to her, and even understood the wordless answers she gave his questions.

What could it hurt to throw in lots with him?

Well, actually it could hurt a lot, but that was entirely inconsequential.

But the seals- the restraints- the leash-

He did not understand.

He did not understand, but- could he?

She was not allowed to speak, and before that, she had been too young to get much practice at it.

But he was not a master, and she was nothing if not resourceful.

She had seen others speak before.

She had heard others speak before.

She closed her eyes. Opened her mouth.

A trembling warble-

“Ah-”

-and a crack. A desert of sand and grit grated raw in her throat. She swallowed nothing, pushed it down, couldn’t help but open her eyes a sliver to glance at her cellmate-

He was watching her, glints of light catching on two full rows of teeth, so, so similar to her masters’ delight-

-but no, this was that strange warmth, this was that impossible sensation wrapped into expression, and something wavering and warm throbbed hesitantly inside her at the sight of it.

It was… not a bad feeling.

She looked down. Tried again.

“Ah-ye-” she broke off again, coughed.

“You.”

Instinct under stress jerked her body in a suppressed twitch as her gaze sought out his. His face was something like urging, but softer, patient- still warm.

“You?”

“Wuh-eh-pp,” she pushed out on clumsy lips. “W-ppn.”

“...weapon?”

The echoed word was correct, but not nearly as warm, as his face fell into a shape tied to disappointment, but- deeper?

She wilted, then immediately jolted at the realization. She cared- she cared? What wasn’t- When did that- Why did-

“But not a tool?”

Glowing purple and gold snapped back to him. He had straightened, crossed his arms, narrowed his eyes, as if to say screw it, fine, though she only realized belatedly the meaning behind the expression. She was a bit busy rebalancing her reality.

She was not of the habit of lying to herself.

She did care.

It didn’t even matter why.

It didn’t matter at all.

Nothing had changed.

Her masters hadn’t changed.

“You’re not a tool.”

She was.

“Weapons are not tools.”

She was-

Wait.

What?

She blinked at him, completely thrown.

He blinked back, looked off to the side, raised a hand, scratched a temple shiftily, though not deceptively so. “Well- I mean- Weapon and tool are two different words, right?”

She blinked to show she was following, though not sure where this was going. He didn’t seem to really know either.

“So they can’t mean exactly the same thing, right?”

A slow blink.

“Well, when I personally think of those two words, I see tools as things that can be used and thrown away without excessive thought or loss. Weapons, though? Weapons aren’t so easily replaced. I don’t even mean in the cost or whatever other material sense. Weapons are partners.” A strange pause. “At the very least.”

She gave another blink, half by rote at this point, entirely lost. She understood the words, of course, but she didn’t see what difference it made.

“Ugh, I’m explaining this all wrong, aren’t I? Probably should have started from a different point or something.” He let the silence fall on them again as he scrutinized her, mentally cataloguing everything he knew and could infer at this point.

“Did you know,” he began abruptly, “it is said that the very best weapons choose their own wielders?”

Blink.

No, she hadn’t known that.

“The stories about samurai swords are most numerous, but there are others. Ninja weapons, too- kama, shobo, suntetsu, nunchaku. I hear there is even a sword in Kirigakure that picks its wielders by the ‘taste’ of their chakra.”

Interesting. But irrelevant...?

Her cellmate lapsed into wordlessness again, head clearly facing her direction, as if running a squinted gaze over the shadows that draped her.

Blinked.

He launched into a rasping series of tales of named swords and cursed blades, metal that could laugh but preferred to weep and wail and scream, hilts that burned firebrand hot and frostbit fingers.

And then he spoke of her again.

It was the first thing he had said so far that she doubted.

She did not choose her masters. She did not make any choices at all. She had no right.

He must have heard the disbelief in her silence- or at least the blank sense of you-do-not-understand.

“You’re not a tool.” The words held a startling firmness in them. Purple-gold rings met the gaze blotted out by the perpetual dark. And then the now-familiar slumped shape by the bars seemed almost as if it had caught a second wind, gathering itself up with a solidity that belied the sickness she could scent in his gut.

“And you’re more than a mere weapon.”

Yes. She was a living weapon, valuable for her versatility and trainability, capable of self-repairing and increasing in power over time. She was not a mere weapon- she was superior.

And in any case, weapons were still bound to their owners.

“Mh-stur. Mah-sturss. Cannutt lehvve.”

She imagined his hidden gaze might have glinted the unfathomable spark of stars.

“Can’t? Or won’t?”

Both. Neither. She didn’t know. She’d never been the one with answers. Then again, she’d never been the one with questions, either.

Those ones were all dead.

It was the way of things.

They came again for him the next day, and again the day after that. From what she could tell, the masters had replaced her normal sessions with his.

Something had changed. They wanted information from her cellmate now, desperate enough to risk moving him around. His further weakened state no doubt contributed nothing to deter them.

Though she had not witnessed his prowess for herself, she had seen the way he’d walked, the way he’d ignored the physical distraction of pain for what it was- first his body’s warning, and then a triviality. He was strong. And then there was the fact that they’d seen fit to stick him in with her. The fact that they dared to attempt to draw information from him now-

“They’ll come. They’ll come, and they’ll make it through, and we’ll leave together.”

“Will you leave with us?”

Impossible. Not disbelief, but mere fact.

But…

The man was strange, had been captured, but he was certainly neither foolish nor incompetent. If he spoke truth, if his… comrades, came, if they eliminated the masters…

The masters had never instructed her for the possibility of their elimination.

Dull crimson wavered shapes through her lids. The customary efficient shuffle and manhandling, and then they were gone again.

Silence.

A long, exhaustion-laden huff.

The drag of skin and fabric across cold stone.

She opened her eyes.

Another week had passed since he had asked her that question. They’d- he’d- talked a bit more, though mostly snippets, and a majority of that had been him helping her get down her alphabetical enunciations. She could string them together into much more coherent words now, but wasn’t much yet competent at proper sentences. The rest of the time he would tell her things- stories, scientific theory, rumors on people and countries she’d never been taught about, history, geology, shinobi culture, inane little tidbits. Irrelevant. Useless. Interesting.

She watched him drag himself to unsteady feet, stumble, and begin to determinedly shuffle towards her, making for the back corner of the enclosure. She’d finally managed to get it across to him that it was a better position altogether. He’d taken her word for it without question.

From what she could tell, the infection in the nasty gash in his abdomen was finally catching up to him. The rank stench of rotting flesh clung stubbornly to his form now. When he offered his meager rations to her, as he had several times since the first, she refused them. She could subsist on what she was given and what the seals permitted her to take from the earth that surrounded them. She had subsisted on such long before her cellmate had come. At the rate he was going, he was going to die.

She no longer bothered attempting to decipher why it was that fact bothered her. It was the way of things. A unique one, compared to what she’d had experience with, but one nonetheless.

A plethora of new injuries now traced a veritable tapestry across his body, old blood caked on practically like a second skin. A new layer of hurts would overlay the older injuries each time he returned. Some of those had also begun to show signs of infection, though none so terrible as the gut wound.

Yet.

She was still in the seal-induced semi-shut-down mode, but after having been left alone for a full week since the last round of seal modifications and recalibrations, she’d recovered from and adjusted to the changes, even managed to scrape out a few extra scraps of chakra from between the gaps of the seals. She still couldn’t really move, and it would be risky and taxing regardless, but…

He was going to die.

He was dying.

She was averse to him dying.

She shifted, purposely disturbing the cold metal pooled around her ankles. They clinked and rattled, the metallic ringing cut dull by contact with solid floor.

The quiet tap of steps halted.

“Neko-chan?” The call was breathy, breathless.

Something coiled in her chest, tense and uncertain and weaker than curiosity. She rumbled a noise back, not quite a purr, but more purr than the not-purr with meaning.

“Yu. Heerre.” She nudged another link of chain. It rang higher, almost reached a clear note.

The light padding steps resumed, bringing her cellmate to her side. He was warm and cold in equally concerning measure, radiating feverish heat from each break in his body while the few patches of untouched skin was as chill to the touch as the stone walls. She could count the scents of the infections with him so close. It was an unsettlingly high number.

“Doing alright, neko-chan?”

While that might have been a valid question, it would only have been if it were not coming from him out of the two of them. She huffed air in his face. He chuckled raspily in return.

“Okay, point. Don’t worry, though, neko-chan. Like I said, my team will come. We’ve just gotta hold out for them a bit longer.”

She’d never given him a proper response to that invitation, but he’d not seemed to care. Instead, he’d apparently decided to take it for granted that she would join them. While she knew it certainly wouldn’t be so simple if it did come down to her masters’ demise, she’d decided that following him couldn’t be so bad. At the very least, she found it hard to imagine it could be anything much worse than their current situation, given the great contrast in her cellmate’s behavior to anything she saw around the facility. She knew what deception was, of course, but there was just something… She wasn’t sure if it was the man himself or the situation or just her more primal-sided instinct, but something in her decided he was not pretending. It helped that he’d not slipped up in any way, either.

One bloodstained hand came up bury its fingers in long ungroomed strands. They rubbed idly, soothing. She pressed into the pressure- submission, acknowledgement, and then something more, newfound in the last days. The closest she could come up with was resolve, though softer edged and more smile-warmth than grim.

She pulled away. Immediately, she sensed that strangely soft yet nervous curiosity rising like a tide in him. It was… interesting, the way he gave so many new emotions so naturally, the way she somehow inherently understood, at least in part, the nature of those unnamed emotions, if not the emotions themselves. At the same time, he’d been as open as a wall with those same emotions, or any at all for that matter, towards his captors.

“Neko-chan?”

Nudging forward through the dark in search of the limb, she found the slightly larger curve of muscle connecting the thumb to the palm. She carefully took it between sharp teeth and tugged. He went easily, squatting, then kneeling, shifting so trustingly into a position of vulnerability before her.

“What’s wrong?”

His rapidly approaching death. She let go of the hand, traced her nose up the length of the arm she could now reach, searching. “Sick-k. Kill.”

Alarm spiked the air, but tinted with the nervous blunted curiosity rather than the sour wash of fear.

Ah. Verbal order of operations.

“Kill sick.” She paused; that still left a bit to interpretation. Hmm. “Ness,” she decided. From what she inferred from remembered conversations, that should be the correct modifier.

A crust of dried blood more questionably smelling than others bumped up against her nose. She stopped her search, hovered over it.

The alarm wavered, probably comprehending but still uncertain.

The guards sometimes repeated orders in triplicate to avoid confusion. Repetition might clarify. “Kill-sickk-ness.” She intentionally snuffled over the gash on the arm so that the light puff of air tickled it in gesture.

The sharply sparking focus of his attention finally abated, smoothing out the jagged edges, though his heart rate remained slightly elevated.

“Oh.”

A mutant form of the direct opposite of tension permeated the whirl of emotions he compressed away. Confusion remained in a not insignificant proportion, though. “So… you know a way to deal with the infection?”

She gave one of the meaningful purrs. “Me. Clean. Can clean,” she immediately amended, catching the slip up quicker this time. Well, to be more specific… “Cn-sume.”

“Consume?” he echoed even as she sensed the briefest trip of confusion be swept away in open comprehension. “Oh.”

Yes. He was very intelligent.

“But, for you to offer now…” He was definitely squinting at her. “What’s the catch?”

...He was very intelligent.

She made a noncommittal noise. “Me. Seal-ed. Weak. Diff-cult.”

She could feel the raised brow.

Very intelligent.

“Possib-ble fail. And me, sickk.”

The spike of alarm flared up to puncture the air again. “The infection will pass to you?”

Huh. Well, technically… but at the same time, no? As far as she could tell, it would be taken into her body and then assaulted by her chakra and seal system. “No-ys-no.” The lack of response prompted more detail. “Like, eatd bad food.”

“I… see…”

He was very intelligent. He did not see, though.

A broad palm carefully rubbed fingers into her scalp. She lifted her eyes to his.

“Well, in that case, thank you but no-”

“No. You die.” She paused. Tilted her head. Blinked. Corrected herself. “You dye-ing. I help.”

He frowned. It was the first time he had ever directed one at her. Something curled up and wilted inside her, but she disregarded it. There were more important things at the moment.

“But-”

“Like eat bad food,” she repeated, determined to help this man that seemed so genuinely determined to help her. “All time eat bad food. No different.” Ah, unintentionally misleading phrasing. She did not want to lie to this man. A correction- “Little different.”

Perhaps it was her full willingness to be transparent and upfront about the side-effects on herself, but her cellmate eventually caved in when she began nipping his finger, not letting him touch her, and refused to eat her own scraps when they were given to her, instead nudging them in his direction before ignoring both them and him. He let her lap away the pus and ooze from the smaller infection she had identified in his arm first. When she confirmed that she was fine after a half-hour wait to allow her body to process it, he allowed her to tentatively begin cleansing the most severe one in his abdomen. It was the most dangerous one for him, and depending on how her own body held up, she might not be able to see to all of his injuries- there were far too many for that. Best to at least neutralize the greatest threat.

And so, face essentially buried in the hole in his gut and nose clogged with the overpowering, cloying, half sickly-sweet half sourly putrid scent of diseased flesh, she listened to the man tell tales of shinobi that could help heal others by allowing them to drink their chakra-rich blood.

There had been a time when she’d been restrained and some other test subjects had been made to bite her until her skin broke, now that she thought of it. They had all died from chakra poisoning.

As she systematically drew out the pus and infection from the gaping wound, she spat out what she could and consumed it when it was necessary to pull the sickness directly from his chakra network and apply her own chakra-infused saliva to reconnect and close the yet-unscabbed tears and gashes. She also took the liberty of cleaning away what remains of the anticoagulants still coated the flesh while she was at it. Finally, drawing the two sides of the large wound together, she methodically sealed the two ends together again with liberal application of chakra-infused saliva over the new scab.

For all the work she had done over the course of two hours, the fact remained that it was a cleaning and patch job at best. The little chakra she had been able to draw on had gone into disinfecting and aiding scabbing. She hadn’t had nearly enough to stimulate regeneration of any kind. Any kind of true healing would have to be done by the man’s own body.

Her cellmate didn’t seem to mind, though, even after she had tried to clarify it to him through three different selections of descriptive phrases. He’d merely smiled that warm-smile of his, broader than any he’d given before, and thanked her in a tone saturated with something profound.

The warm, wavering, throbbing thing warmed, wavered, and throbbed just a tiny bit more.

The next time rations were delivered, her cellmate offered her his once more. She refused the scraps on principle, but grudgingly drank half his portion of water. She had expended far too much saliva earlier. Her own portions were measly, pathetic morsels that had recently shrunk and dried up to nothing, though she still received intermittent, shallow bowls of water.

While she wouldn’t starve from the miniscule portions they gave her, they were still necessary to an extent to allow for her body to grow rather than just stagnate. Her primary source of sustenance remained the bare trickle of natural chakra the containment seals permitted to be dragged into her system. To deprive her when her body was struggling to intake enough meant that they were willing to risk underdevelopment and possible irreversible weakening or damage to her in exchange for reducing the stress her various abilities put on her containment seals.

They were anticipating being unable to perform the routine maintenance in the near future.

It seemed her cellmate might have been right about his comrades. The fact that the masters had been getting increasingly irritable and vicious in their handling of him only gave more credit to his claims. Physical, mental, verbal abuse- everything was game in the world of shinobi, ever more so when applied to captives. When he’d first arrived, there had been little goading, the guards working silently to truss him up and drag him away. Now, though, the barbs came fast and sharp, the blows faster and sharper, and the trussing violent and filled with unnecessary blows and jerks of chains.

That or they were sending out a larger acquisitions team than usual, and were simply frustrated by the lack of results from their questionings. Probably the latter, actually. Judging by the heavier than usual reek of rot in the air, the death rate had been higher than usual as of late.

Among their jeers and snarls of hate were names. Most, she could tell, were insults, some of the standard fare and some of the more creative kind. A few, however, she could not determine if they were monikers or epithets, insults or true names. Irregardless, their oppressors apparently took particular glee from dragging those through the mud. It was for this reason she had been content to refer to him in her mind as her cellmate, or merely ‘the man’. She suspected asking for his name at this point might be something of a sore point. A good few of the insults had revolved around the questioning of his name, of whether he was deserving of it.

He had never asked her of her name, though. Whether it was because he knew she did not have one or was wary that asking her was a sore point the same as it would be for him, given what she’d related to him on herself as a weapon, she did not know. Instead, he simply gave her one. ‘Neko-chan,’ he called her. Little kitty. A nickname, not a true name, not even really a title more than a descriptor, so she didn’t bother to object to it. It made no difference, and it gave him something with which to call her attention to him. It served its purpose.

The day after she’d consumed the worst infection, he returned from a particularly savage trip out of the enclosure on the verge of death. (Their enclosure; the space might as well belong to the both of them at that point.) Most likely they’d seen his abdomen had stopped oozing discolored blood, and had decided that that wouldn’t do.

They’d torn it open again.

The scab had been peeled off, piece by piece, so that the edges of the wound were raw and mauled and open once more, sluggishly weeping plasma and rust and too-light pink blood. Some chunks of flesh had gone with scabs. They’d left the internal organs alone for the most part, seeming to still not want his actual immediate death, but instead had turned their deliberate attentions to the weeping edges. They’d shredded the skin in precise, even cuts running perpendicularly away from the wound, resulting in a morbid mockery of an elongated stylized motif of a sun or flower or even a gaping maw spanning from hipbone to lower ribs, navel to the small of the back. He’d had to be carried back. The guards had dumped him in front of her, sneering laughter remarking that she must have been driven to drink his blood out of hunger, though for meat or for death? She’d set to work immediately. The guards had laughed some more before leaving.

It was then that he’d finally asked her.

Curled into a half fetal position with his front facing her, he laid on his right side so that the gruesome gash in his left side was exposed upwards to her almost delicate attentions. Expanded as the hole now was, it was something of a miracle that his internal organs had only shifted around for the most part instead of slipping out. The wound was a terrible thing, nearly halfway to bisecting him now. The few strips of bandages they’d bound around his side had been only a cruel kindness. It was as much a physical torture as a psychological one. She could see darker splotches of fluids where he’d had to stuff a piece of himself that should never feel the brush of moving air back into himself.

“Do you, have a name, neko-chan?” He watched her work, the crown of his head left to prop itself against the ground, gaze drooping with pain and exhaustion in equal measure, lit by shallow reflections of the flickering glows emitted from his gut. He panted shallowly, raspily, careful to move as little as possible. His words came almost as slowly as hers did.

She stuck the sides of another strip of flesh to its neighbor and drew back to spit out fluid. “Divine beast. The.” Nimble tongue ran over sharp ivory. “Beast lord, the.” Something hard and something squishy were collected from seams and promptly whisked away with a curl of the muscle. “The child of forest.” The residue hit the floor with a light splat and a short clack. She buried her face in his guts again.

Her cellmate grunted and cut off a wince. “Those, are not, names. Are not, your name. They, are titles.” He flinched, tensed, immediately forced the muscles to relax, panted. “Labels. They are not you.”

She nudged a lump of soft tissue into place and shifted another few over for better access. She was very familiar with human anatomy. She had torn quite a few humans apart, piece by piece, as her masters ordered, after all. “What me?”

“You tell me.”

“Weapon.”

“Child.”

“Weapon.”

“Kind.”

She had no idea what that was. “Weapon. You said.”

A featherlight touch to a knelt knee. She glanced at the limb- his right arm, awkwardly pressed into the ground, sprawled out limply to tap a finger against the side of her shin- and glanced back to eyes that spoke.

“Not-a-weapon. A weapon that is more.”

She blinked at the eyes that spoke, the eyes that burned with unseen light in the dark.

She pressed another two strips of skin together.

“Have no name.”

The eyes dimmed with the soft regret, then flared with something warm and fierce.

“In that case, we will find you one.”

She did not object. It would serve its purpose.

The two days after that, they did not come for him. The number of handlers in the facility dropped noticeably.

On the third day, the world as she knew it ended.

Notes:

Does oral removal of infection count as cannibalism? Does it? Because that just makes me wonder what Karin's blood limit counts as then. And a common first-aid tactic of removing snake venom is by sucking it out from the punctures.