Unwelcome Choices by Inumaru_Rapture

Nine Forty-Five A.M.

Kagome

Pain. Splitting, stinging pain in my left temple is my first symptom of consciousness. It stings like a papercut, a burning wetness that seems to creep along my eyebrow. Then I noticed the darkness - or the simple fact that it wasn’t as dark as I remembered. Hadn’t it been the middle of the night? There seems to be an extraordinary amount of light wherever I am… It burns from behind my closed eyelids. My head throbs.

The burning wet on my brow itches. I try to raise my right hand to my brow to feel the wetness. But as soon as I tense the muscles to lift my arm, something holds it down. I test my fingers. They each move against fabric that is smooth against the pads of my fingers. I try my wrist. There seems to be a band around my wrist holding it in place. I try lifting my forearm. There seems to be a band wrapped around the crease of my elbow, hindering my movement. I repeat the process on my other side. Same results.

I am cautious in opening my eyes, lest it make the headache worse. Instead, I focus on my other senses. First, I listen. There are muffled sounds of cars and traffic. I’m still in Tokyo, or at least a large city. I listen closer. There is labored breathing somewhere in front of me. Shallow breaths, as if someone is in pain. Although it’s hard to tell, I feel that the person is male.

I listen even closer. There is a tick-tock of a clock steadily ticking away. It seems to take a while from one tick to the next tock, and I wonder, briefly, if it’s me or the clock.

A scent reaches my nose and I take a tentative whiff. It smells acrid and sour, with a slight scent of burning. It smells like burning meat, a sharp electric burning, an alarming smell that smells so wrong. It is this smell, not the fact that I am tied down, that wakes my brain up, and I open my eyes. The light is intense, and the bright whiteness burns my retinas, making my eyes shut again automatically. It is that disturbing, alarming scent, however, that forces me to squint into the white of the room.

What greets my eyes leaves me breathless. The severity of whatever I’ve gotten myself into needs to be dissected before I make myself believe what I’m seeing.

I appear to be tied to a bed in a rather nice hotel room. I am sitting against the headboard of a king sized bed. My limbs are bound against the mattress with leather straps, one around each joint and one encircling each of my upper arms. I appear to have free movement of my head and neck. My hair is still tied in the braid from yesterday, but I can feel the tendrils brush my shoulders. I glance at what parts of my body I can see.

I am completely naked. Of course. Lovely. I am sitting bolt upright, my butt pressed against the headboard and apparently strapped to it around the waist. I have bands around my thighs, shins, and ankles. My feet are pressed flush against a pair of large, naked, male feet. There are welded metal cords and a bar binding our feet together.

I follow his legs and see he is not bound in leather, but in metal chains. The metal seems to have burned stripes into his skin. It smokes still, even though it looks as if it has stopped burning. I feel my stomach clench when I connect the burning smell to the sight of his burnt flesh.

At his hips, my stomach clenches into a cement knot. He, too, is naked. But it is the markings tattooed along his hips and thighs make me realize all in one instant just who is chained to the bed with me.

My eyes follow up his stomach, his torso. There is a nasty seeping wound in between ribs on his right-side. Blood is stained along his body and arm, pooling on the sheets. The sheets around him are stained crimson and brown. 

There seems to be other wounds along his left side…A scraping wound like he was dragged against something sharp. It’s the side with only a short residuum - what Inuyasha always called his nub - of the arm amputated when he was younger. That nub, too, I realize with a sick lurch of horror, is strapped to his body as if it were a threat.

He is tied, bolt upright like I am, to a hastily built wooden headboard built by someone who had only a vague idea of what a headboard should look like.

I swallow hard and look up into the pain-lined face of my friend’s half-brother, Sesshoumaru. I hope I don’t look as bad as he does. I pray he’s okay. I can’t make my voice say anything.

Gray lines of dirt or dust cover the right side of his face. He has a steadily forming black eye, and two scratches along his clean cheek. The hair above his left ear is matted with dried blood, there is a dry trickle down around his ear and stopping at his chin. He is still unconscious, his head sagging forward. He seems to have some limited range to his head’s movement, because his chin isn’t in his chest like mine had been.

“Sesshoumaru,” I whisper. My voice comes unbidden into the room. It startles me. I glance around me, only to freeze in horror.

Not only are we tied, connected, to the bed, but we are surrounded by barrels and barrels and barrels all connected by wires and wires and wires. There is a lethal looking crossbow fitted to some device pointing straight at Sesshoumaru. Another one hanging from an identical device pointing at me. 

I gaige the setup of these devices for a moment, testing the likelihood of their firing, but they seem to be connected to something more intricate than I can follow with just my eyes. I glance around the rest of the room.

The door to the room is barred from the inside. Large slabs of wood are bolted into the wall, making it impossible to tear it down. There is a smart phone lying near our feet. I stare at it for a moment before finishing looking around the room.

With a jolt, I see my clothes neatly folded behind the barrels on the window sill. Almost tauntingly. There is a larger set of clothes beside mine, obviously Sesshoumaru’s.

I am suddenly painfully aware of how hard my heart is pounding. I feel like it’s about to leap out of my mouth before pulling torturously back into my chest. I take a shaking breath and look above my head at the ceiling. There are old-style surveillance cameras positioned in each of the four corners of the room, all pointed at the bed. 

Directly above my head, there is a second crossbow aimed straight down at my skull. I test my side-to-side movement and find I have some as my shoulders themselves aren’t strapped to anything. I glance across at Sesshoumaru and notice that he, too, has a crossbow aimed straight down. I glance again at the positioning of the other crossbows. They seem to be aimed at the torso or stomach, more than at the heart or some other kill-shot.

Which begs the question, what in the world am I doing strapped naked to a bed in a hotel room with no knowledge of how I got here?

“Sesshoumaru,” I croak. My throat is raw. I try to swallow and taste the metallic twang of blood. “Sesshoumaru, please,” I try again. He doesn’t even twitch. His shallow breathing is still coming in pants. The clock tick-tocks away.

What am I going to do?

“Sesshoumaru,” I try again, trying to put strength behind my voice. “Wake up.” I order. Nothing changes.

“Wake up, damnit,” I try sounding angry and press my toes against his feet. I am trying to tap down the blind panic lapping at my peripherals. That part of me that wants to start sobbing hysterically and break down screaming. The part of me that wants to just start tugging at the bonds like a crazed woman. But that part of me is not yet as strong as my instinct to stay perfectly still and as calm as I can. I shut my eyes and take five deep breaths.

One. In.

One. Out. Shutting out the room.

Two. In.

Two. Out. Shutting out the pain.

Three. In.

Three. Out. Shutting out the panic.

Four. In.

Four. Out. Shutting out the terror.

Five. In.

Five. Out. Letting in observations and information.

I open my eyes.

Sesshoumaru’s dazed golden orbs stare back at me from across the bed.

“You’re awake,” I croak, relief flooding my voice. His face doesn’t seem to betray any surprise or concern at our situation. I watch his eyes dart around the room, taking in the situation, assessing. I know him well enough to give him time.

“Miko,” he growls in a weak voice. Concern rises in my chest. He must be doing worse than he looks, I realize.

“Sesshoumaru,” I answer with a slight nod, “You okay?” Sesshoumaru flexes his hand but doesn’t answer me. His claws dig down into the mattress. I wait for the tell-tale sign of the green poison haze I know so well. But there is nothing.

Confused, I reach down inside myself for that familiar fire of my reiki, or holy energy. But I find nothing. No trace of it.

“I don’t have reiki,” I say, surprised.

“That seems to be a common theme,” he replies, relaxing his hand. His eyes snap up to look back at me. I see them flash up and around, taking in the weapons. His eyes follow the lines around the room better than I can. I wait for him to look at me again so I can ask. His eyes settle on our attached feet. Then to the smartphone. As if on cue, it rings.