Souji had fallen asleep at some point during the night, lingering on the edge of terror that Adachi would return to the bedroom and do something horrible to him, though it never wound up happening. He'd had another nightmare to fill that role instead, with Adachi forcing his pistol up between his legs and wrenching it painfully before pulling the trigger, a blast of something not quite pain but searing hot all the same filling him, all while that deceptive smile hugged the man's lips. Stifling the urge to scream, he'd awakened shaking in a cold sheen of sweat. Realizing his body was still in one piece, he heaved a sigh and sought the bedside clock to discover that it was just past six a.m.
His arms ached terribly from their elevated position, and he wanted nothing more than to rotate onto his side, but he was helpless to ease his discomfort. What was worse, his bladder had been straining for the last few hours, by the feel of it. He briefly wondered if he should summon Adachi to at least let him use the toilet. Or would he have to resign himself and just do it here? No, he could never willingly do such a thing. But if he didn't go soon he knew it would damage him, or start to leak out unbidden. The last thing he needed was even more humiliation stacked on top of what he had already suffered through. Groaning, he jostled the handcuffs against the bars as loudly as he could.
"Hey!" he called out, refusing to address his captor by name. "…HEY!"
After a moment, Adachi answered his call. He stumbled into the room, still shirtless, the top button of his rumpled slacks undone, and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. When he dropped his hand and looked up, illuminated from behind by the light of the hallway, his face betrayed his obvious irritation.
"Geez. What is it?"
"I need to use the bathroom." Souji's voice was blunt, but cutting.
Adachi just studied him as if judging whether the declaration was true or not. Finally, he sighed moved to extract the cuff keys from the bed table drawer.
"Fine. But let's make it quick."
As Adachi worked the key into the first band's lock, Souji wondered if he could make a break for it at the right moment. His wrist fell from the binding and he drew it down, flexing his sore joints.
"Ah ahh." Adachi corrected him in an almost lilting voice and pulled his arm back up over his head. After undoing the second lock, he pushed Souji into a sitting position, arms behind his back, and clipped the open cuff over Souji's free wrist.
"What the hell?" Souji huffed.
"Like I'd really be dumb enough to let you free," Adachi explained in a humorless tone and pulled Souji up off the bed by his shirt. "Move it." He nudged Souji forward to the doorway and followed close behind.
The bathroom stood directly across from the bedroom in the short hallway. Adachi snapped on the light when they stepped inside and Souji stopped to look around. He glanced at the sink, the bathtub half framed by a cheap and thin plastic curtain, the general emptiness of the small, clinically white room. Though its constrictive nature didn't appear, or even necessarily smell, dirty, a humid, dank atmosphere seemed to hang in the air. Only a small, lint-caked ventilation fan led to the outside; it wheezed tiredly from its position on the light above.
Adachi was still behind him, practically breathing down his neck. "Well? What are you waiting for?" he finally bit.
"I can't do this with my arms behind my back."
"Oh? No shit?" Adachi mocked him and guided him by the shoulders to stand before the bowl. Shifting himself even closer, he reached around Souji's waist and roughly began to unfasten the kid's pants.
"Whoa-wait! You can't be serious!" Souji balked and tried to jerk away.
"Cool it," Adachi warned with an emphasized jerk to the fly. "It's either this or you can piss yourself."
Adachi's hand was warm on his skin when it touched him, pulling him free. Though there was nothing blatantly perverse about the way he held Souji's cock, he couldn't help tensing in some dreadful anticipation. Souji wasn't sure he even could go now, despite the heavy pressure overwhelming his lower body.
Adachi laughed dryly through his nose behind him, the bursts of air tickling his neck. "Something the matter?"
"I can't…"
"Oh, come on now, Souji. You've been through far worse than this. You've put your life on the line to save your friends over and over, and you're too scared to take a piss in front of another guy? Man, you need to work on your priorities."
Souji shut his eyes, forcing his imagination to stifle the sensation of someone else's hand on him, and relaxed his bladder. It was a good half-minute before he was empty, but it had felt like an excruciating eternity. Adachi hadn't tried anything to molest him, even after he was done. For that he was thankful, but remained somewhere between deflated and furious from the embarrassment of this entire scenario.
Flushing the toilet with his foot, Adachi pushed Souji back out the door toward the bedroom again. Souji eyed the bed with agitation.
"Please, don't lock me up there again," he mumbled. It had been bad enough for the hours he had already spent there; he didn't think he could handle it once more. He wasn't tired in the least, either. All the same, last night Souji had discovered that he wouldn't be kept here merely to decorate the man's bed for long. Adachi—the one behind all the crimes that had Souji sleepless nearly every night since their beginning—clearly had other, unspeakable plans for him. Only, Souji had no idea when they would be inflicted upon him. From what Adachi had said, he had a very good indication of what they would be, however. He felt anxious, tensed up to knots, as if he watched a fist hovering inches before his face and could do nothing but wait for it to plow forward at any given moment. The opportunity to memorize every crack in Adachi's bedroom ceiling would be like gracious blessing in contrast.
Adachi shoved him without warning again, hard enough that Souji stumbled and fell against the mattress edge with his knees knocking against the metal rails. Before Souji could recover, the man was right there to haul him up onto the bed, crawling over him with the other set of cuffs.
"You know, you really do whine too much. It's nice enough of me to give up my bed, and here you are complaining about it. Talk about ungrateful." Adachi began his work on Souji's wrists again.
"Is this really what you want?" Souji pleaded, dismayed to hear the crack in his voice, but too weak to put up a real fight. "They're going to find you out."
"Huh. I wonder about that," Adachi stated blandly as he snapped the last ring into place. "If that day ever comes, it's not like they'll have any proof. I mean, really. Pushing people into TVs? Not even a kid would believe that."
"He'll believe it," Souji said quietly, looking into Adachi's eyes and trying to hold his ground for what it was worth. "You know he will."
Adachi sat beside him on the bed, looking down into Souji's face with an unreadable expression. "Who? Dojima?" He paused before laughing thinly, though he wasn't smiling. "Yeah, he might." Toying with the bottom hem of Souji's wrinkled school shirt, he silently pondered. "But I doubt he'll remember much about that day."
At the sensation of Adachi's fingers so close to his skin, separated only by that thin layer of material, he tensed. "What did you do?" Though in a mind to pull his body away from Adachi's hand, he lay passive instead for fear of inciting the man.
Adachi's fingers worked over the bottommost button idly, pushing the plastic through the slot before trailing toward the next. "Oh, nothing really. Just slipped him a little something." The button fell open, revealing a pale triangle of Souji's abdomen. "Simple, but effective." He chuckled shortly. "You'd be surprised how easy it is to get that shit."
"The drugs?"
Adachi ran his finger over that bit of exposed skin, making Souji tighten up even more. "A little Ketamine goes a long way." He smirked, the light filtering in weakly from the hallway catching around the grooves of face and transforming it into a mask of noxious amusement. "I thought it was more of a city thing, but we confiscate that kind of stuff all the time. Guess there's not a whole hell of a lot else for the kids to do around here, is there?"
Eyeing Souji's tormented expression, Adachi tempered his face with mild concern. "Oh? You didn't know about that?" A smile slowly stretched his lips. "I can't help wondering how many of your school chums have tried it. Whether or not they realized it."
Whether it was the words themselves rolling off Adachi's tongue or the way in which they were spoken, Souji couldn't keep the perpetual chill from penetrating his bones. "What are you saying?"
"Me? I'm not saying anything." Adachi tapped Souji twice on the head with his forefinger. "You're reading too much into this. What, you thought I was implying that I'm some kind of shady drug lord?" He laughed genuinely for a short time before breathing in deep and wiping a nonexistent tear from his eye. "Nah. Let's just say I have a chemical interest. They suit me better toward my own ends."
His voice had taken on a lower quality, almost a whisper, filled with dark promises. When his fingers returned to his abdomen, sliding slowly upward, Souji wanted desperately to curl into a ball, to vanish. All he could do was turn his head away. Those deliberately deft touches tapered off, drawing closer to his nipple, but a soft series of beeps suddenly issued in from the living room, making Adachi's hand pause before lifting away. Souji didn't look up when it did.
Heaving a deep sigh, Adachi glanced at the clock. "Shit. Almost time for work." He stood and retrieved a fresh dress shirt from a narrow closet before slinging it on over his lanky torso. The tie and suit jacket lying crumpled on the dresser followed. As he threaded the red strip into a knot at his neck, he blinked tiredly at Souji.
"If you're interested, I suppose we can talk more about it tonight. Maybe I'll even give you another demonstration."
With that he straightened the tie against his chest and began to leave the room, but stopped short with both hands fanned out over the doorframe. Pushing himself back, he turned and stooped to rummage through the bed stand's bottommost drawer. When he stood, a roll of duct tape came with him.
"Almost forgot." He pulled a short length of the tape away and tore it neatly with his teeth. Humming to himself, he pressed the strip down over Souji's lips.
Souji knew what was about to happen when he saw the tape, and for the first time—a realization that surprised him—he wondered what kinds of neighbors Adachi had. If he had been in his right mind yesterday, screaming bloody murder, would someone have come to rescue him? Would he have been free of this hell with Adachi behind bars by this time? Well, it didn't matter anymore. Any chance he had was probably long gone.
The tape was tacky and uncomfortable against his dry lips, but he didn't bother to struggle. Instead, he glared at Adachi with as much burning hatred as he could muster.
Adachi deposited the roll back into the drawer again and stopped humming in time with his growing smile. He bent at the waist and planted a kiss over Souji's taped mouth.
"Don't wait up for me."
He left the bedroom then, a light chuckle on his lips, and closed the door for good measure. Souji listened to the sound of water coming from across the hall, the rattle of a cupboard, the closing of the front door. Then, all was still again.
"Listen," Yosuke practically growled as he slapped his hand against the police station's reception desk. "All I'm asking is to know who was working that day."
The man on the other side of the heavy desk remained unfazed by Yosuke's mounting frustration. He leaned forward slightly, his thick mustache conforming to the grimace that had taken over his lips beneath. "And I already told you. We don't give out information without justifiable cause. Now, if there's some sort of problem, maybe you should start talking."
Yosuke attempted to glare the man down, but his efforts proved useless. He was still tired, very tired, having not slept at all the night before. Instead he had paced his room, organized his CDs, even tried to do his homework in an attempt to distract and tire himself out, but all he could think about was Souji. The idea to come here first thing in the morning before school started had seemed like a good plan at the time, but now he wondered just what he could have feasibly hoped to accomplish. There was no reasoning with this man, not without getting into specifics he was unwilling to divulge. After all, it wasn't just Souji he had to look out for, but the entire investigation crew. He didn't want to, no, he just couldn't get them involved with this. Yosuke's head began to throb dully at the temples.
"I don't see how telling me who was on duty that day is a big deal. Aren't you public servants?" He was pulling at straws now, and he knew it.
"Look, kid, either tell me straight out why you're here asking this, or get out and get your ass to school already."
"What's going on here?"
The sudden voice at Yosuke's side caught his attention and he looked over to see Adachi standing there, two steaming cups of coffee in his hands. The detective's eyebrows were raised in surprise.
Yosuke straightened and shoved his hands in his pockets. "Nothing. I was just leaving."
He had just made it to the reinforced glass doors when Adachi's voice stopped him: "Hey, hold up!"
Turning back, Yosuke saw Adachi gesture meaningfully with his head to follow him to the back. Flicking a glance at the reception clerk, who eyed the both of them with annoyance, he found himself falling into step behind the lanky detective.
Adachi stopped in front of a steel door and turned to Yosuke, who regarded him in confusion.
"Wait here a second," Adachi said and hurried away toward the end of the hall before disappearing behind a corner. He returned hardly a moment later, sans one of the coffee cups. A lopsided grin lay plastered over his face and he rubbed his neck with his free hand. "Sorry. You don't wanna see Dojima-san first thing in the morning if I don't have that ready for him."
"Is he here?" Yosuke asked.
"No, not yet." Adachi checked his watch. "Any minute now, though." He tested the heavy door's knob and, finding it unlocked, pushed it open, giving Yosuke a nod to enter. "Something's up, isn't it? Don't worry, we can talk privately in here."
Yosuke looked at the dark beyond the door and saw from the outlines of the sparse objects that it was an interrogation room. Only a desk, a few chairs, and a television sitting in the corner seemed to make up the otherwise claustrophobic space. He looked back to Adachi, perturbed, though he wasn't sure why. "I…actually I need to get going. I shouldn't be late for class."
For a moment Adachi looked decidedly disappointed, but the emotion dissolved away. "Hey, no prob." He smiled and fumbled in his suit pocket. Pulling out a relatively plain business card, he handed it over to Yosuke. "I know you must've wanted to talk to Dojima-san for some reason, but listen, if you need to talk to someone and no one's around, don't hesitate to get in touch. I might not look it, but I'm actually a pretty good listener."
Yosuke took the card and pocketed it. "Uh, thanks." He turned and began the trek back toward the station's entrance.
"I'm always willing to help," Adachi called after him. "Don't forget that."
Fighting the urge to stop and go back, to just ask Adachi straight out if he knew anything, Yosuke kept walking. He knew it was a mistake to come here, to try to weed anything useful from the cops. After all, none of them could be trusted. But what other choice did he have?
Yosuke left the station without a second glance; he didn't see Adachi's intent stare directed at his retreating back as the crisp morning air met his flushed skin.
Souji hadn't slept, hadn't done anything whatsoever during the hours that Adachi wasn't there. With his arms bound and his mouth taped shut, there wasn't much he could do anyway except think. He wondered what life would be like once he managed to escape—if he would ever escape—and about what Nanako and his uncle were doing, or if they even knew that something was amiss. That inevitably led his mind down the road paved by Adachi's elaborate betrayal. The man responsible for everything had been working at Dojima's side all this time and getting away with it. How many times had he been sitting right next to him at Dojima's table over dinner, never even suspecting? What had really been going through Adachi's head back then?
It was too much to consider. The more he thought about it, the sicker he became.
Not least of all, he thought about Yosuke. They might have technically been dating, and though their time together was too depressingly short to really find out, Souji wondered whether they would have ever become serious together if given the chance. Developing relationships with friends was easy, but anything more intimate tended to elude him. He had never been involved too seriously with anyone before; any relationships he had experienced in the past were rather short-lived, and seemed more like formalities than anything genuine. They had their moments, naturally, but over time the girls on the end of his arm wound up revealing a state of mind similar to his own in one way or another. And, in the end, most of them had pursued him for his looks. Things became cumbersome. Girls, too, became less and less interesting in that sense as he grew up. It was a rarity when any one of them expressed an interest in his mind outside the realm of the test scoreboards.
But Yosuke was a completely different world altogether. The two of them just clicked so well it was almost scary. Souji had mused about the possibility of being with a guy a few times before, but the idea had never seemed to hold any more potential than being just that. An idea. Honestly, when Yosuke came into the picture he didn't feel anything more than that same basic level of friendship he had for every one of his Inaba acquaintances. Somewhere along the way, though he wasn't sure exactly when, that all began to change. They might well have ended up together if things had played out differently. If Dojima hadn't been thrown into the TV. Why did it have to take such awful circumstances for he and Yosuke to come together? Still, their bond was all the tighter and unbreakable due to that horrific incident.
The memory of that night sparked the same old cold despair, despite his best efforts to do anything but think about it. Souji closed his eyes, trying to relieve the steady burning behind them, when the sound of Adachi's return startled him back to the present—and more pressing—matters with which he had to cope.
Adachi was in the bedroom soon after the front door announced his presence, and Souji could tell immediately that he was upset over something. Adachi had thrown the bedroom door open with nothing short of violence, letting it slam against the wall without so much as blinking at the crashing noise. The first thing that crossed Souji's mind was that they had somehow found Adachi out. Even with this bit of hope, he could not relax. Not with the way Adachi's eyes looked at him right then.
"Your little fuck-buddy is even more annoying than I thought." Adachi's voice was strangely controlled, which made it all the more frightening. He began to pace about the room.
Souji wanted to ask what the hell he was talking about, knowing that it was Yosuke to whom he referred, but could do little more than emit pathetic and muffled sounds from behind the duct tape while keeping his eyes trained on Adachi's unpredictable movements.
"Already asking questions. I could kill him, you know. Easily. I doubt he'd be missed around here."
And outraged cry tumbled from Souji's panicked throat, and Adachi stopped to regard him.
"The whole goddamn town has had a grudge against that family from day one. Tch. They'd be grateful. Probably already want him dead as it is."
Heart thumping in his chest, Souji jerked defiantly on the cuffs and directed as much venom as he could at Adachi with his eyes. But Adachi wasn't moved by his display.
"I wasn't gonna do anything to your friends. Not really. But now…maybe I should just kill the lot of 'em." Adachi lifted a hand to his face and rubbed his fingers over his mouth in contemplation. "Damn it." After a moment he seemed to calm down; lowering his hand, he studied Souji with mute resignation. "I suppose this shortens our time together, doesn't it?"
Staring at Adachi, Souji fought to unravel the meaning in those words. He doubted the question was genuinely aimed at him, but that didn't slow the fear from rearing out of the depths of his mind. So, he was going to die. Somehow, he knew this as an unavoidable certainty now. Even worse, his friends were now in unsuspecting mortal peril, and there wasn't a single thing he could do about it. He had never felt so powerless in his life.
Adachi worked his jacket off, letting it drop to the floor without care, and began to unfasten his belt, all while keeping his gaze trained on Souji. "Let's take a rain check on our previous plans." He leaned over the bed, over Souji, and unhesitatingly pulled Souji's pants fastenings apart. His motions were swift and disturbingly graceful when he hooked his long fingers into the waist of those pants and underwear together, stripping Souji from the waist down. "I was looking forward to hearing you moan, but right now I really don't care if you enjoy this or not."
Everything Adachi left unsaid crystallized into full understanding in that moment, and Souji buckled, pulling his legs up and curling into himself as much as he could in that awkward position. The same nausea he felt last night returned; its grim, cold fingers prodding at his stomach like a mortician preparing to slice into a cadaver.
Adachi climbed onto the bed, towering over Souji on his knees alone, and started working his own slacks open. Once the button and zipper lay gaping open, revealing to Souji that Adachi was already somehow hard even beneath his clothes, the man smirked down at Souji's pathetic attempt to get away. Leaning down, Adachi placed his hands on either side of Souji's head and hovered over him, watching—almost consuming—Souji's primal fear. Wordlessly, and without even looking away to see what he was doing, Adachi reached toward the bed stand and extracted something from a drawer.
Souji watched as the man leaned back into a crouch, a blue plastic bottle now in Adachi's hand. And then Adachi's erection was free, the bottle opened and spilling clear liquid out into his hand. Once Adachi began to work the substance over his straining member, Souji couldn't look any longer. All of this seemed far too well practiced. How many times had Adachi done this? Did he bring women home, drug them, and chain them to his bed? Souji couldn't help but think with a vague sense of certainty that he was not the first one to be bound in fear under this man.
He heard the bottle's lid snap shut, the thud of it hitting the floor, and then Adachi's fingers were clasped over his ankles, pulling them down and apart with a force he couldn't possibly fight.
"Stop! Stop…" Souji gasped, but the tape made his plea unintelligible.
"Don't throw up this time," Adachi advised bitterly as he hauled Souji's legs around his sides, shifting himself closer. "You might just choke." With a leaden chuckle, Adachi positioned himself between Souji's legs and began to push himself in.
Though he knew very well what to expect at that moment, the tangible, insistent warmth pressed against his ass made the reality of it all come crashing down. Souji instinctively revolted. He pulled his knees back and plowed his feet with all his strength into Adachi's chest. But his action wasn't fast enough, or else Adachi foresaw what he was about to do. The man caught his ankles in a bruising grip before he could be sent falling back off the bed. Instead he used Souji's legs as leverage and pulled himself back over the kid with a snarl.
Adachi's fist cut the air and drove down into the side of Souji's face with a sickening thud, whipping Souji's head to the side. "Didn't I already warn you about playing the fucking hero?"
The pain pulsing over his cheekbone and the faint ringing in his left ear in the wake of the attack did little to distract him from the burning pressure that quickly resumed between his legs. Souji couldn't do anything at this point to stop it; his own fear and revulsion made his muscles taut as coils, and that only made the situation worse. He could feel every inch overcoming his body's futile resistance as Adachi began to steadily fuck him, deeper with each stroke.
It hurt. Indescribably so. Even with the lube it was almost as bad as it had been that night. But there would be no pleasure whatsoever this time. Souji wasn't sure whether or not to feel grateful for that. He couldn't help comparing this to what had happened in the TV world, and that unintentional line of thought proved to be far more destructive than he could have imagined. His entire body adopted a certain ache that he couldn't quite describe, though it rested somewhere between blistering and dull, relentless throbbing. Before he knew it, a blank, white curtain of static began to unfurl over his mind. Souji took refuge in that proffered haze immediately. Was it his Personae trying to assist him? Or something deeper, something unconscious? Whatever it was, its neutral embrace—tucking him protectively away from reality—was welcomed.
Adachi must have seen it in the faded, hollow reflection that overtook Souji's eyes as they stared at the ceiling, must have felt it in the way Souji's body slackened under his thrusts. Seizing Souji's jaw, Adachi forced his head to tilt downward and face him. He shook it roughly until the light returned to Souji's bleary eyes. "No. You're not going anywhere tonight."