Hectic, it was all hectic and crazy and too many prospects of freedom that Tanaka didn't dare believe in. But finally, finally he'd reached the calm that came after his storm of incomprehensible pain, Sato driving him towards a haven, driving him to rest.

Clothes too big, Sato had estimated his size from his pictures from before he was captured, yet ten years later and he was smaller now, thinner, emaciated. Shorter, he wanted to think, but no, no he was taller now. He couldn't control this body, taller, thinner, it wasn't his, wasn't what he remembered being his. It was a frighteningly foreign concept, that his body was his own again. He didn't trust it, didn't dare believe it would last, but wanted to, oh, he wanted to so bad.

"You're filthy," Sato stated with that ever present patient smile. Fake fake fake.

It wasn't real, he couldn't let himself be lured by dreams, but his dreams hurt. Fuck, his dreams actually hurt but he wasn't hurting right now.

He could sense the distant phantom pain, could recall perfectly the vibrations that made his entire skeleton buzz when an circular saw was taken to his thigh. A part of him wondered if maybe it was actually happening and he was just in a world of his own, disassociating with the barest threads keeping him attached to reality.

He was filthy, blood and sweat, mud from when Sato had fallen during their escape. He couldn't walk, couldn't remember how, didn't think he could. Sato had been forced to lift him, hadn't quite anticipated this particular detail. Unbalanced, they'd tumbled into the mud, and Tanaka's neck had snapped.

By the time he came to, Tanaka was already in the back of Sato's van. A part of him wondered if their tumble had been intentional. Easier to drag a ragdoll than to try and carry a squirming, fully grown man.

Tanaka wheezed in response, so long since he'd been able to use his voice. Most of the time they paralyzed his vocal folds, cut out his tongue. The nonsense he'd babbled at the scientists frustrated them, so they just got rid of the ability before he woke up, without killing him. There wasn't much to be done about the screaming apart from gagging him.

So they gagged him, cotton wool shoved all the way to the back of his throat, it made him gag, always made him gag. Everything made him gag, everything they subjected to made him more than just gag. The cotton wool was so tightly packed into his mouth he couldn't even move his jaw, it was choking.

He looked down over his body, eyes flickering towards his feet and up his own body from there. He lay draped over the couch where Sato had left him, his body wasn't ready to move.

"The bathroom's on the ground floor," Sato told him from a nearby armchair. His eyes were trained on the TV, thumbs working over the controller in his hands, "There's a spare change of clothes whenever you feel up to it."

Tanaka grunted in response, thumping his head back against the arm of the sofa. He was so exhausted, but of all the things his body had forgotten, he never expected falling asleep to be one of them.

Or, he considered, maybe he was still dreaming.

-SiCanFly