Straight Lines
Title: Straight Lines
Rating: NC-17
Characters/Pairings: Kamenashi Kazuya/Akanishi Jin
Summary: He'd designed the perfect prison. And now he was a prisoner himself.
Notes/Warnings: For je_squickfic. Please heed the warnings before reading: Graphic violence, nonconsensual sex (it straddles that tricky border between dubious consent and rape--I'd say it's closer to noncon), psychological torture
When he took the job, he hadn't asked many questions. His fridge was empty, his bank account even more so, and he'd always been too damn proud to ask his parents for help.
He should have asked who they were affiliated with. He should have asked where the money came from. And most importantly he should have asked the price of his silence.
Kamenashi Kazuya was often described by his friends, back when he'd still had a few, as obsessed with perfection. It had cost him dearly over the years, had gotten him booted from architecture school. His standards were too high, and thus he never finished projects on the timetables they set out for him. But with this project they'd given him leeway.
He'd been too hungry to ask questions when the envelopes of cold, hard cash had started appearing in his mailbox. "Take all the time you need to get it right," the voice over the phone had said. Kame had convinced himself it was a covert government job. Counterterrorism at the highest security clearance probably since they were going with a random dropout architect and not a regular contractor. Someone they could pay under the table.
The first set of blueprints had taken almost six months, and even with the cashflow he'd still neglected himself. The money piled up in his account for a rainy day, and he kept vampire hours - measuring and measuring and drawing and thinking at his best once the sun went down and he was squinting under the buzzing glow of his desk lamp. His fridge mostly remained empty because when Kame had work, real work, it was way too damn easy to get lost in it.
He'd had to put a brand new notch in his belt when he finally brought the completed plans to the meet-up. The man had been nondescript as Kame believed most government agents to be, puffing away on a rolled cigarette as he examined Kame's work. "We'll be in touch."
It was easy to feel pride then, knowing that he'd worked his ass off so those who threatened the nation's peace would be dealt with. Kame knew every duct, every wall, every square inch of the place they were going to build.
They came for him in the night eight months later, hauling him out of bed, a quick punch to the gut more than enough to silence his protests. They blindfolded and gagged him and drove for what seemed like an eternity. It might have been quicker to have just put a bullet between his eyes, but maybe they thought it was more fun this way.
When he woke, every angle, every corner, every inch of the room he found himself in was of his own design. He still didn't know if they were government or something else, but now that he was in, it didn't really matter.
He'd done a fantastic job, he realized as he opened the door and looked into the stark, whitewashed "common room." He'd added it to the holding block design almost as an afterthought when they'd implied that even anthills had rooms for different purposes.
He'd designed the perfect prison. And now he was a prisoner himself.
--
He only knew the blueprints. So whatever they'd decided to use the place for was something he got an education in fairly quickly. The holding block rooms themselves had no locks and were each sparsely furnished with a futon and tatami mats, cut to the specifications Kame had envisioned. Everything else furniture-wise in the place was bolted down, from the dining tables and benches in the common room to the sconces on the wall.
It was the other floors that mattered, the places to drive them mad. They'd had him plan the duct work in a certain way, so that whatever was happening to someone in one of the chambers below could be heard in every room in the holding block. So it didn't matter that he couldn't lock his door for privacy. It didn't matter that he had a comfortable enough futon. The acoustics were phenomenal. His professors at university would have praised him.
Kame had done a perfect job, so from lights out every night he could hear the begging. The screams. He could hear it all just so perfectly, and no amount of holding the blanket over his head could muffle it entirely.
The system was random enough. He'd already been there a week and had yet to be chosen. Of the twenty rooms in the holding block, fourteen were occupied. There was no such thing as making friends. There was just the long tables where they ate, the long hours in silence waiting to see if tonight was the night.
He didn't ask anyone why they were there. Maybe whatever kind of torture was happening on the other floors was a punishment for talking with each other, for plotting. Kame had never made friends easily anyway, and with the sullen gazes and jittery nerves of the other men in the common room, befriending them would just be another weakness. If he didn't really care about them, he wouldn't care what their jailers were doing to them when the lights went out.
That was until the second week. They were down to twelve prisoners. Sometimes that happened, Kame now understood. One night he came out of his room to see the blood splattered against the common room wall, the slumped man on the ground who'd figured that suicide was preferable to the other floors. As they tried to choke down their rice, cleaners in white scrubs had come in to clean the blood and scrape the brain matter from the wall, the harsh sting of the disinfectants eventually sending Kame and the others to their rooms to retch.
The other prisoner had simply not returned to his room one night.
This left an opening for the newest member of their holding block, and unlike Kame and the others, this man wanted answers. They'd put him into the empty room beside Kame, but he wouldn't stay there. Kame sat on his futon, eyes shut tight as he heard the man go from room to room.
"What the fuck is going on? I didn't do anything wrong!"
"Why are you here? Don't you know anything?"
"Why won't you fucking talk to me?"
They were summoned by the ping of the dinner bell, and Kame and the other 11 prisoners shuffled along to sit at the common room tables. He got his first look at the new guy then. He was still in outside clothes, dirty jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, his hair an untamed rat's nest tied back away from his face. He remained standing as they brought in the dinner trays, trying to get people's attention.
He tried waving in Kame's face as his own tray was set down. "Asshole, are you mute? Are you all fucking mutes?"
The staff simply walked around him, setting down the dinner tray for the next man. When twelve trays were set down, the new guy was even more pissed off. He grabbed one of the staff as they headed to the exit. "Hey, where's my tray?"
The staff member said nothing, wrenching out of his grasp.
"I asked you a question. Where's my fucking tray?"
He tried throwing a punch, and the staff member dodged it and without blinking an eye or getting a hair out of place, he dropped the new prisoner to the floor with a punch to the gut and left the room with the others.
Nobody bothered to look over as the man groaned and whined, curling up in a ball on the floor. It was dinner time, after all, and it was a privilege they could always revoke. One by one, food was finished or left uneaten by those who were too petrified to keep anything down any longer. They disappeared from the common room table, returning to their rooms to cry, to pray, to continue suffering in silence.
Kame remained, finishing all the food that had been given to him. He saw that the new prisoner had managed to crawl over to the wall. The same wall that had had brains smeared across it the other day, though there was no trace of it now. He saw that all the bravado had gone out of him, and he was obviously crying now.
He'd spent two weeks ignoring people. If he ignored it, he'd get through it. If he ignored it, maybe they wouldn't see a need to torture him further. But where the others said little to nothing, this guy had asked why. He walked over, standing a few feet from the newest prisoner.
"You only get food if you're sitting down at the table."
The guy looked up at him, eyes bloodshot. He had his arms crossed, most likely to hide that his hands were trembling. "You can talk."
"We can all talk," Kame said. "But it's best if you don't bother."
The guy held out his hand. "Help me up?"
But Kame felt that he'd passed on enough information. Any more and he'd start to think of the new prisoner as a person instead of just another occupied cell in the beehive. He ignored the outstretched hand and turned around, walking to his room and shutting the door.
When the howls came from the other floors that night, he figured it would be enough of an education for the newest prisoner.
--
There was no ping for breakfast the following morning. It was like that sometimes. If they didn't want to feed you, they didn't want to feed you. Kame opened his door, finding the new prisoner at the table sitting quietly, staring at the wall. He didn't need to talk to him. He knew he shouldn't want to talk to him, but Kame had had all night to not sleep. Had had all night to decide to allow himself one connection in hell.
Only a few of the others had bothered coming out of their rooms that morning. If it was actually morning. Kame's design had made no accommodation for windows, only plain walls. Sometimes there'd be a book or two on the common room floor - an old novel, something in English that nobody could probably read. People still took them, just to have something to do besides sitting.
He sat down across from the new guy. The bloodshot eyes had some additional decoration. Dark purple circles, the signs of a sleepless night. Kame could sometimes sleep through it, at least part of it. But he was kind of a seasoned pro in comparison.
"I didn't...I said I would pay them back," the man across from him muttered, licking his dry, cracked lips. They only got water with meals unless they felt like cupping some out of the toilet in their room or wasting their minute of shower time drinking from the spray.
Kame didn't answer, spying a box of crayons on the dining table that nobody had taken. That was new. He pulled them into his palm and got up from the table, heading back to his room. It didn't completely surprise him when he heard the shuffling footsteps behind him. He said nothing though, letting the new guy close the door and sit down on the floor beside him.
"What are they doing to them?" he asked warily, and Kame noticed how jittery his hands were. He was probably a smoker. Kame's hands had done the exact same thing the first few days until the prison had found a way to make every part of him shake.
Kame didn't have to answer, but where this guy was concerned, he found himself speaking anyhow. "I don't know," he said honestly. And he wasn't in any hurry to find out. He sat cross-legged before the unblemished wall, tapping the small crayon box in his hand just like a pack of Mild Sevens.
"I'm Jin."
Kame opened the crayon box, shaking out a black crayon to hold between his fingers. "I'd say nice to meet you but..."
"S'okay," Jin said as amiably as he could manage. Jin watched him bring the crayon to the wall. It had been weeks since he'd sketched. Not that what he ever did could be considered art. Kame had always drawn models and blueprints and floorplans. He was lacking in creativity, his instructors had always said. He only saw in straight, perfect lines.
He didn't know what to draw, so he let his hand draw a square. Then another. And another. Perfect, even little black squares marring the white paint. Jin was quiet beside him. Kame had drawn at least two hundred small squares on the wall by the time the other man got to his feet.
He hadn't even heard the bell for lunch. This time Jin held out his hand. "You're good at drawing squares," he said with an odd, crooked smile.
It didn't feel right to smile back, not here. Not in this hell he'd designed. But he accepted Jin's hand and got to his feet. "I'm Kamenashi."
--
The next night they took Kame to another floor for the first time.
He didn't resist, figuring it would only get worse if he tried to fight them. His heart was racing even as he tried to stay calm. They carried him out of the room like he was as small and weak as a child and strapped him to a gurney. Kame just pictured the floorplans he'd created as they wheeled him out of the common room. The straight lines he'd drawn - this corridor, hang a right, then this corridor to the elevator.
He only became truly frightened when they brought him to the intended room. It didn't make a lot of sense with the plans he designed. They'd made the ceilings way low, and the staff had to duck as they shuffled around and locked the wheels on his gurney. He started to squirm as a staff member approached with a needle, and he wanted to vomit.
He'd never been good with needles, and he recoiled as best he could, his wrists straining against the leather straps that held him down. The staff member seemed to realize his distress and only made it worse, squeezing the syringe so the slightly cloudy liquid inside sprayed out a bit. He learned quickly that whatever was in the syringe worked fast.
He screamed at the prick of the needle against the inside of his elbow, but the pain was temporary as he ended up refocusing on the low ceiling above him. It was low, Kame discovered, because there was a video screen to watch. The drug they'd given him seemed to freeze him in place, numbing more and more as he tried to wriggle in the restraints.
The screen flickered on. What were they going to make him watch? Did everyone have to watch the video? What did they do that made the prisoners in the place scream so much every night? He was about to find out, even as his entire body felt numb. He could barely blink, his focus trained on the screen.
It was a video of a fairly isolated street, nothing extraordinary, like any street in a metro area in Japan. It seemed like a person was just walking around with a camcorder. It was only when they turned the corner that Kame recognized where they were going.
He felt ill when he saw the sign for a restaurant he'd been to a dozen times. When he'd played baseball in high school, they'd gone to the Hamada family's restaurant often. "Don't go in there," he heard himself whisper. His body was frozen, but his vocal cords still worked. That was why people were still able to scream every night.
Kame could only watch and plead for mercy as the cameraman entered the shop. He saw Hamada-san's daughter approach. She had to be in high school now, old enough to wait tables at the small restaurant. "No," Kame demanded, but the video kept right on playing. How was she not seeing the camera? How did she not notice it?
He was on edge the entire time as whoever shot the video sat down at a table. Hamada-san himself brought over a bowl of ramen, and as soon as the camera man finished his meal and paid, the tape cut out, and Kame felt relief course through him. But it didn't last long.
The tape started up again. This time it was dark as the camera followed along to the Hamada family restaurant. "I'm sorry, we're closed!" called Hamada-san's daughter just before Kame watched the baseball bat in the camera man's hand collide with her skull. Whatever they'd injected him with, Kame couldn't look away. And now he understood the screaming. Now he understood what had driven that other prisoner to bash his head against the wall.
Because Kame had to watch the girl's face disappear. Had to watch the way her body was still twitching on the floor as the camera man crouched down to rip off her skirt. Had to watch what happened next when the bat that had just bashed her brains in was used to violate her. She was still alive, and Kame could do nothing to help her. Except scream and beg for them to shut the video off.
She had been just an innocent girl in a Tokyo restaurant. She'd done nothing wrong.
Except that at some point in her life she had made the mistake of being in the same room as Kamenashi Kazuya.
--
They didn't bother to bring him back to the video room for days. The damage had been done. That was why they didn't seem to have a schedule - they waited until you were doing better before they made you go down there again. He vomited up the first few meals he'd tried and after that ate nothing for a few days, wandering around his own room and the common room in a daze.
He noticed Jin watching him. Jin had had to listen to him scream. Kame sat in his room counting crayon squares, trying to remember what life in this place had been like before the video room. When he'd thought that all they were doing to the prisoners was torturing them physically. Maybe it would have been easier to take.
He counted crayon squares, and eventually they became bits of Hamada-san's daughter that he'd seen destroyed. The crayon squares were her teeth flying out of her mouth from the first blow of the bat. The crayon squares were the checkered pattern on her panties, shoved aside as the blood smeared across her thighs.
Kame shut his eyes, and it was still there. And this was a girl he'd barely known. What would they show him next time? Who would be on the tape?
By the sixth night of barely sleeping and hardly eating, Jin decided to intervene. There were screams in the night, and he woke in a cold sweat to find Jin sitting next to his futon watching him.
"Get the fuck out of here," Kame pleaded with him, his voice scratchy. "Get out of here."
Instead Jin shoved onigiri in his hand. "You're not eating."
"Fuck you."
"Eat the god damn thing, Kamenashi."
In the darkness, it was odd to have someone else so close. He could hear Jin's breathing, smell his sweat. He took a bite of the onigiri, feeling the salty rice against his tongue. If he tried, he'd be able to keep it down. Jin was right of course. He did need to eat. If he was a normal person at least. But ever since the video room, he hadn't seen much point. Hamada-san's daughter would never eat again, and it was all his fault.
"Nobody else will tell me," Jin was whispering, grabbing Kame's palm and breaking off part of the onigiri and eating it himself, seemingly to have something to do. "Nobody else will tell me what happens down there."
"You're better off not knowing..."
"And if you knew before you'd gone, would it have made a difference? They're going to bring me down there eventually, so at least tell me what I'm in for."
Kame took another bite, his whole body shaking. He'd been so fucking calm those first two weeks. Sitting at the table when they dinged for a meal. Not causing trouble. Not making friends. And he'd tried so hard to avoid someone like Jin. He'd tried so hard to avoid becoming someone like Jin. Someone who at least cared about something.
"I don't know if it's always the same," Kame whispered, shoving the rest of the onigiri back into Jin's palm. "But it's the worst thing ever. I just...I don't know how, and I don't know why. They just know exactly how to break you."
"Okay," Jin said. "Okay, man, I won't press you."
Jin left him alone then.
And they took him the next night.
--
Jin had come into their common room with a round face and a soft body, curved in places where Kame had edges. But he whittled down quickly enough after his first night in the video room. The first few days had been the worst for Kame, where every waking moment was the bat hitting Hamada-san's daughter, the bastard enjoying his meal in the restaurant earlier in the video. Remembering the slurping of the ramen.
He found himself keeping an eye on Jin, wondering just who they'd found from his life to kill. If that was what they did to everyone. Kame took up his crayon pack again, took to his squares. He left his door open as he drew them, eyes blurring as he strove for perfection in each line and angle. It took a few days, but finally Jin came in and watched Kame add to his squares.
"Who was it?" he heard Jin ask him. "Was it someone you knew?"
"Barely," he admitted. "But yes, I knew her."
"I worked a job with him," Jin explained, shaking fingers twisting in the thin sheet that covered Kame's futon. "Maybe five, six years ago. I barely recognized him until they started to hurt him. Then I remembered real fast. He had tattoos. In the video they...in the video they cut them off him, one by one."
They returned to silence for a while until Kame had drawn tiny squares as high up as his hand would reach while he was still sitting. He turned to Jin, seeing his sunken cheeks and the way his clothes hung far more loosely from his larger frame.
"Do you get nightmares?" Jin asked.
"Most I don't even have to be sleeping for," Kame whispered, sliding the black crayon back in the box and sealing it up. He'd whittled it about two thirds of the way down with all his fucking squares.
"It helps to talk to you. Can I talk to you, Kamenashi?"
Kame met Jin's eyes. They'd been so full of life when he'd shown up. Now they were probably as empty as Kame's were. He wanted to give Jin a shake and say that they'd already been talking, but the Kame who didn't give a shit had died down in that video room, he was certain of it. Now he cared, and he cared a little too much.
"Yeah," he replied. "You can talk to me."
--
The next week they brought Kame down on the gurney again, and he vomited on himself as soon as the syringe was in his vein. Nobody bothered to clean him up, and he could smell his dinner as the video came on.
It was his younger brother's girlfriend this time. He'd seen her at family get-togethers. This time the video had been taken over what seemed like a few weeks. The person stalked her, following her from the train station, following her to her college campus, to a shopping mall with her friends. Each time the person was closer and closer, and every time he saw her face he whispered an apology, feeling tears streaming down his cheeks even as he wanted to throw up again.
He couldn't shut his eyes as they cornered her in the alley and took a hammer to each of her limbs, shattering bone before burying the damn thing in her skull.
When he found himself in the room once more, he was sick again, but this time Jin was there. He listened to Jin cleaning up with a spare t-shirt he'd managed to find, throwing it in a corner. He managed to drag Kame out of his soiled futon, pulling him to his own room and closing the door.
Kame felt weightless on the thin mattress, seeing the hammer blows fall in his mind, trying to even fathom what his brother might have been going through. Jin tried to make him forget then, surprising Kame with a hard kiss. "No," Kame protested. "Not now, please not now."
"Now," Jin said. "Think about me. I'm right here, Kamenashi. I'm here, I'm not going away."
Jin was rough, and Kame continued to weakly protest, wanting to throw up again as soon as Jin wrenched up his shirt and brought his mouth to Kame's skin, biting and licking his way down to his navel. He was aggressive and demanding, the same as he'd been when he'd shown up that first day demanding answers.
"Kamenashi, I'm here," Jin whispered, roughly yanking Kame's pants down. "I'm here for you, you need me."
"No," Kame said. His brain couldn't handle these feelings, these polar opposites fighting for dominance inside his head. The feeling of Jin's mouth, hot as it closed tight around his cock. He wasn't even hard, he wouldn't get hard. He couldn't get hard. Not after he'd seen the baseball bat tear up that girl, not after he'd seen the hammer come down.
Even then he could feel Jin's awkward, clumsy fingers trying to open him up and Kame moaned. He'd let Jin into his life, he'd found someone in the darkness. The darkness that had nothing but white walls of his own design. "You need me," Jin assured him. "You need me now, and I'll need you next time."
It didn't hurt as much as he'd thought, but maybe he was still numb from the video room, from the liquid in the syringe. Or maybe he'd seen hammer hit bone, and having Jin's cock pressing against him, filling him inch by inch, was nothing compared to that. He turned away, hands grasping Jin's pillow, feeling hollow even as Jin fucked him. He could feel Jin's own tears against his skin, all the empathy he'd probably get. Jin thought this was helping. Jin thought this would be a good enough fix.
Kame listened to Jin's murmured apologies for a few moments longer, then nothing at all until Jin's thrusts grew erratic and he finally came, spilling messily over Kame's sore thighs and the sheets.
He couldn't speak, he couldn't even get angry. He just pulled away, fumbling in the dark for his pants and stumbling back to his own room and shutting the door.
Two people had been murdered because of him. They'd been brutally murdered, and what the hell was he doing? Crying. Getting fucked to dull the pain for a few desperate, fumbling minutes. His fingers found the wall, the wall he'd fucking drawn months ago in his shithole apartment. A line on the blueprint, one of thousands just like all the lines on the crayon squares.
He knew every line. He knew every fucking line, didn't he?
--
There was a yellow crayon in the box, and it barely showed up on the white paint. He'd spent weeks on the blueprints, and it was too easy to just transfer it to the wall. He found the best route, going through the ducts in one of the unoccupied rooms to one of the areas he'd allotted for boiler room space. But he also planned escape routes in twenty other directions. Escape had to be a certainty, not a pipe dream.
Jin didn't come into his room while he worked on it, and Kame was grateful for it. He was going to take Jin with him, but he needed to focus. He worked as long as they left the lights on, making edits in orange crayon. He didn't label anything. He simply drew the lines, just as he'd drawn the squares. He'd never been creative. But he'd always been perfect.
When it grew dark, he traced his fingers over the walls, committing all the lines to memory the same as he'd always remember the two who had had to die for him. He didn't want anyone else to die for him. Three more prisoners killed themselves while Kame and his yellow crayon squinted and sketched.
Jin was taken down the following week, and while he listened to Jin's screams for mercy, he brought his pathetic pack of crayons into Jin's room. For hours he drew squares - red ones and blue ones and green ones. The lines weren't straight because he couldn't see, but he didn't care. He turned Jin's walls colorful because tonight would be the last time either of them would lose to their captors.
They didn't even bother returning Jin to his room, and Kame found him in the common area, thumping his head against the wall and crying. He hauled him to his feet, dragging him into his room and to the futon. Jin had given him little preamble before fucking him. He wondered if it was fair to do the same.
Jin could barely move, and Kame shoved him down on the futon, straddling him. "I'm here. If you need me now, I'm here."
"My aunt," he muttered in the darkness. "She was my fucking aunt, and I fucking hated her. Always treated me and my brother like shit." He felt Jin's hands on his back, trembling. "Gutted her like a fish, and I hated her, but they didn't need to do that to her. She was screaming, and I'll never forget the sound. She was my dad's older sister...practically fucking raised him..."
He kissed Jin's brow, his hollowed cheeks, and his chapped lips. "They're not going to hurt anyone else. Nobody close to us, never again."
Jin arched his hips. "I'm thinking too much, Kamenashi. I see the knife going in. Who will it be next time? My brother? My mom? They're moving to my family..."
"We'll get out," Kame assured him. "You and me, together."
"Fucking liar," Jin murmured.
Kame wanted to tell him about everything he'd drawn, wanted to tell Jin just who he was and how he knew the way out, but it wasn't what Jin wanted. Jin just wanted to forget what they'd done to his aunt, and he could tell him about the plan tomorrow. He pumped Jin's cock in his fist, wondering how the both of them had ended up in hell and where they'd be if they hadn't found each other.
He fucked Jin hard enough to hear him scream, but the pain was real, the pain was good, and he received no complaints. The pain was the penance for those who'd been killed in their name. And when Kame came he had Jin's name on his tongue and he saw yellow crayon lines stretching all the way home.
--
Jin punched him in the face when Kame told him he'd been the one to design the prison that housed them both. But then he told him about the money they'd paid him, still in the bank unused. They might have taken it back when they hauled him in, they might not have. But all Kame knew was that they needed to get out and get their families to safety.
They waited until nightfall, when the screams of those they couldn't afford to help were at their loudest. Jin's fingers traced over the lines Kame had drawn, and they set off for the unoccupied room. Nothing was certain. Even if they got out, there was no guarantee they could save anyone in time.
In the prison Kame had designed, they'd meant to break them. They'd meant to see them lose their will to fight. And had Kamenashi Kazuya not met Jin, he would have been content to bash his own brains out against the wall after they ran out of people in his life to murder.
But he had met Jin, and that had made all the difference. He opened the grate cover to the duct, turning back to meet Jin's gaze in the empty room. "Are you ready?" he asked.
Kame had drawn hundreds of straight, perfect lines to make this place - now they just had to follow them out.
Rating: NC-17
Characters/Pairings: Kamenashi Kazuya/Akanishi Jin
Summary: He'd designed the perfect prison. And now he was a prisoner himself.
Notes/Warnings: For je_squickfic. Please heed the warnings before reading: Graphic violence, nonconsensual sex (it straddles that tricky border between dubious consent and rape--I'd say it's closer to noncon), psychological torture
When he took the job, he hadn't asked many questions. His fridge was empty, his bank account even more so, and he'd always been too damn proud to ask his parents for help.
He should have asked who they were affiliated with. He should have asked where the money came from. And most importantly he should have asked the price of his silence.
Kamenashi Kazuya was often described by his friends, back when he'd still had a few, as obsessed with perfection. It had cost him dearly over the years, had gotten him booted from architecture school. His standards were too high, and thus he never finished projects on the timetables they set out for him. But with this project they'd given him leeway.
He'd been too hungry to ask questions when the envelopes of cold, hard cash had started appearing in his mailbox. "Take all the time you need to get it right," the voice over the phone had said. Kame had convinced himself it was a covert government job. Counterterrorism at the highest security clearance probably since they were going with a random dropout architect and not a regular contractor. Someone they could pay under the table.
The first set of blueprints had taken almost six months, and even with the cashflow he'd still neglected himself. The money piled up in his account for a rainy day, and he kept vampire hours - measuring and measuring and drawing and thinking at his best once the sun went down and he was squinting under the buzzing glow of his desk lamp. His fridge mostly remained empty because when Kame had work, real work, it was way too damn easy to get lost in it.
He'd had to put a brand new notch in his belt when he finally brought the completed plans to the meet-up. The man had been nondescript as Kame believed most government agents to be, puffing away on a rolled cigarette as he examined Kame's work. "We'll be in touch."
It was easy to feel pride then, knowing that he'd worked his ass off so those who threatened the nation's peace would be dealt with. Kame knew every duct, every wall, every square inch of the place they were going to build.
They came for him in the night eight months later, hauling him out of bed, a quick punch to the gut more than enough to silence his protests. They blindfolded and gagged him and drove for what seemed like an eternity. It might have been quicker to have just put a bullet between his eyes, but maybe they thought it was more fun this way.
When he woke, every angle, every corner, every inch of the room he found himself in was of his own design. He still didn't know if they were government or something else, but now that he was in, it didn't really matter.
He'd done a fantastic job, he realized as he opened the door and looked into the stark, whitewashed "common room." He'd added it to the holding block design almost as an afterthought when they'd implied that even anthills had rooms for different purposes.
He'd designed the perfect prison. And now he was a prisoner himself.
--
He only knew the blueprints. So whatever they'd decided to use the place for was something he got an education in fairly quickly. The holding block rooms themselves had no locks and were each sparsely furnished with a futon and tatami mats, cut to the specifications Kame had envisioned. Everything else furniture-wise in the place was bolted down, from the dining tables and benches in the common room to the sconces on the wall.
It was the other floors that mattered, the places to drive them mad. They'd had him plan the duct work in a certain way, so that whatever was happening to someone in one of the chambers below could be heard in every room in the holding block. So it didn't matter that he couldn't lock his door for privacy. It didn't matter that he had a comfortable enough futon. The acoustics were phenomenal. His professors at university would have praised him.
Kame had done a perfect job, so from lights out every night he could hear the begging. The screams. He could hear it all just so perfectly, and no amount of holding the blanket over his head could muffle it entirely.
The system was random enough. He'd already been there a week and had yet to be chosen. Of the twenty rooms in the holding block, fourteen were occupied. There was no such thing as making friends. There was just the long tables where they ate, the long hours in silence waiting to see if tonight was the night.
He didn't ask anyone why they were there. Maybe whatever kind of torture was happening on the other floors was a punishment for talking with each other, for plotting. Kame had never made friends easily anyway, and with the sullen gazes and jittery nerves of the other men in the common room, befriending them would just be another weakness. If he didn't really care about them, he wouldn't care what their jailers were doing to them when the lights went out.
That was until the second week. They were down to twelve prisoners. Sometimes that happened, Kame now understood. One night he came out of his room to see the blood splattered against the common room wall, the slumped man on the ground who'd figured that suicide was preferable to the other floors. As they tried to choke down their rice, cleaners in white scrubs had come in to clean the blood and scrape the brain matter from the wall, the harsh sting of the disinfectants eventually sending Kame and the others to their rooms to retch.
The other prisoner had simply not returned to his room one night.
This left an opening for the newest member of their holding block, and unlike Kame and the others, this man wanted answers. They'd put him into the empty room beside Kame, but he wouldn't stay there. Kame sat on his futon, eyes shut tight as he heard the man go from room to room.
"What the fuck is going on? I didn't do anything wrong!"
"Why are you here? Don't you know anything?"
"Why won't you fucking talk to me?"
They were summoned by the ping of the dinner bell, and Kame and the other 11 prisoners shuffled along to sit at the common room tables. He got his first look at the new guy then. He was still in outside clothes, dirty jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, his hair an untamed rat's nest tied back away from his face. He remained standing as they brought in the dinner trays, trying to get people's attention.
He tried waving in Kame's face as his own tray was set down. "Asshole, are you mute? Are you all fucking mutes?"
The staff simply walked around him, setting down the dinner tray for the next man. When twelve trays were set down, the new guy was even more pissed off. He grabbed one of the staff as they headed to the exit. "Hey, where's my tray?"
The staff member said nothing, wrenching out of his grasp.
"I asked you a question. Where's my fucking tray?"
He tried throwing a punch, and the staff member dodged it and without blinking an eye or getting a hair out of place, he dropped the new prisoner to the floor with a punch to the gut and left the room with the others.
Nobody bothered to look over as the man groaned and whined, curling up in a ball on the floor. It was dinner time, after all, and it was a privilege they could always revoke. One by one, food was finished or left uneaten by those who were too petrified to keep anything down any longer. They disappeared from the common room table, returning to their rooms to cry, to pray, to continue suffering in silence.
Kame remained, finishing all the food that had been given to him. He saw that the new prisoner had managed to crawl over to the wall. The same wall that had had brains smeared across it the other day, though there was no trace of it now. He saw that all the bravado had gone out of him, and he was obviously crying now.
He'd spent two weeks ignoring people. If he ignored it, he'd get through it. If he ignored it, maybe they wouldn't see a need to torture him further. But where the others said little to nothing, this guy had asked why. He walked over, standing a few feet from the newest prisoner.
"You only get food if you're sitting down at the table."
The guy looked up at him, eyes bloodshot. He had his arms crossed, most likely to hide that his hands were trembling. "You can talk."
"We can all talk," Kame said. "But it's best if you don't bother."
The guy held out his hand. "Help me up?"
But Kame felt that he'd passed on enough information. Any more and he'd start to think of the new prisoner as a person instead of just another occupied cell in the beehive. He ignored the outstretched hand and turned around, walking to his room and shutting the door.
When the howls came from the other floors that night, he figured it would be enough of an education for the newest prisoner.
--
There was no ping for breakfast the following morning. It was like that sometimes. If they didn't want to feed you, they didn't want to feed you. Kame opened his door, finding the new prisoner at the table sitting quietly, staring at the wall. He didn't need to talk to him. He knew he shouldn't want to talk to him, but Kame had had all night to not sleep. Had had all night to decide to allow himself one connection in hell.
Only a few of the others had bothered coming out of their rooms that morning. If it was actually morning. Kame's design had made no accommodation for windows, only plain walls. Sometimes there'd be a book or two on the common room floor - an old novel, something in English that nobody could probably read. People still took them, just to have something to do besides sitting.
He sat down across from the new guy. The bloodshot eyes had some additional decoration. Dark purple circles, the signs of a sleepless night. Kame could sometimes sleep through it, at least part of it. But he was kind of a seasoned pro in comparison.
"I didn't...I said I would pay them back," the man across from him muttered, licking his dry, cracked lips. They only got water with meals unless they felt like cupping some out of the toilet in their room or wasting their minute of shower time drinking from the spray.
Kame didn't answer, spying a box of crayons on the dining table that nobody had taken. That was new. He pulled them into his palm and got up from the table, heading back to his room. It didn't completely surprise him when he heard the shuffling footsteps behind him. He said nothing though, letting the new guy close the door and sit down on the floor beside him.
"What are they doing to them?" he asked warily, and Kame noticed how jittery his hands were. He was probably a smoker. Kame's hands had done the exact same thing the first few days until the prison had found a way to make every part of him shake.
Kame didn't have to answer, but where this guy was concerned, he found himself speaking anyhow. "I don't know," he said honestly. And he wasn't in any hurry to find out. He sat cross-legged before the unblemished wall, tapping the small crayon box in his hand just like a pack of Mild Sevens.
"I'm Jin."
Kame opened the crayon box, shaking out a black crayon to hold between his fingers. "I'd say nice to meet you but..."
"S'okay," Jin said as amiably as he could manage. Jin watched him bring the crayon to the wall. It had been weeks since he'd sketched. Not that what he ever did could be considered art. Kame had always drawn models and blueprints and floorplans. He was lacking in creativity, his instructors had always said. He only saw in straight, perfect lines.
He didn't know what to draw, so he let his hand draw a square. Then another. And another. Perfect, even little black squares marring the white paint. Jin was quiet beside him. Kame had drawn at least two hundred small squares on the wall by the time the other man got to his feet.
He hadn't even heard the bell for lunch. This time Jin held out his hand. "You're good at drawing squares," he said with an odd, crooked smile.
It didn't feel right to smile back, not here. Not in this hell he'd designed. But he accepted Jin's hand and got to his feet. "I'm Kamenashi."
--
The next night they took Kame to another floor for the first time.
He didn't resist, figuring it would only get worse if he tried to fight them. His heart was racing even as he tried to stay calm. They carried him out of the room like he was as small and weak as a child and strapped him to a gurney. Kame just pictured the floorplans he'd created as they wheeled him out of the common room. The straight lines he'd drawn - this corridor, hang a right, then this corridor to the elevator.
He only became truly frightened when they brought him to the intended room. It didn't make a lot of sense with the plans he designed. They'd made the ceilings way low, and the staff had to duck as they shuffled around and locked the wheels on his gurney. He started to squirm as a staff member approached with a needle, and he wanted to vomit.
He'd never been good with needles, and he recoiled as best he could, his wrists straining against the leather straps that held him down. The staff member seemed to realize his distress and only made it worse, squeezing the syringe so the slightly cloudy liquid inside sprayed out a bit. He learned quickly that whatever was in the syringe worked fast.
He screamed at the prick of the needle against the inside of his elbow, but the pain was temporary as he ended up refocusing on the low ceiling above him. It was low, Kame discovered, because there was a video screen to watch. The drug they'd given him seemed to freeze him in place, numbing more and more as he tried to wriggle in the restraints.
The screen flickered on. What were they going to make him watch? Did everyone have to watch the video? What did they do that made the prisoners in the place scream so much every night? He was about to find out, even as his entire body felt numb. He could barely blink, his focus trained on the screen.
It was a video of a fairly isolated street, nothing extraordinary, like any street in a metro area in Japan. It seemed like a person was just walking around with a camcorder. It was only when they turned the corner that Kame recognized where they were going.
He felt ill when he saw the sign for a restaurant he'd been to a dozen times. When he'd played baseball in high school, they'd gone to the Hamada family's restaurant often. "Don't go in there," he heard himself whisper. His body was frozen, but his vocal cords still worked. That was why people were still able to scream every night.
Kame could only watch and plead for mercy as the cameraman entered the shop. He saw Hamada-san's daughter approach. She had to be in high school now, old enough to wait tables at the small restaurant. "No," Kame demanded, but the video kept right on playing. How was she not seeing the camera? How did she not notice it?
He was on edge the entire time as whoever shot the video sat down at a table. Hamada-san himself brought over a bowl of ramen, and as soon as the camera man finished his meal and paid, the tape cut out, and Kame felt relief course through him. But it didn't last long.
The tape started up again. This time it was dark as the camera followed along to the Hamada family restaurant. "I'm sorry, we're closed!" called Hamada-san's daughter just before Kame watched the baseball bat in the camera man's hand collide with her skull. Whatever they'd injected him with, Kame couldn't look away. And now he understood the screaming. Now he understood what had driven that other prisoner to bash his head against the wall.
Because Kame had to watch the girl's face disappear. Had to watch the way her body was still twitching on the floor as the camera man crouched down to rip off her skirt. Had to watch what happened next when the bat that had just bashed her brains in was used to violate her. She was still alive, and Kame could do nothing to help her. Except scream and beg for them to shut the video off.
She had been just an innocent girl in a Tokyo restaurant. She'd done nothing wrong.
Except that at some point in her life she had made the mistake of being in the same room as Kamenashi Kazuya.
--
They didn't bother to bring him back to the video room for days. The damage had been done. That was why they didn't seem to have a schedule - they waited until you were doing better before they made you go down there again. He vomited up the first few meals he'd tried and after that ate nothing for a few days, wandering around his own room and the common room in a daze.
He noticed Jin watching him. Jin had had to listen to him scream. Kame sat in his room counting crayon squares, trying to remember what life in this place had been like before the video room. When he'd thought that all they were doing to the prisoners was torturing them physically. Maybe it would have been easier to take.
He counted crayon squares, and eventually they became bits of Hamada-san's daughter that he'd seen destroyed. The crayon squares were her teeth flying out of her mouth from the first blow of the bat. The crayon squares were the checkered pattern on her panties, shoved aside as the blood smeared across her thighs.
Kame shut his eyes, and it was still there. And this was a girl he'd barely known. What would they show him next time? Who would be on the tape?
By the sixth night of barely sleeping and hardly eating, Jin decided to intervene. There were screams in the night, and he woke in a cold sweat to find Jin sitting next to his futon watching him.
"Get the fuck out of here," Kame pleaded with him, his voice scratchy. "Get out of here."
Instead Jin shoved onigiri in his hand. "You're not eating."
"Fuck you."
"Eat the god damn thing, Kamenashi."
In the darkness, it was odd to have someone else so close. He could hear Jin's breathing, smell his sweat. He took a bite of the onigiri, feeling the salty rice against his tongue. If he tried, he'd be able to keep it down. Jin was right of course. He did need to eat. If he was a normal person at least. But ever since the video room, he hadn't seen much point. Hamada-san's daughter would never eat again, and it was all his fault.
"Nobody else will tell me," Jin was whispering, grabbing Kame's palm and breaking off part of the onigiri and eating it himself, seemingly to have something to do. "Nobody else will tell me what happens down there."
"You're better off not knowing..."
"And if you knew before you'd gone, would it have made a difference? They're going to bring me down there eventually, so at least tell me what I'm in for."
Kame took another bite, his whole body shaking. He'd been so fucking calm those first two weeks. Sitting at the table when they dinged for a meal. Not causing trouble. Not making friends. And he'd tried so hard to avoid someone like Jin. He'd tried so hard to avoid becoming someone like Jin. Someone who at least cared about something.
"I don't know if it's always the same," Kame whispered, shoving the rest of the onigiri back into Jin's palm. "But it's the worst thing ever. I just...I don't know how, and I don't know why. They just know exactly how to break you."
"Okay," Jin said. "Okay, man, I won't press you."
Jin left him alone then.
And they took him the next night.
--
Jin had come into their common room with a round face and a soft body, curved in places where Kame had edges. But he whittled down quickly enough after his first night in the video room. The first few days had been the worst for Kame, where every waking moment was the bat hitting Hamada-san's daughter, the bastard enjoying his meal in the restaurant earlier in the video. Remembering the slurping of the ramen.
He found himself keeping an eye on Jin, wondering just who they'd found from his life to kill. If that was what they did to everyone. Kame took up his crayon pack again, took to his squares. He left his door open as he drew them, eyes blurring as he strove for perfection in each line and angle. It took a few days, but finally Jin came in and watched Kame add to his squares.
"Who was it?" he heard Jin ask him. "Was it someone you knew?"
"Barely," he admitted. "But yes, I knew her."
"I worked a job with him," Jin explained, shaking fingers twisting in the thin sheet that covered Kame's futon. "Maybe five, six years ago. I barely recognized him until they started to hurt him. Then I remembered real fast. He had tattoos. In the video they...in the video they cut them off him, one by one."
They returned to silence for a while until Kame had drawn tiny squares as high up as his hand would reach while he was still sitting. He turned to Jin, seeing his sunken cheeks and the way his clothes hung far more loosely from his larger frame.
"Do you get nightmares?" Jin asked.
"Most I don't even have to be sleeping for," Kame whispered, sliding the black crayon back in the box and sealing it up. He'd whittled it about two thirds of the way down with all his fucking squares.
"It helps to talk to you. Can I talk to you, Kamenashi?"
Kame met Jin's eyes. They'd been so full of life when he'd shown up. Now they were probably as empty as Kame's were. He wanted to give Jin a shake and say that they'd already been talking, but the Kame who didn't give a shit had died down in that video room, he was certain of it. Now he cared, and he cared a little too much.
"Yeah," he replied. "You can talk to me."
--
The next week they brought Kame down on the gurney again, and he vomited on himself as soon as the syringe was in his vein. Nobody bothered to clean him up, and he could smell his dinner as the video came on.
It was his younger brother's girlfriend this time. He'd seen her at family get-togethers. This time the video had been taken over what seemed like a few weeks. The person stalked her, following her from the train station, following her to her college campus, to a shopping mall with her friends. Each time the person was closer and closer, and every time he saw her face he whispered an apology, feeling tears streaming down his cheeks even as he wanted to throw up again.
He couldn't shut his eyes as they cornered her in the alley and took a hammer to each of her limbs, shattering bone before burying the damn thing in her skull.
When he found himself in the room once more, he was sick again, but this time Jin was there. He listened to Jin cleaning up with a spare t-shirt he'd managed to find, throwing it in a corner. He managed to drag Kame out of his soiled futon, pulling him to his own room and closing the door.
Kame felt weightless on the thin mattress, seeing the hammer blows fall in his mind, trying to even fathom what his brother might have been going through. Jin tried to make him forget then, surprising Kame with a hard kiss. "No," Kame protested. "Not now, please not now."
"Now," Jin said. "Think about me. I'm right here, Kamenashi. I'm here, I'm not going away."
Jin was rough, and Kame continued to weakly protest, wanting to throw up again as soon as Jin wrenched up his shirt and brought his mouth to Kame's skin, biting and licking his way down to his navel. He was aggressive and demanding, the same as he'd been when he'd shown up that first day demanding answers.
"Kamenashi, I'm here," Jin whispered, roughly yanking Kame's pants down. "I'm here for you, you need me."
"No," Kame said. His brain couldn't handle these feelings, these polar opposites fighting for dominance inside his head. The feeling of Jin's mouth, hot as it closed tight around his cock. He wasn't even hard, he wouldn't get hard. He couldn't get hard. Not after he'd seen the baseball bat tear up that girl, not after he'd seen the hammer come down.
Even then he could feel Jin's awkward, clumsy fingers trying to open him up and Kame moaned. He'd let Jin into his life, he'd found someone in the darkness. The darkness that had nothing but white walls of his own design. "You need me," Jin assured him. "You need me now, and I'll need you next time."
It didn't hurt as much as he'd thought, but maybe he was still numb from the video room, from the liquid in the syringe. Or maybe he'd seen hammer hit bone, and having Jin's cock pressing against him, filling him inch by inch, was nothing compared to that. He turned away, hands grasping Jin's pillow, feeling hollow even as Jin fucked him. He could feel Jin's own tears against his skin, all the empathy he'd probably get. Jin thought this was helping. Jin thought this would be a good enough fix.
Kame listened to Jin's murmured apologies for a few moments longer, then nothing at all until Jin's thrusts grew erratic and he finally came, spilling messily over Kame's sore thighs and the sheets.
He couldn't speak, he couldn't even get angry. He just pulled away, fumbling in the dark for his pants and stumbling back to his own room and shutting the door.
Two people had been murdered because of him. They'd been brutally murdered, and what the hell was he doing? Crying. Getting fucked to dull the pain for a few desperate, fumbling minutes. His fingers found the wall, the wall he'd fucking drawn months ago in his shithole apartment. A line on the blueprint, one of thousands just like all the lines on the crayon squares.
He knew every line. He knew every fucking line, didn't he?
--
There was a yellow crayon in the box, and it barely showed up on the white paint. He'd spent weeks on the blueprints, and it was too easy to just transfer it to the wall. He found the best route, going through the ducts in one of the unoccupied rooms to one of the areas he'd allotted for boiler room space. But he also planned escape routes in twenty other directions. Escape had to be a certainty, not a pipe dream.
Jin didn't come into his room while he worked on it, and Kame was grateful for it. He was going to take Jin with him, but he needed to focus. He worked as long as they left the lights on, making edits in orange crayon. He didn't label anything. He simply drew the lines, just as he'd drawn the squares. He'd never been creative. But he'd always been perfect.
When it grew dark, he traced his fingers over the walls, committing all the lines to memory the same as he'd always remember the two who had had to die for him. He didn't want anyone else to die for him. Three more prisoners killed themselves while Kame and his yellow crayon squinted and sketched.
Jin was taken down the following week, and while he listened to Jin's screams for mercy, he brought his pathetic pack of crayons into Jin's room. For hours he drew squares - red ones and blue ones and green ones. The lines weren't straight because he couldn't see, but he didn't care. He turned Jin's walls colorful because tonight would be the last time either of them would lose to their captors.
They didn't even bother returning Jin to his room, and Kame found him in the common area, thumping his head against the wall and crying. He hauled him to his feet, dragging him into his room and to the futon. Jin had given him little preamble before fucking him. He wondered if it was fair to do the same.
Jin could barely move, and Kame shoved him down on the futon, straddling him. "I'm here. If you need me now, I'm here."
"My aunt," he muttered in the darkness. "She was my fucking aunt, and I fucking hated her. Always treated me and my brother like shit." He felt Jin's hands on his back, trembling. "Gutted her like a fish, and I hated her, but they didn't need to do that to her. She was screaming, and I'll never forget the sound. She was my dad's older sister...practically fucking raised him..."
He kissed Jin's brow, his hollowed cheeks, and his chapped lips. "They're not going to hurt anyone else. Nobody close to us, never again."
Jin arched his hips. "I'm thinking too much, Kamenashi. I see the knife going in. Who will it be next time? My brother? My mom? They're moving to my family..."
"We'll get out," Kame assured him. "You and me, together."
"Fucking liar," Jin murmured.
Kame wanted to tell him about everything he'd drawn, wanted to tell Jin just who he was and how he knew the way out, but it wasn't what Jin wanted. Jin just wanted to forget what they'd done to his aunt, and he could tell him about the plan tomorrow. He pumped Jin's cock in his fist, wondering how the both of them had ended up in hell and where they'd be if they hadn't found each other.
He fucked Jin hard enough to hear him scream, but the pain was real, the pain was good, and he received no complaints. The pain was the penance for those who'd been killed in their name. And when Kame came he had Jin's name on his tongue and he saw yellow crayon lines stretching all the way home.
--
Jin punched him in the face when Kame told him he'd been the one to design the prison that housed them both. But then he told him about the money they'd paid him, still in the bank unused. They might have taken it back when they hauled him in, they might not have. But all Kame knew was that they needed to get out and get their families to safety.
They waited until nightfall, when the screams of those they couldn't afford to help were at their loudest. Jin's fingers traced over the lines Kame had drawn, and they set off for the unoccupied room. Nothing was certain. Even if they got out, there was no guarantee they could save anyone in time.
In the prison Kame had designed, they'd meant to break them. They'd meant to see them lose their will to fight. And had Kamenashi Kazuya not met Jin, he would have been content to bash his own brains out against the wall after they ran out of people in his life to murder.
But he had met Jin, and that had made all the difference. He opened the grate cover to the duct, turning back to meet Jin's gaze in the empty room. "Are you ready?" he asked.
Kame had drawn hundreds of straight, perfect lines to make this place - now they just had to follow them out.