Pinkgothic played:

Dread and Noko

"Gosh, you're still here."

The voice seemed touched by a strange concern and incredulousness, but Frederick's mind only picked up on that after he'd snapped his head around, past his bindings, trying to spot the source, while simultaneously becoming aware that it could not be Byelobog. The voice was younger than that, more like his own. The chains of the cuffs that bound him to the bed tinkered softly, and from the corners of his straining eyes he caught a glimpse of massive black wings.

Something about this new presence sent a chill down his naked spine.

A flustered breath was cut short, before he found the courage to ask the lesser of two questions: "...what? Who are you?" An edge of irritation has his voice in firm grip, oblivious to the primal beckonning of respectful fear. His entire shape ached from neglect and lack of motion over what seemed like the course of an entire day - unless this stranger was here to help him out of his shackles, no amount of reverence would remove the CRANKY from his voice.

"That wouldn't tell you anything," the stranger remarks as he strides along the edge of the bed until his scrawny shape is in better view of the bound youth. "But what you really want to know - what you should know - is that I'm responsible."

The words registered to his mind, but their meaning ricochetted off his synapses as if the stranger had spoken in a foreign tongue. Numbly, dumbstruck, he remained silent, only shifting a wrist in its bindings. Responsible?

"You're in an awful lot of agony right now, aren't you?" the stranger observed with a tone of fascination and concern, an exotic medely, shifting his shape to sit on the edge of the bed like a concerned family member, and extending a hand to touch the captive boy's face.

With the touch came familiarity and abrupt, ghastly recognition. A fierce twitch touched Noko's shape, twisting his head away from the touch in reflex, wringing a gasp of barely-restrained revulsion, loathing and fear from him. No, no, that wasn't even possible. This was some kind of horrible self-deceptive illusion. Something in his mind must have broken, disassociated with whatever drove him to act, because what had just been implied was impossible on so many levels.

At the next touch, the world melted, along with the most immediate sources of pain, eliciting a wide-eyed stare and soft, breathy gasp from the incredulous boy. It reeked of black magic, of the occult, like some twisted fairytale.

With the spatters of pain gone and the bed's frame dissolved, leaving his bindings to fade off into an intangible darkness while the more background aching faded, it was tempting to ask to be freed - but so much of this felt like a fever dream.

Maybe I'm dying.

Maybe this is just some last ditch attempt of my mind's to soothe my conscience.

Wings rustled softly, and the strange brushed fingertips through the captive's long, straight, black strands of hair. "Someone will find you," a soothing voice remarks; but that glitter he knew had been in his own eyes less than a day before sparkled in those coal-coloured eyes, suggesting something far beyond courtesy. "Elizabeth will." The eyes close, and a slow, methodical nod tilts the stranger's head.

The next three words that followed, though retaining the same tone as before, had some hidden quality that merely served to knot his nausea firmly into his gut:

"I assure it."