It's warm, somewhat. But cold, too.
It isn't the good kind of warm, the kind of heat that seeps into your body from a winter hearth. Nor is it the crisp, refreshing cold you crave when the summer sun beats down too hard.
It is a wretched, suffocating temperature. And worse than the temperature is the fact that both the warmth and the cold are moving.
Sakura lay curled on the damp stone floor, her tiny knees pulled tightly to her chest, her forehead pressed hard against them. She tried with everything she had to make herself smaller.
Smaller than the pitch-black darkness swallowing her whole. Smaller than the nightmare she had been trapped in for what felt like an eternity now.
The things inside her, and the things crawling outside of her, never stopped. It didn't matter what she did. It didn't matter what she could do.
Under her bruised skin, behind her sunken eyes, slithering between her fragile ribs, and wrapping around her small hands, they squirmed.
They were a constant, writhing tide, whispering and chittering in wet, scratching noises she couldn't understand. It made her feel profoundly disgusted.
It made her terrified. It made her so hopelessly, deeply scared.
Even after she had hollowed herself out, even after she had scooped out all her feelings until she was nothing but an empty shell to survive this place, the terror remained.
She thought she had discarded those emotions so they couldn't be used against her, so they couldn't hurt her anymore. Yet, here they were, festering in the dark.
She didn't cry anymore. She couldn't. The tears had dried up shortly after she first realized that crying only made it worse.
The salt and the distress seemed to excite the worms; it made them wring and thrash faster, both inside her veins and over her skin.
And more importantly, crying didn't do a single thing. Screaming did nothing. Crying out for help did nothing. Praying to God, to her father, to her mother... it was all useless noise.
Still, from time to time, her broken mind would wander. It was pointless, and she knew it, but the thoughts bubbled up anyway.
They clung to her like the very last remnants of her humanity, repeating in an endless, dizzying loop.
Why is this happening to me?
The spiral always started there. Always. Of course, there was no answer, and there likely never would be.
But the question haunted her regardless, quickly followed by the others that plagued her days in the pit. And today was one of those days.
Why did Papa give me away?
Sakura shifted slightly, her deadened, empty eyes staring up blindly at the invisible, dark ceiling.
Insects slid over her pale face, but she didn't flinch.
Her tiny body was fully covered in a blanket of squirming bugs. Inside and out. Just bugs. Only bugs.
Why wasn't it Rin? Did I do something wrong? Was I the wrong one? Is that why Grandfather threw me down here again?
She had tried to be good. She really had. She tried to be quiet and obedient. She hadn't cried. She hadn't screamed.
She had bowed her head and whispered, "Yes, sir," every single time that monster asked if she understood her lessons.
And yet, no matter how good she was, she always found herself thrown back down into this pit. Again. And again. And again.
Why does no one come?
Mama was gone. Papa was gone. Rin was gone. Everyone was gone. If I die, will they come then?
But even the concept of dying felt... too far away.
Dying required doing something, and Sakura couldn't do anything. She couldn't even die in this pit of worms and rot because the moving things wouldn't let her.
They needed her to live so they could feed. Grandfather had said so.
If she died... maybe they wouldn't even notice she was gone. She was nothing, after all. That was why she was here.
The thought painted a bitter image in her mind: Rin, sitting in a bright, warm room right now. Laughing.
Holding Papa's hand on one side, and Mama's hand on the other. Laughing and smiling, completely unaware or uncaring that Sakura was gone.
A weird, ugly feeling twisted deep inside Sakura's chest at the thought. Was she really that bad? Was she so unbearable, so completely unneeded? Was there truly not a single person in this world who needed her? No one who could help her?
It had already been a year, maybe more. Time didn't exist in the dark. The fragile, pathetic hope that maybe, just maybe, someone would come to save her only seemed to surface to remind her that the only thing coming was nothing. Just nothing.
No one was coming. No one cared.
She blinked. There had been no tears for a long time. She blinked again. It didn't matter if her eyes were open or closed; the impenetrable darkness was exactly the same either way.
The only difference was the horrifying sensation of tiny, scratching legs brushing against her eyelashes when she kept them open.
Hot, she thought, her dulled mind briefly confused.
There was nothing hot down here. There never was. It was damp, dark, and cold. But this heat wasn't in the air or the room. It was painfully localized to one specific place.
Her hand.
Sakura weakly clenched her fingers. She didn't fully understand what was happening, and a part of her didn't even care, but the sensation was so foreign that she shifted her gaze from the empty ceiling, lifting her small hand just high enough to enter her field of vision.
It wasn't there before... or was it? she thought sluggishly, staring at the back of her hand.
A strange, geometric symbol was etched into her skin, glowing with a fierce, brilliant red light. No. It definitely wasn't there before. She would have remembered.
The cellar was absolute black; if her hand had been glowing like this, she would have seen it. She only ever saw light when Grandfather finally opened the door to drag her out.
As she stared at the glowing red mark, the ground beneath her suddenly ignited with the same ethereal light. Sakura's empty eyes widened slightly as she shifted her gaze downward.
It was like someone had suddenly thrown open a brilliant window in the floor, though there were no windows here.
Beneath her palm, a small trickle of blood, from a fresh bite from one of the worms, had soaked into the damp, filthy dirt.
The magical energy in her body, desperate and overflowing, seized that blood and dirt, drawing an accidental, perfect circle.
Light poured upwards from the earth like a rising flood of water. It stung her eyes, accustomed to months of absolute darkness, but Sakura didn't look away.
Around her, a frantic, hissing sound erupted. The crest worms that had been gnawing at her flesh and writhing over her skin suddenly began to screech.
Terrified by the sheer, overwhelming pressure of the energy radiating from the light, the bugs scrambled frantically away from her body, retreating into the deepest shadows of the pit.
The blinding light began to condense, gathering into a singular, towering pillar in her vision. A shape formed within the glow. It was strange, everything about it was strange, but for the first time in a year, Sakura didn't feel afraid. She didn't dislike it.
Finally, as the blinding light dimmed just enough for her to see, a figure emerged from the glow.
He was a tall man. He had striking, gravity-defying white hair, and strangely, his eyes were completely covered by a dark blindfold.
Both of his hands were casually shoved into the pockets of his dark uniform.
Upon his lips rested a wide, arrogant smile, the kind of smile meant to taunt an opponent, to show that he was completely untouchable and unbothered by whatever world he had just stepped into.
"Are you the one who called for me? Huh? Do you have a cand…y…?"
But that confident, taunting smile lasted for barely a fraction of a second.
The moment the man's unseen gaze swept the room, taking in the squirming, cursed rot of the worm pit, and then settling on the tiny, broken, bug-bitten girl curled on the floor, the smile vanished. It didn't fade; it was wiped completely clean from his face.
It was replaced by an expression Sakura didn't know how to read. He was looking down at her, but not the way others did. It wasn't the tragically sad, pathetic smile Uncle Kariya sometimes gave her.
It certainly wasn't the wicked, triumphant grin Grandfather wore when he looked at her suffering.
This was a smile, no, a look, that seemed to instantly see every single thing she had been through. Was it disgust? Was it sadness?
No... it was...
….
A/N: Next Chapter In few Hours!