Chapter Text
When Orochimaru is finished with him, he picks his discarded clothes up from the floor and leaves Sasuke naked on the bed, his wrists still tied to the metal frame above his head.
It’s a game the two of them play—or rather, a challenge. How long will it take him to escape from his bonds? An hour? Thirty minutes? Fifteen? He’s shaved several inches off his time in the two years since he first found himself in this position. It took him three whole hours to escape then—now his record is nine minutes.
He was rougher this time than usual. Rougher than he’s been in a while. Sasuke can feel the bruises the man’s fingers pressed into his thighs; the sting at his collarbones and down his stomach, where sharp fangs nipped at his skin and drew pinpricks of blood. His throat is raw and aching, his mouth tasting of something bitter, and the sheets bunched around his legs are sticky. He feels lethargic, utterly drained of energy, like he could just sink into the mattress and fade away.
He imagines it for a moment, his mind drifting and not quite tethered to his body. It’s a nice fantasy.
But it’s only a moment. That’s all he allows himself. Then he is sharp and focused, ignoring the dull pain and the phantom sensation of hands on him. He ignores the chill that goes through his body, bare and exposed to the cool underground air. He focuses on the ropes securing his wrists to the bed frame, working out the knot with the tips of his fingers that are just long enough to brush against it.
There’s a trick to this that he understands now. He rotates both his wrists in the ropes’ tight binds, gritting his teeth at the way the rough fibers chafe against skin already rubbed raw. He keeps twisting his hands, even when he feels the strain of joints and the increasing burn. Biting down hard on the inside of his cheek, he pushes, pushes, pushes—
SNAP.
With a sharp noise that cuts through the empty bedroom, the bones connecting his wrists both break. White-hot, stabbing pain shoots through his wrists and down the nerves in his arms, and his teeth clamp down so hard that he tastes blood in his mouth.
The metallic, coppery taste is something he’s grateful for. It overpowers the bitter, sickening taste of him that still lingers heavy on his tongue.
Sasuke bends his legs, pushing himself further up the bed and digging his heels into the mattress to give himself a firmer purchase. He ignores the stab that shoots through his wrists at every small movement, focusing instead on the pain in his mouth, teeth biting through his inside cheek.
Sasuke takes a bracing breath, then yanks.
His vision goes white. A gasp escapes his throat—his raw, damaged throat that burns as the noise is ripped from him—and the world in front of him spins. His teeth slice deeper into his cheek, more blood flooding his mouth.
He feels his hands slip free. He lays there on his back, waiting for the white to fade.
Seven minutes. He’s beaten his record again.
Sasuke sits up. He stares, his expression blank, at the small smears of red staining white sheets. Then he stands up and collects his clothes, slipping them on again before leaving the room.
★
The first time, Sasuke doesn’t understand what is happening.
Five days since his defection from Konoha—since he arrived at the mouth of the hideout beaten and bloody and exhausted, with only the clothes on his back to call his own—and he hasn’t seen Orochimaru once. Not since that first night when the man shuffled him off to Kabuto for medical treatment, suggesting he take some time to rest and recover.
It's been close to a week now. Sasuke is rested. He is recovered. Frustrated by the silence, impatient to begin his training, he seeks Orochimaru out in one of his labs.
“Sasuke-kun,” the man greets him. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
There’s something about the way he speaks Sasuke’s name—the way his tongue slides over each syllable like a caress. It makes a shiver go down the thirteen-year-old’s spine.
“It’s been nearly a week,” Sasuke says, jaw locked. “I want to begin my training.”
The words are spoken firmly, with much more bravado than he feels. He isn’t ignorant to who he’s talking to—this is the man who killed the Third Hokage.
Orochimaru’s body turns partially towards him, his golden eyes barely visible in the low light. “Training?” he echoes, a smear of dark red against the white of his jaw.
Sasuke can now see the steel table he stands over. There’s a shadowy heap on it that looks distinctly human-shaped. Darker smears against the silver surface, sharp tools, and the thick smell of copper in the air.
Brown hair. Dull hazel eyes. A bare foot.
The body looks small. Child-like. Sasuke attempts not to react, forcing his eyes away. “Don’t play dumb. You know what I’m talking about. I only came here because you said you would make me stronger.”
Strong enough to kill Itachi, he doesn’t say. But the words sit in the air between them, visible to them both.
Orochimaru sets the scalpel down on the table with a quiet clink. “And so I shall,” he says, fully turning to face him where he stands silhouetted in the doorway.
“When? I didn’t come here to waste my time. If that’s what I wanted, I would have stayed in Konoha.”
The older shinobi seems amused by his demanding tone. His slitted eyes flicker over him and take him in—the thin white shirt, open slightly and exposing some of the bruises still present from his fight with Naruto. The purple rope, tied around his waist and barely holding the fabric closed.
The attire makes him uncomfortable. But the clothes he arrived in are ruined, and he doesn’t have anything else.
“Very well,” Orochimaru says. His mouth curves up at the left corner. “Tonight at midnight. Meet me in my chambers.”
He expected it would take more to convince him. Feeling surprised but accomplished, Sasuke agrees.
He does find the particulars of the request a bit strange. Why in the man’s chambers? Why so late at night? It isn’t exactly an ideal setting for a training session. But he doesn’t think too deeply on it, eager to finally be starting in on the thing he came here for; and at midnight that night, he goes to Orochimaru’s room.
“Come in, Sasuke-kun,” comes the call from beyond the door.
Sasuke turns the door handle and steps inside. He’s instantly plunged into darkness, as the door closes behind him and cuts him off from the light of the gas lamps lining the hallway walls.
Pitch black. He can’t make out any of his surroundings. But Orochimaru is there—he can feel a presence in the room with him, and a sense of uneasiness slowly creeps up his spine. He activates his Sharingan when his normal eyes refuse to adjust, vision immediately sharpening and piercing through the shadows.
But before he can gain any bearing, a heavy weight pins him against the door face-first. It presses against his back, cold fingers caging his mouth when he tries to cry out.
“Shh, shh. None of that now. You’ll wake poor Kabuto.”
Orochimaru’s voice is low and purring. Sasuke’s fight instinct immediately kicks in, and he bucks against the other’s body, ramming his elbow back at his gut. “What the hell, get off—”
Orochimaru grabs the arm and twists it, grip bruising as he pins it between their bodies. “Look at me,” he says. “Let me see your eyes.”
Sasuke fights him, of course—panic rising in his chest as the large body only pins him harder, and he realizes how completely helpless he is against the older man’s strength. A hand clamps around his jaw like steel, wrenching his head forcefully up and to the side.
He finds himself face-to-face with golden eyes in the dark. They look into his burning red ones—wanting, hungry.
“Beautiful,” that low voice breathes.
Sasuke snarls, bucking against the man’s weight again. But he’s barely thirteen, a fourth of Orochimaru’s age, and the older shinobi overpowers him effortlessly, grabbing him by the hair and shoving his face into the stone wall. He tastes blood in his mouth as he slices the inside of his lip on the edge of a tooth.
“I don’t know what game you think you’re playing,” Sasuke snaps. There’s a subtle tremble to his voice, and he hates himself for it. “But if you don’t let me go right now, I’ll—”
Orochimaru’s nails dig painfully into his scalp, fingers tightening in his hair. “Quiet.” A brief flash of fangs in the periphery of Sasuke’s vision.
He can feel the rapid beat of his own heart against his ribs. “You said you would train me. That’s why I’m here.”
He’s caged in. Trapped, between the wall and Orochimaru’s body. The man tilts his head down so they’re closer in height, strands of his hair brushing Sasuke’s cheek. Sasuke despises how he can’t turn around, can’t even see the predator at his back.
“You’ll get your training, child. But I take my payment in advance.”
“Payment?”
Hips push forward. That’s when Sasuke feels the hardness pressing against his lower back. He freezes, body going cold.
He can’t breathe. The feeling is metallic in his mouth.
Lips trace the column of his throat—mouthing over the black curse mark inked into his skin. A hand slips between his body and the wall, undoing the knot of the rope around his waist.
“You didn’t think power came free, did you? There’s always a price.”
★
When Sasuke looks back on that first time, he can never remember it quite right. The memory is distorted and fragmented, like trying to peer through a mirror that’s covered in splintering cracks.
He thinks he fought back. He thinks he struggled. He thinks he told him no, told him don’t touch me, stop, get off.
Or maybe he did none of those things. Maybe he just froze.
★
Sasuke limps into Kabuto’s laboratory with bruises stark against pale skin, his wrists violently inflamed and jutting unnaturally.
After over two years, it’s long since become a regular occurrence. The older shinobi is at his desk examining some chemical component through a microscope, and he doesn’t even need to turn around in his chair to know who the limping footsteps belong to.
“Sasuke-kun. What is the damage this time?”
Sasuke doesn’t answer, instead simply moving over to the lab table located behind Kabuto and lifting himself up onto the edge of it. Pain radiates through his hands as he does, sharp and piercing, as well as an accompanying stabbing ache in his lower body. He’s used to it though, and doesn’t so much as grimace.
His clothes are uncomfortable. Sticking to him in places they shouldn’t be. He’d much rather be sinking into a tub right now and scrubbing every inch of skin clean—but like after each of their ‘transactions,’ he has to go for healing first.
Orochimaru doesn’t want his future vessel damaged, after all.
Kabuto finally leans back from his work, standing up from his chair and walking over to him. They’re at about eye-level, like this; the other shinobi’s expression is blank as he catalogs Sasuke’s injuries, but like always when he looks at him, there’s a hint of disdain and resentment peeking through his healer-patient professionalism.
He starts on Sasuke’s wrists first, having him hold them out in front of him while his own hands hover over them and bathe them in a familiar green glow.
“You’re more bruised up than usual,” he notes tonelessly. “Looks like the two of you had some real fun this time.”
“Jealous?” Sasuke asks. “All the gold in Fire Country still wouldn’t be enough to get me on my knees for you.”
“Funny. I was under the impression that getting on your knees was all you were good for.”
Sasuke is far past the time when he would have let himself be baited by such taunts. “I can do multiple positions. Far better than you, from what I’ve been told.”
Kabuto’s hands have moved on to his throat, gripping his chin and tilting his head back to fully expose the mottling of bruises. Fingers twitch against his windpipe, as if repressing the violent impulse to strangle him. Instead there’s the warm green glow again, and Sasuke feels the terrible ache at his neck beginning to recede as the abused tissue heals.
The truth both of them know is that Kabuto is jealous—though not for the reason Sasuke insinuated. There’s an almost palpable envy to Kabuto’s touch, as his hands skate over the purpling marks left by Orochimaru’s teeth. It used to be him in Sasuke’s place. It used to be him down on his knees, against the wall, tied to the bed frame. It used to be him covered in dark bruises of ownership, and unlike Sasuke he wore them with pride; bowing down at his master’s feet like an eager, conditioned dog.
But Orochimaru no longer touches him. He blames Sasuke for this, and perhaps he’s partially correct to. But Orochimaru stopped touching him long before Sasuke’s arrival in Otogakure, and the simpler, harsher truth is that Kabuto is just too old for him now.
Sasuke suspects he’s beginning to get too old, too. Orochimaru doesn’t fuck him nearly as much as he used to.
Kabuto finishes healing him—the green glow from his hands passing over Sasuke’s entire body, even healing the marks covered by clothing. Sasuke feels the ache as he sits disappear, along with the sting across his inner thighs. The back of his throat is soothed, no longer feeling like there’s a razor blade trapped in it when he swallows.
“There,” Kabuto says, dropping his hands and stepping away. “Now get out of my medical room.”
Sasuke looks down at his lap, turning his wrists up and staring at them. Minutes before, the skin was colored with bruises, bleeding and scraped raw from ropes. Now it’s smooth and undamaged.
Gone. Like it never happened.
But it did. And it will, again. Over and over and over, and Sasuke has nothing to show for it. He’ll have nothing to show for it years from now, no scar he’ll be able to bear as proof: Look. This is what he did to me. This is the mark he left.
He slides off the table, and there’s no longer any ache as he stands. A part of him wishes for it back. The only evidence left is the stickiness that remains between his legs, that will be washed away as soon as he leaves here to scour himself beneath scalding water.
As he stands in the doorway, he turns his head back. Kabuto has returned to the chair in front of his desk, head bent over his work as if he was never interrupted. But there’s a harshness to him that wasn’t present before Sasuke entered—the slash of his mouth, the set of his shoulders.
Orochimaru will never touch Kabuto that way again. Not so long as Sasuke is around.
He should be proud of himself, he thinks, as he steps out of the room and into the hall. All these years, and he’s finally found something he’s the best at.
★
After that first time, as Orochimaru pulls out of him, he brushes the hair from Sasuke’s face and licks the tears from his cheeks, then tells him he’s the best he’s ever had.
“Your training will begin tomorrow at dawn,” Orochimaru tells him, slipping the sleeve of his robe back onto his shoulder. “That is, of course, assuming you haven’t changed your mind. Is this still what you want, Sasuke-kun?”
Sasuke sits there on the bedroom floor, bruised and shaking and his face streaked with tears. His body is sore and bleeding in places it’s never been before, and the air is sharp against exposed skin.
He looks up at the man’s gold eyes that pierce through the dark. His voice is raspy when he answers. “Yes. I want this.”
“Good. Remember that.”
Sasuke does remember. He will always remember, in the years to come. He will remember that this was his choice. He will remember that it was him who sought Orochimaru out, not the other way around. He will remember that it was him who pushed, who demanded, who wanted.
You did this to yourself, he’ll be reminded again and again and again. His face pressed into the mattress—against the wall, against the floor. A hand tangled in his hair and pulling. You asked for this. You wanted to be strong.
★
He doesn’t fight again after that first time. He doesn’t say no.
(Did he ever? He can’t remember.)
★
“Sasuke-kun,” Orochimaru says. “I have a task for you.”
The morning after fucking him rougher than he has in over a year, this is how the older man greets him. Sasuke’s body remembers, even if the damage has been mended and erased—the brutality with which Orochimaru drove into him, the merciless grip on his hair that held his head in place as his throat contracted and choked, his vision blackening. All of this flashes through his head as he sees him.
He shows none of it on his face, wiping the sweat from his forehead and turning to face him with his sword in hand. “What is it?”
“I need you to deliver something to Karin.”
It’s early, not long after dawn, and the sky is painted in orange as the sun rises up from Oto’s horizon. Sasuke has been practicing with a new form of Chidori, and the grass around him is charred brown.
“I’m busy,” he says, giving Orochimaru an unimpressed look. “Get one of your summons to run your errands for you.”
There’s a quick flash of fangs as Orochimaru smiles. “You know how they feel about being called upon for such menial tasks. They find it degrading.”
“So do I.”
It’s the same complaint he’s given a dozen times now. He doesn’t want to seem like he actually wants to visit Karin, after all. It would look suspicious, especially considering Sasuke despises most people on principle.
Orochimaru walks forward and closes the distance between them. Sasuke takes special care in making sure his body language doesn’t shift, not even when the man reaches across the few inches of space to press the pad of his thumb into Sasuke’s bottom lip.
It's a familiar action. If they were alone in his bedroom, he would tell Sasuke open. Sasuke would obediently part his lips, allowing his tongue to circle the thumb as it pushed into his mouth.
But they aren’t alone in his bedroom, so Orochimaru lets the thumb merely rest there.
“I was a bit rough with you last night. Just do this small thing for me, and I promise I’ll make it up to you when you get back.”
Sasuke feels coldness slide down his spine. Make it up to you meant another night in Orochimaru’s chambers—but this time it would be gentle caresses and strokes, a sick mockery of care and affection as he took his time pressing himself in. Sasuke hates those times a thousand times more, would rather be made to feel broken and filthy and abused than be made to feel good.
He hates this man. The feeling is so intense that it chokes him sometimes, sharp and burning in his throat.
There’s only one person he hates more.
All of this is your fault. When I kill you, it will finally have been worth it.
Itachi is always a productive target for his anger. Sasuke’s hatred for him is a fire burning in his chest at all times, and each instance of a hand in his hair shoving him to his knees only fuels the flame. It’s a solid, strengthening feeling, much steadier than the nausea and panic that swirls in him when Orochimaru stands too close—the memory of hands and teeth and yes so good that threatens to send him spiraling.
Sasuke steps back, causing Orochimaru’s hand to drop back down to his side. “Fine,” Sasuke says to him. “I’ll do it. What am I taking to her?”
Orochimaru holds out the manila folder held in his other hand. “Some recent findings in the research she’s helping me conduct. I doubt it will make much sense to you.”
Sasuke takes it from him.
Karin operates out of Orochimaru’s hideout to the south—a small island off the coast of the Land of Waves. The hideout serves primarily as a containment facility for the majority of Orochimaru’s living test subjects, and Karin serves as both a warden and a long-distance partner in his research. It will take Sasuke a day and a half, at minimum, to reach her. Orochimaru will expect him back within a maximum of four.
He sets off with his sword at his hip and a canteen of water clipped beside it. It’s been too long since his last visit—close to six months, when he confessed to her his plan. And she promised to help him.
He hopes her promise still holds true. Orochimaru grows weaker and weaker by the day. Soon, time will be up.
Sasuke’s small rowboat reaches the island by early evening of the next day. His arms and the palms of his hands are sore, as he anchors the boat and steps out. A large formation of stone, corroded and weathered by the ocean waves, rises up before him and reaches into the clouds. The landscape is harsh and jagged, no softness to be found; not a single patch of green or sign of life, just gray rock surrounded by deep blue water.
The mist in the air has settled over his skin and his hair as a thin layer of vapor. His attire does little to protect him from the chill, and he suppresses a shiver as he approaches the hideout’s entrance.
Karin has sensed him, of course. She sensed him from miles away. The door swings open before he reaches it.
“Well it’s about damn time,” she says, hands on her hips.
His mouth curves just slightly. “I know it’s been a while.”
“No shit. Six months!”
“Five and a half, actually.”
“Don’t start with me, Uchiha.”
She goes quiet, her eyes looking him over from behind the black frames of her glasses. There aren’t any marks on him—there never are—but still, she examines every inch of bare skin he has on display. She does it each time he visits, as if it might be different this time; as if his body might actually reflect the damage it’s had pressed into it, the way it’s been so clearly and cruelly carved into hers.
Her scars are silver against her skin in the sun. “I’m glad you’re here,” she tells him, tone gentling with her expression. She steps back to let him inside.
★
Sasuke meets Karin two months into his tenure as Orochimaru’s student. Karin Uzumaki, though he doesn’t know her surname at the time and neither does she. A group of prisoners have escaped from one of Oto’s nearby research facilities, and Sasuke is sent to help her reacquisition them. They handle the task swiftly and efficiently, without incident.
She seems slightly familiar to him, though he can’t place where from. It won’t be until months later that he’ll remember the red-haired girl in the Forest of Death that he saved from a bear.
She is professional and straightforward as they complete their assignment, only interested in doing her job and getting the situation handled. It’s an attitude Sasuke can appreciate and respect, an attitude he so rarely saw demonstrated by anyone in Konoha—but then, once all the prisoners are knocked out and tied up, that demeanor changes.
Her body language shifts, to something more fluid and seductive. She snakes her arms around his shoulders and presses herself close.
It’s only been two months since his arrival in Otogakure—two months since Orochimaru began their payments for his training. Sasuke hasn’t yet mastered the art of controlling his reactions, of dissociating himself from his experiences, of hiding the effects of the abuse. He’s jumpy, hypervigilant, flinching away from contact. So when Karin presses the entire length of her body against his—
Sasuke freezes for half a second, his heart seizing, then nearly guts her open with Kusanagi.
“What are you doing?! Get off!”
He shoves her roughly away from him, hand tight around the hilt of the sword he just barely restrained himself from killing her with. She stumbles slightly on the large tree branch they’re standing on, but steadies herself and looks at him coyly from behind her glasses.
“Oh, come on. I saw the way you were looking at me.”
His teeth clench. “I wasn’t looking at you any way.”
“Of course you were.” Heedless of the danger in such a maneuver, she steps close again and her hand goes for the rope tied around his waist. “Stop playing hard to get. I’ll make it real good for you, baby—”
I’ll make it so good for you, Orochimaru murmurs, hot breath at his throat and hand reaching down to—
In a flash, his hand grabs her wrist and snaps it. “Don’t touch me,” he snarls, icy panic seizing his lungs and shaking his breath.
She falls to her knees with a cry. The panic clears as quick as it came, leaving him off-balance and ashamed by the slip in composure.
Crimson eyes, same color as her hair, glare up at him. “What the fuck?”
“I told you to get off,” Sasuke says, knuckles white on his sword.
She huffs, cradling her broken wrist as she shoves herself to her feet. “Oh, please! I don’t know why you’re acting like you don’t want the same thing from me as everyone else! That’s why Orochimaru-sama sent you to assist me, isn’t it?”
The anger in Sasuke’s veins freezes to something colder.
Barely acknowledged before, now the white scars across her skin are sharp and glaring to him. Raised teeth marks, overlapping up her arms and her legs. They reach up to her inner thighs, disappearing beneath the fabric of her shorts. Sasuke’s hand loosens on his blade, as he pairs them with her behavior and her words, and it all slots into place.
Sasuke swallows the sick feeling in his throat. Memory ghosting against his skin, pressing bruises into his thighs and his hipbones.
“I don’t want that from you,” he says quietly.
Karin scoffs, disbelieving words ready. But something stops them a moment before they leave her lips.
He bears no scars, no damage carved into his skin. But his voice, his expression, the way he holds himself across from her—she must see some sort of reflection in it, somewhere, because Sasuke sees the same realization as his own bloom in her eyes.
The defensiveness bleeds from her body. “Oh,” she breathes, a single syllable that somehow contains everything.
She steps forward hesitantly. Her hand, the one with the uninjured wrist, reaches out to cautiously wrap around his own. He tenses, but doesn’t pull away.
“Me too,” she says quietly, neither one of them needing to say it out loud. Her fingers are warm around his.
And Sasuke, in that moment, feels more understood than he has in his entire life.
★
“It’s time,” Sasuke tells her.
Karin’s foot drags across the floor to halt the spinning metal stool she’s sitting on. She looks up from the research file in her lap, crimson eyes slightly alarmed behind their frames. “What? Already? I thought we had another half a year at least!”
“He hasn’t begun to fully deteriorate yet,” Sasuke says. “But he’s growing weaker—and more impatient. I don’t think he’s going to wait much longer to attempt the transfer.”
She grimaces. “Sounds like him, yeah.”
“Do you have it ready?”
Orochimaru’s notes, his writing cramped and slanted, glare up from the open file. Karin presses her lips together, then closes it and turns in her stool. She sets it on the table behind her, then stands to reach up and pull open one of the cabinets above her head. She emerges with an opaque vial.
“Right here. Careful,” she warns as she hands it to him.
He takes it from her slowly, feeling the liquid slosh against the glass inside. “And you’re sure it will work on him?”
“Yes. I’ve tested it.”
There’s a slight pinch to her mouth at the words. Sasuke’s witnessed enough of Orochimaru’s experiments to imagine the testing Karin performed, and knows it couldn’t have been pleasant for any of the subjects involved. Two years ago he would have been disgusted at the idea of ever signing off on such things—still had to clench his hands and bite his tongue as he watched Orochimaru drag the bodies from the bloody lab table.
But sometimes, cruelty is required. Sometimes the ends justify the means. If his time in Otogakure has taught him anything, it’s taught him that.
Power doesn’t come free.
“Thank you,” Sasuke says. He pockets the vial, making certain it’s secure.
“You’ll come find me?” she asks. “After?”
“Of course.”
He puts off returning to Oto as long as he can. But after a day he has to bid Karin farewell, and he lets her wrap her arms around him in a hug before he leaves—the only person he’ll allow such a thing from. If all goes as planned, he’ll see her again soon.
Late that night, Orochimaru makes good on his promise to make up for his previous rough treatment. He presses Sasuke back into the mattress, removing his clothing one piece at a time. His hands are tender against his skin, his mouth soft, as he whispers words of praise. An agonizing impersonation of a considerate lover, even pushing Sasuke’s hands away when they move to get him off. No, no. Tonight is about you, Sasuke-kun.
Sasuke isn’t that thirteen-year-old child anymore, weak and trembling and terrified in the dark. It’s been over two years. He’s strong enough now, to shove the larger body off of him. Not strong enough to kill him, not yet—but strong enough to make him stop. Strong enough to push him away.
But he doesn’t. Instead he closes his eyes, his hands fisting in the sheets beneath him as involuntary, shameful pleasure courses through him. He thinks of the vial hidden in the bottom desk drawer in his bedroom — and he bides his time.
★
“I’m going to kill Orochimaru,” Sasuke says.
He lays with his head in Karin’s lap, staring up at the sky above him. The sensor-nin is braiding his hair, her touch light and gentle as she separates the strands and crosses them over each other.
The rocky ground is cold and hard beneath him. Karin’s fingers in his hair are warm. Sasuke thinks of sharp nails digging into his scalp, twisting at his locks and pulling as his knees scrape the floor and he chokes. Karin’s touch is nothing like that.
The fourteen-year-old girl is silent and unmoving. The sunlight breaking through the clouds illuminates the dozens of bite marks decorating her skin, turning the scars silver. She stares up at the sky, where a bird has taken flight.
“Tell me how I can help,” she says.