He's lost track of the days.
Each breath exhaled from his lungs is jagged and hoarse, a heavy pain that feels like a knife twisting in his chest, blood hot on his face, pooling from his nose, from between his teeth. Sound felt weird and distorted, the constriction of the muzzle around his head an awful weight and even in the darkness of the room, it's difficult to make anything out.
He'd gotten grabbed, snatched away during a dispatch that had been a setup. A means of capturing him so Shroud could take advantage of the Mega Bat. He wanted to turn Victor against SDN, tried to implant in his head that they didn't care about him, but he'd refused, fought back as best could in the circumstances, and he surely paid for it.
Even laying on the floor now, he could feel the extent of the damage: broken ribs, the sharp pain in his chest might be a collapsed lung, and a few other broken bones here and there that sent aches and pains all across his body. Burns from Toxic too, just yelling at him to hurry up and change already.
Most of the time, he was left to the silence to stew in the fucking loneliness.
But today, there's a new sound outside that heavy iron door.
The sound of fighting, of gunshots and yells to evacuate. Flurries of footsteps sprint by his prison but none of them move to open it. Something was happening, sounded like a war, and for a moment, he swears he can see through that small little window in the door the glowing red eye of Shroud's mask peering in on him one last time.
It conveys everything i that single look, our time is not yet done. Then he's gone, like a ghost, like he'd never been there to begin with.
Victor flinches hard when the door slams open, ears pinning back and eyes squeezing shut, trying to make himself look as small as possible where he's stuck on the floor, unable to even stand. His hands quiver from where they're bound behind him, flinched back like that'll stop Shroud from bringing more pain.
He wants the Bat. He wants to fuck with his mind and turn him against his team. I had expected Robert to cut you, Shroud had said. Guess I can still be surprised sometimes.
The pain does not come though. In fact, the freezing cold room begins to burn hotter, and Victor's eyes open slowly, only when a familiar voice breathes a relieved, "Vic..."
Flambae burns there in the doorway, pure light and warmth, pure destruction and violence. His eyes gaze only once across the scene of Victor lying there, looking every bit of pathetic and wounded, and it's almost like someone dumped a bucket of ice cold water over him, his flame extinguishing sharp and sudden.
He shifts a bit, can't move that much with every limb feeling lead heavy. "Chad..." He manages to warble through the blood in his lungs, through the muzzle, trying desperately to convey just how happy he was to see him.