His eye hurried to point toward her-- left of his cramped little cage, above his head. Though the darkness showed no signs if he’d made the right guess, the soft pats on the top of his cage told him everything.
He crawled toward the gate on his hands and knees, then sat pretty and awaited the hinges’ slow squeak.
“You will return to that room,” she told him. “You will prepare for any time your master deigns to keep you in his room for the night. Now, come.”
He crawled out of his cage, then sat on his knees and pointed his gaze up expectantly into the darkness. Her hand hovered over his head... then vanished from his immediate vicinity.
Her heels clicked against the stone, and he crawled as fast as he could to follow the noise.
The sound stopped. His breath hitched-- He perked up and searched the empty air for any sign of her presence, and felt his back freeze over as the nothingness around him increased. The silence locked him firmly in place, even as the flat stone underneath him agitated his hands and knees.
Rylde heard the hinges of a cage squeak. The eruption of fire onto an oil-soaked torch settled his nerves and he melted into a puddle on the ground. The shackles hung ominously over his head, but nobody told him to stand or lifted him up to chain him in place.
He heard the door shut and the lock click into place. He recognized the blanket that once covered the other prisoner’s cage when it covered his body, as a pair of dirt-covered, charcoal-grey feet stepped through his line of sight. His gaze crawled up the other prisoner’s leg, along tattered shorts, to the slightly emaciated abdomen of the other captive. His eye could venture no further up, but soon, it wouldn’t need to.
The other prisoner squatted down next to Rylde, who still lay on the hard stone floor. Rylde caught the look in that pair of dark red eyes. He looked the way Rylde felt: Like he wanted to be anywhere else in the world.
A question popped into Rylde’s mind for a moment. What if we lie and say it happened? He could pretend to be spaced-out again. The other captive could pretend to want to die even more than he already did.
Except the other captive must have already thought of that.
She was watching, or if not that, she was good at seeing through others’ facades. Why else would she have left the two alone?
A golden-brown hand reached from under the covers-- stopped short millimeters away from the top of a soot-shaded hand that dangled from a squatting knee. Rylde bit his lip.
“Asking to touch, huh?” the other’s weary voice half-whispered. “That’ll get you some points with the boss. Doubt you really want that, though. So I’m gonna--” His half-dead expression turned to one of shock as he witnessed Rylde’s hand retreat while hazel eyes pointed down like a scorned puppy’s. “Hey...”
Shock turned to sympathy as he witnessed Rylde wipe the beginning of a tear away before it could form. “C'mon, don’t...” Rylde’s hand snaked back out into the open air and hovered over the sighing drow’s.
“Yeah. Yeah, I gotcha.” His hand wrapped around Rylde’s, and he dropped from his squat in the process. “Nobody out there is going to do this for you...”
“You will,” Rylde countered, quiet as could be. His hand twisted; their fingers intertwined.
The captive forced out a scoff. That wasn’t going to get this one any points with their boss... But he started to understand. Rylde was not broken as he once thought. Rylde was clever.
Maybe a little too clever, there, if he could manipulate his fellow captive that easily. Maybe not enough if he showed his hand like that.
The captive climbed under that dark blanket next to Rylde, hovered a hand over oily golden locks-- His eye turned away. Rylde unlinked his fingers from the other’s and pressed that hovering hand onto his scalp.
“Um... What’s your name...?” More quiet words left Rylde’s mouth, and the other tried to offer a smile-- Though it fell flat.
“Krenyraen.” Literally, foolish heretic. Krenyraen softly pet the length of the surface elf’s long hair, and though Rylde tensed-- waited for the sharp yank he came to expect from the ‘boss’ as Kren had called her-- but he settled after a few minutes of this.
Rylde nestled into Kren’s chest-- He shifted, slipped his garments down his own legs, past his feet.
“Hey, you’re gonna want to keep that under you,” Kren explained. “Rubbing against the stone is...”
Rylde gathered his trousers back up and laid them down to sit upon. He laid back down, but this time turned away from Kren as his bare behind pressed close to the other’s covered crotch.
Panting, Rylde grasped at Kren’s hand with both of his and wrapped the foreign arm around his body. As Krenyraen tried to pull away, a soft, sad whimper escaped Rylde’s throat... so Kren merely resigned himself to his fate, now.
Rylde wanted someone to treat him nice for once... It didn’t have to be Kren himself, it just helped that they were in the same boat and all. That was the conclusion Kren came to. This was just a sad attempt at regaining some of the treatment he got back home, that’s all.
“Hungry?” he asked the surface elf. “She gives me more food when she has me do this test...”
"I’m fine.” Rylde’s growling stomach said otherwise.
Krenyraen ignored quiet whines of protest as he got out from underneath the salt-scented blanket and dug up what looked like an oddly-colored loaf of bread. This, he broke in half to offer to his ‘guest’ of sorts. On one hand, claiming to be capable and well even during starvation or other such was a trait that would serve Rylde well... On the other, Kren wanted to vomit when he heard the lie.
Rylde settled down and ate, though pouted every so often in Kren’s direction.
“Don’t give me that look...”
Rylde doubled down on ‘that look’.
Kren peered from his seat in front of the sun elf. “Cut it out.” The pout persisted. “Look-- I--” Rylde’s hand outstretched from underneath the blanket, and hovered over the top of Kren’s again.
“Yeah... Fine...” He could indulge this. It’d make the rest of this test easier on both of them, anyway.
