5 star but all rooms are vacant - roommates vs c-cats day 2

There's someone watching him.

He knows that, can feel a prickle on the back of his neck from it, but it doesn't slow him. Akira keeps on slowly, eyes trained on the castle looming in the distance in front of him, a crumbling monument to an elder god. Fire licks down his limbs, blooming out from his core in a steady beat, eating him alive. The pain is unmanageable, to the point that his brain has given up on trying to understand it. It's merely become part of him.

He has always been like this.

Things start to slip out of his control in the castle courtyard. The stake falls from his hand as he moves, fingers raw from holding it so tightly for so long. It rolls across uneven stone with a hollow sound. His breath comes haggard, air running ragged in and out, catching in his lungs and burning him to ash from the inside out.

He leans against the castle doors and they open with a gentle creak. The hall that Akira stumbles into is well lit with torchlight and lined with paintings of strangers wearing guilded crowns with eyes that seem to follow his every step. He tracks dirt on the red carpet, lets the night in with him. That old familiar feeling settles down in the cavity where his heart is promised to be; dread.

He isn't welcome here, but the feeling is too familiar to really trigger flight in him. It's the same way he's always felt walking in his own front door.

Maybe that's why Akira keeps moving forward or maybe it's just that he simply can't stop. There's little thought left in him, just the idea that he needs to find somewhere to rest, somewhere no one else will think to look for him.

There's a set of statues in his path to the stairs at the end of the hall, they tower over him and he pauses for a moment, gazing up to the rafters of the hall to see where they end.

One head held high, the other, covers her face to hide her pain, shoulders caved in, making herself small. Somehow he feels like both forms at once. A contorted grimace cuts across his face and Akira holds himself for a moment, nails digging into the fabric of his shirt as a wave of pain pushes through him. He falls to his knees on the carpet, and bends forward, forehead hitting the ground as he tries not to pass out.

For a moment, Akira just kneels there, trying to breathe. Pathetic, he knows that even without his father's voice echoing through his head. He's really going to die before taking a single hit.

Nah.

Akira raises his head, gaze running over the portraits to his left. Ginger hair and a flat, stern expression. There are goggles held loosely in one hand, a torch in the other, reflecting light off of a black background. The painting is too far away for him to read the plaque underneath it but Akira doesn't need to.

Patricia Valfierno is a household name.

He gets to his feet, one hand grabbing onto the edge of the large pedestal the statues stand on to help him. The marble base is cold to the touch, but his thumb hits metal. Akira turns his gaze to a plaque at the base of the statues, flat on the marble and not something he might have noticed in this state unless he'd touched it.

There are lines of poetry on the plaque that Akira has to read once or twice before realizing that it isn't a poem at all, but a riddle. He stands there silent for too long, running his fingers over the raised lettering. His hand, there's something wrong with it. It isn't lifting properly. It's hard to feel his fingers, he's lost feeling. His veins seem too dark, he can follow their paths with his eyes, see where they've gone, where they're going.

"I am the language spoken by the powerful to the powerless," he mumbles softly, "You'll find a knife in your back...."

Akira closes his hand into a fist over the letters and rests his knuckles against the words.

"What am I?" he says, and smiles, too wide and wrong for it to be a pleasant one. He looks back up at the statues, and the feeling of dread that he felt when he entered makes perfect sense. "You think so too, huh?" he asks them.

And he thinks about that afternoon a year ago, when he stood in the front hall of the house that he'd grown up in and told his mother about his father and his secretary.

And what she'd called him in response.

"Liar," he says ruefully, "The answer is a lie."

Heavy stone suddenly shifts with an awful grating noise. Two objects fall from the statues, landing heavily on the pedestal in front of him. He cringes backwards, arm raised in case of more debris but after a moment, when nothing else falls, Akira opens his eyes again.

There in front of him rests a gleaming shield, edged with sharp blades and a curved, double-bladed knife with a handle inset with a single red jewel.

He lowers his arm shakily and glances upwards again, to confirm that nothing else is going to rain down before picking the treasures up with shaking hands.

"Thanks," he says with a nod up at the statues.

He looks over his shoulder suddenly, eyes on the castle door that still sits open. That feeling of being watched is back again. He has to find somewhere to rest.

If a castle follows the same rules of a home, then it's likely a bed will be up the stairs, it's also where someone might expect someone to go. Akira continues down the hall instead, passing by portraits of victors from the last ninety-two years. Their eyes seem to follow his every step, gazes waiting for his approach, refusing to let go until he's gone too far from them.

But they can't be actually looking at him, he knows that. Paintings can't do that, he's just losing it.

Near the back of the hall he finds a small wooden door. He pushes it open, and finds a small stone hallway, thankfully empty of decor other than the metal brackets holding torches on the wall. Akira enters and pulls the door shut behind him, shoulders falling in relief as he twists the lock behind him.

There are a few rooms in the hallway but other than some wooden tables and a chair on it's own in one, there's nothing. At the end of the hall is a small staircase that spirals up and Akira takes it, landing on the floor above in another small hallway. The rooms in this one are all the same, shoeboxes with a wooden chest and a narrow bed.

He collapses on one and drops the shield and knife beside him, curling up with his back to the wall, eyes on the door just in case. Letting his guard down would be a mistake, it'd be stupid to even shut his eyes with so many tributes still alive, but laying there in the dark, pain moving through him in dull waves, he's beginning to wonder why he's even trying this hard.

Akira isn't like Storm or Avriel. There's no one he's fighting to get back home to, no one to prove himself to. There's only ever just been himself and if this fever takes him, if he doesn't wake up in the morning, no one's going to mourn him.

And that's all he's ever wanted, it's why he's never let anyone get too close, why he's burned every bridge he's built.

But it suddenly seems so sad, laying there, heart beat irregular, body too heavy to move. His eyes slide shut. A tear slips slowly down his cheek. Maybe he'd been wrong.

His heart stops.





"Jesus, fuck! You're alive?"

Akira comes to slowly, in bits and pieces. First there's sound, then vision, blurry, a little bit useless. There's a girl over him, dark hair hanging loose over his face, tickling his cheek, she smells like wildfire.

She's holding the shield that the statues gave him in her hands and he's holding her by the wrist, hand wrapped tight around her skin. He doesn't remember grabbing her. He can feel her heartbeat beneath his hand, hear blood pumping under her skin. It sounds like the river in Nine and it sounds like nothing at all.

"Let go, idiot!"

The girl is tugging on the shield. Akira blinks, gaze on his hand on her wrist, on his pale skin against hers, alive, pumping with blood, his still, silent.

He lets go of her as she yanks away and turns his hand over to look at his palm. He's been hungover before, looked like hell, bags under his eyes and so pale he was almost green. This is different, this is wrong, he knows that without knowing it.

You're alive?

The girl is scrambling around in front of him with some sort of animal but Akira hardly seems to notice. He rests two fingers on the inside of his wrist and waits.

Nothing.

He shuts his eyes, then opens them again a moment later. The pain is gone, the fever lifted, actually, he doesn't feel anything at all. Even the muted feeling that's blanketed him for as long as he can remember is gone.

The shield cuts into the mutt's skin and Akira looks up, the sudden scent of blood rousing him from deep thought. His pupils dilate as the smell travels through him, taking every thought with it. He forgets everything that isn't that thin red line on the mutt's skin, the girl, the shield, the games, all of it. None of it matters.

Akira launches himself at the mutt, a blur as he moves past Izzy.

[akira attacks mutts, teefs]
J2LK2b7FiVknife
[miss]

accuracy
[akira attacks mutts, teefs]
knife
[block LMAOOOO]

The cat leaps at Akira, long, hooked claws extended. He slides his left foot out in an effort to duck and slip beneath it's paw but he's never been good at this kind of thing. A claw scrapes across his forehead, drawing a deep cut across his skin. He throws his arms up to cover his face and rolls across the floor to his left.

His shield swings out beside him, catching the other mutt in the shoulder. Akira grumbles a little, and presses a hand to his forehead where the cat just cut him. His fingers come away coated in a rusted red substance, closer in colour to dried blood than fresh.

He squeezes his eyes shut and curls his hand into a fist in front of him. That's not normal. Blood doesn't look like that, his blood doesn't look like that. Feels like he's going to be sick.

Akira pushes himself up and moves away from the cats and the thieving girl. He knows she has a name but thoughts have been coming through filtered, everything feels too sharp, too all-at-once. Izzy maybe? Probably?

"Do I fucking look dead to you?" he snaps, "Might want to book an eye test, Six."

He grabs the bladed boomerang off of the bed and throws it as hard as he can at the cats.

[akira attacks mutts, boomerang (throwing knife)]
jdhVlA9MrTthrowing knife
[Shallow Cut on Bicep -- 3.5]