Chapter Text
Arun’s hands stung with a raw prickling heat. He was weak once the well of desperation inside him had dried up. There were no surges of indignation left to cup the smooth, cavernous hollows under his arms and lift them so he could continue to pound his fists on the solid expanse of darkness that surrounded him so completely. Without the tiny eye of fire from his lamp he felt it possible he could go blind and he feared if he ever was allowed outside again the heat of the sun on his skin would be the only way he’d know he was free from the brothel. He couldn’t guess how many days had passed since the lamp was taken; just that it had been long enough for hunger to cease its demanding stabs at his stomach. Before he had been locked in this room, when food and water were still brought to him, Arun let it go untouched. ‘Let the mold feast on the bread. It certainly has more will to live than I do,’ he thought resolutely.
He wanted to be angry at his past self for being so foolish as to refuse food when it was provided but he didn’t have the energy. He was so tired. Lowering himself to his knees was more effort than his body could take and they buckled before he could kneel on them, giving out so he fell to the ground with a staggered wobble, his legs useless and bent at twisted angles. The protruding bone of his temple throbbed with a deep agony when it bounced off the stone wall. He whimpered but found that like pressing on the tender bruises around his wrists and ankles, digging his temple into the hard surface brought about a dull pressure that softened the sharp edges of pain that burst from behind his eyes.
The stone wall felt alive against Arun’s skin. That was not unusual as he had, on numerous occasions, rested his aching head on the cool, bumpy surface and sensed a reverberation of movement from the water outside lapping against the rocks. It was a comfort to have the waves reaching for him, the insistent sound like the heavy glug of a leviathan’s heart beating unfettered alongside his own.
What was unusual on this day—or maybe it was not day at all and rather it was night, Arun had no way of determining which it was when men visited the brothel at all hours— was something that appeared clearly before Arun’s eyes despite the pitch blackness: a boy with the palest skin Arun had ever seen and white hair like the wispy trails of a passing cloud. Even more unusual were the tall rabbit ears that stuck straight out of the boy's head. A rabbit mixed with a boy? A boy mixed with a rabbit? It was impossible; yet there such a boy stood, certainly real unless Arun had gone mad —which Arun was positive he had not, and being decidedly sane he felt he had the authority to say the boy was no trick of the senses or mind.
The rabbit boy's nose twitched like any typical rabbit's would but in a way most untypical for a human; and without a glance at the crumpled pile of wasted limbs and hopeless eyes that was Arun, he turned toward the door.
"Wait! You can't leave!" Arun demanded. In his days of silence his voice seemed to have healed from the hours of screaming he had done at the start of his solitude and now it came out as sharp and full of rudeness as it often did (whether it was warranted or not).
The ears on the rabbit boy's head flipped in the direction of Arun's voice before the boy looked at him with such shock one might have thought Arun had told him night and day were made from the earth making a loop around the sun and not the other way around.
"No, I must go," the rabbit boy replied. "Master is waiting and it won't do for me to be late. Oh, how he hates to be kept waiting!"
With a hurried fumble, the boy pulled a ticking disk that hung from a gold chain fastened to a twisted belt of white fabric around his waist, held it up to his face, and yelped—his ears flattening on his head. "This won't do! I'm late! I'm late!"
"If you're late already then it won't hurt so terribly for you to stay a little while longer, would it?" Arun asked the boy. He wouldn't be able to bear sitting by himself in the endless nothingness again after this temporary respite. The images he filled his weary head with, of majestic whales who lazed through the vast sapphire water outside the walls, railing against his captivity and coming to take him away, set in as the childish daydreams they were and a festering despair replaced them. If the boy left him he'd be alone in the room where the walls weren't walls and the floor wasn't a floor; where everything that caged him in was the void Arun sunk deeper into, falling forever without any chance of reaching the bottom. Never had he feared something so much. He needed the rabbit boy to remain by his side, to grasp his hand and pull him up or to weigh him down so he could touch the realness of the solid ground faster, but the boy wouldn't.
"Stay and be later than late? I did not expect you to have such a fool's logic, Amadeo,"the boy laughed in a way that suggested they were friends of many years and could joke in a brotherly manner. Untrue as it was, the familiarity stripped back the final thin layer of Arun's own propriety.
"You are the fool for appearing out of nowhere into a room that is locked and for calling me by a name that isn't mine!" Arun replied, his temper inflamed by his failure to consider the inescapability of the room before he had begged the boy to stay. The boy was just as trapped as he was and the thought pulled the corner of his mouth up as if it were being tugged by a hook.
The boy's foot thumped twice on the floor Arun could hear but not see and he asked: "Well, since you are protesting; what is your name then? Can you remember?"
"Arun, of course," Arun said confidently, though the more he thought on it the more his certainty in the answer slipped through his fingers.
"Is it? Are you sure?" the boy asked, his head tilted to the side and his nose twitching curiously.
If Arun had ever been sure before, that sureness was blown away like sand in the wind. "I suppose. Or maybe…perhaps I'm not sure. I don't know."
"What name can you hear being called in your mother's voice?" the boy asked gently.
Arun turned away from the boy and looked into the void in search of his mother but she wasn't there—not fully. Her saw an outline of her shape but even as he strained to remember details that might help her appear, he couldn't. He couldn't remember the heat of her leg against his cheek or feel her fingers raking through his hair. Did her hair curl like his own or did it grow straight like a swaying field of hay? He didn't know. When he cried, had she wiped his tears with her thumbs or did she deliver strike after strike to his face until the drops stopped racing down his cheeks? He didn't know that either. What name followed her words of I love you? It must have been Arun. That is what he is called so it must be what his mother named him. She loved him and called him Arun… she must have.
"Arun. I'm sure now," he answered finally.
The boy wore an expression that reminded Arun of the one he saw on the faces of the other children in his first week at the brothel; when he had looked to them for help as he fought and roared, only to be dragged off to this room or that one for men to do to him any sinful act their vile minds willed them to. Poor boy, the expression said. Poor boy who knows nothing.
"Do not look at me that way," Arun snapped at the boy. "I won't be locked in here with someone who looks at me with such sickening pity!"
"So, you won't. You're very sure of things like your name and the door being locked but I wouldn't be acting so mighty if I were as wrong and lonely as you are," the boy said, his dignified and cordial tone still stretched around his words.
With that, the boy checked his ticking gold disk again and walked to the door that Arun knew was in fact the door due to the shuffling of feet he could sometimes hear coming from that direction.
"It's locked. As you will see, I was wrong about neither the door nor my na—" Arun started to say to the back of the boy's head but halted in silence when the darkness was wedged open by a sliver of muted light that grew wider until Arun was watching a fluffy tail disappear into the hall and then dart away, leaving an empty doorway.
The door was open. He could leave.