Nine
The Drowned OneDongho had been sleeping when they had come for him, two strong attackers who used the darkness of the night to throw him off. He had trained in fighting when in middle and high school, it being a hobby of his, but the unexpected attack and the strength of the two overpowered him and soon, he was dragged from his chambers with a hood over his head. Deposited in a room in a different building not too far away, he had been tied and left to wait for hours. He'd tried to free himself from the knots but had been unable to, and by the time his captors had returned, he had only succeeded in rubbing his wrists raw.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked, though they didn't answer as they untied his binds. As soon as his feet were feet he kicked out and he knew he caught one of them: they gave a grunt of pain that gave him a surge of hope. But then even as he began to rise, his arms still bound ot the chair and the hood still over his head, something hit him hard in the face and he fell back. The blows continued for a long moment, striking his face and snapping his neck back and forth with the force.
Just when he thought he would black out, a voice came that stopped the beating. "We can't kill him yet."
A grunt was the only answer, but the blows stopped coming, and Dongho assessed the damage as best he could. A broken nose, he thought, the rattling breath that he forced past the blood telling him that he needed to set it soon or risk permanently damaged breathing. Someone finished untying his ars, then he was yanked roughly to his feet, his hands tied behind his back, and then he was taken out of that room. The sound of a door opening and closing was what told him that.
Down what seemed to be a hallway, because there was no noise of other people about, and then into another room. Nearly as soon as he entered, he heard her voice: "What is he doing here!?"
Yeri? His mind reeled as he tried to decipher what was going on, but then a blow to his back kept him from being able to focus on the rest of what was being said. He did hear something about a jellyfish, he thought, but that could have been the fact that one of his ears was ringing from the beating he had taken.
And then a hand shoved him roughly forward, and he stumbled and tripped over onto his knees. It was only through sheer determinaton that he didn't sprawl facedown on the floor, and the jolt through his body made him want to cry out with the pain: but he wouldn't give the satisfaction.
Then hands were working at the tie on the hood over his head. "Dongho, I am not part of this," she began, then she pulled the hood off and he saw Yeri though the red haze in his eyes. She gave a gasp of shock as she reeled backward at the sight, then her face turned furious and she threw the bag to the floor in a fit. "Jellyfish!" she growled. "Completely spineless, soft-bellied jellyfish, the lot of them! With no brain to share!"
He couldn't help it: he laughed as he heard the insult and immediately regretted it. "Oh," he mumbled through the blood in his mouth, then turned to spit it out. "Sorry," he told her, to which she gave an unbelieing laugh.
"How in all the world are you still laughing and apologizing? You're so strange,"s he told him factually, without any of the venom she often had coating her words. She reached as if to touch his face, then changed her mind and moved behind him to untie his hands instead.
He flexed his hands as they were released, trying to get feeling back into them as he moved them back and forth. "I love that insult," he told her as she came back into sight.
"Jellyfish?" she asked,
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