Death Note Fan Fiction ❯ Taming the Tiger ❯ Angel Wings and the Tiger ( Chapter 4 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

A/N: Hola. This is the last graphic/disturbing chapter for a while.

Warning: Violence mostly.

Disclaimer: Death Note belongs to Takeshi Obata.

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Blood. There was so much of it. It was as though the walls had been painted with his blood. He couldn't see the colour in the darkness, but it was still sticky and he could feel it. He felt so weak. Today had been more brutal than anything he could remember. There had been three men. They had raped him, beaten him, and left him to bleed. He was used to that, but this had been worse than usual.

He had two deep gashes down his back that wouldn't stop bleeding. One of the men, the one who had cut him, laughed and said it made him look like an angel with severed wings. They had cut straight through the tiger tattooed on his left shoulder. Really he couldn't help but laugh at the irony. The tiger wasn't just something pretty. It meant something to him. It was a symbol of his strength, his courage, his power. It was his identity and his guide. Severed. Like the angelic wings he never had, symbols of the innocence, if you could call it that, which they had stolen from him.

He felt broken, empty, alone. It was gone. Everything. They had stripped him of everything. His pride, his honour, his dignity, his strength, it was all gone. He was used and he was ruined. But he hung on, clinging to life just to spite them. They could hurt him, they could humiliate him, they could break him and taint him, but they could not kill him. He would never go down. Not for the likes of them. He may be reduced to scum, but they were lower.

The blood was drying on the wall, matting his hair to it so that he had to pull the strands loose so that he could move away. His golden hair clung not only to the wall but to the side of his face as well. There was a gash running along his jaw on the left side of his face. That, however, had stopped bleeding. He could no longer feel the sticky liquid oozing down his back through the layers of the stuff already hardened and flaking, but he knew it was there. He wondered just how deep they had cut. Carefully he reached one hand around to his other shoulder, ignoring the searing pain this caused in his back. The cut felt deep enough to have gone to the bone. And that made since considering the man said they looked like severed wings. But at least they were straight. They would close up easier that way than if they had been jagged.

He was absolutely freezing, save for his back which was covered in warm blood. He figured he should put his vest back on, but he didn't want to risk having it stick to the wounds and pull them open again. Instead he curled up against the wall farthest from the outside where it was a couple of degrees warmer. He usually slept as far from the door as possible, but he figured sleeping where he would not be immediately visible was just as good. He pulled his vest to him so that it covered his chest, leaving his back bare, and curled into a ball, careful not to stretch his back. The blood loss made sleep come easier, since he was already tired and he was starting to get dizzy. At least it was good for something.