ash

Jun opens his eyes and sees a painful blur that flickers into a suffocating monochrome.

The man is watching him, Jun knows, because he can feel the man's eyes on him.

"Jun." It is an unfamiliar rasp that curls round the man's tongue like a dry wine.

His throat works to say something around the gag, but it escapes as a muffled moan, ragged and strung with desperation.

Jun imagines the man smirking in the almost-darkness. His breath is coming in shallow pants; panic is coiling like keen-edged ice around his heart.

There are fingers, cold and very calloused, working against the skin on his wrists to loosen his bonds. "We can't cut off your blood circulation." The man's voice is tinged with a strange accent that Jun cannot place, as rough as his hands. It makes him want to both shiver and cry at the same time, and Jun can hear the rasp of his shallow pants in the silence of the room.

…

Damien is trailing blood as he limps painfully to the doorway of Jun's apartment, and he winces at the odd, empty silence that meets him as he nudges the door open. He hardly makes a sound as he pads across the musty room to get to the cordless phone sitting despondently on the coffee table, the sound of the buttons clicking under his fingers as he dials a number painfully loud in his ears.

"Gabriel?"

"Ja?"

"You bastard."

…

There is water in the mug that the man is holding to Jun's lips, and as he tries to drink, his parched throat hurting like sand grinding on stone, he can see the man's eyes, the colour of cigarette ash. There is something burning in them that scares Jun, makes Jun want to turn away.

"Who are you?" he manages to croak; Jun's own voice is unfamiliar in his ears.

And in a way so similar to the blond Kindred Jun vaguely remembers killing, the stranger shrugs and smiles almost-wryly. "You don't want to know."