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This one is very largely encouraged by the wonderful chibi mitsukai, who cheered me on no end XD
Oh and I know I promised to tell Anna his name... but things didn't quite work out the way I planned. But there's something nice in here instead, I promise.
...In all honesty he didn’t want to get his hair wet. His hair did strange things when it was wet – enough to reduce Yuan to tears of laughter in the past, and he rather wanted to keep his authority among these people by looking respectable.
So he took a series of inside tunnels and a few disused rat-runs (many of these ranches were just old structures that had been built over) to cross from the isolation rooms, where he was carrying out the checks on A012, to the officer’s quarters where he had a bedroom and study waiting.
However, when taking a shortcut through some of the Human holding cells, he picked up on some screams and crashes coming from what sounded like a fight down one of the turn-offs in the corridor, which he had been intending to ignore it until he clearly recognized one of the voices screeching the words ‘bitch!’ at the top of her somewhat irritating voice.
He realized with an inward groan that it was almost certainly A012 making the racket; he recognized the tone, and some of her strange colloquialisms that were thrown in the verbal onslaught, so reluctant to have to patch her up again (if not for the guilt then at least for the crystal’s sake) Kratos rolled his eyes and turned off course.
“You cheatin’ bloody whore!” a female voice Kratos did not recognise rang out, and judging by the accent it was no Desian , “your no better than’em dirty bastards, are ya!”
“You’re talking shit!! A012’s voice screeched back, as Kratos approached the source of the noise (a single shared cell) forebodingly, “you don’t know anything so quit chatting out of your a…”
“That will be enough!” He barked, sending the older, not-A012 woman bolting down to the ground in terror, whereas she just whirled around with a challenging scowl on her face.
“Somebody cares?” She announced sarcastically before she’d recognized him, by her rule anyone disturbing prisoner fights was only spoiling for some action themselves, “Well that’d be a fir…oh!” Her amber eyes widened as she set upon the clash of red hair and purple armour; confronted with the person she had least expected to see.
“You.” She said nervously, drawing into herself and knotting her arms tightly around her chest, a frown on her face as if she was thinking about something rather unpleasant.
The various other prisoners in the cell stared at the guard on the other side of their cell door – he didn’t look like a normal Desian… but then again who could he be bar one of them, they'd all given up on rescue already.
“Ohhhh, is that’im then?” said the woman who A012 had been arguing with, (although by the looks of some of the scratches on her face they had been exchanging more than verbal blows), who then she seemed to regard him for a moment “…fancy little whore ain’t ya?”
A012 made a crude gesture at the woman and directed her eyes straight at Kratos’s feet. Why she found his feet so interesting he could not fathom, but the quick heaving of her shoulders seemed to indicate some kind of anxiousness on her part.
“Shut yer mouth now, ain’t ya?” the woman crowed, old and diseased. By the looks of her she was probably on her last legs and failed to care about the Desians any more: if she was going to die then she might as well go out kicking and screaming. So, she turned her cataract-plagued gaze on him again, and wiping spit from around her mouth she spoke.
“An what sorta feckless scum is he..." No sooner than the words had left her sore covered lips did A012 suddenly launch herself at the woman, flying to her in a catlike leap, hissing and screaming as she swung at her face.
The woman began to howl and pushed the younger, smaller woman back. But despite looking weak she was strong, stronger than the average malnourished human should be, and Kratos made a note to report these apparent side effects of the Cruxis crystal on No. A012.
“Shut up!!” She snarled as she scratched at the woman, pounding on her chest and probably taking a day off her life with each swipe, “you don’t know anything!!”
Kratos deliberated over his options, judging by her temper A012 would not obey any orders he were to give from this side of the cell, but she was hardly losing the fight, and if he were to open the doors and get involved there would probably be a great deal of unnecessary consequences.
And the woman had called him scum…
However, before he could make any further decisions more words were spat from A012’s mouth, ones that happened to catch Kratos rather off guard.
“You don’t know anything about him!!” Anna screamed as she cracked a hand hard across the woman’s face, “you have no idea! So shut up just shut up!!” Kratos suddenly realized who Anna meant by ‘him’, as she tore into a dying woman, (and he later realised that he had just thought of her as ‘Anna’ instead of her identification number).
“He is nothing like them!” She spat and raised a hand to hit the woman again, she had not drawn blood yet, but the woman was obviously ill and could no longer fight back, “Nothing! You hear?” Tightening a fist around the top of the woman’s shirt and pulling her face up to meet hers, Anna let her other arm fall and through gritted teeth whispered, “you will take back those words” in a voice so ominous even Kratos didn’t doubt what would happen if she wasn’t obeyed.
The woman panted and wheezed, thinking she was far too old for this, but nevertheless turned her face up to promptly spit at Anna, who didn’t move to block the assault or try to wipe the woman’s saliva away, but with a deadly look in her eyes raised her fist high above the woman’s face, letting it quiver in the air and hang like a deadweight.
Kratos estimated that if A012 were to punch that woman in the face with that margin of strength, then she would be unlikely to survive the night. He found that he knew something had to be done.
However before he could reassert himself on the situation (as yet again A012 had managed to paint him out of the picture), Anna suddenly calmed and let her body fall loose, dropping the fist and setting herself at ease.
“You aren’t worth my time.” She spat, and stood up, finally wiping her face on her shirt, which involved yanking it almost half way up her torso, exposing her stomach to the others in the cell and Kratos.
Everything he had been about to say to stop Anna from hitting that woman turned to ash in his mouth, he was quite literally dumbstruck on the other side of the bars. Inwardly his mind whirred in a panic, grasping for something to say that wouldn’t sound odd.
“A…” he started, but stopped again as five faces turned on him: A012’s, the woman and three other prisoners huddled quietly in the corners of the cell.
“…” The longer he left it the more of an idiot he looked and sounded like (not that it was supposed to matter to these people anyway). “…You would do well to get along with your cellmates,” he eventually forced, trying to ignore the fact that hewas the reason she had attacked the woman so viciously, “or you will be transferred to another Ranch.”
At that, Anna’s yellow cat’s eyes widened in something resembling panic, and she backed away from the centre of the room as if she were avoiding the limetlight, huddling herself against a wall and not once removing her gaze from him.
“I…” she mumbled, now quiet and docile, giving Kratos no need to stay any longer, as she was no longer endangering herself, “I’ll… see you tomorrow…”