Moment |YANDERE X READER|

Chapter 16: Empty Promises

What woke Ted up was the familiar buzzing of his phone. He opened his eyes groggily, scanning his surroundings and trying to dismiss his headache.  He was not tied to a chair, as he had feared, but instead was slumped against a wall in a dark room.  Across the room, he could see the faint glow of his cellphone on a table as it lit up again, buzzing faintly after it's short hiatus. 

The next thing Ted noticed was that his hands were not tied up.  He pushed up off the floor slowly, and looking down, noticed that his shoes were gone, but the rest of his clothes were unscathed.  He took a step forwards towards the phone, then another, but on the third step, he sprang back, in pain. 

What lay in front of him that he could not make out before were thousands of tiny needles, all standing upright seemingly encased deeply in cement.  Ted groaned, burying his face in his hands.  Before the small square of light on his phone went out, he noticed the glint of the needles around ten meters in front of him.

Of course, they had increased in height. While the ones right in front of him can't have been more than a centimetre high, the ones at the end stretched to at least half a meter.

After a long time spent walking, Ichigo and you had arrived in civilisation. You eyed a carpark hesitantly, not wanting to disobey Ichigo's instructions but also not wanting to risk setting a car alarm off. Besides that, there weren't many cars around at 1AM. Ichigo had not given up calling Ted, though he had already brung you with him.

Either way, there was no excuses for him to make now, because you were already there. "Do you see anything that looks promising, y/n?" You squinted, trying to make out anything useful in the dim streetlights, when a man strode over to his car. It was quite an old fashioned car, considering he had to unlock it using a key.

You described him to Ichigo, who nodded and told you to wait for his signal. You watched in reluctance as he approached the man, who was still fumbling with the lock. Though Ichigo was armed, you weren't sure if he would be able to react quick enough if the man chose to strike him. He was at least a head taller than Ichigo, and didn't look friendly.

You strained your ears to try and hear what Ichigo was saying. "Excuse me sir," he began. The man didn't look thrilled, but he abandoned his fumbling to face Ichigo. "My sister is a diabetic, and she's running low on blood sugar, she's almost passed out and I need help getting her to a hospital, but there's no one else around and my cellphone's dead."

You held your breath, leaning against the wall. Then the man spoke, "for heaven's sake! Don't leave her by herself! Where is she?" Ichigo pointed the man over in your direction, trailing behind him before holding his hand up and grinning as he dragged a finger across his throat, pretending to slit it.

When the man was about to speak to you, you pulled a knife from your pocket, as instructed by Ichigo, slashing at the man. It didn't do much, since you were inexperienced, but it bought you enough time to sprint to the car and jump into the drivers seat, Ichigo following right behind you.

Unluckily, your blade work only resulted in a scratch on his face, and he charged after you and Ichigo with ridiculous speed. He managed to latch onto Ichigo's sleeve, shouting profanities, but Ichigo himself was stronger than he looked, and managed to pull free, though lost the corner of his clothing as a result.

Unsatisfied, the man leapt to grab onto the door of his car, and held on, though you heard the skidding of his feet as the car was driving. This didn't last long, and soon he lost his grip, but the car door had broken, and wouldn't fit into the door frame any more. It slammed once, then Ichigo grabbed hold of it and held it so that it didn't rip off completely. "Close call, now, let's go find Naomi."

"How are you holding up?  Do you want anything else to eat or drink?  You've had a long day."  Cathy was with Sai in his and Ted's apartment.  She didn't have the heart to abandon the boy when Ted clearly wasn't coming back, so she decided to sleep the night on the sofa.

Sai shook his head silently.  He hadn't spoken since Cathy had driven him home, and she was beginning to get worried.  She looked at him, and said in a forced carefree voice: "maybe Ted will be home when you wake up in the morning."   Sai didn't even humour the idea, and slouched deeper into his chair, the food in front of him untouched.

"Not feeling hungry?"  Cathy asked, to which Sai shook his head again.  Cathy took the plate from in front of him, tousling his hair gently, "I'll be on the couch if you need me."  And Sai was left alone with his thoughts, which he did not prefer but didn't have the strength to ask Cathy to stay. 

If only he had asked Ted to come in with him.  Surely it would've been fine, Ted had already given his statement.  Maybe it would have ended differently.  Too late now, and Sai watched the clock strike the next hour, closing his eyes halfway to shield them from the glare of the light bulb.

Though his gaze was fixed on the turning hands, Sai didn't even realise how long he'd spent coming up with alternatives to the situation, how he could've helped Ted to come home.  When he came to his senses, he tore his view from the clock on the wall, and snapped the light shut, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness before treading carefully through the living room.

Cathy was asleep, as Sai would've guessed she was by now, and so he didn't want to wake her on the way to his room.  Except, at the last moment he had a change of heart, and turned sharply towards Ted's room. 

Ted would've murdered Sai if he had trespassed into his territory without permission, let alone trying various passwords on his computer, but Ted wasn't here any more, and Sai was doing just that.  After several attempts, Sai managed to log in.  He didn't know what he was expecting to find, but was rather led by some sort of sixth sense.

Sai looked through the files that Ted had, finding many images that had been imported from one of Ted's phones.  Sai remembered looking across a playground at his brother, and grinning for the camera before continuing his activities.  He blinked back tears, and kept searching until he found a text file titled with his name.

It detailed what to do in the circumstance that Ted went missing.  Of course Ted would've expected his own death and tried to protect his brother.  Everything he seemed to do was for the sake of him.  Sai skimmed through the lines of text, but eventually his eyes became too blurry to read them, and so he shut the document. 

He pushed away from the desk by a small distance, looking down and slouching in the chair.  His eyes met the tangled wires hanging from behind the desk.  It would be so easy to get trapped in those, he thought.  Maybe even get squeezed to death, if you pulled too hard at the right angle.  Maybe he should test that theory. 

So he crawled under the desk, and took hold of one of the many wires.  They fizzed as they momentarily lost connection with the blinking monitor, but the desk was too close to the wall to allow the wires to slip through.  The boy went on wrapping the wires all the way around and around, until eventually, the monitor stopped flickering, and went completely black.