Sometimes, Anarchy is Best ~~ Shadows

2.) Rune

Pain.

It was a word Rune knew well. She’d spent years trying to process it, deal with it in an orderly fashion, ignore the chains that weighed on her wings and arms and everywhere like she’d escape if a single one of them wasn’t there. 

She’d thought she was done with that pain. The achy pains in her wings and back that throbbed after a session with Nightmare or sometimes Linus, them trying to get words out of her it was impossible for her to speak.

She was so wrong. 

The pain that split through her back, like she was getting torn in half, reverberating all the way down to her wingtips, made her wonder if escape was worth it at all. Maybe she could fix things. Maybe she wouldn’t be given an extra few dozen sets of lashings for her attempted leaving if she agreed to just tell them. She didn’t know how she would say it, because what they wanted to knew she knew from a gut feeling and not a fact or thing she could point out, but it just hurt so bad that she’d almost been willing to try.

Almost. 

The thing that broke her out of that spiral was the alarm, wailing like a toddler throwing a tantrum as security realized she wasn’t there. That broke any thought of wanting to go back, broke through her swimming mind like a lighthouse in the fog.

Toby had people waiting for her.

They’d help her.

They’d protect her.

He promised.

“Just run. They’ll find you, I promise.”

Rune pulled herself up, glancing down towards the window she’d flown out of, causing the wounds to reopen and send her into the pain spiral in the first place. It was still open, and Rune hoped Toby was long back in his area. Her wings hung limply behind her, and the only thing she could do without wanting to screech from the pain was pull them in a bit so they didn’t drag against the ground. 

And with that, she was moving. Alarms were going, Nightmare and Linus would be on her tail in a few minutes at most, and despite her previous thoughts, she didn’t know if she could handle being thrown back in there after getting to breathe real air again for the first time in two years.

Her wings may have hurt, but her legs were fine, and the thing about this city is that so many buildings were connected in strings that it was easy to go from roof to roof, going in a general south direction, according to her internal compass, but really just wherever the sound and people and attention wasn’t. The more people saw her, the more she’d get reported and maybe caught. 

Toby had made sure to tell her every danger and thing to avoid, and she’d taken careful care to note every one in some corner of her mind.

And every single little note went straight out the window as she was finally forced to go down onto the street. The lack of sight made her paranoid, and her steps sped up the second her feet were off the stairs that she’d taken to get down, because no way was she daring to try and glide down in this state.
 
The air at night was brisk, but she didn’t think it was quite fall yet, just the promise of it. The buildings before that had seemed all the same size Rune felt were towering above her, just begging for something to jump down and pin her. As she passed an alley, she could’ve sworn she heard footsteps, and in another, a flash of orange. Each time she changed her course slightly, hoping she wasn’t just going in a circle and ending up back there.

There was a little click, and that was all the warning she had before a sharp BANG sound rang through the air somewhere distantly behind her and a feeling like she’d just dipped her wingtip in lava spread through it, and she bit down hard on her tongue to stop the screech of pain she wanted to let out.