Rafariel kept his eyes open, because he knew that he would get smacked hard if he was seen with them shut. But he was not seeing anything outside of himself anymore. His eyes were glazed over, staring at nothing.

He was inside his head, he was somewhere a long way from this room. He was visiting the zoo with his oldest brother, back when his brother still paid attention to him; they were touring the pens of the carnivorous animals, and Shuuichi was teasing him and telling him he was small enough to be a mouthful for one of them. He was shivering with delighted fear, giggling; he was happy; he was content. He was far, far away.

When he'd first come here, when he'd first realised that he was being kept here against his will, he'd kicked and screamed and thrown a tantrum. When he'd realised what they really intended to use him for, he'd screamed still more. He'd shed more real tears in the last few months than he'd shed in the rest of his entire life. Sometimes he thought he'd gone crazy. Sometimes he wished he'd go crazy.

But eventually, something had snapped. Something had broken inside him. He'd internalized and squashed it all into non-existence; all the pain, the hurting, the fear, the caring about what happened to him. He'd stopped caring about anything anymore. And he'd stopped caring to show it on the outside.

He knew that he could never beat them, never overcome them, never escape them. He wasn't strong enough. He wasn't smart enough. They'd caught him because they were hunters, trained hunters, and he was just foolish, childish prey, thinking himself young and immortal and safe from such harm.

But if he stopped caring, stopped crying, stopped feeling, then it didn't matter so much any more what they did to him.

So he let it all go. He became cold and still, silent and expressionless. No more tears. No more screaming. No more running or hiding. And no more begging for anything. He let them do what they wished, and he stopped caring about what happened to him. He was hidden, on the inside, in a safe place, and all they could see of his feelings now were perhaps the glint of anger that stirred subconsciously somewhere deep inside his eyes when he looked at them.

The only irony was that when he stopped screaming, stopped reacting, and stopped caring, he finally started to understand how easy it would be to escape.