It is black, just as the nights in which the moon itself hides, and the stars blot from a mass of clouds. At first perhaps that is all it is, just the night sky and air. Perhaps its closed eyelids. Yet, a flame hovers in the far off, and a figure next to it, indiscernible at distance. Stitches tuts his tongue as he stares at the shape the orange light outlines, and steps closer, carefully, as he feels the ceiling may be close to his head. After a long blink, he himself holds a torch in hand, and it lights his surroundings, including him on the secret of where he is. This is a cave.
"What the..." He begins to ask in his head, looking at the hand that holds the torch and seemingly belongs to him, but it is clothed with a strange thick cloth, purple and yellow, a garish color clash that hurts his eyes.
As he approaches the light he had first seen, before him would make him recoil, had he any control of his body whatsoever. Matted straw colored hair hangs down to cover the face of a barely breathing man, tied down to a chair, hands behind his back. The man is naked, and large still open gashes top both his feet, which shake and rattle his chains ever so slightly. His breath isn't as easy to hear as it is to see, labored and slow, and as soon as Stitches draws near to him, the man seems to attempt an even stiller state. He slouches forward which makes it harder to identify him from a stand, pale skinned but darkened by bruises. His whole body looks damaged from toes to fingers. Beside the weakened man, just to his right, and Stitches' left is a table on which a candle sits, as well as an array of metal objects that cause his mind to wince at thought of their purpose. He wants to kneel down before the man, to help him, to say something or do anything.
The purple clothing covering him prevents him from any of these, holding him to a set action, in which he reaches forward as the sound of the torch crackling comes to a silence. His gloved hand cups under the chin of the man, and a voice that is not his own speaks to the trapped and bound man with a hint of excitement, a deep sort of giddy splendor, "Now, sweet pet, shall we begin for tonight?"
The man lets out a soft grunt, almost pathetic enough to be a whimper. The purple coated hand tilts the face of the man up to show his chin to the light, and across his mouth from one cheek to another is a pattern Stitches himself remains to this day all too familiar with, the one of his name and what has become him. Starting at one cheek, across the mouth to the other cheek, thick and black, and lined with dashes as though his mouth is held shut by a thick dark and inky ribbon. His lips part once more to let out a breath that speaks for itself, a gentle sound of a creature defeated, nearly closed eyes of an emerald doused in a white dye to lighten it hidden behind locks that dangle before a terror filled face of himself.
Stitches's eyes swing open like a rapidly thrown door, and he is met by the early evening light. He had sat himself against a tree and passed out, arrows clamored into its trunk above his head, his gray hood drawn up. His eyes dart about, and his hand flies up to his face, where his fingers meet with the self given scar at the far right of his stitch mouth tattoo, and he frowns. His eyelids close a little as he squints, and Bread greets him with a gentle neigh. As his shaking fingers clasp at his chin he keeps his breath quiet, eyes eyes glancing to his feet, afraid of what might be found beneath the boots.
