[Week 33, Day 2] [Dream] You Never Have To
The sun is high, and dust is caught up in the wind as it passed over the ground. Debris, splintered wood and paper doors torn and shredded, litter the area that was a village, buckled from within leaving only sad shells of what it was. Like the corpses you step over gingerly and without a second glance. No cuts or wounds on their bodies, but blood drips from their lips and their eyes remain wide open in the horror of realizing that they would die from the inside out.
You should be finished now, correct? At least with your part of the job.
The gun.
But your name is called, and with a disinterested turn of your head to the sky, you leap, breath rushing out of you, and hem of your long coat flapping about your spindly legs as you soar through the sky like an arrow, rotted through its fragile frame. Perhaps you notice how much higher and faster you can glide the less of you there is for the wind to carry. From the air you can see your work, smoke rising into the sky, but you regard it in emptiness. Just another job until you can make your wish. Which is when-
-you feel something. An aura? A power? Something none of the others that have collapsed before you or begged for mercy have had. Brawny or quick, no matter the weapons, no one before has garnered enough interest for you to pause, until now as you look below, and find eyes, large and green, peering up to meet your own. No, not meet. They trap your own, and their owner, so small beneath you, you know immediately that he is misleadingly powerful. Behind the guise of wide-eyed uncaring fragility.
The dream goes awry here, growing static as it skips, jerks, and reels ahead with only bits of sound and blurs of images.
The shinrabansho is here
\\
Hurry back, Yoite!
//
"Stop it.... STOP!!!"
You freeze, finger pointed downward, the forehead of a man who is inconsequential to you, but, he is no the one who has made you stop. The finger twitches, awaiting that internal trigger though it doesn't come. It is a gun rendered impotent as the bullet becomes abruptly jammed in the barrel. You turn up your chin, brim of your hat lifting to once again reveal that same person, again watching you with verdant gaze.
Different. It's different than the way this happened. Even in a dream you can sense it.
And as the boy, the shinrabansho....Miharu steps forward, you find your hand shifting. Moving to take him in its aim instead.
Move, Miharu, I don't want to kill you. Your eyes speak it but your lips don't move.
"You don't have to." He didn't here you. But he knows. Even approaching a weapon he remains undeterred, even smiling a little as his own small hand reaches up. "You never have to," and coming to rest over your own, simply curls his fingers about it and unfurls all your fingers, revealing your palm, and leaving it open to the sky, your gloved knuckles caught securely between his own.
"You don't have to, Yoite."
And slowly, creepingly slowly, all about you the world fades, then seems to abruptly catch up with you, a heavy force flinging you away into the darkness-
[-And Yoite wakes as in his mind his body meets with the ground. His eyes stare up at the ceiling, then slowly he gathers his upper half from the ground, sitting up to find he had fallen asleep amongst the renewed junk piles of the sitting room, sliding door open to the evening sky as it is not yet night.
The rabbit, distracted in its search for food, shuffles past, pushing the hitomi aside and turning it off in its path towards a discarded dumpling.]