[Thread] Some days, my soul's confined and out of mind.

[lazyish]

Who: Shikamaru and Nill.
Where: Terra, the apartment.
When: Friday, after this and this.
Summary: Yosuke's missing, presumed dead.
Rating: R, I guess.
Other: RAGE.

Comments

[silencedbird]

It wasn’t difficult to tell what had happened, not really. She didn’t know if it was Ninjin’s death that had finally done it or if maybe it had been missing all along, but some of the hopeless cheerful optimism she’d held before then seemed to have dissipated, replaced by the quiet and somber truth of the reality she lived in. It wasn’t that Nill hadn’t always known the danger that her pseudo-family always seemed to be in, nothing like that-it was just that whenever they had left before she worried they would be harmed, but there was never a shadow of doubt in her mind that they would come home safe and sound.

But she couldn’t believe that anymore.

Shika would have never brought her home and stayed there with her (even if he hadn’t said a word to her and just holed up in his own room) if he thought that Yosuke was still alive out there somewhere.

Nill had tried to sleep at one point, but even that simple thing failed her, and she spent most of the night sitting in the one eternally-empty corner of her room, trying to do her homework. She at least managed that much. But morning came and went; even without Yosuke in the apartment, the sun still rose, and the world moved forward, and Nill got up and left her room. ...Shika, on the other hand, did not.

Finally, after waiting mostly by herself in the apartment for what felt like an eternity, the small winged girl stepped through the apartment and peered into her two senpai’s bedroom, blue eyes mirroring the worry she couldn’t speak herself.

[lazyish]

He heard the door of Nill's room open. Maybe it was time for school. Another glance at the TV told him it was a bit early for that, even. The morning news was just beginning. No reports of an explosion at the park, not now and not on last night's news either. Well, of course they wouldn't report that. Not if the government was responsible for it.

The grip on his knives tightened. He looked at Yosuke's bed again. It was as messy as he'd left it yesterday and Shikamaru wasn't going to touch it. His clothes on the floor, his magazines and papers scattered around... Shikamaru was going to leave them right there for him. Everything would be just the same when Yosuke returned.

Shikamaru rose from his bed. He almost put the knives down on his desk, then changed his mind and tucked them into his belt instead. He didn't know why Yosuke had been targeted, but it would be stupid to ignore the possibility that he and Nill might be next. His dark, tired eyes went to the doorway, where he spotted Nill watching him. "I'm fine," he assured her. Of course, he was only speaking of his physical state.

[silencedbird]

The assurance from her senpai did little, if anything, to assuage the girls worry, and after a moment of lingering in the doorway (albeit somewhat awkwardly) she stepped into the room, careful to avoid whatever might have been on the floor. She spared the briefest moment of hesitation, as though worried that perhaps such an action had been the wrong course to take, but in the end she reached out and shut the door behind to the room behind her.

But this room was Shika’s and Yosuke’s room, a domain that Nill did not properly belong in or even be allowed to come close to, and so she did not step forward, instead leaning back against the door with her hands clasped behind her back. She wouldn’t go further in unless Shika allowed it.

She shook her head a little though, finally, because Shika was lying. He wasn’t alright in any sense, as far as she was concerned-he looked sleep deprived and like he needed to rest for the next week just to function, and he definitely wasn’t ‘fine’ in any other sense of the word. So he was lying, and Nill wouldn’t let him.

[lazyish]

He wasn't lying to her on purpose. He had promised himself he wouldn't do that anymore, that she deserved to know the truth just as much as Yosuke and Itachi and Naruto did. But this mantra-- I'm fine I'm fine I'm fine-- was the lie that he told himself so often he believed it. After all, here he was, unscathed. He wasn't the one whose grave had just been made in the skies above Abyss.

Looking at her face now, he knew what she wanted to hear from him. She expected, like everyone else always did, that he would just open up and talk about everything that was going on in his heart and mind. Like it was something he was even conscious of. He tried, searching inside for some emotion he could name for her, but all that he found was...

Before he even realized what he was doing, he'd pulled one of the trench knives from his belt and slammed the blade into the wood of his desk. Burying it to the hilt so that the knuckle of his thumb bruised and throbbed when it hit the desktop.

[silencedbird]

It wasn’t that he had to talk, exactly. Shika had never spoken to her with the same degree of trust or conviction as Yosuke or Itachi, didn’t even look at her in the same way half the time. Nill suspected it would be a long time before he properly said anything to her without their situations being somewhat similar, and she was mostly okay with that. Things had at least-they’d change, between the two of them, hadn’t they? It was enough for her, but...

...for most of her life, through all the awful things that had happened in the labs and nightmarish nights spent in Abyss or on the streets, Nill had always been alone until she met Spanner. And It was the loneliest feeling in the world, she though, when the world just wouldn’t let you have a single victory and you kept being pulled down, and she had never wanted to be on her own during that, even though she always had been. So she at least, just... wanted to be there. In case he did want to say something, or if he just needed someone around.

She almost jumped though when Shika moved, too randomly for her not to be startled by the action, and the loud ‘thunk’ (almost a bang) of the blade as it hit the wood made her recoil slightly, though only visibly evident by the ways her wings retracted and laid flat against her back. (When had Shika started carrying around knives? Somewhere in the back of her mind she wondered this, but found no way to raise the question that didn’t seem strange for the time.) She stared at the knife for a moment before looking back at Shika, and raising one hand to her lips, though more for a reason to be moving as opposed to anything else.

...The ninja wasn’t upset, it seemed. He was mad. At himself? Was she even right? ...Nill honestly had no idea.

[lazyish]

Shikamaru exhaled a quiet gasp of pain, more than just a reaction to the impact. Everything... was so overwhelming. When was the last time he'd even had a moment to recover from everything life was throwing at him? How was he supposed to think straight when every week brought him all new kinds of horror? He looked down at the knife and was amazed-- just fucking amazed-- that it was buried in the desk and not Nill. That he even had enough remaining sanity to not destroy everyone in his sight.

How much longer could he hold onto that?

"I'm sorry," he whispered, uncurling his reddened fingers to release the knife. He left it there, not trusting himself with it right now. His palm ran over his weary face and now he didn't look at Nill but at the far wall. "I can't believe I let this happen again. To us. It should've been me they came after. I'm the one who's been planning to take them down. Yosuke... Yosuke didn't deserve that."

He raised his eyes to the ceiling. "I'll fix it. Do everything I can to make this better. I can't keep losing them. I'm going to get him back, and then we're all going to get out of here."

[silencedbird]

And all too easily the worry was once more evident in the blonde’s expression, her gaze flitting from Shika’s half-visible face to the knife practically buried in the desk-when had he gotten that strong? When had the gap between her and the rest of the people that she loved become so wide that she couldn’t even begin to find the hope she would ever need to try bridging it?-and for a moment she wondered just how alright he really was. She lifted a hand, an almost unconscious gesture, and began rubbing her forearm, all too aware of the muscles and tendons beneath her skin that had been engineered (never had parents to start with) to remain under a certain level of strength for her entire life.

She was about to shake her head, try to tell him that he didn’t have to apologize because it was fine and that it was just a desk, and that what had happened to Yosuke wasn’t him fault-she would’ve made a way to tell him, somehow, even if she had to write it out on the wall-but then his final statement sank in, and all she could do was stare at him, eyes wide and confused. Get out of here? ...Of what? The-the city? That didn’t even make sense. No one ever left the city. Sure, there were things beyond it, but it just-it seemed like a law, that if you were born there you stayed there.

She moved a hand and tapped her knuckles against the door behind her, trying to get Shika’s attention, trying to get him to look at her. She didn’t understand. Why was he going to try to leave?

...Why, when this was home and everyone they loved was here?

[lazyish]

The sound brought Shikamaru's gaze back down from the sky (or where he was imagining the sky to be, somewhere miles beyond the ceiling and Elysium). He had been mostly speaking to himself, so he was somewhat alarmed to remember Nill could hear him too. Saying things he hadn't quite meant to say to her, in ways he hadn't quite planned.

But sure, he would explain. He gestured vaguely with his hand, to the room, to the world. "This place is destroying us," he said to her. "It isn't where we've come from. It isn't where we belong. We don't even know how long we've really been here. Five years? One year? One month?"

Shikamaru took a deep breath and shook his head. "Not... Not that I'm saying what we have here isn't real. Nill, I love you and Yosuke. I'm gonna do everything I can to protect you. But right now it seems like the best way to do that is to get us out of this world. This place... It's all an illusion."

[silencedbird]

An illusion. Something in that statement rang too true, true down to her core, too sick-to-her-stomach for her to ever believe that Shika was lying to her in anyway, no matter how much she might want to reject it. And for a moment she just stared at him, blue eyes wide and bordering horrified. A month? That didn’t make any sense, she’d been with Shika and Yosuke for almost a year, and before that she’d been with Spanner, and she’d met Kazama and Mello-

--Mello, who knew her name and who she was long before she ever knew him, who said she’d been blown up when she didn’t remember anything like that-Mello, who was gone now too, someplace no one could find him-

She lifted a hand to her mouth, fingertips trembling slightly, and finally looked away from her one currently living senpai, down to the ground infront of her. No. Mello wasn’t an illusion. He couldn’t be-she remembered him, just like she did anyone else, just like-

Like her parents?

...slow realization finally spread across the girls face as her shoulders slumped slightly. Shika was right. He always was.

This city was destroying everyone, but they couldn’t save them all. Could they even save the people they wanted to? ...but it still felt like home.