fanfic || Rat Tales [No. 6] || oneshot
Title: Rat Tales
Fandom: No.6
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Friendship/Humor/Romance
Pairing: NezuShi
Disclaimer: I don't own.
A/N: Originally not supposed to be like this... but oh well.
Summary: They simply have too many stories to tell.
Even the Keeper of Dogs had left, along with the detestable old man.
Good riddance, Nezumi wouldn’t have been able to stomach being sent off by that man; needing his aid was bad enough already.
He was no stranger to pain-no, they were good friends, and it was obvious that it intended to remain with him until his last moments. He, however, had other plans. Pain or no pain, there was a mess of a boy lying next to him who needed immediate attention. Nezumi gulped in a breath and held on to it, willing himself to move.
The ground around him-them-was warm and damp with blood like molten chocolate, coagulating, darkening by the second as the cement drank up the liquid with greedy lips, licking it for more. How sweet…
“Sion… Sion…”
He shook the boy with an energy that, by all logic, should not have been in his body given his state. But he found it as he always did when it came to Sion.
“Oi, c’mon open your eyes. Sion!”
There. A breath. A steady rise and fall of the chest and a flutter of eyelids. The world grew fuzzy around the edges as Nezumi became acutely aware of how incredibly cold it was becoming. A pair of pale hands, almost as pale as Sion’s crown of snow-coloured hair, was slowly sapping every last drop of warmth from his body. He shivered, eyelids drooping; he shook, muscles giving to the coax and call and beckon of whatever lay beyond this… this dilapidated…
The weight on his stomach was a mark of impending doom in his mind as Sion struggled to grasp the world again. It was more difficult than the books described, far beyond the simple act of opening his eyes. A fight, he would have called it, though against what he was fighting, he couldn’t have said. Philosophers would have said it was fear. Scientists would have called it mere fatigue. Nezumi would have called them stupid and said it was death sewing Sion’s eyelids together stitch by stitch with calm fingers that never wavered.
Sion would have said himself.
For it was not fear, or fatigue, or even death that begged him not to open his eyes and surrender to this blissful eternity. It was a small voice inside his head that often annoyed him and bugged him, dripping poison into his ears, tracing venom along the innermost walls of his brain.
But this was a fight he could not afford to lose. In short, it wasn’t his fight to lose-there was someone waiting for him out there, someone who could be this weight on his stomach, someone who would need his help; someone who he cared for so much it shred his organs to pieces to think about.
The world was dark, but growing lighter. The patch of sky barely visible beyond the small window was the shade of a well-developed bruise, of which Sion was sure he had many. Sitting up was another battle, and forcing his brain to turn again was a third. And he won them all, with the single-minded goal of finding the rat that had chewed a hole in his chest and made itself a permanent home there. Leaving him was not an option anymore.
“Nezumi…” No, he wasn’t anywhere around… “Nezumi?”
Worse, he was lying over Sion’s legs, draped there in a mockery of a particularly bulky winter blanket.
Instinct kicked him up the ass and chased all remnants of pain and self-preservation from his mind. His body flipped to auto-pilot; feeling drained from him as blood was draining from the gaping wound in Nezumi’s side.
Sion didn’t remember much of what he did. All he knew was there were things needed to be done and that he did them. Exactly how they both ended up outside the wreck of crumbling cement and putrid waste was beyond him. Even his memory was being spared in favour of conserving energy to help the limp, doll-like body wrapped around his shoulders. He put one foot in front of the other, and then again, and again, and again.
And the rest was history.
A group of wide-eyed children stared, enraptured by the words pouring from the young man’s mouth. His eyes closed as he took a deep breath and smiled, folding his hands in his lap, letting the dénouement of the tale linger in the air.
“Oi, oi, wasn’t it I that saved you? Not the other way around?”
Sion looked up from the huddle of children sitting on the floor; Nezumi was standing there, a hand on his hip, the other holding a tray of perfectly baked cookies that were still warm to the touch.
“Cookies!” came the excited exclamation as the children all sprung to their feet and clambered around Nezumi for the sweet treats.
“Details, details. The point is, we didn’t leave each other behind, right?” Sion smiled, though a bit sheepishly.
“Right, and who cares that it was Macduff who killed Macbeth in the end, because the point is that Macbeth was corrupted and someone needed to stop him; no need to scrabble over who it was.” Nezumi rolled his eyes, bending to place the cookies on the small table where all the children could reach.
“Shh!” Sion shot him a half-hearted glare, “I haven’t gotten there with the kids yet. Don’t ruin the ending for them.”
Nezumi’s mouth hung slack as an even more exasperated expression danced across his features. “You’re reading Macbeth to a bunch of kids?”
Sion shrugged, “Well, why not? It’s a good story.”
“Yeah, full of murder and gore and corruption. Don’t you think it’s a little inappropriate?”
“I never thought you would say something like that,” Sion said, leaning over to place a chaste kiss on the taller boy’s cheek. “You’ve changed.”
“I’ve gone soft,” Nezumi snapped back, though making no attempt to move away, “thanks to you.”
“You make that sound like a bad thing. I think it’s nice.”
Nezumi sighed, a bit theatrically, resigned to his fate.
Sion grinned and slipped his fingers through Nezumi’s hair, now long enough to rest on his shoulders even in a ponytail.
“Hey, are you guys in love?”
Stumped, the pair of them could only blink back at the little girl with wide, amber eyes. The rest of the kids soon followed, attention now no longer held at bay by the empty tray of cookies.
“Are you gonna get married?”
“Like Momma and Pappa?”
“And have babies as cute as my little sister?”
“Yeah! Yeah!” The noise level rose in with a direct correlation to the colour in Nezumi’s cheeks.
“Now, now kids,” Sion said over the cacophony of little voices. They quieted to listen, riveted as they always were whenever Sion spoke. He peered over his shoulder at Nezumi, who was now doing a wonderful impression of an overripe tomato, and smiled back down at the children.
“That, is a story for another day.”
---
Comments are loved. Critiques are treasured.