#no29

Ama tanıdığın insanlar, tanımadığın insanlara dönüşebiliyor...

En acı verende,

Tanıdığın insanların, tanımadığın yabancılara dönüşmesidir...

Day 29 title: I only sink deeper the deeper I think.

no29 - Death Is My Reward

Vivarium Recordings

Here comes the new drabble prompt!

☀️ SUN ☀️

Thank you, Tea!

So dear Galladrabble Crew, warm up your typing fingers, heat up your fantasy cells, let's bathe in sunshine and sweat this week out!

Prompt: All work and no play ("you're still not dead", too weak to move, overworked) Fandom: Naruto Pairing: Shikamaru/Ino Rating: T Words: 738 Notes: Requested by @cinlat

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The cold was like a presence. It soaked through the hero’s clothes and into numb and aching limbs like a particularly nasty poison. Slow acting and quickly growing painful--just like one that the antagonist would pick if they’d been up and plotting. 

Unfortunately, the antagonist had been unconsciousness for the better part of the last four hours, slung over the hero’s shoulder unceremoniously--the hero smiles momentarily through blue tinged lips at how they imagined the conversation was going to go when they told the antagonist that they’d carried them out like a sack of potatoes. 

They’d be livid--sputtering and embarrassed--their cheeks flushing pink, the way their dark eyes would snap with outrage, but then of course there would also be just a smidge of gratitude, a healthy pinch of mutual understanding....The hero stopped walking for a second, the smile that had started as a smirk and grown to a cheek busting bright megawatt real smile melting off of their face as they pushed the odd fondness that they’d just had for their enemy to the back of their mind. 

They were just taking their defeated nemesis back to base--saving them from freezing to death, just like they’d do for anyone else. They pushed the odd warmth that had blossomed in their chest down inside of them as deeply as they could. 

They shifted the antagonist's limp form to get a better grip, wincing as they did so, the hand not holding the antagonist going to cover the screaming wound on their side protectively, it had been a parting gift from a knife wielding thief last week--fighting with the antagonist had opened it back up again--figures. 

The hero didn’t think it was bleeding, it had been sharply painful when the antagonist had kicked them there, ripping the stitches and barely healed skin back open, the ache flaring back up to bright agony that had clouded hero’s brain for several seconds. Now it just ached angrily, feeling like the only warm part of hero’s body as it pulsed hot with every heartbeat, almost like it was angry at being disturbed. 

Hero couldn’t feel much anymore, their existence was narrowing down to the measured steps through snow drifts, the panting breaths that fogged in the air, exhaustion weighed down limbs and eyes, glassy with pain as they pushed forward--not as if they had a choice. 

They’d been out here for far too long, the antagonist had thought that using their shoddy overheating surge capture thing in the dead of winter would maybe be the crazy solution that they’d been looking for. Instead it had just exploded, it would have taken the antagonist with it if hero hadn’t been there to frantically rip it off them as they scrambled underneath them, otherwise the antagonist would be twining with Doc Oc, with their weird mechanic fused-to-them backpacks. Now the hero’s legs felt like they didn’t belong to them, they might as well have been made of stone for how clumsy and heavy they felt, the cold having driven the feeling out of them. 

Hero sighed, failing to suppress another pang of frustration at the idiot that they were carrying across this winter wasteland towards wherever they’d parked their car. It was getting pretty difficult to see, hero wondered if it was because of the rapidly falling snow...Or if it had something to do with how their vision kept blurring and distorting, hero kept having to blink to focus them. 

They must be bleeding a lot, hero gathers their thoughts like they are picking change up off of a flat marble floor. That must be why their vision is blurring, they couldn’t stop shivering now, their legs threatening to give out on them, they hoped that they’d be able to keep going--maybe they needed help. Not that they’d get it, they were the only person stupid enough to be out in this storm. 

Well, themselves and the antagonist anyway. 

They paused in their constant plodding, the wind whipping tiny hard snowflakes against them--not that they could feel it. 

They just had to keep going, it had to be around here somewhere! 

Eventually they falter, it may have been minutes but it felt like hours, their legs buckling under them, they don’t realize that they are falling until the snow crunches against their face. They roll over, blinking in confusion, trying to understand how they got here. 

“Hero?” was that the antagonist's voice it was hard to tell, it was coming from so far away, ? Did they sound worried? it couldn’t be, hero chalked it up to the ringing in their ears. The antagonist never worried, least of all about them. 

“Hero whats wrong with you?” 

Was the antagonist touching their face? Hero couldn’t feel their face because of the cold wind, but it sort of felt like the antagonist was cupping their face through a wool sweater. 

What was going on? There was movement at their side, hero tried to protect their wound only to have the antagonist push their hands away easily.

“Honestly hero,” they scoff, not quite hiding the fear-born sheen in their eyes as they get a look at the loosely bandaged stab wound they crunch their face into a frown when they see how much it’s bleeding. 

Some nights he wished he were numb, that he didn’t have to feel the ache that pulled in his chest for what they hadn’t been able to do, for the lives they hadn’t been able to save. Other nights the numbness hurt more, the not being able to feel anything was suffocating because he knew he should have felt something for those that they couldn’t have done any more to help. 

On both kinds of nights, it felt good to float in the zero gravity of his space station. The weightlessness making him feel less and more all at once.  Sometimes he felt like he could float forever, letting the numbness take over until feelings were simply nothing to him and he didn’t have to think about all he had done. Other times he fears exactly that happening, that one day everything will mean nothing and the world becoming little more than a planet that he orbited. 

Except he knows that would never happen. There are too many in his life that simply wouldn’t let him go numb. His brothers had always been louder than him, and so much better at understanding him than he was at understanding himself. It was like a brotherly sixth sense that they somehow always knew when the colour needed bleeding back into him as they demanded his attention, pestered and joked with him.