Sometimes it is the smallest sounds we pay the most attention to. Somehow they are more honest than the big things, which perhaps are only made up of a million little noises, each trying to be heard in the din of their combined voice. But when the entirety of your world is composed of little noises, well spaced and seemingly louder than their actuality, you seem to appreciate them more.
At that moment, the sounds occupying Shion's mind were the small scuffles of Nezumi's robotic mice as they moved along their intricate network of causeways through their tiny home. Those were the sounds you had to focus on to hear right, and even then, you were never one hundred percent sure you hadn't made them up.
Pulling his focus from the mice in the walls, Shion shifted on the thin, over washed sheet that covered the old, slumped bed Nezumi had given up for the similarly decrepit couch. The rasp of linen was like the bellow of a storm in the numb, near silence of the night. Before everything, the dark and the silence had never seemed as one to Shion. There had always been someone working, traveling, talking, loving; Velvet blackness was a shroud over the private activities of the people he had matured round, busy with living. And yet, here with Nezumi, in his second life, it was debatable he felt more alive than he ever had when surrounded by the living. Out here with the supposed dead, it gave his existence meaning, definition and distinction.
In sync with Shion's sleepless thoughts, Nezumi sighed in his sleep, drawing the scratchy woollen blanket tighter rover his shoulders. Back to the room, Shion knew he wouldn't be able to see his face unless he stood up. It had taken awhile to pick up on, but for someone like Nezumi to sleep with his back to the room had struck Shion as odd. Naive as he may be, some things about his taciturn saviour had etched themselves to Shion's conscious mind. Unlike most, in sleep Nezumi was not peaceful. True, he moved little, and was largely silent but for the slow rhythmic breathing that was so inexplicably soothing to hear, but he was never relaxed. His muscles were always tensed, ready to jump up and fight or flee, his face always a firm mask of disappointment with the world of his dreams. Shion suspected that disappointment spread far wider than the world Nezumi constructed for himself in sleep. Often he thought it was drawn to him, to his mistakes and insecurities and apparent ignorance of the world as Nezumi new it, here in the outskirts, the fallen places.
Nezumi's disapproval held a special, disproportionate fear in Shion's heart. It was unlike anything he had ever felt, this overwhelming need to please and be praised, but not how a child would seek praise, or even the want of reassuring words from a close friend or parent. This was something other, unknown and new, and as cautious as he was about it, he wanted to learn more. About himself, Nezumi, how to live and survive and, quite possibly love, although that word had an ambiguous meaning in his mind.
A shift in the soft soundscape of the room pulled Shion out of his reverie, grappling instead with trying to pin point the change.
"Shion." The low, sleep softened voice made him jump, not expecting such a sharp interruption to his listening. "Sleep. You need it." Obediently he lowered his head, eyes letting the room slip out of focus, and ultimately into the lucid darkness of sleep. It all seemed so much clearer, here with Nezumi.