Question Sleep?
part one: bomb
The happy little world where no one was.
Sleep was the sound of the ticking time bomb that had exploded and destroyed mankind.
He didn't really have any set direction to where he was going. He was just.. going. The booming sound of the distant explosions in the east was fading away like the tick of the clock -- bomb -- above his head in this dark, ominous room.
He didn't know where he was any longer. All the time, he questioned the surroundings. Was he here or there? There was nothing left to make him stay in one place at one time; there was only the nothing. There were no roads to travel; they'd all disappeared after the end of the world.
And.. still...
nothing.
Most of all, he questioned sleep.
Sleep was death and sleep was life again. That's why he both despised and cherished sleep, why he questioned it's motivations to come to him; so sweet, so innocent, so trustworthy, so vile and vain in it's desire to give him less pain he deserved and craved. He wanted to destroy sleep, with it's wonderful and lavish attentions and visions of a life that had long since ended. There was no one left in the fucking world anyway.
He much preferred the Nothing.
In sleep, there was being. While he was awake, he dreamt of nothing and nothing was the reason he could survive any longer; in sleep there was being alone and knowing he was alone created fear but when he was awake he knew emptiness and lay, ever quietly existing, in the world where no one else was.
Subaru didn't know how the world had ended.
In fact, he'd been in this very apartment when it had happened. There were millions of voices screaming in terror, and he had not moved. The sunlight was streaming in, the bare wood floor humming with the powers of the two Chosen Ones -- the Kamuis -- as they probably battled some miles or inches or whatever ways away. Time started slowing down. It just kept repeating.
That would never be enough to fill him up.
Then the world had ended. All the voices had abated, gone, destroyed, disappeared. There was silence, and Subaru smiled. So peaceful.. he lay for days, and one -- if there were someone -- would have thought that that peace was brought upon him because his soul had gone Within. Indeed, he had not.
Subaru simply saw. And watched. He would step away from the ceiling and turn on the tv and smile when he saw nothing there with static. Some days he would even leave his room and run about the apartment building, decrepit and wracked with filth in it's human days, now made beautiful by the absence.. and he would turn on all the electronic devices that had at one time belonged to someone who would use them to cook, to watch, to entertain, to mimic, to record their meaningless existence. His features were beautiful with a smile as he sat back on his heels in the middle of the floor, watching the chorus of metallic sounds and voices make sweet silence into a corpse.
A hundred camera recorders saw Subaru smile up at their glass eyes.
Glass eyes..
He was never lonely. He had always been alone since before that brief Time, and now that he was alone again, he was content. Content to watch the new world transform before him, to blossom, to bear witness to it's eternally new charm; to cherish the world he had loved with all his heart when he had existed with it, which had died and gone away.
Subaru stopped.
Just like everyone else.
Who was everyone?
Sei--
No.
And Subaru questioned sleep. He questioned it because in dreams, the person he loved still existed. Love still existed. And there was none of that here.
He scrambled towards the choir of electronic voices. Fakes! FAKES! He screamed, wishing they would die suddenly, withering outside into a thousand dead corpses—they-- the ones he could smell for weeks after the world had ended..
Never, ever go outside.
Never, ever, again.
When he got lonely, Subaru could turn on the radio and make believe..
..make believe there was someone else listening to all that static.
The light shone into his window again, and he lay down, his collection of humanity's devices silent. It would be a long time before he turned them on again, but whenever he got lonely..
He slept.