Title: Parallelism
Fandom: Wolf's Rain
Length: Roughly 300 words
Rating: G
Characters: Tsume, Toboe, Gil
Pairings: None
Summary: Tsume considers, in the span of a few seconds, the parallelism between this time and last time.
Notes: The very first piece of Wolf's Rain fanfiction I have ever written. I tried to keep Tsume in character as much as I could while still making him seem slightly distracted. The end result? I think he's a little insane.
He was running on the pipes again, the dome above and gunshots below, people ahead and a kid behind.
He wondered if Toboe would slip and fall like Gil had, if he would get there in time like last time or if he'd be too late.
He wondered if he'd turn and stop and try to save him at all.
So many options. It didn't have to be like last time. Maybe that "god" the humans worshipped had given him a second chance, had thrown him back in time to keep Gil from dying.
He heard a stumble in the kid's thudding footsteps, then a startled gasp and the screech of metal. He turned on instinct just like last time—or was it last time done over?—and was crouched before the redhead before he could think to leave him.
His teeth found purchase in the kid's shoulder, the illusion flickering in his haste, and this time the kid didn't flinch and scream like he expected.
But no, this wasn't Gil. It was different, wasn't it? It was the same chain of events, but something had changed along the way.
Where did the two timelines deviate? Back when he was chasing wolves instead of humans or when he realized that Toboe's hair wasn't so much red as russet brown?
The kid closed his eyes against the pain of the other wolf's teeth, and then he was back on the pipe instead of plummeting to his death.
"Go on," he said, because now the kid could. Gil had stopped forever, just like the human he was, but Toboe was resilient. Toboe was a wolf.
Toboe had looked death in the face twice now, and he'd been scared and shaking but he hadn't stopped.
Toboe was worth something. Gil was not.
Maybe this 'Paradise' place was worth something too, if a kid like Toboe was going there.