Yukine wondered what was going on.

He shifted and turned uncomfortably in his futon for the umpteenth time this night, unable to find sleep. His incapacity to find sleep might have something to do with the foreign presence in his chest, with the painful stream of emotions shifting and moving in his chest that wouldn't stop hurting him. Thankfully, it wasn't anything too painful, but he found himself unable to close his eyes and just ignore it.

He wanted to talk to Yato, or maybe stay by his side until he felt better, but the latter had one of his arms cushioning his head and looked like he was peacefully sleeping, with deep breaths and an uniform and silent respiration. Yukine debated the issue a few seconds more because he knew he couldn't sleep like this, but given the mess that had happened a few hours ago with his father, he guessed it was better not bothering him. He needed the most rest he could. It wasn't worth bothering anyone in the house, anyway. It would surely pass.

He sighed, and turned again, wondering what was making his stomach churn like that. He was feeling fine – he'd talked a little bit with Yato about his father - so what could it be?

After this internal debate that had just let him absolutely nowhere, he chose to busy his relentless mind by identifying the different patterns on the ceiling, hoping that would bore him soon enough for him not to fall asleep too late.

Yukine woke up from his only hour of sleep feeling exhausted. He'd never felt his body being so deprived of energy, and never thought someone alive could even feel like this.

His limbs felt like they were made of rock and steel, not flesh and bones. Even opening his eyelids when Yato shook his shoulder to wake him up so that he would take his breakfast ended up being a gargantuous task.

The god had asked him if he wanted to sleep more, but he yawned him something like 'It's fine' and got out of bed despite his body's protests, hoping going through his usual morning routine would wake him up a little and make him feel better. No such luck; no amount of cold water seemed to be effective today.

He'd never have thought it was possible to be so fatigued. He felt like his knees would buckle under his weight at each of his steps and his eyes would close by themselves at any moment and his balance would fail him to make him crash against a wall. He wondered if he had caught a cold or if he was feverish, because he was feeling awful.

Worse than the day before.

He slumped next to the table when his feet had finally dragged him there, his mind still processing how he had managed do get down the stairs without falling. Yato's sharp eyes soon noticed something was wrong. "Yukine, what's wrong? You're sick?" he asked, the spoon in his mouth making his words be almost incomprehensible.

The shinki stayed dazed and silent, and Yato wondered if he'd even heard the question. The back of a cool hand found a way to his forehead through his messy fringe of hair, and Yukine let out a sigh of relief while closing his eyes, leaning into the touch. Yato's frown deepened, and the hand stayed here. "You don't have a fever, though..."

He leant on his god's shoulder a little bit, then more, and more until he was practically starting to sleep on it.

Kofuku would've liked to chuckle at the sight, but she wasn't naïve enough to think Yukine's pallor could be explained through tiredness alone. She leant towards the kid, and he almost could feel her pink locks tickling his neck when she spoke. "Say, are you sick, Yukki? You can rest upstairs if you're tired, you know..."

"I can bring you some medicine and your breakfast too. Sleeping looks like it would be the best thing to do now. You look like you didn't sleep during a week," said worriedly Daikoku.

Yukine blinked twice, wondering when he'd arrived downstairs. Then the situation caught with him and he shrugged off Yato's shoulder as if it had been poison, waited for his vision to stop swimming in front of him and he laughed awkwardly. "N-No...! I-It's really not a big deal, Kofuku-san. And Daikoku-san and Yato too, don't worry... I-I just didn't sleep well this night, maybe that's why I look funny. It will get better once I've eaten, I'm sure. You shouldn't concern yourself like this."

Yato peered at his kid, at his white face and his lost expression before sighing. His eyes were unusually serious and sharp today. "You should have woken me up if you couldn't sleep. It looks serious."

"I-It's really fine, Yato. There was no need to wake you up."

"Doesn't look like it. Your eyes are all red, Yukine."

Were they? He didn't remember having cried, though. "But I'm fine. I assure you, Yato. Trust me; it will be better after I've eaten." He hoped he'd been convincing enough.

Yukine looked away from his god's particularly thoughtful expression. His heart tightened a little bit, and he wondered if Yato thought he was hiding things from him again. Maybe he was angry because he'd not waken him up that night when he wasn't feeling good?

The god simply rose to his feet and ruffled his hair slowly. "Wake me up next time you can't sleep, kid. Stay here, I will get you breakfast."

He had thought that Yato was annoying when he was worried, but it was nothing compared to Hiyori. She'd come to visit the second she heard Yukine's hoarse and drowsy voice, and wouldn't stop fussing over him when she saw how pale he was.

Prompted mostly by her insistence, but also by Daikoku's, Kofuku's and Yato's, he swallowed some bitter medicine pills – he wondered what he wouldn't do for her, really, because they tasted absolutely awful - and went upstairs to get some shuteye during an hour or two.

I never thought Hiyori could get so pushy when she was worried. I swear, her children are going to live hell if they're sick one day, he thought amusedly before drifting off to a peaceful sleep as he closed his eyes.

He cursed his brain, making him dream about scary imaginary things.

He had no idea of where he was exactly. The place he was wandering in was perfectly unknown to him; a thick forest, dark because of a night sky, with cold mist barely floating above the bushes. The place looked magical and eerie, and he began to wonder if it was some place he'd seen before in a children's book. It certainly did bear some resemblances to it.

He decided not to think much about it. He was dreaming, lost somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, so he didn't spend more time trying to figure out where he was. The most important thing about that place was that it was dark and that he needed to find Yato there, or the Yato in his dreams that would protect him from this suffocating darkness like he always did.

"Let's play, Hiiro!"

He let out a breath of relief at his master's voice, which was close enough for him to hear it but not close enough to hear what he had just said. He advanced confidently and blindly towards it, longing to see a familiar face.

He advanced in the unknown forest slowly and cautiously, carefully listening to any sounds around him. But he couldn't hear anything, save his slow breathing and the sound of dead leaves crunching under his shoes, so he assumed it was safe to advance.

All his precautions didn't prevent him from tripping several times on some thick trees' roots, or head-butting some trees that he hadn't even noticed they were here. After ten minutes wandering in it, he didn't mind saying that he'd had enough of that forest in which he was walking without getting anywhere, and was about to cry out his frustration when his master's voice rang out again in the silence.

"Die already!"

The yell made him jump, and he whipped his head in the sound's direction. His surroundings suddenly became clearer, all the white mist disappearing and the sky lighting up all of a sudden as a sort of path appeared on the ground.

He didn't even take the time to decipher his brain's actions as he ran towards his master.

He saw Yato – not Yato, it was Yaboku – standing in the middle of a bloody mist, corpses and even pieces of person strewn on the ground there and there.

He couldn't see his face, and his was infinitely thankful to his mind for this. A movement, or maybe a whimper that was too loud in the deathly hush made him tear his eyes away from his god. Not too far from Yato, a man who was already bloodied was trying to crawl away from the danger – he hated referring to his god as a danger, because it wasn't Yato, yet it was him.

A light and childish laugh that would forever stay in his mind elevated in the air. He mumbled something that Yukine hadn't heard over his too loud heartbeat, and a black-haired girl soon appeared next to him. She, too, was looking at the man like she was mocking him.

Like all his efforts to live were futile, like he was trying to run away from his ineluctable fate that was death.

He was practically bleeding out and very obviously missing an arm, along with several of his fingers and looked like he was at death's door, but he still continued to crawl. "M-Monsters... He is a-a-a monster... S-Someone, a-anyone... Help m-me...!"

"How should we kill him, Yaboku?"

"Let's drown him!" he said with an amused voice. "I never tried to kill someone like this. Father told me that when people can't breathe, their faces get all purple! If I bring purple ears to Father, he will be happy!"

Nora nodded next to him, although Yukine didn't see it because he had bent to throw up at both the horrifying sight in front of him and the pungent smell of blood. "He will certainly be rejoiced. But I will do it. You should go kill the person who's been spying on us all that time."

"Really? There is someone? I didn't notice there was, though..."

"You can be so oblivious sometimes," she sighed, poking his forehead like she was a big sister teasing her brother. She advanced towards the man, who started to cry and crawled faster. "I will take care of him, so hurry up, Yaboku. If we don't hurry and bring him back all the ears, Father won't be proud of us."

The god rushed in Yukine's direction, and Yukine, who had fallen to his knees by now, shivered more. He didn't want to make noise and be noticed by Yato, because whether it was a dream or not, he didn't want to die, and even less at Yato's hands.

But now that he'd seen this, there was no way he could just stop hyperventilating and get his feet to work so that he would escape.

Like they were playing a game of prey and predator, Yato's footsteps lightened and slowed down. His voice was now sweet and cooing, like he was trying to convince a spooked animal to stop hiding from him. "Where are you? Stop hiding, I know you're here. Come out, it will be easier for you."

The sound of Yato's footsteps became louder and louder, and so did the sound of Yukine's breathing that he tried to muffle the best he could by covering his mouth. His heartbeat accelerated and wouldn't stop doing so, until it stopped altogether when two blue shining orbs appeared a few centimetres away from his face.

"Found you!"

Yukine woke up with a deafening yell that made jump every single living person downstairs. Plates fell from Daikoku's hands and shattered on the floor along with Yato's heart, and by the time they had all arrived upstairs, the shinki had locked himself in the bathroom and was curled up in a ball against the door, trying his hardest not to throw up at what he'd seen and burst in tears and panic more than he was already doing.

Unsurprisingly, the first voice he heard was Yato's. He was pounding on that door like his life was depending of it, and Yukine would have appreciated the gesture of worry if the hits weren't reverberating in his skull. He felt like he would explode. "Yukine, are you alright?! What's going on? Why can't I- Open the door!"

He started to yell when the pain became unbearable, and he immediately felt that it was far from arranging things. He felt like someone was gleefully hammering his skull again and again, almost hearing the bone crack under the hits, and his heart swell with all sorts of painful and dark feelings that existed until he couldn't breathe anymore.

Then he indeed heard a crack, but he didn't know if it was from his name or from the door Yato had surely broken by now. Couldn't he feel that Yukine needed to be alone and calm down for a few minutes?

The pain in his heart intensified when his silence lasted for too long, tearing a loud primal wail out of him. Yato's hits were now strong enough to completely destroy the door now. Yato cried his name, and ordered Daikoku to go bring something to demolish that damned door preventing him from saving his kid.

He tried to calm down, really, to breathe, but it felt like there was something in him that simply refused to do so. Yukine's eyes rolled at the back of his head and he fainted.

As sad as it was to say this, passing out and finally be freed of all the pain and despair which had been drowning him since he opened his eyes had been the best thing that happened to him today.

His return to consciousness was a lot calmer this time. He woke up without a sound, and heard quiet conversations floating around him. He blinked a few times. Apparently no one had noticed he had woken up.

He found strange that Yato hadn't noticed, though. Usually he could tell when he pretended to be asleep.

The person was holding him lovingly and tightly, so he had little doubts about who it was. He closed his barely opened eyes so that no trace of his orange pupils would be visible anymore and continued to pretend that he was sleeping. He wasn't in such a hurry to face the world again.

Luckily, one of his hands was already resting on his chest, so it wasn't that obvious when he started to rub it in discreet movements from left to right like he had sometimes seen Yato do.

He let out a barely audible breath. He had no idea about what the origin of the storm that wrecked his body before, but the violent and wild emotions from before had dulled a great lot and had finally become bearable.

He closed his eyes, buried his nose in whoever's chest he was snuggling against and breathed as quietly as he could, enjoying every single molecule of air entering his body.

It felt like it had been centuries since he last breathed so serenely. He kept his eyes closed and said in a voice like a sigh, supposing he was alright now. "Yato."

"Yukine, you're awake?!" asked Daikoku in a loud worried voice, stopping what he'd been doing to kneel next to the semi-conscious child. "Are you hurt? You scared us, you know, when you just started to yell like that..."

"I suppose I did... All my apologies, Daikoku-san." He untangled himself from Yato's grip to sit on the floor next to him. The god said nothing and let him go, but the twitching of his fingers and the worry dulling his eyes said everything.

"Yukine-kun, drink a little. Your throat must be hoarse from all the crying and yelling from earlier," Hiyori proposed him softly, although the strength she used to shove the glass of water in his hands wasn't quite matching it.

Her pink eyes shone with worry and urgency, similar to Kofuku's and Daikoku's. He blinked at them a moment before he lowered his head and looked at his lap sheepishly, feeling their concern warming his frigid chest. "Sorry, Hiyori."

He accepted the glass with trembling fingers, but Hiyori frowned at the disgusted expression that appeared on his face as soon as he took the glass in his hands. "Yukine-kun? I-Is something wrong?"

"Let's drown him!"

He could see the man from his nightmare crawling again in his peripheral vision, leaving a trail of blood mixed with tears behind him, and his cries. Goodness, his cries too... They wouldn't stop resonating in his head, along with the thousand and thousand other voices. This macabre choir stopped the second he looked at where he should be, where they should all be, because there was no one.

He could have sworn he'd seen him.

He smoothed his expression the best he could before anyone could question his bizarre reaction to a mere glass of water and quickly brought the ice-cold water to his lips.

But when he saw the man's expression reflect in the water's ripples, terrified and crying, he froze, and it slipped out of his hands. Hiyori caught it before it spilled on the floor. "Yukine...kun?"

He let out a breath and covered his face with his trembling palms, unable to meet anyone's face. Unable to explain why he'd freaked out about water.

"Yukki..."

"I'm not very awake... I'm sorry Hiyori," he apologized with a silent voice, although he knew that she wasn't in the slightest angry at him. He had to think about something, anything. "I-I'll drink later. I think I would prefer eating first."

Unluckily for him, they all firmly refused to put his two earlier fits out of their minds.

Every living person in the room fussed over him for at least twenty minutes each, asking what on earth had happened earlier or if he wanted to talk about it or if he wanted to go to sleep again, but this time with somebody. He answered each of their questions patiently, and tried to smile a little to reassure them. Oddly, he found he didn't mind that concern too much. It made him feel less alone.

Eating lunch eased some of their worries, though, and especially Yato's. He felt a weight being slowly removed from his chest, making it easier to find his appetite. After he'd engulfed all his lunch, taken seconds and drank a little – not water, though; Hiyori had somehow guessed proposing him that again would trigger him another fit - someone proposed the idea of going outside. An idea that Yato, his way too protective god, rejected right off the bat, arguing that Yukine was still fragile and needed to rest after whatever happened earlier.

But Yukine insisted that he was fine now, because it was the truth. He'd been through hell a few hours ago, but now the pain was dull and he barely sensed it. Better taking advantage of that before it worsened again.

He proposed the first place that came to his mind, and Yato puzzled over his instantaneous answer. "The... beach?"

"You want to go there too, right? Then we should just go. Getting some fresh air will do some good to everyone, not just me."

"It's a good idea!" cheered Hiyori. "Marine air is often the remedy when feeling sick or unwell. It will do nothing but good to Yukine-kun."

"But-"

"I'm okay now Yato," he smiled dimly. "Stop worrying about me."

"...How did you know that I wanted to go to the beach?" Yato's gaze hardened yet at the same time his brows furrowed, and Yukine frowned at the sudden intensity in his god's eyes. "I-I don't know; don't look at me like that. You must have said it one day, and I made the mistake of listening to you."

Yato didn't even laugh at this, and waited that Hiyori had left to help Kofuku taking something in the kitchen that was too high for her to reach to talk again. He advanced in front of Yukine, not bothering to hide his concern. "What happened earlier?"

"I had a nightmare," he mumbled silently, choosing not to point out that the nightmare was about him. "I'm sorry to have yelled. And scared you too. I... It was a stupid dream and I got really scared, but I'm fine now."

He didn't like lying to Yato, but to his greatest surprise, the god didn't flinch to the lie. He thought he would be stung, but apparently not. His eyes glassed over a moment, and worry burst in the god's eyes again. "Are you hiding something from me?"

He smiled wobbly. "I'm not. I-I'm going to take some stuff... for the beach."

"Are you sure you're alright?" he insisted, blocking his path. "You've been acting weird ever since we ran into Father last day. He didn't do anything to you, right?"

"Yup, I'm fine!" he said convincingly, trying his best to imitate Yato whenever he wasn't fine but didn't want the others to worry. "Don't worry. You should better help Daikoku-san prepare the bags; otherwise he will get mad and call you lazy."

Yato left him with his thoughts only when Daikoku grabbed him by the ear to drag him in the kitchen to help his goddess make the sandwiches. Yukine looked at Yato with a smug look as he yelped and tried to get free from Daikoku's iron grip, and dropped the act only when he was certain to be alone.

"Why on earth did I dream about something like this...?" he mumbled to himself.

I'm sorry if you think that it's not interesting yet... But something actually happened in the last two chapters. What's going on with Yukine will be revealed in the next chapter, but don't hesitate to say it if you have an idea :)