Summary: The world's shortest interlude! We're all going down, baby.
Part of And On Tuesday, The World Ended, but stands alone.
What a Wonderful World…(it could be)
He wakes alone in the middle of a forest.
…No.
He wakes alone, at the bottom of a hole, in the center of a crater, in what appears to be… the middle of the forest.
Not alone - a deer watches him.
Its ears twitch, swiveling back and forth. He moves a hand and he's got its full attention.
It's a doe. No antlers. She stretches her neck toward him, sniffing the air.
He is bleeding sluggishly from a dozen small wounds. Scrapes and scratches mostly, though his face is raw from the wind and the knuckles on his left hand are swollen. The last, the one just above his pinky, is depressed. It looks like a boxer's fracture. His hands must have been closed when he hit.
He wonders if she can smell the blood. He remembers reading somewhere – a deer will eat meat if the opportunity presents itself.
She hovers on the edge of the circle.
It was in America. The whitetails were eating birds, stealing babies straight from the nest. They had it on camera and everything.
At the time, he took it as a reminder that the world was a terrible place.
Now, he watches a doe take a cautious step forward.
The earth around him is soft and crumbly, pulverized to the fine grain of beach sand by the force his descent. Her hooves sink in.
Sand is a global commodity. After water, it is the most widely consumed natural resource in the world. And so, it is stolen at an alarming rate, then sold to construction firms and four-star resorts, to Singapore. A black-market sand trade. Beaches disappear in the night.
His hands sink in.
He's not entirely sure what happened. There are gaps in his memory. He remembers the look on Lucifer's face, the force of his blow, Yukio's own sense of elation, an alien rush of glee and adrenaline. He remembers going for the guns.
He remembers how things got louder and louder, then quieter and quieter, as the screams failed and the shooting stopped and the engines died. He remembers ordering Lightning's summons to bring down the ship. They must have succeeded. He remembers falling.
Breathing hurts, but in the ever-present aching way of ribs that are bruised, possibly fractured, but not displaced. A lot of him hurts, but excepting his hand, which throbs in time with the beat of his heart, it's not overmuch. He is alive and, all things considered, quite well. That isn't right. He's trained as a doctor. He should be a corpse, and the corpse should be unrecognizable.
The doe edges closer. Cautious considered steps. She leaves prints like broken hearts.
He wonders if the illuminati ever searched for unicorns. If they did, would they have come here?
His eyes sting and tear, wind-burned. His glasses are broken. One lens is missing, the other cracked. Glass is made from sand, but Yukio's lenses are poly-carbonate plastic: thinner, lighter, 10 times as strong. Still not enough.
It doesn't matter. He can't understand anyway.
Why does Satan save him on some occasions, but not others? Why protect him from himself, from Lucifer, from 45,000 feet, but not Shura's snake-demon or Gedoiun's ghouls?
What would happen if he chose just to lie here, peaceful, and let the deer lip at his bloodied face?
Would Satan kill her?
It feels like limbo. Like the center of an hourglass. Like the dreams he hasn't had in a very long time. He doesn't want to die, but he can't say he wants to live, either. There's pain, but it's slight and far away, like someone else's problem. There's Lucifer and Satan and the Illuminati and the Order, elixirs and lies, sacrifice and murder, and, oh the fate of the human race, but those things might be someone else's problem, too. Rin's, maybe. He's the real chosen one. Yukio was meant to save him from himself, from the reality of his make-up, from being Satan's son, but it's too late for that now, and what other purpose, really, has Yukio ever had?
His hands sink in. Maybe he doesn't have to go back. Perhaps he could make sand for a living. Climb a mountain and fall, over and over and over again. It sounds like a penitent's story, an underworld punishment. It sounds restful. No more questions. No uncertainty. Climb and fall. Fall and climb.
It's what he does anyway.
The doe is a stone's throw away, and with the sun setting behind her, her shadow washes over him like the rush of the sea. Three feet, two feet – close enough to touch.
If she dies, it is because he has brought her here.
If she dies, it is his fault and no one else's.
So he struggles, shifts up to hands and knees, and she startles. Her head jerks up.
He braces himself, swaying. He just needs a moment. A little time to find his bearings, but it's too late: Equilibrium has been lost.
The clock starts ticking. The sand starts flowing. The ground falls away from him, pooling in the bottom of an egg timer, an hour glass, around tennis courts and lounge chairs and nations he's never seen.
He's dizzy. It's like he's falling again, watching the ground speed closer and closer except this time it's the future, this time it's his life, and he crashes into it with all the speed and grace of a bullet train. The pain follows after, like a sonic boom or a wake, and Yukio kneels in the sand and gasps and coughs and retches, helplessly alive.
He is so, so tired.
The doe's shadow retreats, leaping away between the trees as the surf rolls out to sea. He can hear it crashing, beating rock to sand, and he listens for a long time, until his heartbeat has settled and the sun has gone down, until the sound of its so faint he's not sure he hears anything at all.
Alone, in a puddle of sick, at the bottom of a hole, in a crater, in the middle of a forest.
Yukio walks home.