A/N: If you read these head over to my LJ for Nabari no Ou, you can see the pretty pictures that accompany it. The URL is nyanja14(dot)livejournal(dot)com .
All of these are un-beta-ed and most were written late at night. So please let me know if you spot errors!
023: STRAY
The cat was too old to be a baby, too young to be an adult, and too thin to still be alive. Despite that, its frail chest lifted and lowered, once, twice, again and again.
"She was outside the building," Yukimi explained. He'd left about ten minutes ago to head into the office of a magazine he worked for, but instead he'd come back up the stairs with the pitiful creature wrapped in his arms.
"I'd take her to a vet, but I don't think there's anything that can be done…"
You should have just left it outside, Yoite thought. But he didn't say that. Yukimi wasn't the type of person to consider such things.
Yukimi was in the kitchen calling his sister Kazuho now, but Yoite knew it was no use. Kazuho was a good doctor, but Yoite could feel the cat's weak ki fluttering against his own. The cat was in pain and it wasn't going to make it through the night.
Yoite reached out with the kira. He'd never tried to kill anything gently before, but he knew almost instinctively how it could be done; he enveloped the cat's life pulse in his ki, like cupping hands around a butterfly, and squeezed once.
The haggard cat's chest rose once more, then fell. After that, all was still.
Yoite slipped out of the apartment before Yukimi could return from the kitchen. He didn't want to witness the man's reaction to the death of a stray.