Slaine hadn't realized how much he'd missed unrecycled air before he was wheeled out of the compound. It struck him in that exact moment - his hands cuffed together, one of his ankles cuffed to the gurney, being wheeled out to an awaiting chopper - that he likely hadn't had an honest moment to just enjoy natural air in a very long time. During the war, he'd been to worried, running here, looking there, worry, worry, worry. The last time might have been as far back as when his father was alive. He couldn't recall when was the last time he'd taken even a moment to just savor the simple pleasure that clean, crisp, fresh air was.
As he looked up at the beautiful blue expanse of sky above him, he realized that he probably never would. His current predicament hardly seemed appropriate for taking in something so fundamentally simple, that he hadn't even contemplated its loss before. He looked up at the sky, and thought of just how big it was, how limitless the sky had felt, and how small his little window with bars was. He always thought he'd been good at adapting to new situations, to places and people and languages and societies, and whole other worlds. Perhaps he'd always been wrong about that. Maybe it had just meant he'd never really had much to begin with, and he'd never honestly contemplated those losses, because he'd never had them to begin with.
The thought should have been something he denied, but it rang within him like sound escaping the hollow chasm of a bell. When he took away his father, or the Princess, what had he ever really had? The air around him, the sky above him, the earth below him, empty rooms without personal possessions, and a lack of familiar faces.
He thought of his father, toiling away on his research day and night, not eating or sleeping, just working and working and working. It struck him that he and his father where actually very similar. His father had needed something to fill that void, that endless yearning for things that he'd already lost, or had never had to begin with. It had been such a fervent need that he'd wasted away trying to fill it with research. Slaine wondered if his father had been able to fill that void, if the culmination of his professional work had led him to euphoria, or dread. There always had to be something afterwards, something had to continue filling that void. Maybe it hadn't been so sudden or strange that his father had died when he did. Maybe, in some cosmic sense of balance, the void, that need, had killed him. Had he not wanted to live past the completion of his research, the culmination of all he'd worked for? Slaine certainly didn't, and he hadn't even completed it. In childhood, he'd always seen his father as distant, smart, unreachable. Maybe in reality they were far more similar than he could have ever imagined.
He almost laughed, and felt his hands gripping at his chest. The familiar weight of his father's necklace in his hand felt far too heavy for him to comprehend. And he had entrusted that weight to Princess Asseylum, without realizing what it meant. He'd given her the most important part of his life, and expected her to be able to fill that emptiness. What a fool he'd been, to weigh her down with such a burden. She'd saved his miserable life, and he'd given her loyalty she didn't need, and hope that she would be able to fix something that had been broken from the start.
His view of the sky ended as they approached the helicopter, and the guards lifted him up into its hold. Kaizuka was a few steps behind, gracefully vaulting himself into the craft to sit beside the gurney. Slaine was aware of it, but it didn't matter. All that mattered was the clean crisp air around him, and the play of wind on his face. Right then and there, he had that, and it was so important that he wanted to cry.
He wished, more honestly than he'd ever wished for anything before, that he would not be making the return trip.