#gosh lately i've been... very exposed to cave exploring and cave diving tragedies and at first it was just because

[mythvoiced]

" what is there between us if not a little annihilation? " kazuki

@astremourante | ✧˚ · . so much (for) stardust - fall out boy

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Hasn't Inoue Kazuki always been a pinnacle of calm?

Why else would his father care, hm?

Kazuki's strength lies in the stiffness of his arms and the frozen silence of his resolve. An avalanche is eerily silent until it gets close enough for it to be too late, wind howls only through crevices and right angles, and no death is as quiet as the one experienced all on your own, buried beneath the very earth, suffocating on the air you expel.

Calm and resolute, like the earth. Changing only in millennia, like the earth.

Ruthless and unforgiving, like the earth.

But whenever he's forced to face her, he becomes both the cave and the explorer. The earth is resolute and ancient, it is his job to stand somewhere and keep an eye for the movements surrounding his father, all for the pretense of his father not being perfectly aware himself of how he's been played and where the blades pointed at his back are being drawn from.

That was the idea. He's no guard, no heir, no student, no teacher, he doesn't hold his father's arm to help him stand or walk, he doesn't collect his belongings, he doesn't stand for him in meetings.

He's no more than a dog trained to be very quiet, very still.

Because dogs that bark don't bite.

And he never barks.

Then, comes her, and suddenly his father's pretense is no longer a pretense. She reeks of bad ideas, there's a glint in his eyes that threatens to blind him, suffocates him with the promise of escape from a crevice thousands of miles under the ground.

He sees the light in her eyes and knows it's not the surface, but a bubble of rock in the middle of a cavern, with no way through and no way back, where every breath he takes slowly kills him because there is nothing there to filter his own foolishness out of his surroundings.

There, she is, and his father's pretending fades into non-existence and Kazuki thinks he's above it, finally. Here comes an opportunity, something she's not allowed to know so long as his skin moves strange where it wraps around her scar on him, the opportunity to prove himself as more than a loyal lap dog.

But he's a cave explorer.

Gone spelunking too far.

No, there's not a 'little annihilation' between them. She's the rock pressing into his Floyd Collins, Neil Moss.

There's nothing left between them. If annihilation was all she brought, she'd be easier to deal with.

But she brings... too much more.

His fists flex at his sides. He doesn't know if he wants to strangle her or...

"You always look like you're having fun," he breathes out. Knowing English isn't even all that much a requirement around here. Does he often try to over-achieve?

To answer that question, answer this one: is he mad? Insane? Deranged?

A little lot worse than he intends to be?

Is she the only key to that?

"You never stop having fun. Do you."