Level Horizon (Haikyuu!! WingedAU)

Year Three.80 4/4; Anamnesis & Provocation

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. ~Thornton Wilder

Keishin Ukai isn't sure how he ended up staying with the group of eccentric beach dwellers, but he won't complain. It's been a mind-bending last twelve hours and he's exhausted, but doubts he could sleep anyway.

The avian heir and the bunting had shown up in Sheru bay not long after the first wave had come and destroyed the vast majority of everything. Keishin had been helping scour the murky bay for missing people when he'd noticed their shapes over the coastal hills.

Tanaka had stopped in to grab a sweet for Natsu just that morning and told him that the short crow and several of the others would be gone to some spring festival a good day's walk inland, so he'd scrunched his face in confusion. But it had quickly dissolved.

Of course, they'd be on their way back after something like this.

He'd met them head on, knowing they would be aghast at what had become of Sheru Bay. They'd immediately inquired after Noya and Keishin had frowned, because the small crow was also supposed to have gone to the festival, and he hadn't seen him for two days. After a stuttering and broken explanation that the short avian had bolted and torn back home ahead of them, Keishin had felt something very much like dread settle in him.

The inn had been one of the few buildings that had been left even partially intact and still recognizable as having been a building. It had come to rest upstream in one of the creek ravines; in the pandemonium of the aftermath, he'd completely forgotten that the remaining unit members were supposed to be renovating it.

They'd arrived in time to find Tanaka, Daichi, and Bokuto crowding around a hole in the roof, Noya's frantic voice echoing from within.

"— Asahi's trapped! We need to get him out!"

They'd proceeded to hack their way inside only to find the other crow in shock, his one wing literally destroyed. It still makes his breath catch and his gut twist when he thinks about it now. They'd managed to find another axe to help them get inside, but Keishin had had to stop them from just cutting and pulling one of the walls away to get him out.

It had been over seven centuries since the last earthquake like this, but it was something he would never forget. He'd probably been around their age now, maybe a little younger... but he knows that they will feel loss as keenly as he had if they aren't careful. But that hadn't meant his interference had been welcome. Noya had nearly gone ballistic when he'd stopped them from lifting the wall off Asahi's pinned wing.

"What are you doing? We need to get it off him!" He'd screeched and Keishin had reacted under the insistent press of those memories by grabbing the small crow's shirt and jerking him up off his feet.

"And he'll die!" He'd snapped.

He'd lost a sister this way.

In that last earthquake... she'd been trapped under rubble for three hours, one leg crushed beneath a beam and bricks. They'd freed her.

And she'd died from shock an hour later.

Keishin remembered her shrieks as the pain became agonizing, her glazed eyes and confusion as she'd started shaking all over. After she'd been pulled from the mess, she'd rapidly gone pale, her pulse growing thready, and entirely nonexistent in the injured leg at all. She'd gotten violently sick, and increasingly weak, her mind slipping. She'd finally succumbed to unconsciousness while his family had panicked trying to save her only for her to stop breathing.

She'd been fine while she was trapped— in pain, but coherent and responsive, her mental capacity and pallor holding steady. Only later did they find out that they had incorrectly extracted her, inadvertently paving the way for her to die as her body overwhelmed her in the wake of blood being restored to the massively injured limb. The leg had been left too long without blood flow, the tissues dying, and when it had returned, the crushed dead muscles had poisoned her. She'd have been better off if they'd have amputated the limb at the outset and she might have survived.