Breaking Through the Iron Wall - Aone Takanobu x Reader

Chapter 11

Beside me, I could sense Aone's pure fretfulness. His exterior exerted his usual stoic presence, yet the smallest draft of a broken child drifted through the cracks in his skin. Second after second, those cracks grew larger and larger until he seemed frail enough to snap. But we were outside, in the blatant view of the rest of the world - from what I knew - Aone wasn't a person to let his guard down in front of just anyone, somehow I felt the exact same way. But I was certain that the reason behind him was something entirely opposed to mine, perhaps it was something even darker.

I tried to shake myself out of my deep pondering, it was selfish to think about myself in a time where Aone was trekking through the furnaces of hell - and he needed me to accompany him on that adventure. I was certain that he couldn't do it alone, he'd break. There wasn't a more eloquent way of putting that statement, nor could you sugar-coat it.

Roaring skies bellowed up above us, winds howled in agony - all of their lamentations lashing and tearing through the atmosphere; almost biting at our skin, shredding our outwards protection into ribbons of devastation. Those deafening bellows closed off my hearing almost entirely, I couldn't hear anything - let alone my own thoughts.

Throughout the whole journey, the winds kept us separated, no matter how valiantly I quested to ameliorate his feelings... I just couldn't reach them. Normally, a trip to the vet shouldn't have caused Aone's level of anxiety, so maybe... It was so much more than just a trip to the vet.

Hesitantly, my fingers gingerly edged the door open, shrouding us both in a whole new light of apprehension. The ring of the entrance bell almost seemed deafening - breaking the agonisingly tumultuous silence. Everything was unreal. No, I didn't understand the situation to the fullest extent; but somehow, deep inside of me - I just knew. Soon, we were welcomingly ushered into the establishment by a woman in a lab coat. Her hazel eyes oozed with the highest volume of empathy that I had ever witnessed, somehow she knew to be gentle with Aone, as if she knew him well.

Almost in a chain of reactions, we were now sat down in the waiting area - side by side in silence. A gargantuan urging churned inside of me to console him, in any way possible; a pat on the shoulder; some words of sympathy or maybe simply the warmth of another human against him, so that he knew he had at least one shoulder to weep upon. Almost identical to the situation beforehand - Aone began quivering, but ever so slightly. And as always, I was the only person in the nearby vicinity that could notice exactly how he felt. As if on instinct, my arm shot upwards to wrap it around Aone's shivering shoulders, but at least the the farthest that I could reach.

His whole body jolted at my touch, almost as if he had recently been snapped back into the current reality. Quicker than a blink of an eye, his eyes snapped over to rest upon me, their unnatural glossiness glimmering underneath the light - searching for the slightest scrap of comfort to latch onto.

Never before had I gazed upon his face in a manner such as that, to me, he seemed a new person entirely. Not a single aspect on his face had been altered, however, there was just something inside of me that didn't recognise him. My eyes darted around until they latched straight onto his. At that point - I had the slightest inkling to avert my gaze, but I just couldn't, - there was something inside of him, scraping and pleading for just that one moment of comfort. And that was when he had located that source of comfort, in me, no less. His whole figure softened as if he had lost his skeleton. He was but an empty vessel of what he was before.

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The amount of time that flew past us was unfathomable, almost immeasurable. Time was always supposed to sprint forwards when you were enjoying yourself, and at that moment, both of those aspects were completely averse to the latter. The pure trepidation we were both enduring stretched out the time to the extent where a second was a terribly drawn out eternity.