Sasuke wasn’t breathing heavily.

What Asahi heard was his own breathing. And what he spoke was for his own benefit only.

After all, the fair-faced martial artist was unconscious, his breaths shallow and meager, far removed from the steady, calm breathing that was instilled in him by his father and grandfather. It was a thread, fraying. A thread about to snap. A thread that Asahi had to weave back together.

Pink threads slipped out from his fingers, teased out from the forge within his core. They snagged, like spidersilk, upon Sasuke’s pale, pallid flesh, and immediately, Asahi felt it.

There were no thoughts. No emotions. Nothing to latch onto except the faint signal of a life ebbing away. It was void, a crippling, exhausting void, one that could only inform him of the internal injuries, the organs skewered by broken ribs, before being exacerbated by methods of carrying that were as primitive as a piggyback ride. It was a flash of alacrity, and then, like a TV with its plug pulled, it turned to black as well.

Asahi’s stomach seemed to fold in on itself, the forge gone cold from both dread and simply lack of fuel.

He hadn’t eaten yet. He hadn’t even drunk anything yet. He had hardly slept. He was already on the precipice himself, and instinctually, as an Awakened and simply as a human being, he understood that he couldn’t keep pushing himself. He was empty. He had been empty since the night before, burnt to cinders by his efforts at keeping up with the hulk-phant. He had pushed himself to the shatterpoint healing Tsubaki. Some rest had helped him recover, but he needed more. He need water. He need rest.

And, most importantly, he needed food. So much food. Easily twice the amount of food he had just managed to gather by himself.
But what he didn’t have was time.

His threads, his Cables, dissolved, disconnecting from the fragmented vestiges of Sasuke’s unconsciousness as Asahi’s own mind grew faint. Such banal arguments they were all having.

It must be so nice, having the energy to bitch and moan.