The Undesired Second Chance

Chapter 47: Caring

Minato followed him to the floor, crouching next to him while Axel just tried to focus on breathing. Again. This was happening far too often. He cupped his hands to his face, his unsteady exhales warm on his palms, and reminded himself that he wasn't dead.

There was a tingling sensation across his shoulders, yes, but he wasn't dead. He couldn't even tell if he was just imagining that feeling or not.

"I'm not dead," he said aloud. "It could have... but it didn't, right? It won't."

"It won't," Minato agreed, softly. "Like trying to drown a fish."

Axel snorted, finally lowering his hands to give his friend a sardonic look.

"Okay, I admit—not my best metaphor." His expression went a bit unfocused, casting about for a better comparison. "More like... trying to splash water on empty air, or catch light with a butterfly net. You can try, but nothing's going to happen."

As he continued to ramble, trying to clarify his various comparisons and not doing a great job for any of them, Minato herded him over to lean back against the side of his bed. Axel slumped gratefully against the furniture and his friend, still a little dizzy. The support—both literally and just being there for him—meant a lot.

And, even if Axel couldn't follow the more complicated chakra-science Minato seemed incapable of fully explaining, it was reassuring that he was so convinced that there would be no effect. He'd have to ask for another summary later, when he was less overwhelmed and had a better shot at understanding anything.

Then something in his friend's metaphors clicked, abruptly, and his entire thought process promptly fell headlong down a cliff of random connections to land squarely on an outdated meme.

"I don't run Doom," he murmured to himself, feeling a sort of unhinged laugh rising in the back of his throat.

"What?"

"I don't run— It didn't work because I don't, can't, uh..." Axel shook his head, giving it up as a lost cause. "Sorry, explaining would take a while, and I can't even think of the words right now."

The important take-away, for him, was the understanding that the seal was essentially an incompatible software—the fact that he's something of a chakra non-entity means the seal literally cannot run on his physical system. He's safe.

For a given value of 'safe'.

Safe enough.

Dach insistently nosed at his hand until he started scritching behind his ears, then settled to lean against them both. It was grounding.

Axel closed his eyes, letting himself relax slightly. The persistent apprehension of the past however-many-days had certainly not been helped by this fresh surge of seal-inspired anxiety, but he decided that, since he was apparently safe right now, it was alright to run out of energy to care.

It was like a weight had finally dropped away, though admittedly not entirely: more like it had fallen from his shoulders into his hands, but things felt much more manageable all the same.

"So..." said Minato, breaking the quiet, "you two are on speaking terms now?"

Dach snorted. "You're making it sound like we were fighting."

"It wasn't— I was... You know what, let's just move on." He coughed, embarrassed. "Axel, I have your things back at my apartment. In case you were wondering."

"My things?"

He didn't bother to open his eyes, but he felt his friend nod. "Yes, the backpack you had, with your stuff inside. I found it at the bottom of the stairs, and figured it'd be best to remove them." Minato cleared his throat again. "On that note, do you know why... That is, did they know, er, that you—"