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When the twins were 7 years old, a congregant had a heart attack in the middle of Mass. Rin had been the first one to notice; he rarely had the attention span for services anyhow, his eyes constantly roaming the chapel for anything more interesting than the line for Communion. Their Confirmation had been put off yet again, meaning they had to stay in the pews while everyone else filed up to the pulpit.
Rin tapped Yukio’s shoulder repeatedly until his younger brother finally gave in and turned to look at him. “Look at how sweaty that guy is,” he said, causing Yukio to roll his eyes.
Yukio had been about to tell Nii-san not to be rude when the man collapsed.
There were a few surprised gasps from the people around him in line, then several long, agonizing moments of stillness and silence. It was clear everyone was unsure of what to do– and then their father leapt into action. The bottle of communion wine Father Fujimoto had been holding shattered with a crash as he pushed into the crowd, hollering for one of the other priests to call 119. Moments after reaching the man’s side, Father was already pushing on the man’s chest with all his might.
Nagatomo had rushed over to the twins moments later, ushering them away from the scene, but Yukio uncharacteristically resisted. He stretched up onto his tippy toes and craned his neck to watch his father work. Yukio knew the man was in danger, but he wasn’t scared at all for him; Father would save him, just like he saved people from monsters every day.
Yukio never could have imagined he’d be trying to save his father the same way 8 years later, in that exact same chapel.
He wasn’t sure why he’d returned to the Monastery that night after a long day of moving into the True Cross dorms. Yukio had just had a bad feeling– and in his line of work, he’d long since learned to listen to his gut.
When he walked into the scorched, trashed room and saw his father motionless on the floor, everything else in the room disappeared. He was faintly aware of his brother only meters away, the sight of a tail making bile rise in his throat, but that could be addressed later. Nii-san was breathing; Father wasn’t.
“Father!” Yukio called out, kneeling by his side and giving his shoulder a good shake. He remained horribly, awfully still. The only sound was Rin’s quiet sobbing in the background, filtering into Yukio’s ears as if he was hearing them from behind a locked door.
He had never done CPR on anyone before. All Exorcists were required to learn it and keep their certifications up to date, but most of the casualties he’d encountered on missions were too far gone for chest compressions and rescue breaths to be of any use.
His father wasn’t one of those cases, Yukio thought as he fumbled desperately for a pulse on his cooling neck. There was a lot of blood, sure, but it wasn’t the most Yukio had ever seen. The dark, oozing puncture wound slightly to the left of his chest was small. Whatever had hit him, maybe it had missed.
(He could already tell from the burns and broken hands that Satan was involved and Father had likely stabbed himself. Father never missed.)
After failing to find a pulse, he took a deep breath and readied himself for chest compressions.
“Place one hand over the other and grip using the one on top. Perfect,” Shirou said, guiding Yukio’s tiny hands to the right spot on the dummy. “Lock your elbows and use your weight to press down as hard and fast as you can.”
It was harder on a real person. Not just emotionally, but physically. Human ribs didn’t want to compress the way manikins did, at least at first. There were a few sickening crunches and cracks about a dozen compressions in… and then suddenly, the compressions didn’t take quite as much force to get the proper depth.
“If you do it right, you’re going to crack their ribs.”
Yukio threw his hands away from the manikin, horrified. He remembered how much pain his father had been in when Nii-san had broken his ribs. Was Yukio even capable of that? “But I don’t want to hurt them!”
“They’re already dead, you can’t hurt them any worse,” Fujimoto told him matter-of-factly. “If you’re lucky, they’ll wake up to yell at you about it later.”
Father had waved and grinned at the twins as the ambulance had carted him away with three broken ribs. Yukio was pretty sure he’d done more damage than that; he could feel the bones shifting and crunching under his palms, the sternum nearly completely detached from the rest of the ribcage. His father didn’t react at all. Rin had cried for hours after those three little fractures; Yukio felt utterly numb, like his limbs and head had been filled with buzzing static. He was doing it all right, but it was wrong.
Thirty compressions passed quickly. Trying to even out his own breathing, Yukio pushed his father’s chin upwards and wrenched his jaw open with some difficulty. Though his eyes were closed and his expression relaxed, the muscles in Father Fujimoto’s head and neck were incredibly stiff. Almost like–
The woman (the body) on the floor of the parlor room had a face frozen in a permanent scream, her limbs contracted into her body like a dead spider’s. Her face was withered and sunken; the vampire had drained her dry.
“Rigor mortis,” Fujimoto told a newly thirteen Yukio. “Lord have mercy on her soul.”
No. No, that couldn’t be it. But it was impossible to ignore the lack of warmth in Father Fujimoto’s body as he was pinching his nose, pushing his own breath into his father’s lungs. Yukio restarted another cycle of compressions, the world drowned out by the whooshing of his own heartbeat in his ears.
Thirty chest compressions, then two rescue breaths. Every five rounds, he’d check for a pulse and breathing and find nothing. Yukio continued like that, over and over, because there was nothing else to do. Getting his untrained, monstrously strong brother to try taking over CPR gave Yukio the mental image of a watermelon exploding after being clobbered by a baseball bat– except instead of a watermelon, it was their father’s torso. Bad idea. So there was nobody else to take over, but Yukio couldn’t stop, either; stopping meant giving up on his father. It meant failing to save him.
It simply wasn’t an option.
He went on with the motions for what could have been a few minutes or a few hours, his muscles screaming from the exertion, when a soft voice whispered in his ear.
“Yukio, it’s time to stop,” Misumi said, lightly placing a hand on Yukio’s shoulder.
Yukio shrugged him off and kept working.
Misumi frowned. “You’re a bright boy, Yukio. I know you know he’s gone.”
“You… don’t… know… that,” said Yukio between compressions, breathless. “Go grab... epinephrine—”
Arthritic hands wrapped around Yukio’s wrists. Yukio grit his teeth; he could have torn himself out of Misumi’s grip easily, but risked seriously hurting the older man. “Think about how long he’s been down,” said Misumi with a sharpness to his voice Yukio had never heard before. “Even if you eventually get a pulse, what happens then? Machines can keep him living, but his mind is long gone.” Misumi met Yukio’s gaze, his warm brown eyes filled with a weary sorrow. “Do you think Father Fujimoto would want to exist that way?”
Once again, one of the characters in Nii-san and Father’s favorite drama was in an ‘indefinite’ coma. Yukio swore he could see the actress blink and the 'ventilator' looked like a repurposed vacuum; he wasn’t sure he’d ever understand what the rest of his family found so entertaining about this drivel.
“If I ever get like that, pull the damn plug. You hear me?” Shirou announced to his sons before throwing a chip in his mouth. “She’ll probably come back, but that shit doesn’t happen in real life.”
“Don’t say that, Father,” scolded Yukio.
“I’m serious! Put your old man on a ventilator and I’ll haunt you,” said Shirou, waving his finger accusingly.
Yukio’s compressions slowed and then stopped completely, arms falling to his sides. “No,” he said in a dull voice, staring at a point a few meters past where his father ( his father’s body ) lay. Belatedly, he realized his brother was gone from the room; at some point, one of the other priests must have pulled him out of the room. Now it was just him, Misumi… and the body.
“What shall I return the Lord for all his goodness to me? I will lift the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord. I will fulfill my vows to the Lord in the presence of all His people,” murmured Misumi, pulling a white sheet upwards over Fujimoto’s still form. Yukio stood up and stared, swaying; his arms felt like they might fall off. His legs were holding him up, but only barely.
Misumi finished the Psalm, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His faithful servants.”
Precious in the sight of the Lord . Yukio turned and walked out of the chapel, into fresh air and a too-bright dawn. Though too scientifically minded (and too ineffective an Aria) to count himself as a true believer, he had always found a familiar comfort in ritual and Scripture. Right now, it felt like a mockery. Yukio had seen plenty of death and precious was the last word he’d use to describe any of it. He took no comfort in the fantasy of his father up in Heaven, leaving Yukio to fend for himself and manage… whatever, whoever his brother was now.
“Damn it all,” he spat to nobody and everything.