Chapter Text
"Hey, hey, Akaashi.”
Keiji turned his head, already getting used to Bokuto’s turn of phrase for all that they'd only met yesterday. Hey, hey, Akaashi. He’d probably start hearing it in his dreams soon if they continued on together.
That wasn’t a bad thing. The things he heard in his dreams these days were a lot darker than they used to be.
“What is it?” he asked.
Something flew—a stick of deodorant, tossed towards him. They were in an abandoned convenience store, surrounded by a mess of overturned shelves and scattered products. It was better stocked than any of the stores Keiji had crawled through when he was on his own, half-starved and desperate for scraps.
Of course, food was the one thing this shop lacked, thanks to looters who’d come before; everything they’d found so far had been hidden well, jammed beneath fallen cases or disguised among nonessentials. A freezer box was filled with melted ice cream, smelling of sugar and decay when they made the mistake of opening it.
Keiji caught the deodorant one-handed before looking up at Bokuto. Bokuto was grinning.
“You said you missed things smelling good.”
Had he said that? He’d complained about the stench, maybe, but not about this. He pulled the neck of his ratty T-shirt aside and used the deodorant anyway, smelling his armpit after. His nose wrinkled. Now he smelled like death and a mild blend of manly spices. It wasn’t an improvement.
“Come on, don’t look like that! We’ll find a working tap soon. You can get all cleaned up.”
Keiji looked down at the water bottles hooked onto his belt. They were almost empty. Bokuto was wearing his backpack with the water filter now, Keiji’s body light without the weight of that pack, and if they didn’t get to use that filter soon their situation would be dire.
Bokuto’s grin didn’t acknowledge the danger; it said they were just hanging out, as if they’d met before the world went south, as if he hadn’t saved Keiji’s life hours ago, soon after they’d met in a Tokyo alleyway.
Bokuto’s grin said this was all one big adventure, and they’d make it through somehow.
“Do you want some?” Keiji asked, tossing the deodorant back. He thought he might be able to find some more food if he could crawl under one of the upturned shelves.
“Depends. Does it help?”
“Not at all.”
Keiji suppressed a snort when he saw—from his peripheral vision as he searched through scattered stock—Bokuto smelling the deodorant and accidentally bumping his nose against the stick. Bokuto jumped and held the thing at a distance as if it had attacked him, and Keiji bit his lip against laughter.
Being with Bokuto made Keiji feel just a tiny bit more human. Perhaps it was only amusement at another’s expense, but the tiny thread of laughter he felt watching Bokuto’s antics made his whole body feel looser, his mind less close to being unhinged. The silence and terror of traversing corpse-littered Tokyo alone had made a part of him disconnect until his mind felt all animal.
The strange boy who’d greeted him like a long-lost friend was beginning to tempt that part back.
“We might have to risk the river water eventually,” Keiji said, his stomach tight with nerves at the thought of it. He knew corpses and infected had fallen in the river—but they were almost out of water, and even if the filter they had was rudimentary it had to be better than dying of thirst.
The infection probably spreads person to person, he reminded himself, though the safety of drinking from the river wasn’t the only fear in his mind at the thought of approaching that great body of water. It was too open; both infected and uninfected would be able to spot them, and though the former seemed to lack the processing power of uninfected humans, they weren’t blind to their prey. The latter category terrified him, but in a different way. There had been evacuations, orderly conduct, organizations hell-bent on saving as many people as they could—but chaos was rampant in those early days, and not everyone could make it to a group of uninfected.
Many had not dealt well with being left behind. They were angry, or mad—literally mad. In his university dormitory with no friends to rely on, Keiji had gone through stages—disbelief, anger, terror that could have driven him out the window if not for the thought that his family might still be alive, and the thought that three years in medical school might count for something in humanity’s fight for survival. That pure intent had faded after he left his dormitory, when his mind had narrowed to placing one foot in front of the other.
He’d been alone for weeks now, and every day in this place felt like forever.
“Let’s not give up yet,” Bokuto said. “The river’s the wrong way. You need to go home, right?”
That was the other thing: when Keiji had said he wanted to make his way home, Bokuto had agreed—as if it didn’t matter where they went. He hadn’t said we should look for a community or there’s probably nothing there anymore.
He’d just asked which way.
“Yeah,” Keiji said, and a moment later he spotted a half-crushed energy bar. He held it up triumphantly; Bokuto snatched it from his fingers, put it in his pack.
“For later,” Bokuto said, though Keiji had heard his stomach rumble earlier. “We’ll feast.”
Keiji doubted that their meager haul would amount to a feast—but he appreciated the sentiment.
That day they covered more distance than Keiji ever had on his own. On his own, every rush from building to building was preceded by long minutes of vigilance to make sure the coast was clear and followed by longer minutes of taking deep breaths and reminding himself he was alive. On the first day of travel, after deciding to leave his university building and make his way to the neighbourhood where his family lived, he’d only gotten to the next building over.
That night he’d shaken rather than slept.
With Bokuto tugging at his sleeve and mumbling assurances—to Keiji or to himself, Keiji didn’t know—everything was easier, even if Bokuto’s occasional loudness made Keiji fear for his life more than once. Thankfully Bokuto was being a lot quieter since yesterday afternoon when his loud, rambunctious greetings had almost gotten them killed.
He’d also saved the day, dispatching of infected with ruthless efficiency, so Keiji figured he’d made up for it.
“We should sleep here,” Keiji said, when the next building on their careful journey from the center of Tokyo to the outskirts turned out to be a hotel. He wasn’t sure whether to be reassured or disturbed by the fact that the corpses in the lobby were mostly bone; how long ago had those corpses been picked clean? If it was recent, the infected who’d ravaged them might still be here, hungry for more. If it was long ago, they’d likely move on to the next feast.
There were enough corpses in the city to feed the infected for months, though they never stopped hunting living prey.
Bokuto seemed not to notice the corpses. “Upstairs?” he asked.
Keiji swallowed. The glass doors to the hotel were shattered, so anything could come at them from the street—but anything could come at them from upstairs too.
Given a choice, though, he’d rather sleep in a bedroom than a hotel kitchen.
“Upstairs, if that’s okay with you.”
They made their grueling way upstairs, checking doors, waiting for painful minutes to hear the shuffle of infected feet. There was no sound; only their own breathing.
Keiji tried to calm his racing heart as they walked down a lushly carpeted hallway, Bokuto in front with his arms wide as if he was going to challenge the infected by being bigger than them. There was still no sound beyond their own—until there was.
A loud bang as they passed a closed door caused Keiji’s heart to jump into his throat.
Oh god oh god oh god oh god—
Bokuto peered at the door for a moment, eyes curious rather than terrified. His head tilted to the side.
“It’s locked in,” he said. “It can’t get to us.”
The banging sounded like someone throwing themselves against the door repeatedly, full-strength, and Keiji had a feeling that was exactly what it was. “Are you sure it knows that?” he asked.
For a moment Bokuto looked surprised, and then a delighted smile pulled at his lips. “Akaashi! Did you just make a joke? You can make jokes?”
Keiji already regretted his comment. “Please don’t make a big deal out of it.”
“If it hasn’t gotten through yet, it probably won’t,” Bokuto said, looking at the door’s frame. It did look very solid. “Our footsteps woke it up. It’ll run out of energy soon.”
Keiji’s nose wrinkled. He’d seen the feeding habits of infected, but he’d only ever seen them on the move. The thought that they could be woken up meant that they slept, and somehow that was almost more terrifying than shuffling mindless creatures; it meant they could lie still until woken.
That is not dead which can eternal lie…
It meant he could have stumbled across one and been surprised.
“Oh, but I don’t think they use it tactically or anything,” Bokuto said, seeing Keiji’s expression. “We’ll be fine as long as we knock. The dormant ones always do that thing where they storm the door once they hear noise.”
Great. Etiquette amongst the undead.
They continued past more closed doors until they came by one that was ajar, propped open by its own lock. Bokuto knocked, and Keiji braced himself.
Nothing happened.
Bokuto pushed the door open bit by bit, revealing a generic hotel room: a door on the left, a coatrack on the right, beds and desk ahead and a half-open suitcase in a mess on the floor. So far so good. They knocked on the bathroom door, and again no slamming noises greeted them.
The room was clear.
Keiji could have wept with relief as he sat down on one of the beds, unbuckling his belt to get at the water bottles. His muscles were twitching the way they always did when he found temporary safety. Bokuto slapped his back.
“Not so bad, hey?”
Keiji nodded, trying not to actually weep with relief. Before this he’d been alone; it was strange to hide his reactions again. He heard Bokuto move into the bathroom, some banging noises, and then:
“Akaashi!”
Keiji jumped up, panicked—and then more sounds told him Bokuto was laughing, and there was a sound of water running: a working tap.
“This hotel has its own water supply! Let’s use your filter.”
Again tears threatened. None of the other places had had water, or power. He grabbed the bag and brought Bokuto both the filter and the bottles, not sharing the fact that the filter might not be enough to protect from pathogenic E. coli, let alone whatever had turned people into mindless hunters. There were a thousand things he wished he’d researched before the internet became a thing of the past; water purification was one of those things.
They filled the bottles, and then their eyes rose—as one—to the western-style shower stall.
“Do you think…?” Bokuto asked, voice almost reverent.
Keiji’s stomach was tight with desire. “I don’t know.”
They looked for a moment longer.
“It would be a waste of water,” Keiji said, imagining clean water against his skin, washing away weeks of fear-sweat.
“We don’t know how much there is,” Bokuto agreed.
Keiji gazed at the shower longingly, his lips pressing together in pure want.
“Akaashi,” Bokuto whispered. “Let’s do it.”
Keiji nodded. “Together?”
Bokuto stared at him, as if the thought of two men showering together was ridiculous. “Akaashi!”
“What? I don’t want to be the one left with no water, and I doubt you want to either.”
Bokuto’s eyes lowered, his cheeks slightly pink. His hesitation made something like nervousness bubble up in Keiji’s stomach—a kind of nervousness that seemed totally without substance in their after-world.
Was Bokuto gay or just really concerned about Keiji’s modesty? Because guys bathing together was pretty norm—
“Fine,” Bokuto said, before Keiji could contemplate it further. “Together. It might be cold, anyway.”
They shed their clothes, stepped into the stall and turned the water on.
It wasn’t cold.
Keiji actually did cry with relief then, with the water from the shower to disguise his tears. Bokuto seemed just as overwhelmed. He was humming some sort of victory song, squeezing his eyes shut and putting his face under the stream.
If the pathogen was waterborne, they’d probably be infected by now—so Keiji decided not to worry. They took turns under the showerhead, using the already-unwrapped soap whenever it was their turn to be out of the water. It took several goes to get properly clean, and Keiji knew they were both delaying turning the water off—but eventually they managed to step out of the shower.
They had to use two already-used towels, in addition to already-used soap, but neither of them was in any state to complain. The used-by-a-stranger towels Keiji would have avoided a month ago were a fluffy, welcome gift from the universe now.
He found himself humming too, too quiet for anyone but him to hear.
“Akaashi.”
The room was pitch dark. Bokuto lay in the other bed, his body still now after half an hour of restless movement—movement Keiji had been too wired to block out despite the exhaustion thick in his limbs and the softness of the mattress under him.
“Yes?”
“Can I—I need—”
Bokuto’s voice sounded completely different. Before there had always been good humor behind it; now it was devoid of that, more like the voice of a scared child than that of the fearless man who’d greeted him yesterday. A part of Keiji was glad to find out he wasn’t unaffected by circumstance either.
“Can I hold you?” Bokuto managed finally.
Whatever Keiji had been expecting, it wasn’t that. He remembered Bokuto’s blushes earlier before they’d showered.
“Are you gay?” he asked, expecting a fierce no.
“Maybe,” Bokuto said without inflection. “I’m attracted to you. But I just want…”
He didn’t finish the sentence, and he didn’t have to; Keiji could guess. And Keiji wasn’t opposed to the idea. The thought of feeling that closeness with another person made longing pour through him, opening like a wound in his chest.
“You can hold me,” he said, making his voice flat so it wouldn’t tremble. Bokuto slid out of his own bed instantly and crawled into Keiji’s. They were both wearing borrowed, mercifully clean clothes from the suitcase, and Keiji let his hand touch the cotton of Bokuto’s T-shirt very lightly.
Bokuto took it as the invitation it was; he curled into Keiji tightly, throwing an arm and a leg over him and turning his face into his shoulder. Keiji’s arms wrapped around him.
There were no words, somehow, although Bokuto had been noisy since the moment they met, talking or whispering or humming. Keiji’s body welcomed the weight and warmth of Bokuto’s even as his mind reeled at the strangeness. His body didn’t care; it let that warmth sink into every part of him.
His hands tightened in the back of Bokuto’s shirt, and he realized Bokuto was holding him tight too.
“Your group really left you?” Keiji asked, his voice shaky. It was cruel to ask a thing like that, but he couldn’t help it. He’d been on his own since the start of this mess, holed up in his apartment eating through his supplies, thinking someone would come for him. He’d never known the comfort of a group, but he could imagine the loss of it.
“Yeah,” Bokuto said.
“Because you were too loud?”
“I guess.”
“I won’t do that,” Keiji said. His heart was hammering. What was he saying? No one could know what might happen—
“Akaashi.”
“Yes?”
“Your family. What’s it like?”
Keiji paused. He imagined them standing side by side like in a family photograph: his divorced parents, his second father, the little sister who’d been born when he was twelve. She was nine now, shy in the same way he’d been shy when he was her age. His biological father was barely in the picture, visiting for his birthday once a year, helping him move when he went to university. He got his reserve from his mother, but she hadn’t passed on her sweetness, not to him. People said their smiles were similar, tough Keiji didn’t think so.
He wasn’t sure how to talk about them, especially when he didn’t even know whether they were alive. He told Bokuto the bare bones of it.
“What’s yours like?” he asked when he was done.
“Dead,” was Bokuto’s short reply, and the certainty in his voice made Keiji’s stomach sink. Bokuto knew for sure, then.
“I pretend they’re still with me,” Bokuto added.
They are, Keiji imagined himself saying, the way people in drama movies reassured each other.
“I pretended everything was a big joke,” he said instead. “That everyone was pretending and someone would jump out at any minute yelling surprise.”
“Like a TV show,” Bokuto said, and he sounded a bit more like himself. “Surprise: you’re on candid camera.”
“Yeah. Exactly.”
They fell silent, and Keiji felt Bokuto’s arms loosen just a bit until the embrace was more comforting than strangling. They both smelled like the stranger’s fabric softener, but Bokuto’s warmth was all his own, and Keiji found himself wondering if he could keep it—if he could keep Bokuto and this tiny bit of comfort.
Another part of him wondered if it would be so bad to die now, like this, with someone here to hold him. He’d never have to go out into the streets again. Paradoxically, he’d never have to fear for his life again. He knew he’d feel differently in the morning when survival instincts kicked in and told him to move on, to keep on living—but for now he daydreamed about surrender, and went willingly when sleep tugged at him.
They woke to knocking.
For a moment, the disease-torn city they’d walked through seemed like a dream, and Keiji imagined that he was waking up in a hotel room with a stranger after a series of bad decisions. It wasn’t something he’d done before, but it was the sort of thing he’d seen on TV.
The knocking continued, and Keiji’s imaginings fell away like torn paper. Fear gripped him. He remembered yesterday’s creature, thumping itself against the door over and over in a desperate bid to get out. Had it freed itself at last?
“We know you’re in there!”
He gasped. People? There were people outside.
“We’ll knock down the door if we have to.”
“We’re not harming anyone!” Keiji shouted back. “We didn’t know anyone was here. We’ll be gone before you know it.”
Bokuto was shoving their possessions under the bed, hiding their backpack and the leather jacket he wore and their water bottles.
“You used our water,” the voice behind the door said.
“We didn’t know. We used as little as we could. We won’t take any more.”
“Open this door, or we’re dragging you out. We have an axe.”
That didn’t seem like an idle threat. Keiji glanced at Bokuto; he nodded. In his hand was the knife Keiji had told him not to use on the infected in case of blood splatter.
These people weren’t infected.
Keiji opened the door, Bokuto at his back.
“We’ll be out in a moment, we swear,” he said. There were four people outside: three men and a woman, all between eighteen and thirty. The tallest of the group held himself like the leader.
“So give us something worthwhile in return,” he said. “Water for something of yours.”
“We don’t have anything,” Keiji said. His heart was hammering. He wasn’t sure they’d find food again if it was taken from them.
“Everyone has something.”
Keiji’s shoulders rose, and he remembered the knife Bokuto had grabbed.
“Well, we don’t, so—” he tried to swing the door closed, but the leader stuck out his foot. The leader opened his mouth to say something, threaten him maybe, but a noise from behind Keiji drew his attention.
“Dh—dh—dhh—”
There was a sound of something heavy dropping, and the people at the door took a step back. Keiji whirled, staring down at Bokuto. He’d fallen; he was twitching, making that garbling sound.
He’s having a seizure, the part of Keiji that remembered three years of medical school told him dispassionately. All he could do was stare. Bokuto has epilepsy.
“Whoa,” the woman said, and her face was twisted into something that looked like pity. “You’re traveling with him?”
“That guy is a time bomb,” another said. Even the leader looked stricken.
Keiji bent down, snatched up the knife Bokuto had dropped before he could hurt himself with it. He held it up towards the strangers, even though they didn’t look like they wanted anything to do with them anymore.
“Leave us alone,” he said. His voice sounded strange, like he was on the edge of tears. A lot of things were starting to make sense: the way Bokuto had wanted to be close last night, how he’d steered the conversation away when Keiji asked why his group had left him behind, his lack of concern for his life when he went up against the. Bokuto thought he was doomed already, with a condition like that, and he wasn’t wrong. And suddenly the way Bokuto looked at Keiji made sense too: the quick adoration that had crept into his gaze almost from the first, the pink cheeks, the grins, the fact that he’d only asked which way.
He’d just been looking for someone to be with before a seizure at the wrong time claimed his life. And he hadn’t told Keiji a thing.
“We’re leaving,” the woman said, and she tugged on the leader’s sleeve. He nodded slowly.
“Make sure you’re gone by afternoon,” the leader said, allowing himself to be dragged away.
Keiji closed the door, and it went hazy in his vision.
He was crying again; great.
He tossed the knife away and put his hands under Bokuto’s armpits, dragging him out of the room’s narrow hallway so he’d have more space. Keiji grabbed Bokuto’s leather jacket from beneath the bed and slid it under his head, hoping it would be enough. Then he sat, and waited, and tried to ignore Bokuto’s twitching—how helpless he looked.
“Akaashi…?” Bokuto asked after what felt like hours. His voice was weak.
Keiji stopped hiding his face in his knees. “I’m here,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want you to leave yet.”
“I told you I’m not leaving.” Until now he hadn’t been certain of that. During Bokuto’s seizure he’d imagined it: telling Bokuto that his keeping this secret was a breach of trust and they couldn’t continue on together. No part of him had wanted it, but it had seemed like the smart thing to do.
He wasn’t going to do it.
“How long have you been like this?” Keiji asked.
“Since—not long.” Bokuto moved, lying curled on his side. “I got sick. After the disease spread. My first group—not the one that left me—they tried to get me treatment. We broke into a hospital and they gave me what they could find. None of us were doctors. I was fevered, so I didn’t… I’m not sure what happened after.”
“What do you mean?” Keiji asked, fear in his stomach.
“I don’t know. This jacket—it belongs to my friend. He must have put it on me while I was sick. They hid me. Maybe they were chased out. I don’t know. I woke up alone in a morgue.”
Maybe they were infected, Keiji thought. Maybe they were eaten. He didn’t say so.
“The seizures started after you were sick?” Keiji asked. “Not during?”
Bokuto curled a little tighter. “During too.”
Keiji was being stupid even asking these questions; Bokuto had a disease, and that was that. But the timing…
“Were you scratched?” Keiji asked in a whisper. He moved so he could look down at Bokuto. “Came in contact with the infected? A few days before you got sick?”
“I… maybe.”
Keiji’s insides were shivery.
“Why?” Bokuto asked. His eyes were droopier than usual, tired. His hair was splayed across the jacket, surprisingly endearing.
Maybe you were cured, Keiji thought. It was a ridiculous idea that a bunch of panicked kids could cure someone with a random slew of antibiotics or fever-reducers or whatever Bokuto’s friends had used, especially when scientists had failed to contain or cure the disease. But what if Bokuto had been infected with a weaker strain? What if his lymph nodes were flooded with the answer to their current hell even now? What antibodies could his cells produce?
“I’m not sure,” Keiji said. “Not about anything. But maybe—maybe you had the infection and lived through. Maybe you’re immune. It’s just an idea.”
Bokuto sat up slowly. “What would that mean?”
“If we could get to a hospital, maybe we’d find something in your blood. Some reason to hope for a cure.”
He didn’t know if the infected could be cured. Living on human flesh was an invitation for disease, beyond whatever had crawled into the brain stems of those affected. But if healthy people could be vaccinated…
“But it’s a distant possibility, right?” Bokuto asked.
“Yeah,” Keiji said, slipping back into reality. “Yeah, it is. Maybe you had some known form of bacterial meningitis, or something. There’s no way to know.”
Bokuto nodded slowly. “But we have to find your family first,” he said, and looked up with big eyes. He looked hopeful, somehow.
Because Keiji had told him he wasn’t leaving him.
And Keiji wasn’t, even though Bokuto was a time bomb. Even though Keiji could imagine a million different ways they could get in trouble now where before he’d only imagined a thousand.
“Yeah,” Keiji said, and when Bokuto’s hand slid across the carpet towards him he covered it with his own. He swallowed. Bokuto’s knuckles were big, his hand cold. He was a stranger in most ways, an acquaintance of two days.
Two days was a long time in this world.
“Let’s go,” Keiji said. “Before those guys come and kick us out by force.”
Bokuto hid his face, his shoulders slumping. For once Keiji wasn’t the one crying with relief.