Work Text:
The day begins like any other. They wake up to the sound of the tripwire-and-tin-can alarms going off around the barricaded entrance to the building. They throw a couple of glass bottles out the window to draw attention to the alleyway instead of the exit. They make their escape while their visitors are distracted.
And they spend the next half-hour running for their lives.
Downtown Kobe—or, really any formerly populous area—couldn’t have been a worse place to look for shelter, Kokichi keeps muttering whenever he can breathe evenly enough, cursing like a sailor all the while, though it isn’t clear which, if any, of the two of them he’s actually angry at. Shuichi occasionally stoops to grab rocks or pieces of debris from the street to throw at cars stopped along the road, setting off blaring alarms or just breaking the windshields to cover the sound of their footsteps. They keep to the side roads, acutely aware of their surroundings, of the creatures that always seem to notice them eventually.
By the time they find a building with a fire escape down the side, there are more than fifty zombies closing in on them. Kokichi scampers up first, reaches down to pull Shuichi up after him, and together they drag the ladder up and out of the horde’s reach.
They make the arduous climb to the top of the building while the monsters growl and groan far below, and when Kokichi pulls himself up over the edge of the roof he swears again and calls “Four!”
Shuichi’s face to face with a lunging zombie the moment he reaches the top of the ladder, and it’s by sheer reflex that he dodges to the side to avoid its snapping teeth. A swift kick to the side of its knee and a forceful shove send it toppling off the roof, giving him time to grab the crowbar from his back before the other one attacks. He ducks under its arms to get behind it and finishes it off with a sharp strike to its head.
“Kokichi?” he calls, turning back to where his companion is… standing over two dead zombies, bringing his baseball bat down over and over on their heads, until they resemble lumpy piles of ground beef more than anything else. Ew.
Panting lightly, Kokichi straightens and backs away from the mangled corpses. “And stay down,” he mutters.
Shuichi pulls off his motorcycle helmet for a breath of fresh air. “Are you okay?” he asks.
Kokichi lets out a whew! as he takes off his own blood-splattered helmet, shaking sweat-damp hair out of his face. “Never better! Never in my entire life!”
Shuichi does his I-can’t-tell-if-you’re-joking face, then crouches down by one of the dead zombies to rifle through the backpack it’s wearing.
“Nothing like a death-defying chase and a climb up the side of a building to wake you up in the morning,” Kokichi muses, looking out over the ruins of the city below. “Aw, and it’s not even eight o’clock! Let’s go for round two before breakfast, huh?”
“Well, you’re not hurt and there’s still a positive tone to your jokes.” Shuichi pulls a small pocket knife from the zombie’s bag and examines it briefly before putting it back, unimpressed. “So I’m going to assume you’re all right for now.”
Kokichi stretches his arms over his head, sighing when the joints in his back pop. “Not a bad view,” he says at last.
Shuichi cranes his neck to see over the lip of concrete at the edge of the roof. “If you say so.”
“It reminds me of a game I used to play.”
“Does it?”
“A video game, I mean. Before. You know. Well, no, you don’t know.” Kokichi shrugs, tapping his bat against the ground. “Shumai never played video games, for some reason.”
“I just didn’t want to buy all of the consoles, and….”
“He just read his books all the time!”
“I still watched you play, sometimes….”
“Shuichi hates technology!”
“Kokichi….” Shuichi sighs, seeming to recognize he’s getting nowhere with this. “Tell me about your game,” he relents.
“If you insist,” Kokichi says. “So, in the game, you played as this tall, dark, and handsome thief, and you went around causing trouble for all the stuffy old rich people in the city. A real Robin Hood kind of thing. And there were even side missions where you could, like, ruin their golfing trips or paint their nice cars awful colors. It was great.” He snickers. “One of the characters was my first crush, actually.”
“You had a crush on a phantom thief,” Shuichi chuckles. “I guess that doesn’t surprise me.”
“Not on the thief, silly Shumai.” Kokichi grins over his shoulder. “On the detective chasing him.”
That gives Shuichi pause.
“Ah, they were brilliant together, too,” Kokichi says, tipping his head toward the sky. “Chasing each other around, trying to guess the other’s next move, both of them always just barely out of reach. And I wanted someone to chase me like that, too, you know? Someone who wanted to figure me out that badly.”
“Kokichi,” Shuichi breathes.
“Do you think, in another life, we could have been like that?” Kokichi asks, then laughs as if the question is ridiculous. He spreads his arms wide, spinning in a lazy circle, the bat swinging wildly in his grip. “Running along the rooftops, chasing and being chased, somewhere where the only problems are the ones we make for ourselves?”
“C-careful of the edge—”
“You wouldn’t have to be scared of the city at night, if it was just you and me. And you already know I’d love you in any lifetime, but—but what if we found somewhere we could really be happy? Where being alive is really living?”
“Kokichi.” Shuichi catches his hand. “Kokichi, hey.”
Kokichi stops laughing and stumbles, slumping against him, seeming to give up entirely. “Hey, yourself.”
Shuichi cups his chin and tilts his head up, gazing searchingly into his eyes. “You’re in an odd mood,” he observes quietly.
“I am, huh.”
“Was that a real game?”
“Does it matter?”
Shuichi doesn’t answer. His fingers brush Kokichi’s bangs aside and he presses a lingering kiss to his forehead before pulling him into a hug.
Kokichi lets the bat clatter to the ground, the tension draining out of him. He rests his chin on Shuichi’s shoulder and wraps his arms around him, too, shivering as Shuichi rubs slow circles into his back.
“Do you remember what day it is?” he mumbles at last.
“I know it’s not your birthday,” Shuichi replies. “We celebrated it last month, so don’t try to trick me—”
“It’s our anniversary,” Kokichi says. “The anniversary of our promise.”
Shuichi’s hands still.
“Oh,” he manages at last. “Oh.”
“‘Oh’ is right.”
He hears Shuichi open his mouth to respond, then close it again.
“You okay?” Kokichi adds.
Shuichi brings his hand up to the back of Kokichi’s neck, playing with the hair at the base of his skull. “Let’s….” He swallows. “Let’s find a way into that big hotel we saw yesterday. We’ll get up to the top floor, and… and just take it easy, for today.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Yeah.”
“You haven’t changed your mind?”
The arms around him tighten. Shuichi shakes his head.
They’re reluctant to leave the rooftops, but from their vantage point it looks like the only way into the towering hotel building is on the ground. The surrounding streets are basically clear of the undead, anyway—their only company is a skeleton curled against an alley wall with AIM 4 TH HEAD scrawled on the bricks in what must have been his own blood. Shuichi shushes Kokichi before he can make a joke about too little, too late and pulls him toward the employee entrance.
Kokichi picks the lock while Shuichi holds the door closed, scanning the streets and whispering “Two” when they’re noticed by a pair of zombies that begin shuffling toward them. Kokichi hums his acknowledgement as the doorknob clicks.
“Save the bullets,” he mutters, and Shuichi nods, readying his crowbar and pulling the door open.
Kokichi rushes in first with a sharp uppercut, catching one of the undead under the jaw and snapping its head backward with a grisly crack. Shuichi rams his shoulder into another before its reaching hands get too close, sending it sprawling, then brings his crowbar down on its knee.
“Stairs?” Kokichi says, scanning the room. Then, quieter, “Oh.”
Zombies aren’t exactly difficult to kill. They’re slow, especially compared to two experienced humans in their prime, and their bodies are fragile, with brittle bones and skin like tissue paper. One or two of them are arguably easy to deal with.
An enclosed room of twenty-something of them, however….
“Should we leave?” Shuichi says.
“There’ll be more outside by now.”
Shuichi’s tense beside him, wound up like a spring, hesitating only to deliver a vicious stomp to the downed zombie’s head. “Stairs are over there.”
“We can make it if we cut through those two,” Kokichi says, pointing. “On three?”
“This is stupid,” Shuichi warns.
“One, two, three—”
There’s something darkly beautiful about the way they move. A razor-keen focus hangs between them, a hyperawareness of the enemies on all sides but also of each other, their every action and reaction. An instinctive knowledge of where the other is going to strike next—Kokichi doesn’t have to think twice about the lunging, openmouthed creature in front of them because Shuichi is already slamming his crowbar into its temple, and Shuichi can keep his back to the ones closing in behind them because Kokichi has already knocked one down, tripped the others up. They’re lethal, cunning, efficient; fierce loyalty and unquestioning trust.
And even with their lives on the line, even in this moment where it shouldn’t matter, all Kokichi can think is that Shuichi’s beautiful like this. A force of nature, stunning as lightning and wild like the wind.
There’s no one he’d rather have at his side.
They burst through the door to the stairwell and immediately begin sprinting upward. Behind them echo the guttural groans of their undead pursuers as the horde shambles after them. Shuichi had apparently grabbed his wrist at some point, and is practically dragging him, taking three stairs at a time. Kokichi’s chest burns and he’s sure his legs are starting to liquefy, but he thinks that’s him laughing between gasps for air, somehow both panicked and carefree, like this is all another game.
They don’t need to make it all the way up. Zombies have limited object permanence, so they just need to stay quiet and out of sight long enough for the horde to lose track of them and go dormant again. That’s easier said than done, though, with the way their lungs are heaving, and their steps are slowing despite their best efforts—so they only manage to put about three floors between them and the zombies before Shuichi’s legs give out.
Kokichi pulls him up onto the landing and shoves his face into Shuichi’s chest to muffle the sound of his panting, and Shuichi pulls him close and covers the mouthpiece of his helmet with his arm, drawing in the steadiest breaths he can.
The shuffling footsteps below them continue, until they’re considering trying to run again—but then they slow, and then they stop, and the two of them dare to sigh in relief.
Kokichi raises a gloved hand and taps Shuichi’s helmet where he guesses his nose would be. “Love you,” he manages.
“Love you, too,” Shuichi returns, bumping their heads together. “That was really stupid,” he adds.
There’s no water in the pipes—there hasn’t been for months, so it’s no surprise—so they wash off the worst of the sweat and grime with a bottle of water each and a few baby wipes from an apartment they’d stayed in a few days back.
Shuichi scrubs down with the hotel’s complimentary bar of soap, too, sighing when he finally decides he smells like a human being again. He changes into his cleanest pair of clothes and thinks, not for the first time, about showers, and electricity, and all the things he used to take for granted.
His gaze travels to the dusty mirror. The person looking back at him is older than he remembers, lean and all edges, with the same sort of aura that clung to the grizzled veteran detectives at his uncle’s agency so long ago. They’ve seen too much, Uncle Sojiro used to say.
Shuichi thinks a better descriptor might be lived too long.
He stares at the mirror for a long time.
“Shumaaai, you’d better not be using all the hot water….”
Shuichi blinks, coming back to himself with a small huff of laughter. “Even if that were possible….”
He combs his hair into submission and hangs his towel on the rack, then slings his backpack over his shoulder and returns to the other room.
Kokichi’s reclined on the window seat, fingertips tapping out a slow rhythm on his knee. He’s humming along, something gentle and lighthearted, and when he catches sight of Shuichi his face lights up. “Well, don’t you clean up nicely! What a soft face my beloved has!”
Shuichi sets his bag beside Kokichi’s. “Only when I’m looking at you,” he returns, relishing the tint of pink that creeps into the other’s cheeks.
Kokichi, of course, lets out an exaggerated gasp and clutches his chest as if he can keep Shuichi from noticing his reaction. “Aah! Stop that, you’re making my heart do funny things!”
And Shuichi laughs again, because that’s so easy to do around Kokichi, even when everything else is....
Kokichi’s watching him carefully, with a cautious half-smile. His analytical face. Shuichi decides to change the subject before his darker thoughts can seep through. “What were you singing, just now?”
“You don’t remember? I added it to your emo playlist a few years back.”
“You added at least twenty songs every time you stole my phone….”
“This one was good, though! Really soft and slow. You’d have liked it.”
“I’m sure I would have.”
“I’m looking for a place to start,” Kokichi hums, “and everything feels so different now…”
“It seems a little familiar….”
“Just grab ahold of my hand,” Kokichi continues, twirling away from the window and extending a hand toward Shuichi. “I will lead you through this wonderland…. Dance with me, beloved?”
Shuichi smiles and shakes his head even as he takes it. “It doesn’t sound like a very… dance-y song, you know.”
“Oh, hush.” Kokichi’s other hand goes to Shuichi’s shoulder, and Shuichi’s circles around his waist, swaying them gently. “Hey, what makes you think you’re leading?”
“You hush,” Shuichi returns with a quick peck to the top of Kokichi’s head. “Aren’t you going to sing?”
“Somewhere deep in the dark,” Kokichi sings as if he’d never stopped. “A howling beast hears us talk….”
He looks so… peaceful, in a way Shuichi isn’t used to seeing anymore.
“I dare you to close your eyes… hmm-mm-mm, I don’t know the words….”
Kokichi’s smile isn’t the familiar ear-to-ear grin that narrows his eyes into slits. Instead, his eyes are shut as Shuichi leads them back and forth, and there’s something soft in the way the corners of his mouth curve upward. That’s how Shuichi knows it’s sincere.
“I always listened to your songs,” he says quietly. “I don’t remember them all, but I always did.”
Kokichi’s smile widens, the softness creeping up into his eyes until they glow in the way Shuichi can never figure out how to describe. He tips his head up to press a soft kiss to Shuichi’s cheek, still humming.
“It felt like… you were still there, when you weren’t,” Shuichi murmurs as the kisses trail down to his jaw. “If I was listening to your songs, or reading books you liked, or…. B-because I always missed you, when you weren’t with me. Even if we’d spent the whole day together.”
Kokichi lets go of his hand, fingers gliding up his arm, until he’s holding Shuichi’s head in both hands, teeth grazing the skin just below Shuichi’s ear. Barely humming anymore, but Shuichi moves to the beat anyway, lazily, tracing patterns into Kokichi’s back.
“I can never get enough of being with you,” he finishes somewhat breathlessly, turning his head so that their lips connect.
Kokichi’s eyes slide closed again, and his fingers tangle in Shuichi’s hair as he reciprocates, kissing like this is all he’s ever wanted, like this moment is his entire world. He murmurs Shuichi’s name against his lips like a prayer, and Shuichi sighs against him, hand cupping the back of Kokichi’s neck, memorizing the warmth of him, the way he breathes.
They’re moving, Shuichi realizes distantly, stumbling a little as Kokichi guides him backward. His legs bump into the bed, and Kokichi’s hands travel down to his waist, pushing him gently down into a sitting position, then further, until he’s propped up on his elbows.
“Kokichi,” he whispers into the kiss as the other hovers over him on the bed, just to say his name. He wants this, he wants this forever, just the two of them and the way it feels when they’re together.
Kokichi presses Shuichi’s back against the mattress, and it’s only then that he breaks away, nudging their foreheads together, eyelashes fluttering against his skin. “Shuichi,” he breathes. “Shuichi, can I have you?”
Shuichi’s pulling him down before he finishes the question.
“Where do you think we’ll go after this?” Shuichi asks.
His head is resting lazily in Kokichi’s lap as the latter plays with his hair. Kokichi glances down at him and makes a questioning noise into the can of expired soup he’s finishing off.
“I mean... what do you think it’ll be like?” Shuichi says, softer. “Being… dead.”
Kokichi swallows, grimaces, and holds up the can. “Want the last bite?” When Shuichi returns the grimace and shakes his head, he sets it down on the floor beside them and leans back against the wall, slipping his other hand into Shuichi’s hair, too. “I think,” he says, “that Shuichi could stand to turn off that big, beautiful brain once in a while.”
“Can’t,” Shuichi mumbles, closing his eyes as Kokichi’s fingers scritch against his scalp. “...Do you think it’ll be nice?”
“Hush, beloved. We’ve got a while before you need to worry about that.”
“I just thought... we might as well talk about it,” Shuichi says. “If you want to.”
“Do you want to?”
“...Yeah.”
“Okay, then.” A thumb brushes soothingly against Shuichi’s cheek. “I think it’ll be nice, yeah.”
“Like... sleeping forever, or reincarnation, or... or something else?”
“Something else would be cool. Sleeping sounds like it’d get boring after a few millennia.”
“I don’t really think you’d be… aware of it.”
“Mm. Pretty anticlimactic, then.”
“It’d feel like… nothing you did, or felt, ever mattered.”
Kokichi frowns, recognizing the distant undertone in Shuichi’s voice. “I’m guessing Shuichi’s hoping for reincarnation, then!” he says. “I bet he’ll come back as a cat, since he likes having his head pet.”
He earns a quiet laugh, and a bit of the tension leaves Shuichi’s shoulders. “Actually, I was hoping for reincarnation in more of a… second chance sort of way.”
“How’s that?”
“I mean, I’d like it if we got to… do everything over again, but… have it work out?”
“Doing everything over again is kind of the point of it.”
Shuichi sighs. “I just… this world took everything from us. And not just, you know, running water or the internet—our whole future disappeared, and so did everyone else and we’re just—just alone—”
“Shh, shh….”
Shuichi takes a deep breath, laying his forearm over his eyes. “Sometimes I think we’re just as dead as the zombies,” he says. “And I miss being alive. I want to start over in a world where we don’t have to be scared all the time. Where we can just be.”
“I know what you mean,” Kokichi says. He ducks his head down to press a kiss to Shuichi’s forehead.
“I wanted to marry you,” Shuichi says suddenly.
Kokichi pauses, hovering a breath away.
Shuichi lowers his arm, blinking back tears, and forces a wry smile. “It sounds so stupid, but… during the outbreak, when we were just trying to stay alive, I kept thinking everything would go back to normal someday. That somehow we’d find a safe place and I’d… I’d get us rings, and we’d exchange vows, and we’d live together and be happy for the rest of our lives. I wanted it so, so badly.” His voice fades to a whisper on the last word, and he bites his lip to stop it from trembling. “I wanted so much more than this.”
There’s nothing left to say after that. It’s a sentiment they’ve tried to express in a thousand different ways for what feels like a lifetime, and no words can truly capture the magnitude of how it feels. Except for three, maybe: it’s not fair.
It’s just not fair.
“I have something for you,” Kokichi says into Shuichi’s hair. “It’s not gonna help, but I didn’t want to forget.”
Shuichi breathes into the crook of his arm, swallows, and scrubs the tears from his cheeks as he looks up. Kokichi reaches for his backpack, tugging the zipper on the side pocket until it’s wide enough to squirm his hand into.
“It’s kinda dumb….”
He offers Shuichi a piece of chocolate in a faded wrapper, no bigger than one of his fingers.
A breathy laugh escapes Shuichi as he takes it. “Where did you get this?”
“Grocery store, a few weeks ago,” Kokichi replies, crossing his arms over Shuichi’s chest and hugging him close. “The mice got all the rest. Thought you might need cheering up sometime.”
Shuichi’s smile is soft and painfully adoring. “Share it with me?”
“Hm. No, beloved.”
A hand on his cheek, thumb caressing the corner of his jaw. “Please.”
Kokichi hesitates a moment longer before turning his face and kissing the inside of Shuichi’s palm in response.
“Life’s been worth living,” he whispers, “because as cruel as the world was, it still gave me you.”
When the evening arrives, the sun paints the sky with fire.
Standing at the window, Shuichi stares at the clouds and thinks about Before. Thinks about what could have been. Thinks about other lives they could have lived together, if things had turned out differently.
All the worlds they could have been born into, and it had to be this one.
Still. It’s a beautiful sunset.
Kokichi calls his name, softly—Shuichi suddenly remembers wistfully that he’s always loved the way his name sounds when Kokichi says it—and when Shuichi turns back to him….
He’s only seen this expression on Kokichi’s face a handful of times. It’s probably as honest as he gets—or, more like he’s feeling too deeply to remember to hide it behind a mask. There, illuminated by the gold-yellow sunlight, dark hair haloing his head, he looks like something from another world—ethereal, like a ghost, like an angel.
He’s the most beautiful thing Shuichi’s ever seen.
“Are you ready to go?” Kokichi asks. His eyes hold a lifetime of sorrow, a million things left unsaid.
Shuichi returns his gaze equally, and nods.
Kokichi reaches up to caress his cheek, so tenderly, fingertips following the angle of his jaw, then the outline of his lips. “Don’t be scared, beloved,” he murmurs, and Shuichi shakes his head.
“Just sad,” he admits.
Kokichi nods his understanding. They’re so close, and it’s—it’s so comforting, having him here.
“It’ll be okay,” Kokichi says, and—it could be a lie, it has to be, nothing’s been okay since the outbreak and he’s so tired of it—but Kokichi sounds so certain, so Shuichi pushes that thought aside and clings onto his words. Maybe if he believes in them deeply enough, they’ll become the truth.
Kokichi’s lips are on his again, though not with the desperate passion from earlier. It’s achingly soft, and it might as well be their first kiss for the way it pours into his chest and fills his heart to overflowing.
“No more tears, now,” Kokichi says when he pulls away. Shuichi hadn’t even noticed they’d begun to fall. “We’ll be together again soon, all right? I promise.”
It could be a lie, too. There’s no way of knowing. But Shuichi figures he can let himself indulge.
“I’ll be waiting for you,” he says.
Kokichi smiles. Soft, glowing. He brushes a lock of hair away from Shuichi’s eyes, longing, lingering, finally withdrawing.
“Turn around,” he says.
Shuichi turns to face the window, his pulse echoing in his ears. He swallows. “Hold my hand?”
Kokichi’s fingers lace together with his, thumb soothing over his knuckles. “Breathe,” he says. “I’m here.”
Shuichi breathes.
Faded gold-red sunlight glowing on the windows of towering buildings. Clouds bleeding pink against the sky. Running through rain-slashed streets and shadowed alleys, death breathing down their necks and danger at every turn, hiding under crashed cars and in broken-down attics, snatching comfort in whispered I-love-yous wherever they can. Laughing and carefree in his room, Before, pretending to study and getting lost in conversation instead, someone’s head on someone’s shoulder, linked together at the ankles. Dashing across rooftops. Chasing, being chased. Always just out of reach.
“Kokichi?” Shuichi says.
“Yes, love?”
“In any world... in any lifetime….” He bites his lip, tasting salt. “I’d always chase after you.” He squeezes Kokichi’s hand. “I love you, my phantom thief.”
“I love you, too, Shuichi.” He can hear the smile in Kokichi’s voice, the barest hint of a laugh even as his breath catches. “My beloved detective.”
Shuichi smiles, closes his eyes, and waits for everything to end.
Heartbeat.
Kokichi.
Sunlight against his eyelids.
Before.
Deep breaths.
Kokichi.
Salt. Breath. Warm hands. Chuffing sound in the distan—
Chuffing sound.
It’s so out of place, so unexpected, that it shuts down Shuichi’s train of thought as quickly as if he’d been slapped.
No.
Kokichi. Shuichi doesn’t want to die thinking of anything else. Kokichi, Kokichi—
But the sound’s still there, pulsing at the edge of his awareness, wrapping itself around his mind until he has no choice but to fixate on it. He’s sure Kokichi hears it, too, from the way the white-knuckled grip on his hand has slackened, so he risks opening his eyes.
It’s familiar. Where does he know that sound from?
…That’s not possible.
That’s….
“Kokichi,” he breathes. His voice barely carries over the pounding of his heart. “Kokichi?”
Kokichi’s hand, still grasping his own, trembles. He makes a strange noise low in his throat.
“Kokichi, that— that’s a helicopter, Kokichi.”
He stumbles to the window and presses both palms to the glass, squinting against the light as he scans the clouds. There’s a small black silhouette in the distance, hovering against the backdrop of the sky.
“I see it,” he gasps. “I can see it, I—Kokichi, we’re not alone.”
When he turns around, Kokichi’s tear-streaked face stares back at him, mouth moving soundlessly, disbelief giving way to a dozen other emotions in rapid succession. Kokichi slumps to his knees, the gun slipping from his grasp, and sobs.