Chapter Text
There are more rumbles underfoot. It doesn’t matter, everything has already been destroyed.
Fuma waits. All he has done is wait. He’s waiting for something he knows will never happen. If Yudai was alive he would have come back days ago so now he is just stretching out the inevitable. Yudai is dead and Fuma has to survive the rest of his life without him.
With how late he is in leaving his house and finding supplies, the rest of his life could only be a couple of days. He can’t even bring himself to joke about how his gym routine and personal self restraint had practically been practice for an end of the world situation like this. Yudai would have laughed - he would have been the one making the joke. And It wouldn’t have been funny, Fuma would have rolled his eyes and smiled but it wouldn’t have been funny. He would give anything for that scene to play out now. Instead he sits on the floor of their bedroom willing himself to leave, or even just stand up.
Nothing was in the place they had left it the night before the first earthquake. The floor was filled with glass from the shattered mirror and window, broken pieces of furniture, and almost everything that had previously been on the desk and bed. He didn’t recognise any of it as home. Next to his hand was a broken bottle of perfume and he didn’t even have to read the label to know it belonged to Yudai. It was the only scent he ever used and the room had been drenched in it from the second the bottle rolled off the nightstand onto the floor. It's how he was convinced Yudai was still there when everything started. He wasn’t, and he never came back.
For the entire week Fuma waited he tortured himself imagining what Yudai was doing when the earthquake hit, what he was doing when the second followed, and which one killed him. Maybe it was a falling tree or something less dramatic, more benign - Yudai deserved to go out softly. It’s who he was, the most gentle person Fuma knew, keeping him sane when he got angry with himself. Maybe that week was just enough time for him to accept that he will never see the love of his life again. His light would be forever dimmed.
People with lights would never survive something like this. Fuma could, and he would out of pure spite of losing the man he wished he could marry someday. He can leave the bedroom behind, he just needs to sit for a few more seconds to memorise the smell of the perfume and the way the rug Yudai picked out felt under his fingers, he wanted to remember what home felt like before it could only ever be a memory.
Fuma stands up and wipes the dust of his trousers. His legs are numb from where he had been sitting for so long. He takes a bag, packs the essentials and leaves. His hand hesitates on the doorknob before he shuts it for good, heading for the front door. He doesn’t lock it. He walks down the path to the front gate, not closing it or looking behind him.
The road is deadly quiet. He almost doesn’t recognise it. There are no people and no cars, everything stopped in the exact place it was when everything happened, moved only by the shake of the ground. Almost every vehicles’ windows are glass shards littering the road and the grass is growing over. If Fuma ignored the clear signs of destruction and abandon he could imagine someone walking towards him in the opposite direction with their groceries or coming back from walking their dog. No one comes.
Most likely no one will ever come again. There is nothing down this street except houses that are all half caved in. Families didn’t stand a chance in these conditions. Fuma barely stands a chance and he had unconsciously trained for something like this all of his life. Yudai would have been prepared, hw should have made it - he was fast, and smart and everything Fuma never was. He should have been the one to make it.
Fuma hadn’t even realised he’d stopped, he hadn’t even really started and all he could think about was finding Yudai’s body - it could be on the path. It’s too close, Yudai would have dragged himself back bleeding out if he was this close to home just so Fuma could hear his last breath. Yudai didn’t die here. Fuma would have to keep searching.
He wasn’t sure why he was so determined to survive. It was a good distraction from the gaping hole he could feel inside his chest but it was also something to remember Yudai by. He would be occupied for days on end by nothing but his own mind and if he could find peace in Yudai being gone by facing the very thing that took him then he would do it, he had to do it. He wasn’t one for breaking but this was the closest he had ever been to splitting in half. One part of him wanted to cry and scream while the other part wanted to steal his mind and continue - his rational side always won out.
So he would continue, go out into the world he hadn’t seen for a week. He would leave his home and never come back, not for anything - he wouldn’t know the way. He would search high and low until he knew what happened to Yudai. He would survive. Those were all promises, and he never broke his promises.
₊ ⊹
The moon was high in the sky but the world was washed in a deep pink as the sun set below the horizon. There was orange mixing with it and Fuma could imagine this sunset filtering into their bedroom window and how he wouldn’t have been able to see the stars.
When the sun had fully set and twilight broken, the stars were the clearest thing he could see. Without the lights polluting central Tokyo he could spot constellations he wasn’t even sure existed. He wanted to lay down, breathe and look up until they disappeared again and could convince himself everything would be back to normal.
This was the new normal - there would be no lights to guide him during the night except the moon and the stars so he had to rest, there was no other choice. He hadn’t picked up any supplies but he could survive the night with what energy he had left. Formulating a game plan was something he could do in the morning.
He enters the outskirts of a wooded area, it wasn’t dense enough to be a forest but the trees stretch for at least a few meters. He can hear twigs breaking in the distance but it's so far away he tries to forget about it. He tries to forget about everything.
He was never very good at letting things go. Whenever he and Yudai had an argument it was always Fuma that would give the silent treatment, he could never let anything go. He would try now.
The floor is damp, and the leaves were still wet from the most recent bout of rain. He sat down and he could immediately feel his jeans absorb the moisture - it wasn’t a lot, similar to sitting on the floor after mopping and drying it but he could tell it was there. He became acutely aware that he was outside with the sun almost fully gone and the whole night ahead of him.
He hadn’t slept outside like this since he went camping as a child - adults to watch over everything - at that time he felt safe sleeping on the floor. Now was very different to then and all the times he went camping as an adult - there were no tents and no security. Fuma was at least thankful the earthquakes started in the spring.
Spring was still unpredictable. It was May now, the cherry blossoms were truly dead but the likelihood of rain was high. If it rained overnight he would be drenched in the morning. The air would have a faint remnant of something falling but it would catch on the leaves in the trees and each droplet would drip one by one until it was soaked into the ground. It would smell like late spring and Fuma had forgotten that taste.
He knew what it looked like, he could remember how the shadow of the raindrops would fall onto the floor of his and Yudai’s bedroom and it would stay there for hours but always leave by the time moonlight hit. The moon never hit them making a rainbow, Fuma didn’t even know if that was possible.
It was.
On his first night alone in however many years the light around the moon wasn’t pure white, Fuma could see the specks of rainbow weaved within it until it was hanging dead center in the sky.
And then the colour was gone. Everything was dark.
The tree canopy didn’t allow for much light to get through to where Fuma was sitting. He couldn’t feel his hands so he tucked them into the sleeves of his overshirt. The shaking didn’t stop and he couldn’t tell what was causing it. He wasn’t cold, not really, he was convincing himself he was but it was a warm spring day and there was no movement in the leaves - the air was still.
But there was something shifting, he couldn’t close his eyes because he could feel something pricking at the back of his neck. He doesn’t look, he can’t. Fuma was always the brave one but one night alone in the woods has got him paranoid. He closes his eyes but it only makes the feeling of something intensify. It doesn’t go away no matter how many rational explanations he gives himself - maybe that feeling never will. He needs to try and live with it because either he survives never feeling alone or isolation will consume him.
He doesn’t sleep during the night but he is knocked out with the first ways of daylight.
He can’t be sure what time it is when he wakes up but he would place it some time in the afternoon. It’s cooler than it was the day before, the ground hadn’t dried during the night. Fuma enjoyed waking up to the smell of pollen and the sound of birds singing in their nests right above his head. He needed to find supplies.
He was late, everyone would have gotten their supplies a week ago, used the food in their houses while it was still fresh from the most recent grocery shop. The chicken in their fridge went bad days ago and he couldn't use any appliances anyway. The rice was gone, he had eaten it straight from the bag and it was the same story for most of the non-perishables they had in their house. Fuma had wasted them waiting for Yudai.
Thinking about it now, he didn’t know what he would have done if Yudai had come back - there wouldn’t have been anything for them inside that house except from each other but that wasn’t enough to survive.
He needed to find basic medical supplies and simple food - in such a residential area the stores nearby would have nothing left so Fuma would have to travel to get what he needed.
His stomach was already growling as he would usually have his biggest meal of the day after waking up. That wasn’t possible - Fuma would eat when he had what he needed, he couldn’t rest.
He stood at the edge of the woods and looked towards the houses lining the street across from him. He looked behind him and knew he would find more food there. After he found a pharmacy he would make his way back and test if he really could kill a deer like so many people joked he could.
A pharmacy was easy, bandages were easy to find and that's all he really wanted to protect against small cuts, on his way back he would go into kitchens for knives and matches. Most people didn’t have the thought to go to a pharmacy when things broke out until something even worse happened. Fuma didn’t want to take that chance - if he got injured and couldn't hunt he would die. There were no two ways about it.
In the 24 hours since he gave up on ever seeing Yudai again he had come to terms with his own mortality and how imminent it might be.