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The Only Exception

for @medusashima’s Rise of the Dead event // inspired by The Only Exception by Paramore

An unexpected partner finds you two years into the zombie apocalypse. crossposted to AO3

tags: yuuji x reader, zombie apocalypse!AU, major character death, afab reader, gender neutral, reader gets their period, weapons, violence, blood & injury, gore, angst, no comfort

wc: 8.2k

Patient zero popped up not too far from home. Less than a hundred miles away, actually, which was the last piece of reported information before the world very quickly collapsed around you. Separated from your family in the flurry of panic, you were left alone and nearly resourceless to fight against the infected. It was unclear how the disease came to fruition, but it was very clear how quickly it could spread.

Infected are most threatening in numbers, but when they’re alone, they’re easy enough to kill. They’re slow, and lack coordination, but a bite from them is a kiss of death. Some are quicker than others, but there’s really no rhyme or reason to what someone will become after they’ve been bitten.

And to start with, all you had in your pack was a book, your wallet, and a lighter.

On the first nights, when you had to resort to the woods for refuge, you used some pages of the book for kindling. In the days to come, you raided markets when you could, when you passed, cleaning them out for as much as you could eat and carry. You get yourself a weapon, and basic medical supplies, just in case. During the first week, you chose to knick the fresh, but rotting produce. You savor it while you eat, knowing the nectar of a fruit might not ever grace your tastebuds again.

In the beginning, you’re on the move for what feels like forever, walking through the evidence of disaster. Crashed cars, debris, and you ignore the piled bodies you think you spot in your periphery, focused nowhere but forward.

There comes an abandoned town on the ninth day of wandering, infected scattered around like roaches. You keep quiet until you finally find an apartment building that feels safe. It’s not hard to find an unlocked room. You push open the door until it hits the wall behind it, analyzing every corner of the room before you can deem it harmless.

You step over the threshold and let the door shut softly behind you, with finality. For the first time, loneliness replaces fear. It settles deep in your chest, echoing like a knock on a hollow box.

By the skin of your teeth, you survive, alone, not really living for any purpose other than for the sake of it. Every couple of days, it’s one temporary shelter to the next, and over time you end up miles away from where you started. Life becomes meaningless, and you could never quite squash that ache of solitude.

Roughly two years later, you make a pitstop at a temple.

There’s a shrine out front, and the vines enveloping it are unkempt, and overgrown, weaving and twisting over any crevice they can find. It all looks very gothic. If the implications of them weren’t plain, you’d allow yourself to find it pretty. You mostly stop in to take a leak, but maybe they’ll have some sanctified liquor left over for you to drip onto your tongue. They won’t be needing it, so you might as well indulge.

After you take care of business, you sift through an altar first, but there’s not much to find other than worship excerpts. You find more rooms down a long hallway, each of them filled with desks and cabinets, and cross your fingers that not everything has been picked clean.

It’s your fault for leaving your back exposed for so long.

The first time you hear his voice, he has a bat pressed into the back of your skull. Brutal way to go, you think. You wonder how desensitized one has to become to close-proximity killing for that to be a weapon of choice.

“Get on your knees,” He rasps, sounding like he hasn’t used his voice in a while. When you don’t move, he makes you. With a foot, he knocks you forward onto your knees, and you hold your hands up in lazy surrender.

He carefully fingers your knife out of its holster and kicks it across the tile floor, and you listen as the metal scratches until it comes to a stop, too far away from you. There’s no getting out of this one. With how you were living day-to-day, you knew you’d probably have little control over how your life ended, and you figure this outcome is as good as any other. Maybe even the best case scenario. At the very least, you wouldn’t be infected. And when you get reincarnated, your next life might not be so purposeless.

“Why are you out here alone?” He asks.

You huff a humorless laugh, “Why are you?”

He falls silent, and you think your next breath will probably be your last.

“You need a better weapon,” He says from behind you, and you peel the eyes you had closed in anticipation, back open in confusion. You glance at the knife that skirted across the floor and landed about five feet away from you, “How’ve you been getting by with just that?”

You don’t shrug, in case he’s skittish enough to crack open your skull over it, instead eyeing your pathetic blade for a few beats longer, “Been lucky, I guess.”

The bat disconnects from the back of your neck, and he steps in front of you. Your eyes rake up, starting at his feet until you can meet his own. He’s got brown eyes, and a sweet face, and by the looks of him, you don’t think he was written for an apocalyptic world, “I could use some of that.”

Luck, he means.

When he holds his hand out to help you up, you consider swiping his legs out from under him to get a running start. But you find no malice behind his eyes, and with a sigh of resignation, you reach out your own hand.

You come to learn that Itadori Yuuji was not always so tough. The world changed in an instant, and he was forced to mature with it. He’s kind, and patient, and it’s hard to believe that he ever considered beating you bloody.

“I wasn’t alone, by the way,” he whispers, once you’re acquainted, “My brother, he-“ He starts confidently, like he thought he could get through it without choking up. He takes a deep breath, and starts with easier details first. Choso. Three weeks ago.

“Sacrificed himself for me,” He doesn’t have to explicitly tell you that he wishes he had died instead, “I didn’t want to make his death meaningless. So I kept going.”

Where he was going was something you had only fantasized to exist, between bouts sleep on dreamless nights. Him and Choso were traveling to a rumored quarantine zone far northeast. The world had stopped spinning and you were isolated so quickly that you couldn’t have known anything about it. You tell him you haven’t spoken to anyone else to have heard of it.

You’ve been wholly distrustful of any other humans, keeping quiet and hiding in the shadows from all of them, until now. He’d been the first one to catch you. People are what’s scarier than the infected. They have the power to inflict a fate much worse than death.

When he asks you to accompany him, he sees you hesitate.

“Got something better to do?”

Aimlessly, for years, you’ve been wandering over the rubble that’s left of the world. You haven’t felt your stomach flutter like this, with promise, with adventure, in too long.

“I suppose not.”

Though you’ve become comfortable in his company, full trust between you is still pending, which keeps you quiet while you walk on the road together.

Four miles in, you spot a persimmon tree not too far out from the path, and Yuuji is flicking out his switchblade before you even finish pointing it out. Both of you wordlessly agree that it’s an acceptable time to take a break. You assume position in the crotch of the stump and you slurp on the slices Yuuji hands you from between his thumb and knife. Neither of you let your guard down, your heads turning on your necks to scan the shadows between the trees while you eat.

There’s juice from the fruit dripping down Yuuji’s wrist, sticky and sweet, and you watch as he licks up his own skin to clean it off. You squeeze your eyes shut and turn the other way, but the shape of his pink tongue is burned behind your eyelids. Your gaze bores into the bark of a random tree while you cool yourself down. It’s been two years since you were this close to anyone, and Yuuji isn’t ugly. You forgive yourself for any thoughts less than pure.

You walk five more miles before the sun starts to set, and he urges you to start looking for somewhere to stay for the night.

“You don’t want to keep walking?” You question, eyebrows furrowing.

He doesn’t look at you while he answers, eyes darting around for a habitable building, “We can’t go on in the dark, it’s dangerous. Besides, we should sleep. We can keep going all day tomorrow.”

“I’ve done it before,” you mutter under your breath.

You think he doesn’t hear, because he’s quiet, and searching, but then he says, “You really are lucky, huh?”

You pretend you don’t feel your cheeks heat, and swallow down the smile his cheeriness brings you.

The two of you make it into an empty department store without a hitch, both you and Yuuji coming up with nothing on your security inspection around the place. Though it’s been mostly cleared out, there are pillows for you both, which is a treat.

He sets himself up no further than three feet away from you, falling asleep in under ten minutes. You watch him as he breathes, as his chest rises and falls, and notice how soft his face looks when his eyes are closed.

Though you don’t feel completely settled, the ache in your chest dulls, just a little.

Yuuji lets you wake up on your own, and once you do, the first thing you see is the dark blue wrapper of a protein bar placed on the floor right next to your face. He is the second. He’s sitting tall and criss-crossed in the same spot that he slept, grinning down at you while he takes another bite into his already half-finished protein bar.

“Good morning,” He greets, distorted by a full mouth.

The sun rays brightening the newspaper laid over the windows is making it hard for you to open your eyes all the way, so they remain squinted while you prop yourself up on an arm and offer him a halfhearted grunt of acknowledgement. Your gaze warily lands on the bar he left for you again, and you reason that him not robbing you and leaving you for dead in the middle of the night in tandem with the hunger rumbling in your belly is enough for you to accept his food.

You make eye contact with him while you take your first bite, a silent sign of trust. But he doesn’t say anything, only keeps munching on his own happily, the sides of his mouth minutely upturned. You don’t notice the map on his lap until he tilts it up towards himself. From the expression on his face, he’s not looking at anything new, instead like he’s seen it hundreds of times before.

With one hand, he folds it back into itself, and slips it into his pack before his eyes land on you again.

“Nothing in here worth taking,” He says, and lowly chuckles when you lift a brow in question, “I looked around while you slept.”

You nod.

He waits a few beats to give you an opportunity to speak, and when you don’t, he continues, “Figured we’d walk as far as we can today?”

You nod, but this time it’s accompanied with a tiny smile.

“Now you’re just teasing,” He stands, grinning, slinging his pack over his shoulder and ticking his head to the side, “Let’s go.”

Today brings more conversation than yesterday. You tell him the story of how you ended up alone, quietly raiding the necessities to keep yourself alive while you clung to the shadows for two whole years.

You bond over the grief of having to accept the death of your family. The difference between you was, you didn’t watch your brother get his throat slit right in front of you. It’s hard to believe that Yuuji was so quick to trust another person so soon after him and his brother were betrayed. But, like you, he must have been itching for connection after it was taken from him. For you, it was an aching yearn, but for him, it was an empty space he needed to refill.

As time passed, you had convinced yourself that everyone you knew was dead, to stifle the hurt of being separated. At least for you, there’s hope that someone is out there, somewhere, surviving. Though you’re not sure that’s really living.

He helps you climb over the abandoned cars on the highway when they block your path forward. A lot of them have grown over with weeds, becoming an extension of the earth. He goes first, and holds your hands in his softly, making sure you don’t slip while you step over them. The skin of his hands are calloused, and rough, and your heart beats a little quicker every time he touches you. You nearly forgot what skin-to-skin contact feels like, but the comforting familiarity of it makes you remember. You miss the feeling of his palms every time he pulls away.

At the next car, you’re biting back a smile. He has his arms outstretched to you while you carefully walk onto the hood, like you’re a toddler he’s about to pick up. When you don’t fall into his hands, he looks up and catches the look on your face.

“What?” He asks, eyebrows raised.

“Nothing,” You answer, grin still playing behind your lips. You give his hand an extra squeeze before you let go of it, and take a step ahead without looking back to see if he noticed.

The integrity of the small bridge you eventually have to cross is questionable, because it creaks and groans under your feet while you pass over it. If you were in a car, you’re certain it would have fallen out from under you. It’s not as remote of a route as you would have liked, and when you express that to Yuuji, he says, “Good luck charms have nothing to worry about.”

It doesn’t placate your concern, so you bite into your bottom lip and grip onto the hilt of your knife a bit tighter.

“I’ve never killed anything,” You quietly admit.

His eyes widen and he cranes his neck to gape at you, “You’ve never- How have you-?”

“I’m a fast runner,” You cut, not meeting his eyes, “And a better hider.”

A heavy breath is pushed from your lungs, and both of you continue onward.

“You still need a better weapon than that,” He tries, the corner of his mouth pulling up.

You stay quiet for a few beats, to toy with him, and then you say, “Stop trying to corrupt my innocence.”

A slow and confused smile spreads over his lips, but then he starts laughing, and you don’t stop yourself from laughing with him.

Days pass, and you and Yuuji fall into a routine. Wake up early, walk as far as you can, and find somewhere safe to sleep each night. You take food when you can find it, a lot of which consists of nonperishables and things pickled in jars, all stocked on shelves and frozen in time for longer than they were expected to be.

Yuuji finds you an ax, and suggests that you try out your swing before you adopt it into your arsenal. You tentatively accept it from him, holding it in your palms rigidly. With a few words of encouragement from him, you adjust your grip on the hilt, then unsurely swing it from one shoulder down to your opposite hip.

When you look to him for feedback, he giggles, but doesn’t give you the time to be offended before he says, “Not terrible. Can I help you?”

You hum in agreement, and don’t think better of it until his hot breath is puffing into the crook of your neck and making it feel moist with condensation. His large hands close over yours, and he explains where to keep your fingers placed on the base. You allow him to move you through one slow swing, and your body moves through the same motion as before, but the ax cuts through the air straighter, crisper, sharper.

With his chin on your shoulder, he continues to explain how to maintain your focus on where the blade goes, and keep your core engaged while you swing. Maybe you’d learn a thing or two if you were actually listening, and not distracted by how the length of his body feels when it’s pressed against the back of yours, or how his rasp sounds when it's this close to your ear.

If he wasn’t teaching you how to decapitate something that used to be human, it might have been romantic.

You and Yuuji work surprisingly well together, especially when you fuse his survival skills to your knack for staying out of sight. On your journey, you don’t come across much, only spotting a few straggler infected in the distance, too far for them to pose a threat, but you keep quiet as you walk anyway.

One night, a couple of weeks in, you feel more uneasy than usual. Sleeping doesn’t feel right, but neither does staying awake. While he gets ready to sleep, Yuuji watches as you pick at your fingers.

“What’s wrong?” He pokes.

You glance at him, but quickly look back down, forcing yourself to look more casual and less anxious, “Nothing. Sorry.”

You think he’s about to drop it, but then you hear him whisper, “Don’t hide from me, too.”

For a few moments, you’re as stiff as stone, but you get your eyes to gaze into his eventually. His eyebrows are furrowed in worry, and there’s a look of genuine concern on his face.

“I-I’m just. Thinking a little bit too much,” You admit.

You expect him to say something stupid, like, ‘just don't think,’ or, ‘want me to knock you out?’ but instead, he asks, “Do you want to talk about it?”

You don’t give Yuuji enough credit. Even after weeks together, you still don’t want to believe that he is everything you needed from the start, because you know it can all be stolen from you in an instant.

“I don’t know,” You confess.

“Try,” He suggests softly.

“This whole time, I never had anybody,” You start, breath already shakier than you had hoped it would be, “And then we meet, and suddenly I’m not alone anymore. You remind me what it’s like t-to look after someone, and have them look after you. You make me think of home, and I can’t believe that I wasted two whole years when I could have been looking for them, and now the chances that they’re all dead are higher than ever and I don’t know what to-” You’re cut off by a choking sob.

“Shh, shh. It’s okay. Come here,” He moves to sit down next to you, and you wrap your arms around his neck and nose your way into it without a second thought, knowing he’s not the type to shy away from physical contact. Yuuji hushes you reassuringly, before you get too hysterical.

“I’m sorry for-”

“Do not apologize,” He says sternly, “You were alone, and scared, and there’s no way you’re expected to act when something like this happens. You have nothing to say sorry for when you did so much better than most. Others wouldn’t have survived longer than a month on their own,” His chest falls with a breath, and he holds you closer, “You did your best.”

One of his hands is smoothing over your hair, and his lips are pressed onto your forehead while he shushes you. Not kissing, just touching, and it calms your whole body down.

“I was so lonely,” You breathe into his neck, muffled by his skin.

An open palm runs over your spine, “I’m here now.”

When Choso was killed, the caregiver instinct within Yuuji must have been intensified. He arranges his sleeping bag right beside yours, and lays on his side next to you, running his fingers over the planes of your face. He starts on your forehead, trailing one fingertip from the middle of it, down the line of your nose and over the peak, then into the dip of your cupid's bow. His finger skips over your lips and continues down the underside of your chin until it hits the hollow of your throat.

He switches his caresses between either side of your face, sometimes using his whole hand, but he doesn’t stop until you’re soundly asleep. With him, you are safe, so he lets his eyes get heavy, and closes them with you.

Shooting cramps in your lower abdomen wake you up before him. You’re buried in the crook of his arm, and you would have burrowed yourself deeper if you didn’t have to pee so badly. You pull yourself up, and step into the next room, where you’ve designated a bathroom area.

As soon as your pants are around your ankles you see the beginnings of a blood stain on the crotch of them, and you let out a long, and low, “Fuuuuck.”

Since the beginning of the apocalypse, it never fails to surprise you every time it arrives. There are a pile of napkins that you use to clean yourself up as best as you can, but now you have to find something to absorb all the blood. You don’t have another pair of pants readily available to let these ones get soiled. Having to craft makeshift tampons and pads only from what you have on hand is the most annoying part of every cycle.

Yuuji blearily blinks up at you when you return, propped up onto an elbow. You pout at the cute and sleepy look on his face, “Sorry if I woke you up.”

“S’okay. Where’d you go?” He slurs, head tilted towards his shoulder, like he’s on the verge of passing out again.

“Bathroom. Got my period.”

He hums absentmindedly, and lays back down. He’s quiet for a second, until his brain catches up to him, “Oh, shit,” His head shoots back up, and he looks up at you with a scrunched brow, “Forgot you still have to deal with that.”

You shrug and toss him a look that says, what can you do?

“Are you okay? Any pain?” He asks.

“A little. I have painkillers, though,” You answer casually.

He blinks again, then squints playfully, unbelievingly at you, “And where did you just ‘get painkillers’ from?”

You smirk back at him, and explain animatedly, “Hit the mother lode at the beginning of the apocalypse. Some of the strongest stuff I could find, the kind you need a prescription for. They still work well enough, and they’re easy to conserve because they’re so strong I don’t have to take a whole pill every time,” You sigh, wistful, “The whole pharmacy, untouched,” Your hands fall down into your lap, and you tilt your head at him and smile, “Well, until I came along.”

He shakes his head, and you don’t hear whatever he mutters under his breath. You sit down next to him and don’t flinch when his hand brushes your knee.

“Why don’t we stay here for the day?” He suggests. He doesn’t sound annoyed, and doesn’t say it like you’re an inconvenience. He gestures around to the messy nest you both lay in, I’ll try to make it… cozier.”

A huff of laughter leaves your nose, but you nod, “Sounds nice.”

The gleam of the sun rays streaming in have nothing on his bright, toothy smile, “You could read me that book you’re always looking at.”

He’s referring to the single book you had on you when all of this began. You kept it for sentimental reasons, as a reminder that it was not always this way. That you never had to think about surviving, it would just happen until you laid your head down on your pillow every night.

At such a personal proposal, you should feel vulnerable, but your cheeks heat when you realize that he’s indirectly admitting to watching you when he knows you’re not paying attention.

Sitting upright on the floor together as you show him the book slowly evolves into leaning onto each other while you flip through the pages. It doesn’t take long to get from cover to cover, most pages missing because you had ripped them out for various uses. Another cramp festers through your belly, and you’re reminded that you forgot to take any dose of the painkiller, urging you to stop reading to Yuuji and take a bite out of one of your white powdery pills. You wash it down with a big swig of water, and it’s bitter on your tongue as it goes down.

Leaning onto each other’s shoulders evolves into him nosing at the back of your neck while he spoons you over your sleeping bags. One big, warm hand is resting on your lower belly, massaging soft circles into it with a little bit of pressure. You breathe through the pain, and he lays with you until the medicine kicks in.

One of your hands closes over the one he has on your stomach, encouraging his movement, weaving your fingers into the empty spaces of his. You let out a contented sigh when the pain begins to dissipate into nearly nothing.

The ache in your chest alleviates, too.

Yuuji gets you both up early the next day, to make up for lost time. He says you’re within the fifty mile radius of the QZ, and if all goes well, you would make it there within the week.

“What if it doesn’t exist?” You ask.

He looks up at you from where he’s crouched over his pack, at where he studies the well-worn map once again, and shrugs.

“Then I’ll take you somewhere else that’s safe.”

Even in hypotheticals, it’s never about him.

The street is quiet while you make your way towards the highway again. You bend your neck to look up at the weathered, battered buildings as you pass, discolored with sun stains and water damage. Some brick is painted over, and most doors are barricaded, evidence that life has passed through here before. In thirty more years, these buildings might be so worn down that all that’s left of them is ash. The same could happen to you, too.

You and Yuuji seldom take breaks, walking until your legs feel weak, only stopping to eat or to use the bathroom. There’s a piece of thick, torn cloth stuck in between your legs, courtesy of an old shirt Yuuji found and ripped to size. It’s not ideal, but it will have to do.

You walk for longer than you should.

When night falls, and you still haven’t found shelter, you come across a poor soul lying in wait to turn. They’re lying face down, and you can see they’ve been bitten right into the meat of their shoulder blade, the wound weeping and slimy. They call to you for help, but you and Yuuji share a knowing look as he pulls out his bat from his back.

They look up at you both confusedly, tears brimming in the waterline of their eyes. But in an instant, they're on their feet, the last moments of their life overtaken by hysterical strength. Under their body, they were concealing a machete, which they swing across Yuuji’s face, slicing him right down the center of the forehead, over the bridge of his nose, all the way to the top of his cheek, narrowly missing his right eye. Blood cascades out of the gash and down his face, and he looks like something out of a horror film. For a moment, you’re frozen in fear.

It’s like they’re sent into overdrive before they turn, and Yuuji dodges out of the way when it brandishes its weapon again, with less precision this time. With one far reel back, and a strong swing forward, Yuuji sends them hitting the floor, and a sickening wet crack echoes on the empty street. By the way their skull is cracked open, brain protruding out in demolished chunks, you know they won’t be getting back up.

Unthinkingly, instinctively, the first thing you do is haul one of Yuuji’s arms over your shoulders, and drag him forward, watching with wide eyes as his blood drips onto the pavement beneath your feet.

“Don’t pass out. I can’t carry you,” You warn, anxiety rising in your chest at the thought. He doesn’t respond, focusing all his energy on forcing his legs onward for you.

You don’t know how long you carry him until you find a storefront that looks safe enough. You pull him in and lock the door behind you, keeping him upright as you walk him in further. It’s quiet, and small, and doesn’t seem like it’s been completely cleared out, and you don’t know what good deed you performed to bring about such luck.

He fights to stay awake just long enough for you to practically throw him down onto the linoleum.

In a different aisle, you collect what he needs for first aid, things like gauze and hydrogen peroxide first. Then you scramble to find something to use for stitches, and a sewing kit comes to your rescue. You run back to him and fall onto your knees at his side, watching as his eyes droop.

“Yuuji? Yuuji, keep your eyes closed, this is going to sting,” You announce to him, wetting the gauze with the peroxide and not giving him a countdown before you press it straight onto his gash.

“I’m sorry, I know, I’m sorry,” You chant, tears welling in your eyes when he cries in pain. You shouldn’t have stayed out past dark. What if the machete had infected blood on it? Can it pass through blood? Are you cleaning it out of him right now? You never got the chance to learn if it could be passed through bodily fluid. The world imploded before it could all be understood.

After he’s clean, the worst part is over, and Yuuji is brave while you stitch him, barely even wincing, but you know it hurts. You pinch each side of the wound in one hand, and puncture the needle through his skin with the other, pulling the thread taut with each weave until it’s holding his skin together on its own.

There’s another cut by his mouth, a round coin of skin sliced clean off. It’s not deep enough to be stitched. It looks like he dodged the blade a hair too late when it lunged at him the second time. You clean and dress it for him, securing gauze on his face with medical tape. Softly, you wipe up the rest of the blood caked on his skin.

You slip a whole painkiller onto his tongue and gently tilt his chin back as you waterfall a sip of water into his mouth, and he swallows it down without you having to command him, eyes closed all the while.

With a sigh, you sit down next to him, both of you propped against the shelving, shoulder to shoulder. You listen to him breathe, for reassurance that he’s alive, that you’re alive, and you haven’t been separated yet.

“We’ve had a shitty couple of days, huh?” You whisper.

His chuckle comes out garbled, and his smile is crooked from where the bandage on the side of his mouth warps it, “Fuck, don’t make me laugh.”

A puff of air sounds out of your nose, “Okay. Sorry.”

“S’okay,” He slurs. Weakly, he leans his head on your shoulder, and you climb away from him before his breathing can get too heavy.

You set up his sleeping bag on the floor, right next to yours, both of your jackets folded up to use as pillows. You help him to slip under the cover, getting him comfortable and whispering, “I’ll be right back, okay?” Then shushing his groans of protest.

Only after triple checking that the door is locked, the place is empty, and you two are hidden enough, do you let yourself lay down beside him. Tonight, you hold him in your arms instead.

There’s a lot of downtime while Yuuji heals, but he never turns, and you deduce that the machete was most likely clean. The forehead cut starts to give him headaches, and you tend to his wounds like a perfect bedside nurse, as he had put it. He was riding on a high dosage of the painkiller wave when he said it, and his tolerance was low after not having any foreign chemical in his body for years. If he wasn’t sliced so close to his eye, he might have been able to keep going, but the dressing obscures part of his vision, and you couldn’t take that chance.

A large bruise starts to form between his eyes, and it spills onto the surrounding skin, dancing between purples and blues, slowly fading into greens and yellows. You lather the slice in ointment for him, and wipe it when it weeps. The one by his mouth starts to shine with a new layer of growing skin, and it looks more like a burn than a cut.

When his stitched skin shows the beginnings of fusing back together, you get back on the road. Antibacterial ointment and a sewing kit are the newest additions to your packs. While he was healing, Yuuji showed you the map he’s been using all this time. With a finger, he runs through the way you’re supposed to go from here. The path that you’re following is lightened on the map, like the oil of his finger had started lifting the ink after one too many passes over it.

You don’t push yourselves too far the first day, both of you getting back into the groove of navigating. For a while, you stay quiet, you stay hidden, you stay safe. And every night since he was injured, you hold each other a little tighter than before.

Things weren’t terrible, but your luck was bound to run dry at some point.

On a supply run, less than fifteen miles from your destination, you encounter a group of infected. They like to stay in packs, producing their strength from numbers. They’re loitering right in the way of where you need to go. Unavoidable. If you were alone, you would have turned back around. You and Yuuji’s backs are pressed against the wall of a building while he scopes out the situation.

There are three of them. I think one is blind, Yuuji signs.

On the first day of the outbreak, you were on your way to sign language class. Being out, and not at home, was how you ended up alone, deserted and solitary. The lone book you kept on you, one you used for kindling at the beginning of your journey – was a sign language guide. You only burnt the least important signs, keeping the most useful pages bound into the spine. For the first two years, on quiet nights, you taught yourself what you didn't already know, and the pages were your only company in the dark. Yuuji became your eager student, and you taught him everything you knew. There was a lot of time to kill while his face was healing.

And now you can use basic signs in times of trouble.

Simultaneously, Yuuji raises his hand behind his head to wrap his fingers around the base of his bat, and you slip your ax out of its holster and into your hand. You nod curtly at each other once, adrenaline pumping. He brings you courage.

You sneak behind them quietly, assigning yourself one each, raising your weapons and gearing yourself up to swing. Yuuji knocks his down onto the floor quickly, and it’s not dead yet, but it’s certainly stunned. You’re not as fortunate, and your ax gets caught halfway into your zombie’s neck. Yours falls forward, face planting onto the floor, and you drive your boot into its back to keep it down and for leverage to tug your blade from its neck.

At the sound of a scuffle, the last one whips its head around after the moment of impact and charges at you. Yuuji thought it was fully blind, but it’s actually only half-blind, with a growth over one of its eyes. Yuuji cracks his bat across its face before it can get to you, but the first one he knocked down gets back on its feet and pounces on him, tackling him down to the floor.

Yuuji pushes the length of his bat into its mouth, gagging it, using all his strength to push it aside, minding its teeth and where it’s trying to bite. You get the ax out in time to swing it across the half-blind one’s face, but it’s not a swing deep or precise enough to kill. The one that you half-decapitated slips out from under your foot while you try to kill off the other, crawling up onto its feet menacingly, both of them ganging up on you while Yuuji struggles with the last one on the floor.

You go for the half-blind one first, because they pose more of a threat by having their head fully attached to their neck. Each of your swings don’t make close enough contact with its throat, and black ooze is seeping out from their skin wherever you slice them. The second one is gaining on you, and you start to fight like a cornered animal, with little tact or strategy.

But then a gunshot rings out, sending the one you almost decapitated falling towards you and onto the floor. It unblocks your vision of the shooter, who is dressed in all black, and armed with a rifle. They shoot another calculated shot and take out the second zombie in front of you. He turns on his heel and approaches where Yuuji has flipped his zombie onto its back, where he’s using all his might to keep it pressed into the ground with his bat in its mouth.

The stranger shoots it right between the eyes, and they immediately stop kicking under Yuuji’s weight. Yuuji removes his bat slowly, like he’s unsure, and waits for the zombie to try to sink his teeth into him again. He gets onto his feet, and backs away from the stranger, stepping in your direction but not taking his eyes off of him.

He has black, long hair, tied up in a low ponytail. His ears are stretched, but he’s got no gauges in them. He smiles, “What happened to you, ugly?” He gestures his chin to Yuuji, referencing the stitches tracking down his face. Neither of you laugh, both of you sizing him up quietly. He doesn’t feel right. There’s something sinister about him.

His jaw ticks annoyedly in the silence, “Where’re you coming from?”

“West,” Yuuji answers, voice level, “Is there a quarantine zone here?”

The man raises a brow, “Is that where you’re fixing to go?” His body language is calm, but his voice is stiff, “Might as well keep doing what you’ve been doing. Stay free.”

Through the corner of your eyes, you and Yuuji make eye contact.

It’s real.

The sound of a cocking gun makes you look away to see the man raising his in Yuuji’s direction, “What did you just say?” He demands, loudly, sternly.

Yuuji doesn’t move, only flashes his eyes over to the stranger.

“You’re in Shibuya now, motherfucker. My turf,” The shooter bites, stepping forward, vitriol laced in his tone, gun now pointed straight towards Yuuji’s face, “I’m not going to let a couple of kids sell me out.”

“We’re not here for you. We just want to make it to the QZ,” Yuuji explains calmly, enunciating every word, fingers tightening around his bat.

The man laughs, but it’s grim, “No way you’re leaving now.”

“We won’t tell anyone you’re here. Thank you for helping us, but we-”

“Thought I just heard myself say you’re not leaving,” He spits, “We need recruits. I was going to offer you a place in our ranks. You look strong enough. And you,” He speaks at you, “Look intelligent. But not if you’ve got a listening problem.”

“We’re not interested,” Yuuji says, short.

“You haven’t even heard my proposal,” The stranger drawls, smirking.

“Thought you weren’t offering us one anyway.”

“Don’t-” He pushes the gun closer into Yuuji’s space, but Yuuji doesn’t even flinch, “get smart with me. I’ll shoot you dead where you stand.”

In a blink, Yuuji is ducking out of the line of the gun and tackling him to the ground, pinning his arm down onto the floor so he has nowhere to shoot. His bat rolls to the side when he uses both hands to try to knock the gun out of his grip. You step in closer, lifting your ax to slice it into the man’s arm, but Yuuji yelps in pain before you can swing it down.

Yuuji is pushed to the side, like dirt, and you see a knife sticking out of his side, blood seeping into the fabric of his shirt. The stranger is back on his feet and pointing his gun at you before you can whip your ax at him in fury. You scurry to Yuuji’s side, dropping to your knees and cradling his face in your hands. His eyes are glossy.

“Yuuji? Look at me-”

“You have to run,” He whispers, quiet enough for only you to hear.

You shake your head at him, “I can’t.”

“You have to.”

“Yuuji, is it?” You hear from over your shoulder, “Tell you what. You come quietly, and you’ll both get to live. We’ll fix you up all nice,” He offers boredly, but you hear him jostle his gun when he says, “Or we can do it the hard way.”

Two hands in the shape of idle fists drag themselves up Yuuji’s chest.

Live.

“Help me up. Please,” Yuuji coughs at the both of you.

“Coming with me?” The stranger asks.

“Yes,” Yuuji responds, but he doesn’t look away from you, stars twinkling in his eyes. You look back down at him pleadingly, but you know he’s made his mind up.

Each of you takes either of Yuuji’s hands, hauling him up onto his feet. He stays hunched over for a few, and he watches the blood stain on his shirt grow bigger as he gets woozier. You’re not really sure what his plan is, but you know he’s not telling this man the truth.

Slowly, he straightens out, but not without a few groans of pain. You hook his arm over your neck and let him lean on you while you lead him forward. The shooter doesn’t help you, but he keeps close.

“What’s your group about?” Yuuji pipes.

The stranger side-eyes him, but answers, “We’re a resistance.”

“To what?” Yuuji asks, breathlessly. Over your shoulder, you feel him tap your bicep twice while he talks. When you look down at his hand, it’s pointing down to the ax in yours. You don’t agree with whatever plan he’s come up with, but you do as he asks anyway. Slowly, you shimmy the ax’s hilt up until Yuuji can grab it into his hand. He keeps it along the length of your arm, so the interloper won’t see that he’s got it.

“Y’talk a lot for a guy who just got stabbed,” He remarks, but you can tell he is unsuspecting of you both.

“I don’t want to pass out,” Yuuji answers, quick and cool, “How far are they?”

You look up at the side of his face. It’s code for you. He’s really asking, are you alone?

The man sighs, “A mile, I’d say. You’ll get ther-”

Before he can even finish speaking, Yuuji swings your ax right into his forehead. It’s buried so deep that it stays put even after Yuuji lets go of the hilt. The man falls face forward onto the floor, and the blade skins deeper into his skull from the impact.

For a few moments, you’re both silent, staring down at his body like he’s going to jump back up any second. But he’s still, face pressed into the pavement, chest unmoving, blood pool growing under his head.

You grab Yuuji’s jaw, and guide his face to look at you, “We have to go.”

He nods.

The knife is still buried into his side, right between his ribs, and he winces with every step, but you don’t dare pull it out. Neither of you even suggest it, because you know he’ll bleed out instantly. Every step he takes feels harder than the last, but you keep pulling him forward.

“Not much longer,” You tell him, “We’re nearly there.”

“You’re going to make it,” He whispers.

You look at him, “So are you.”

He blinks at you once, slowly, before he collapses. You follow him down, cupping his pale face in your hands again before gazing down at his torso, which is soaked in much more blood than before.

“You’re okay, Yuuji, you’re okay- I’m going to take you somewhere safe, and I’ll clean you up. Just like the last time,” You grab onto his arm and try to lift him again, “Please get up, please-”

“They’re going to come looking for him soon,” He sputters, “You have to get out of here.”

“Not without you,” You insist, tears blurring your vision.

His hand comes up to cup the side of your face, and you can feel the slickness of his own blood coating his palm as he smears it onto your cheek. His eyes look heavy, like it’s taking all of his strength to keep them open.

“You became my purpose,” He confesses, and a tear slips from your eye and drips onto his neck. His hand falls, limp atop his chest, “You’re gonna make it.”

His eyes fall closed, and everything goes quiet.

“Yuuji?” You ask, eyes darting over his face in panic, before you ask again, louder, more brokenly, “Yuuji?”

He just looks like he’s asleep.

Silently, you hug him into your chest and sob.

If you’d have known yesterday night was your last together, you would have held him tighter. Or told him how he saved you, even with his bat threatening your brain stem. He would have laughed, and you would have committed his smile to memory a little better.

Even in death, he saves you.

You don’t know how long you stay on the ground with him. Tears fall in abundance, landing onto his still warm cheeks while you cradle him on the pavement. When you finally lay his head down, you’re numb. You walk over to the stranger's body and pull the rifle off of him and onto yourself. There are tears streaming down your cheeks, but you don’t feel them. You barely feel the burn in your thighs with each stretching step as you move away from them.

Selfishly, you wish you were the one in Yuuji’s place. It’s more painful to be the one who keeps on living. But your legs carry you forward anyway, away to live on and honor him, as you leave his body behind.

You wonder if this is an unfortunate cycle you’ve been caught in.

Before it gets too dark, you barricade yourself in an abandoned building, far enough away from the scene that you’re sure you won’t get caught by the Resistance. You don’t sleep. You don’t cry. You only clutch the gun between your arms and stare into the wall across from you while you wait for daybreak.

There will never be another soul like him. There is no one left on this earth for you.

And all you have left of him is the blood smeared on your cheeks.

Your body moves on autopilot while it follows the lightened path of Yuuji’s map in your mind. Only you never imagined you’d be walking through it alone.

The tall and dark metal gates of the quarantine zone are hard to miss as you approach. They loom over you, and you crane your neck to look towards the top. You collapse onto your knees in front of them, and hold your hands up in surrender when you hear the distant shouts from above ordering you to. But it feels different than before. When it was Yuuji.

Salvation died with him. Even in the face of protection, you don’t feel safe. You’re not sure you ever will again.

He was the only one ever worth the risk of trying for.