Chapter Text
1.
The barren and scarce landscape swallowed many sounds. Iwaizumi profusely sprayed the chemical all over himself while remembering what the shopkeep told him- This will help, a little. A gasoline scented cloud surrounded him. The acridity of chemicals made his eyes water. With a swift zip, the tent opened up to a small black swarm buzzing in nearby thicket. The high pitched and piercing hum of hundreds of wings had grown familiar to his ears. The mosquitos here weren’t even fazed by DEET, and relentlessly pinched his skin.
It’s better than nothing, I wonder how much of repellant is left, should I make a trip to the town, they said it’ll only be another two weeks until mosquito season is over, I really don’t want to walk five hours to the town then five hours back just for a few bottles - drudgery and ephemera cluttered his mind as he headed to the traps he set the day before.
He wondered if he caught anything. None of the traps had succeeded. He wanted to eat red meat. Fish wasn’t too bad, but that wasn’t what he needed. His food supply was decreasing faster than he anticipated, and it scared him. I wonder what went wrong. He did everything that was written in the survival guide book, but he only caught a single fish after three days of trying. The thought of starvation reluctantly made him put several field traps here and there. All failures. Broken trap wires, some with only the bait gone.
At first, he laughed at his failures. A week passed and it wasn’t laughable anymore.
He was getting angry, and most of all, he was hungry. Why did I do this? If he were still in Japan he’d be sitting in his warm and sunny college cafeteria, leisurely munching on his lunch. He viciously smacked his arm. Over his unseasonably sunburnt skin was splat of black and red, once an insect. His blood mixed with the fat of the insecticide and glistened. If it keeps going on like this, he’d have to walk for ten hours and lug back groceries on top of repellants. All to survive.
His stomach tighten as he got closer to the next trap. I’m hungry. I want to eat meat.
In the fifth trap there was something. He hastily pulled the line- a rabbit. An animal choked to death was not a clean sight. What was I thinking? What did I think this would be, a neatly butchered and packaged thing from a market? He sat there, and loosened the noose from rabbit’s throat. Thin piece of wire dug deeply into the skin, exposing bright redness of its flesh. You fought with your life. The rabbit’s fur was the same color as his hair. His throat tightened. It died while running for its life.
His relentless love was frightening. He said he’d be going away for a few months, casually in passing. He answered okay, sure . He filed for a leave of absence from school and left. He wanted to go far away and be alone. He didn’t want to think. He just wanted to survive. But Oikawa, maybe that was impossible.
With a little bit of sadness, and a little bit of love, Iwaizumi stroked the hair of the dead and cold rabbit. I’m sorry. Its fur in Oikawa’s color was a kind of softness he hadn’t felt in a while. He sat still in the quiet, alone with a lifeless animal.