Chapter Text
Sun was tired and thirsty, but the wasteland that had once been a medium-sized american town offered no relief. He gripped his staff tighter until his knuckles were white. Danger could be anywhere in the shadows between the abandoned houses and looted convenience stores.
It was a long time after the outbreak.
Just as he had decided to try his chances in a nearby store that still seemed relatively undisturbed, Sun heard a noise behind him. It took him mere moments to react, turning around and drawing his gun in one smooth motion. The smell alone had given it away, so he was not surprised when he saw one of the creatures that roamed the empty streets. Some called them walkers, other called them infected - some argued that they were products of magic, others that it had been a disease that created them. Some claimed it had been an act of god. In fact, it sometimes felt like the only thing people could agree on was that you had to run away from them.
Sun wasn't running this time. He knew what they were, and he knew he could handle one solitary zombie.
Sun pointed his shotgun straight at the thing's head and pressed the trigger without hesitation. It was easy when you didn't know who they had been before. This one was a woman with only one eye and half her scalp missing, and she fell to the floor in a sad heap. Sun didn't waste time looking around; he knew the sound would doubtlessly attract more of them.
After locating a building he'd be able to scale, he began climbing up the facade, grabbing hold where he could. He pulled himself up onto the roof with ease - he had been climbing around and going places he wasn't supposed to for years even before the outbreak, and it had certainly come in handy afterwards. From this new vantage point he could see the crowd of zombies gathering down on the street. Their moans and groans had been the constant soundtrack to Sun's life after he left the smoking remains of his hometown behind, and he was almost able to ignore them as he ran from rooftop to rooftop, using a combination of his staff and pure momentum to make the otherwise difficult jumps. He could see the town expanding in every direction around him, small houses and large malls, shops and streets all empty, all dirty and painted with graffiti and guts. A church stood out amidst the other buildings, and Sun stopped on its roof. The sounds of the zombies grew quieter as the few that had spotted him gave up the chase down in the street, and soon it would be safe enough for Sun to venture down one last time before sunset in search of food or water. His throat was dry as parchment. He considered his chances in this dried-out husk of a town and didn't like them. If he saw no change tomorrow, he'd have to go on towards another place to another scavening mission, drifting ever onwards. His bag was empty and he carried no compass.
He was pulled away from his thoughts when a voice cried out somewhere down on the ground.
"Hey, up there!" It was a male voice, not old. Loud. Sun did not dare to hope for anything, having seen more cruel than kind people. He waited before he answered, inching closer to the edge of the roof to get a good look at the speaker. Laying down on his stomach to peek out over the edge he saw a young man - his age or not much older - sticking out like a sore thumb with his blue hair amidst the grey and brown tones of the backdrop. The man was running very quicky.
The man was being chased by a mob of zombies.
He was armed with a gun of some kind, but it didn't look like any other weapon Sun had seen – it looked like it was made of scrap, rough and boxy, but Sun was too far away to tell the exact details.
Rather than to stand still and watch the poor guy being devoured, Sun he loaded his gun, counting the bullets he before he responded:
"Yeah, what?!"
"What do you think?!" the man yelled, "Help!"
Sun stood up, and the two of them looked at each other for a brief moment. Sun saw shaky legs and loss of breath. He figured his own appearance would have taken the stranger's breath away in a different way if they had met at a different time - Sun cocked his shotgun and leant forwards over the edge again.
"These things-" the man continued,
"Those things that are attracted to sounds that we are yelling about?" Sun asked. "Sure, I'll help you out!"
With that, Sun leapt down in a way that he hoped looked impressive. All he knew was that he at least landed perfectly, rolling and jumping back onto his feet. The blue-haired man caught up to him quickly, and Sun felt very heroic until he saw that he, too, was being chased by the mob now. There were about fifteen and that meant he hadn't thought the plan entirely through.
He saw the horde headed right for them. The zombies were all in varying states of decay but somehow able to run when motivated by the sight of fresh meat. He and the stranger were in an open street, so running was still an option, but he feared that they could be outrun - the stranger was in no shape to go much further. He turned towards the stranger, stopping dead in his tracks.
"Name's Sun," he said. "Are we staying and fighting? Or..."
"Neptune." The man stopped and pointed his weapon at the zombies pursuing them. "I can't take them on my own. But we can together," He looked at Sun's shotgun. "If you know how to use that thing."
"I can use it alright!" Sun smirked and fired straight into the mass of writhing bodies. The shot made one zombie bite the dust, but two more followed after. The next shot missed, but then he saw the zombie fall down anyway. Out of the corner of his eye, his saw Neptune shake from recoil.
Not wanting to be outdone (and unable to afford to spend any more bullets) Sun put the gun away and leapt into battle with his staff at the ready instead. He was confident in his abilty to bash in skulls with its ends, spinning and jumping too quickly for the creature's slow brains to handle. He was doing his best to make it look easy when he was suddenly surrounded - the mob had collapsed on him far quicker than he had thought possible, how could there be so many-
"Shit," he muttered, but nobody heard it except for him. Nobody could when the sound of a gun being fired rang out, when Neptune flashed Sun a smile and hit the next one between the eyes.
From there on out, Sun did his best to make the creatures easy targets for Neptune's gun even as his limbs ached from the day's climbing and running already. It was not the worst fight he had been in, but it was certainly in the top ten, a seemingly endless amount of claws and teeth mere inches away from him at all times. A scratch could mean infection or death, so he was thankful for the length of his staff. He strafed left, jumped right, aimed for an exposed stomach and sent its contents spilling over the asphalt. A shot went off behind him; a zombie toppled over. Occasionally, Sun did feel in danger of being shot at, but he was unharmed when the four last zombies hissed and began slinking away, stepping over their fallen as they went back into the shadows. It was unusual for them - both the numbers and the behaviour. Sun had never seen so many together before, nor had he seen zombies with the intelligence to flee. He looked himself over, seeing no scratches, no bites, only tears in his jacket.
He did not know why he was so eager to endanger himself by helping the stranger. Maybe it was seeing another teenager after all that time, or maybe it was seeing the first friendly face in three weeks. Maybe it was the way one of Neptunes bullets burrowed itself inside the brain of the zombie that had been just about to sink it's teeth into Sun's arm. Lots of possibilities.
Sun looked from the corpses to Neptune. "Teamwork, I guess," he said. "That and good ol' martial arts."
Neptune shrugged, but Sun thought he looked impressed. How couldn't he be?
"We should get moving," Neptune said, "this way."
Sun would have asked if that was all the thanks he'd get, but he decided against it. It was best to thread lightly until he knew what kind of person he was talking to. Instead, Sun put away his gun as Neptune did the same. He had met survivors who never went anywhere without weapons in their hands, and he was glad that Neptune wasn't one of them. Neptune began walking, slowly, and Sun decided to follow him, feeling that he had earned some kind of explanation for his efforts.
"So who are you?" he asked.
"I could ask you the same question," Neptune said.
"Go ahead. Info for info, right?" That was how it usually worked. Sun did his best to relax his shoulders as they walked, still tense from the battle.
"Okay. Um...." Neptune's eyes darted around the streets, looking for... something, Sun didn't know. ”How'd you get up there?”
"I climbed."
"No, how'd you get into town."
"I walked."
"Alone? That's strange."
”How so?”
”It's just that our town's been completely cut off for the past months. No communications. No people.” Neptune glanced around a corner. "But maybe, if anyone can come through, it's you. You look capable of protecting yourself."
"No wonder nobody's getting through. You have, like, twenty times more zombies around the perimeter than any other place I've been."
"And how many places have you been?"
"...Four towns by now, I think," Sun said. "Don't look at me like that, it's really not the awesome. But you mentioned 'our town'. Are there others? Live people, I mean."
"Yeah." Neptune's face became serious very suddenly.
"How many?"
"...Some forty people, I think. We have a small secured zone a little walk away. "
"In the middle of all this? Why not just skip town?"
"Our leader dosen't believe in that."
"Huh." Images flashed in Sun's mind - he imagined some drab survivor camp like the ones they had had in bad movies before the outbreak. Ragged tents by oildrum fires, a mad dictator with day-old stubble and a machine gun in his hand. But Sun also thought that if worst came to worst, he could always jump over every fence they put around him. He was willing to risk a lot to see other living people. "Wait, am I going with you to that place? Just like that?"
"I think that's fair. Thanks for the help."
"You're welcome, I guess?" Sun tried to figure out where they were going, but he had only just arrived in the town a day ago. Now knowing was scary, but he did no think that Neptune would lead him to a trap. He was too friendly for that.
"So you're doing well enough for yourself to handle another survivor? No shortage of food?"
"It's as good as it gets, I think. And we have the room, if you're able to pull your weight. Our leader," Neptune said, ”specifically asked us to recruit anyone strong enough to get to us.”
"Naturally. Reminds me, why are you out here alone?"
"Reconnaissance." Neptune pronounced the word carefully. "We usually go in pairs."
"Let me guess. You-"
"Thought I could handle it. Yeah." Neptune's face was a little red. It contrasted wierdy with the colour of his hair and clothes, but most of all it made him look alive. Sun liked alive. "I'm looking for where the walkers are most active, trying to find other survivors, looking for stuff... and testing out a personal project of mine."
"That thing?" Sun gestured towards Neptunes gun.
"Yeah." Neptune made no effort to hide his pride. "I make stuff."
"It looks pretty cool actually."
"It's more than just pretty cool. It's awesome." He paused a short moment before adding, "I'm awesome."
"I take it back," Sun joked. "It's not that cool and you're annoying."
Neptune did not have time to respond as he went silent when they came to the end of the street. Here, a barricade had been errected between the houses on either side. Broken furniture, overturned cars, metal sheets and wire prevented entry except for at a hastily constructed, but heavily fortified gate off to the side. Someone had written a sign and taped it to the barbed wire that made out most of the gate. "NO ENTRY!" it said. Below it, someone had scrawled an almost illegible message with spray paint, the only words Sun could make out being "NO CURE", "end of days" and similar, often misspelled, grafitti. None of it made much sense to him.
Neptune strolled up to the gate first, pulling a string fastened to a wooden pole. The action must have made alarms or some kind of other signal go off in the camp, because a man appeared, barely visible through the mix of construction materials, to open the gate. It screeched on its rusty hinges.
Behind the fence was the largest gathering of living people Sun had seen after the outbreak. The fenced-in area contained a rust-red building that might have been some sort of school, complete with an unused asphalt basketball court. In addition to that, there were two trailers and a beat-up, broken bus parked on the street alongside several stalled cars. Glancing in through the windows, Sun guessed that the vehicles had been slept in. The area wasn't very large; Sun could see it in its entirety from where he stood. But what he saw was a shock to his senses: men and women were walking about carrying sacks and building materials, working together to fix a breach in their barricade. Others were going to and from the school and yet others had to be inside it.
"Home sweet home," Neptune said. Sun eagerly followed him as he walked down towards the school building. His head was buzzing just from hearing the sound of humans all around him - footsteps, heartbeats, voices... "Our beacon of hope."
"You've got it nice here," Sun said, stepping over a stray bit of barbed wire. "Other survivors are huddled up in small houses or under bridges. You've got a school."
"I'm glad you like it." Neptune waved to a girl passing them by. Her hair was almost as unusual as his: white as snow. She was armed with a fencing sword instead of a gun, which Sun thought was strange, but Neptune seemed used to it. "By the way," Neptune said, "There's a thing we have to do. Just a formality, I promise. Not scary at all. Tiny thing."
Sun supressed a desire to sigh loudly. There was always a catch.
"I said you'd be able to stay with us if you wanted, but I don't really have that kind of authority to decide that..."
"So we're gonna meet the boss," Sun said.
"You got it."
The words "HIGH SCHOOL" were carved over the school's entrance. Behind the heavy double doors, the air was stale and still tinged with a faint smell of blood - or maybe that was just Sun's imagination. The electric lights had seen better days, constantly flickering and threatening to stop working entirely. Most of the doors were open, but some of them were torn off their hinges and were still lying around in the hallway. Sun saw classrooms made into improvised sleeping areas with sleeping bags and piles of cloth and blankets on the floor. Other rooms had been made useless during the outbreak - the computer lab and server room had been smashed to pieces, as had most of the library although someone had begun cleaning it up. Sun did his best to not imagine kids covering under the desks or running down the hallways, but it was hard not to. Neptune seemed to know the place very well, guiding Sun effortslessly through the facility until they arrived at a single, closed door.
"The headmaster's office," Sun said dryly, "Of course."
Neptune didn't comment. He just opened the door and gave Sun a small push. The contact, incredibly brief as it was, between Neptune's hand and Sun's back was the first time he had been touched by another human for days (if not weeks), and it startled him more than he'd care to admit. He concentrated on finding his calm again as soon as the door closed behind him, thankful that he had been allowed to keep his weapons.
Not that he thought weapons would be an awful lot of help against this boss.
Sun had, on two seperate occasions, seen people acting as leaders for their particular brand of desperate, scared survivors, and both times they had been violent, armed men. Their voices had been loud and their actions aggresive - predictable - but this man was stoic and still. He had yet to say a word, but his gaze was penetrating. He carried no weapon that Sun could see. He was wearing a well-kept suit jacket and a green shirt, not a torn t-shirt. He could have been the headmaster back when the school was still running and nobody would have batted an eye.
"My name is Ozpin," he said, leaning forward over a maghoni desk covered in spreadsheets and maps. "And you are...?"
"Sun Wukong. I was picked up by-"
"Neptune, yes." Ozpin gestured towards an empty chair in front of the desk. "I know him. Won't you take a seat?"
With that, Ozpin went back to looking over his papers. He took his time, leafing carefully through reports of some sort, leaving Sun on the brink of wondering if he had been forgotten. He sat down in the soft chair and tried to read some of the things on the table, but the print was too small and it was all upside down. Then he looked around the room for a while, noticing how much cleaner it was than the rest of the camp. Broken clocks were laid out in a pile on a filing cabinet in the corner, and Sun wondered if they were being thrown out or fixed.
"So?" Sun finally asked, aware that he was sounding impatient, "Do I get to stay?"
"It wouldn't be morally right to deny you safety in these times."
"Most people don't give a shit about morals in these times - pardon my language."
"Even so, you look like you could be an asset to our group here. Just the fact that you made it this far on your own is pretty good." He looked Sun directly in the eyes. "It's swarming out there, isn't it?"
"Yeah."
He sighed softly. "That's how the times are. You're on board. We can always use another hunter. Talk to Neptune, make sure he gets you sorted out."
With that, the conversation was over. Ozpin resumed acting like Sun wasn't in the room, and Sun didn't mind getting out of the office and its cramped atmosphere. It felt too much like detention, which was one thing Sun was glad that the apocalypse had done away with. Neptune was still lingering outside the door.
"See?" he said, "Ozpin's nice like that."
"It feels like he's running a military operation instead of a... whatever this is."
Neptune shrugged. "He used to be in the military or something. Don't know the details. Let's move while we talk, okay?"
Again Sun let Neptune guide him to whereever he wanted, though he kept observing the routes they took so that he would be able to find his way on his own later.
"He was the first to identify what was going on at the start of all this. He just... knew how to be in charge. It wasn't easy. It took a while for everyone to work together, but he's been good at predicting where to find medicine and other supplies, and he's pretty fair, so..."
"I got the impression that he's a bit... looney, you know?"
"He is," Neptune said. "You still want to stay?"
Sun considered his answer for a while. "Maybe. I like being around people. But I've also remembered that I also kind of don't like to be around people." He left the last part unsaid: I don't know if I can trust you all.
"I hope you get that sorted out," Neptune remarked.
Sun decided to change the subject, "Ozpin talked about hunters. Are we talking zombie hunters or...?"
"We have some people whose job it is to go out and find food and supplies and look for survivors. That kind of stuff. Dangerous work."
"So that's us. Dosen't sound too bad. I've been doing that already."
"Yeah," Neptune's voice was suddenly very sombre. "But wait until you see the turnover rate."
They walked in silence for the next few minutes as Neptune led Sun past more rooms and ruin. Sun noticed one door closed with an out-of-place padlock that seemed strangely new amidst all the old rubble. "What that?" he asked, but Neptune shook his head.
"Not right now. We're headed for room B23. I figure you... want to know where I sleep."
"That dosen't sound right."
"You know what I mean." Sun could have sworn that a blush had crept onto Neptune's face. "So you know where to find me. Maybe you want to sleep there too."
"Sleep with you?"
"Yeah. Wait - No!"
Sun laughed for the first time in a long while at the sight of Neptunes face. There was no doubt that he was flustered now. "Don't worry. I think we've arrived, by the way."
"Oh?" Neptune looked up at the sign on the wall and stopped. "We are."
High windows let the pale sunlight in, and Sun could see birds sitting on the worn benches outside. He wondered if it got cold in the winter. It certainly looked that way when the room were mostly empty and the floor was mostly bare save for a few improvised sleeping spaces. The desks had all been pushed up against the walls to make space for bags and beds. Nobody was there except for the two of them.
"Why are so many people sleeping in here?" Sun asked, staring out at all the things on the floor. "There are so many empty rooms."
"I guess it feels safer than being alone," Neptune answered, sauntering over to his bed. He had secured a corner for himself on the far side of the room. A sleeping bag and a blanket made up a nest beneath a window and a few personal belongings - a bag, a few tools and some clothing - were stashed on the windowsill. And then there were the books, scattered about but obviously in some kind of system that Sun just hadn't figured out yer. Nobody else were in the room although Sun could imagine how crowded it would be at night. Neptune sat down on his sleeping bag, but Sun was content with standing, leaning against the blackboard.
"If you don't mind, I'm going to find a more quiet place to sleep." Sun crossed his arms.
"Go ahead. Now you know where to find me." Neptune grabbed his blanket and threw it at Sun without warning. Sun caught it, but was left staring at the cloth in his hands. "Take this," Neptune said.
"...You're just going to give it to me?" The gesture was utterly strange to Sun - there was no way blankets weren't valuable.
"You can give it back to me once you find somethig to keep yourself warm with." Neptune laid his head back when a sunbeam shone through the window, and Sun figured he was soaking in the warmth. The action made Sun stare at Neptune's jawline and the way his eyelashes fluttered when he closed his eyes - but Sun tore his eyes away and forced his mind back on track.
"What's going to happen tomorrow?" he asked.
"I'm in good shape," Neptune said without opening his eyes. "I'm probably going out again. But we can still hang out. Kind of."
"I'd like to have a look around tomorrow," Sun said. "Maybe we'll run into each other."
"If you're going to look around, I suggest you start tonight down at the cafeteria... Or whatever's left of it. The rest of us have gotten our daily rations already, but you should be able to get something if you mention Ozpin is okay with it. Look for a woman named Peach."
"Got it." The thought of food made Sun's stomach growl, and he was almost at the door before he turned around. "Thanks, Neptune."
Neptune looked at Sun and gave him a friendly smile. "See you around."
-
When night came, Sun had a full stomach and a safe place to sleep.
The only real problem he had at the moment was the bad feeling in his stomach still telling him that something was wrong.
He pulled the blanket tighter around himself and listened to the distant sounds of people shuffeling down the halls. He had found a small, unused room that might once have been a secretary's office or some kind of archive, but now there were no furniture but an old cabinet in the corner. He wouldn't have been able to sleep well in one of the other crowded rooms - the fear of zombies had a lot to do with the fear of other people, he realized. Even though it was hardly a soft bed he had found, he was better off than he had been in a long while. He had a source of food. Safety. People, and one person in particular who seemed interested in being friends or... something.
Sun decided that he could at least enjoy it for as long as it lasted.