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When night falls, the city goes black and the only thing Koutarou can hear is the sound of his partner breathing in and out. Soft, like a secret, like a promise. Tetsurou is flint and knives in the daylight, but beneath the waning moon, his sharp edges give way to something gentler. More subdued—like old times, almost, like before the dead woke and the cities burned to ash and the sun set on everything they once knew.
You have to find something to hold onto, Oikawa told him once. Or someone, neither of them said. But they both knew. Oikawa’s eyes had glanced at Iwaizumi, slumbering two feet away, the hard creases of his face smoothed out for one fleeting moment of peace. With Tetsurou warm beside him, a presence he’s come to know as well as his own, Koutarou thinks he understands that tender look in Oikawa’s eyes, like Iwaizumi and he were the only ones left in the whole of Japan, in the world.
Tetsurou’s voice comes butterfly-soft in Koutarou’s ears—a memory, bittersweet now, like everything in these days.
You and me against the world, he had said, and pressed a stolen ring pop in Koutarou’s hands. The taste was unfamiliar, sugar a distant memory, but sweeter still had been the laughter on his lips, the fond look in Tetsurou’s eyes, the way they’d looked and looked at each other like it would be enough to just stare for forever. And when they collided at last, two sparks lost of their fires, Koutarou forgot the cold. Forgot the zombies, forgot the world, the promise of death following at their heels.
The ring pop is gone now—the memory of its cherry bite gone, too. But Tetsurou’s hand is still here, sure as ever. The two of them against the wide, wide world.
Beside him, Tetsurou shivers—from the chill in the air or nightmares, both as ever-present as the other, Koutarou doesn’t know. Won’t ask. Just loops an arm around him, holds him tight. Everyone left behind is haunted by something. They’re all only half of who they used to be, but between him and Tetsurou, Koutarou thinks, they must make a whole human being.
Between the here and there they’ve lost friends, family, pieces of themselves to the victory of ash and dust. Nothing spared. But in the darkness, it’s almost like they’re seventeen and home again—Tokyo Tower rising like a premonition in the distance, the squeak of shoes against varnished gym floor instead of the squelch of brain and bone against baseball bat.
But then, Koutarou thinks, home hasn’t been a place for a long time. These days, home is shaped like a warm hand in his, a shoulder to lean on, a back to press against when the dead come and come and do not stop. It is tender moments shared in the dark, swift glances and gentle hands; one look that leaves him more breathless than any zombie attack.
They have both lost and lost and lost, but still Koutarou looks forward to the way the sunrise reflects off Tetsurou’s eyes in the morning, to the way tomorrow slots perfectly between their beating hearts. There is no end in sight to this, but Koutarou keeps breathing on anyway.
The sun sets and rises again and again, in slow but sure succession. Tetsurou’s breath rises and falls, evens out in the embrace of Koutarou’s arms. Koutarou looks towards the east, hope flickering in the hollow cavity of his chest, filling his lungs with a new light. His heart beats slow, matches pace with the sleeping man beside him.
On the horizon, the promise of another sunrise approaches. Koutarou smiles, and breathes in.