Chapter Text
“Damnit!” Hajime gritted his teeth as he rounded the corner.
The creature has been chasing him for the past fifteen minutes and every time he thought he had shaken it off, it was right there, snarling at him in the foreign language. He panted, looking behind his shoulder. The creature was nowhere in sight, but Hajime knew better.
He instantly started to regret going out of his hiding place today. But he was running out of bullets for his rifle and if he wanted to stay alive, he needed them. This trip was a total fail though because he hasn’t even gotten the bullets and was now being chased by one of the aliens. He lets out a heavy sigh as he rounds another corner.
He thinks back a few months back when life wasn’t like this. He went to school, played volleyball and spent time with his family and friends. He laughed at stupid jokes and got annoyed when his parents wanted him to help with the chores. No one could do something like that now.
Hajime turns left to an alleyway. This isn’t the route to his place but he knows that. He’s doing this to throw the creature following him off. There is a fence at the end of the alleyway. Great. But there is also a dumpster. Hajime reaches out and grabs the wires with his fingers.
He climbs up while frantically trying to grab onto the wire with his shoes too. He doesn’t hear anything behind him and is glad about it. He grabs onto the sharp wires on the top and hisses from pain. There’s no time to sulk over his injured hands. He pulls himself up and falls into the dumpster that was on the other side of the wire fence. Thank the gods or whatever. He may stink like months old trash but at least he won’t break his bones.
He peeks up from the mass of black trash bags and lets out a satisfying groan of relief. Then the smell of a few months old trash registers in his brain and he gags. He needs to get out of here quickly. He grabs at the dumpster wall only to squirm his face in pain when he remembers his slashed palms. His gloves apparently didn’t help.
Hajime hears something scrambling around the corner and then meets the big glassy black eyes of the extraterrestrial creature. He ignores the stinging pain in his palms as he pulls himself up and swings his trash juice soaked legs over the dumpster wall.
The alien is getting closer and closer to the wire fence as Hajime picks himself up from the ground and starts running. The alien reaches the fence and scrapes at it with its sharp nails. That should keep it busy for a while, Hajime thinks.
A while, Hajime discovers, lasts approximately two minutes. He curses a bit under his breath and turns to round another corner. There is an alleyway that leads straight to the street he was on before turning to the one with the fence and a dumpster. He lets out a relieved sigh as he turns that way.
His relief doesn’t last very long as he hears the alien behind him in a flash. How did it know he’d come back to this street. Hajime pants as he looks around to find ways to escape. Unfortunately, he hasn’t been in this part of the city yet, which sucks for him now. At least he’s getting chased by only one alien and not multiple.
His hands are starting to sweat which only adds to the pain on his slashed palms. He has to get this treated as soon as possible. He doesn’t think the wounds will leave a scar. They look too shallow for that. But that doesn’t mean they don’t hurt.
He turns left into another street and immediately runs into the first alleyway he spots. Although he doesn’t know this part of the city that well, he sure is thankful he hasn’t run into a dead-end yet.
Suddenly he hears a few gunshots and people shouting in the background. He stops for a moment, considering, then shakes his head. He shouldn’t just run in the direction of other people. He doesn’t know them.
The gunshots stop and there’s more shouting. But Hajime doesn’t care. He keeps running. His palms are really starting to sting but he doesn’t care. He just wants to get home. Well if he can call that basement he lives in, home.
He took quite a long detour to shake off the alien. So now it will take him twice as long to get home. He stops for a while leaning his shoulder against the wall. He breathes heavily but tries to inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth to keep him from getting the sharp pain in his side. The pain he’s focused on though is his palms. Damn, they sting. He wipes them off on his trousers. Bad idea.
He hisses in pain again. He needs to clean this off quickly. Looking around, to make sure he’s safe he peels himself off the wall and starts running again. He should be around halfway there now.
Hajime is very glad he managed to get home in daylight. He walks around the store his grandfather used to work at and goes behind it. There he, as gently as possible, to not attract any attention to himself, slides a piece of metal away from the back of the store. The front door has been blocked by the building that once stood opposite of it, but collapsed. He didn’t really mind though, at least nobody thought it was being lived in.
After he was inside, he slid the metal back, again as gently as possible. He took the flashlight from his belt and turned on the light. Then he walked over to the freezer behind the corner and pushed it in front of the metal wall. It wasn’t the best blockade but it did the trick. He never had to deal with intruders until now anyway.
Hajime took the flashlight from the floor and walked towards the door at the end of the hall. He took a key from the pouch on his belt and unlocked it. After he successfully got on the other side of the door and locked it in, he made his way down the stairs.
The place he lived in wasn’t much but Hajime made it his home these past few months. When he got down and turned on the light there was a cat running his way. The cat rubbed against his calves as he chuckled.
“Hey Maki,” Hajime greeted the cat.
Maki jumped onto his leg, raising her head, demanding to be petted. Hajime would have fulfilled her request if it weren’t for his bloody palms. He sighed and shook his head at the cat. She seemed a little disappointed but got off his leg anyway.
Hajime loved his cat. He had gotten her on his seventeenth birthday. And when it came to leaving the house after the aliens attacked, he thought he lost her too until his bag started moving around. Hajime, already crying from the loss of his family, started crying even harder after hugging her to his chest.
Maki has kept him company ever since. He found a lot of cat and dog food in the shop, and his cat wasn’t exactly very picky, so she wasn’t very hard to manage. The boy is actually very glad his cat followed him here. At least he doesn’t have to go through this alone. It doesn’t really compare to a human company, but it’s better than nothing.
Hajime went straight for the water barrels. He took his clothes off and with a towel, he dipped into the water, cleaned himself off the trashy smell. Once he was done cleaning off he cleaned his clothes in the remaining water and put on some new ones
As Hajime started walking, looking for the first aid kit, his cat followed him. He threw his wet clothes on the chairs surrounding his table and looked around for the first aid kit.
He sat down at the table opening it and pulling out the disinfectant. He gritted his teeth as the alcohol burned in the wound. He quickly wiped both of his palms with it and tossed the bloody cotton ball aside. He took out some bandages from the kit and wrapped them around his palms.
Maki was watching the whole process from under the table with her big green eyes. She patted her leg against his shin and meowed. Hajime, with a sigh, scooped her up into his lap and ran his bandaged up palms through her dark fur.
“Today was a really shitty day,” he confided in the cat. She purred under his fingers. Hajime smiled. He closed his eyes and just leaned back in his chair. Most of his days have been like this. Sulking around the shop basement and spending time with his cat. It was not like he could do much else anyway.
He glanced at the jacket on the chair next to him. There were big letters ‘AEAC’ on it and under them in small letters ‘Alien Elimination & Abduction Company’. Under that were two velcro strips with badges, one saying ‘cohort 2’ and the other, under the first one saying ‘Sawamura Daichi’.
Hajime had no idea who this was or what the alien company was, but he found a well-equipped jacket and thought to himself why not take it. As for the name, he didn’t bother to take it off. No one is going to need the jacket or the name badge anyway.
He put the jacket away and went to get his cat some food. He took a random can of soup for himself and while he was heating it up, he put some food in Maki’s bowl. Then he sat down to eat and told Maki about his day. The cat seemed more interested in her food but Hajime knew that. It just felt good to tell someone about everything. Even if the someone was a cat.
After Hajime checked his food supply, weapons and the basement’s security, he went to bed. He hoped it would be a silent night. Lately, he had trouble falling asleep with all the gunshots and alien screeching going on outside.
Maki jumped on the bed and cuddled up next to his chest. Hajime smiled. He pulled the cat closer to him and closed his eyes.
He had the same dream almost every night. He’s in his room, reading a manga he bought recently. His parents are in the living room watching the news on the TV. It’s quiet, only the sound of the news reporter echoing through the house. Hajime thinks it’s strange as his parents usually have some remarks about something they see on the news.
“Hajime!” his mom suddenly calls.
He smashes his face into a pillow and lets out a grunt. He puts the manga to the side and rolls out of his bed. He walks through his door, into the hallway and stops at the living room’s door frame. His mom looks at him with a horrified look in her eyes.
“What’s-” Hajime starts before his dad takes his arm and pulls him to the couch.
He looks at both of them. Why are they acting so strangely? Then he looks at the TV and all the blood that was in his face evaporates.
The reporter nervously explains the situation, which sounds like something straight from a sci-fi movie. An alien invasion all over the world, completed with pictures of UFOs and aliens at which Hajime twists his face.
His mother grabs his hand and looks at him: “Hajime.”
“We need to pack,” his dad takes the lead.
Hajime doesn’t really remember anything that happened after that. He remembers some noises around him, probably his parents moving things around, but the most prominent noise is the ringing in his ear. Then, he passes out.
The floor is cold, he thinks. He opens his eyes, looks around and doesn’t see anything. He moves to get up but feels a flashlight in his hands. He turns the light on. He’s in the basement for some reason.
“Mom? Dad?” he asks.
Nothing. Just silence. He goes to open the door that leads upstairs. It doesn’t want to open, but it isn’t locked either. Hajime walks behind a few steps and throws his whole body onto the door. It budges a little, but not enough. He curses.
There is an axe placed against the wall, next to the door. He takes it and swings it at the upper part of the door. After a while, he breaks it just enough to get through. He swallows the saliva building up in his throat and carefully goes up the stairs.
The next part of this memory is Hajime’s worst so far. Up the stairs in the hallway lie his parents, unconscious and covered in blood. Hajime screams. The tears start falling down his cheeks a second later and they burn. They sting.
He crouches down to take his mother’s dead body into his arms and just cries. He cries until he can’t breathe, until his throat hurts, he cries until he can’t see anything, because his vision is blurred by tears. He grabs onto his mother with all he has left and just lets all the pain out.
He doesn’t know how long he stays like this but he picks his head up when he has no more tears left to cry and his vocal cords don’t work. He looks at his mother’s bloody face and wonders why. Why did his parents have to die?
As he hugs his mother one last time he hears a paper crunch in the pocket of his hoodie. He slowly puts the body on the floor and reaches for the paper. It’s an envelope with his name in his mother’s writing on it. He lets out a dry sob as he opens it.
He clutches the letter with the last bits of strength he has. After reading it he crunches it up and stuffs it in his hoodie pocket. He wipes at his eyes, stands up and takes his bags and leaves through the back door.
Hajime wakes up in cold sweat with a sharp inhale. There’s an offended meow by his side but he can only focus on his breathing. He wipes a hand down his face. Every single dream. Every single dream he has is about this.
He reaches under his pillow and pulls out the envelope with his name on it. He doesn’t really want to read it right now, or ever again, but he skims his fingers over his name and sighs. Every day he keeps forgetting more and more of the letter, but he promised himself he wouldn’t read it again. He needs to stay alive, not cry about his dead parents. That was months ago.
He looks to his side at Maki. She shoots him an offending look and curls up into a ball. Hajime swipes his hand over her fur. I can’t die, I have a cat, he thinks. It’s kind of sad, he thinks, that his cat is the only reason he tries, but it’s better than none.
Most of Hajime’s days are like this: he wakes up, feeds his cat, sulks around his basement apartment, feeds his cat and goes to sleep. On some rare days, he goes out just to get some fresh air, or to get more supplies he needs. Occasionally he gets chased by an alien but otherwise, everything stays the same. Today was an exception, however.
Hajime stands in front of his metal wall passage and has this weird feeling. He turns around. Scanning everything around him, he can’t shake off that feeling. The feeling of being watched.
Maybe he should just go walk around, and come back when he shakes the feeling off. It’s better than risking Maki’s and his life. But it’s already getting dark. Hajime slides against the metal wall and sits on the floor. Few minutes won’t hurt.
Hajime sits there for half an hour before deciding he’s probably just going crazy and slides the metal wall open. He waits for a while, checking for any suspicious sounds, but when he hears none, he just slides the metal wall back and gets back to his basement.
He can’t shake the feeling off when he greets Maki. He can’t shake the feeling off when he makes her food. He can’t shake the feeling off when he checks his supplies and he can’t shake the feeling off when he goes to bed. Even Maki seems a bit tenser next to him.
This feeling stays with him for the next few days. He never notices anything suspicious around him, but if this feeling is staying with him, it can’t just be anything right?
But Hajime lives his life. He sulks around his basement with Maki and occasionally goes outside to gather supplies. However two weeks after his weird feeling of being watched began, everything goes wrong.
He steps out of the place where he got a new first aid kit and there they are. Three full-grown aliens in the distance, looking straight at him.
“Shit,” Hajime says as he starts running.
The aliens unsurprisingly start following him. Hajime grabs his rifle and takes the safety off. While still running he turns to the group of creatures, now screeching at him, and each other, and pulls the trigger. The rifle shoots but doesn’t hit any of the creatures. Hajime curses and picks up his pace.
He’s pretty far away from his basement place, so even if he wanted to go there he possibly couldn’t. He runs into an alleyway and immediately gets out of there and into another one. While trying to survive for the past few months he learned that the best way to throw aliens off was to spontaneously take as many twists and turns as you can.
Hajime looks behind his shoulder and although he can’t see them, the screeching sound gives them away and he fires some bullets behind him. All the creatures seem to be alive and well, much to Hajime’s dismay. He continues running.
After a few turns, Hajime is sure he can hear the aliens closer than before. He runs faster, fueled by sheer panic and then trips at the crack in the ground. He can feel the tiny rocks and sand dig into his skin, but he has no time to ponder about his skin now.
He picks himself up, scrambling to his feet and wiping the muddy residue off his face with his shirt. After his vision isn’t blurred by sand and dirt particles as much as before he runs faster than before. He can’t really see the aliens, but he grabs his rifle and shoots in the direction of the unholy screeches. He thinks one day his eardrums will burst from it.
One alien gives off something Hajime knows by now to be a painful screech, so he assumes that even if he didn’t kill any, he at least shot one. He mumbles something to himself and runs for his life.
If the dirt in his eyes wasn’t enough, his eyes started watering heavily. His vision was now a mess of tears, sand and three figures behind him. He thought of shooting at them again, but with this vision, it was probably worthless, so he kept running.
The tears helped. Hajime swiped the back of his hand over his eyes and he could see much clearer now. On the other hand, he started to feel blood running down his nose and into his panting mouth. He swallowed it and winced a bit at the taste.
Even though he could see better now, he didn’t know where he was going at all. Any open passageway there was, Hajime went there. It took him a while to realise that his eyes weren’t tearing up to get stuff out of his eyes, but he was crying. The truth was Hajime didn’t know why he was crying. The first that came to his mind was because he was going to suffer the same fate as his parents did.
He didn’t mind dying though. He thought he had nothing to live for anyway. And a cat was actually a really stupid reason to stay alive, now that he was thinking about it. But he didn’t want to die like his parents. Not under the hands of lizard-like creatures from possibly another galaxy. He shrugged his shoulders and kept moving.
All of Hajime’s fears came true when he took a turn into an alleyway and saw a wall at the end of it. He gasped. No. It couldn’t end like this. Maybe he could climb it. He wasn’t going to give up just yet.
Hajime runs full speed to the wall, only to realise there is a ladder attached to the wall. He throws his head back, lets out a big sigh, smiles and grabs the ladder. His shoulder suddenly gets lighter and he hears a clack on the ground.
The rifle fell down. Damnit. He can hear the alien screeching behind him get louder, so he just keeps climbing. Now he doesn’t even have anything to protect himself with. He quickly glances down and sees his rifle strap torn apart. With a grunt, he climbs up on the roof. He didn’t think what to do after he was on the roof of the building though.
Hajime looks around and sees other roofs, but they’re either too far away or they’re too high up for him to get there. He could always jump down from the roof. The aliens are approaching and he needs to think fast.
He runs to the edge of the roof to inspect his options for escape. There are some cars parked in front of the building and if he fell he could take less damage than falling straight to the ground. Then he spots it.
It’s a truck with a fabric cover. He has no idea what’s inside the truck, but he is sure that falling into the fabric truck cover is the best option he’s had so far. Well, in the small time frame he has anyway.
He hears the sound of something against metal rods and he guesses it’s the creatures climbing the ladder to get to the roof. Hajime quickly runs closer to the truck, and with full force jumps off the building’s roof.
The fabric breaks. Of course, Hajime has taken this into consideration when thinking about falling onto the truck’s fabric-covered roof. He even thought the fabric looked kind of unstable. What actually is in the truck, Hajime hasn’t taken into consideration.
Eggs. A whole lot of months old eggs, that have probably expired a long time ago. They also stink very badly and are sticking to every part of Hajime’s body. This is exactly the moment he wants to cry. He wants to start crying right here, in this egg-filled truck with this smell.
Hajime gags and pukes onto the egg mess around him. He takes a deep breath, but halfway through he realises that was probably a really dumb idea, so he wipes his mouth, pinches his nose and tries to get out of the egg truck.
He can still smell the fucking eggs as he runs down the road, alien screeching intensifying. He is tired and just wants to be home, sitting at his shitty table, eating shitty canned soup and looking at his shitty cat eating her shitty food, while telling her about his shitty day.
Hajime wants to give up, he really does. Who is he doing this for anyway? His cat? His parents? They’re dead anyway. Why does he even bother staying alive? He has no friends, no family, he has no one. Hajime’s eyes start watering again. Why does he bother staying alive? Each of his days is the same and it’s only a matter of time before he gets killed by aliens.
He stops.
Hajime closes his eyes and just lets himself hear the creatures getting closer. After a while, he senses a giant scaly hand grab him and push him to the floor. He looks up at the creature.
Hajime remembers seeing the alien head print quite often in his childhood. A triangular green head with big black eyes. It seemed funny actually, how people portrayed aliens. But now looking at one face to face, he realised people weren’t actually really wrong with their cartoony design.
The alien’s head is not in a triangular shape, however, the top of his head is bigger than the bottom, and it kind of gives the impression of a triangular head shape. The eyes, Hajime thinks, are spot on.
They’re big, black and glassy. They’re staring right at him, but he can’t tell what emotion they portray right now. Maybe aliens don’t even have emotions. The alien turns his head to the side and screeches at his other friend. The screeching goes back and forward and Hajime decides they’re communicating. The two aliens seem to come to an agreement before the third one chimes in with what sounds like an offended screech.
Hajime looks at him and sees a shiny liquid seep out of his shoulder. Crap, that’s probably the one he shot. The aliens communicate again for a bit and then the one holding him releases him, only for him to be pinned down by the one he shot. Hajime closes his eyes.
Bang, bang, bang!
He feels something splash his face before there is a weight on his body. He opens his eyes and sees the body of an alien on top of him. What the-
“I thought you had it there for a second, but I had to rescue you” a chipper voice announces in front of him.
Hajime tilts his head, so he can see the person slowly approaching him. They have a helmet on, with a few space-themed doodles on it. There even is an alien caricature Hajime had mentioned earlier. What the fuck. Was this person some sort of masochist?
“Are you ok?” they ask, reaching out a hand to him.
Hajime grabs the alien on top of him by the shoulders and pushes it off him. The stranger pulls their hand back after Hajime stands up on his own. Hajime notices the patches on the jacket they’re wearing and wait-
Hajime looks at the breast part of the jacket and there it is. AEAC, Alien Elimination & Abduction Company, cohort 1, Oi-
“Ah, you noticed the jacket. You have the same one right?” the stranger asks.
Hajime lifts his head: “Sorry that I took it.”
“Oh no, it’s no problem, it wouldn’t be any use to that guy anyway” they point at his jacket, where the name badge is.
“Who are you? And why did you save me?” Hajime asks, scrunching up his eyebrows.
“Straight to business, I see” the stranger chuckles and ducks their head.
They reach out for their helmet, before gently pulling it off. The first thing Hajime notices is a well kept, shiny, and thick mass of brown hair that just looks so soft. The stranger picks their head up. The second thing Hajime notices are the shiny silver star earrings dangling on their ears. Then he meets the chocolate brown eyes and he swears the breath catches in his throat.
“My name is Oikawa Tooru, I work at the AEAC and I am here to rescue you.”