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It’s cold on the rooftop overlooking the spill of buildings that were once a thriving metropolis. The sharp night air cuts straight through the material of the sweatshirt Rintarou had pulled on blindly in the dark of the bedroom, and he pulls his hands up inside the cuffs and wraps his arms around his torso, shivering. As his eyes adapt to the minimal light from the moon and the stars above him, he carefully shuffles forward until he reaches the edge of the rooftop. Then he closes his eyes, tilts his head to the sky, and takes a deep breath.
The air cuts down his throat shockingly, leaving icy trails down his trachea. It fills him in a way that makes him feel almost lithe, like it could slowly lift him until his toes brush the concrete of the roof. It’s disorientating. Opening his eyes, he looks at the sky and exhales slowly, watching his breath rise and unfurl into the darkness.
Behind his dissipating breath, the stars twinkle. He holds his breath until nothing’s obscuring the millions of pinpricks in the black blanket of night until his chest feels tight and he lets out a heavy exhale and gasps for air that once again prickles the back of his neck and lungs.
When his breath evens out, Rintarou takes the last few steps to the edge of the building, and lowers himself carefully, swinging his legs over the edge and leaning back on his hands.
His cheeks begin to sting from the cold, but he doesn’t mind because at least it means he’s awake and he’s alive. Which is a good thing. Or so he’s been told.
The only good thing that has come from everything that has happened, is how clear the stars are. It’s not a fair trade, but it’s a considerable reparation. In his opinion, at least.
Rintarou had lived most of his childhood in the city and by the time he moved to the countryside at the age of fifteen, he’d lost his childish wonder at the world and looked ahead at a future that now will never come to pass, rather than up, so never really noticed the stars. He tilts his head back again now and watches them flicker and dance across the sprawl of infinity. Some seem to meld together, he watches as more of them blink and then seemingly disappear. Kiyoomi had tried once to describe the life cycle of stars once, even pointing out constellations to him, but Rintarou grew impatient and found it boring. He found it far more fascinating to not understand because it let him hold onto some magic.
Ignorance is bliss sometimes.
He finds comfort in watching them, in not understanding them, in the mysteries the universe still holds, in how small he feels beneath them, how large that makes the universe. Maybe, out there, there’s a version of himself looking ahead.
“Rin?”
Rintarou twitches at the voice—he wasn’t expecting anyone else to be out here. This tends to be his spot, his hideaway when the earth becomes too much, when the nightmares become too much: nightmares of people lost, nightmares of the things he’s seen, nightmares of things he’s had to do.
The worst ones are about the people he’s had to kill—not people, he chastises himself, he’s still slipping up on this point despite all this time—monsters with human faces. He hasn’t killed them because they weren’t alive. What’s already dead can’t die again.
He turns, and it takes him a moment to distinguish the shape as it shuffles slowly towards him.
“Yeah,” Rintarou replies and feels his chest relax when he sees it’s Osamu, he doesn’t think he could put up with Atsumu right now, and he’s too tired to listen to Kiyoomi philosophise, “just me.”
Osamu’s beside him, something bundled in his arms that he drops on top of Rintarou—a blanket—before cautiously lowering himself onto the edge beside Rintarou. A fall from this height would kill them—if the fall itself didn’t, it would cripple them enough that they’d have to be left behind for the zombies.
Rintarou unfolds the blanket, laying it over his lap, tucking part of it under his leg, and then holding up the other edge to Osamu when he’s settled. They sit in silence for a while, and Rintarou fights the urge to shuffle closer to the heat that’s radiating from Osamu. He seems to always run warm where Suna runs cold. He doesn’t. Instead, he shoves his hands into the pockets of his sweatpants. He feels something in his left pocket, and he soon realises it’s a coin. His fingers begin to toy with it, running a finger over the face of it and focusing on the way the cool metal begins to warm as he turns it over, trying to remember what kind it might have been—all of this to stop himself from reaching out to Osamu. Though he would be so warm.
Rintarou doesn’t know how long they sit like this, time has become pretty inconsequential these days. What’s a second or a minute or an hour or a year when nothing really changes, when each second or a minute or an hour or a year will be the same as the last? Time has blended into one and yet constantly becomes shorter.
“Which one was it?” Osamu asks gently, peering over at Rintarou, their arms brushing gently as he shifts. It’s clear he wasn’t sure if he should ask.
Rintarou opens his mouth but the sound that comes out is small and a little fractured and doesn’t really deserve the name. He closes his mouth and takes a breath in through his nose, long and deep like Kiyoomi always instructs, and out through the mouth.
“Ah,” Osamu says, turning away to look back at what was once the bustling city, but is now nothing but an empty husk and a gruesome reminder of what once was.
“That one,” Osamu says as if he knows, but then again, maybe he does. He’s gotten to know Rintarou better than he sometimes knows himself in the past two years—or at least Kiyoomi says it's been two years, he’s the only one of them that’s bothered to keep count.
“I’m sorry,” Osamu says and repositions himself again, turning back to Rintarou with a sad face that, once upon a time, would have been worrying to him—now is almost normal. “I really am—”
“I don’t get,” Rintarou interrupts him, he’s heard this speech a hundred times from many people in various degrees of authenticity, and it’s always annoyed him. “Why do people apologise? I know it’s what’s done, but it’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault. You can’t stop the nightmares, just like I can't. Slapping a ‘sorry’ on top does nothing to fix it, anything. Just makes it worse. ‘I’m sorry,’ it’s so… empty. Useless.”
There’s a deep silence when he stops speaking. Very few animals scurry about in the underbrush anymore. There’s no electrical buzzing, no cars, certainly no voices or laughs. Well, sometimes there are. Usually, they’re followed by screams. Rintarou hates the unnatural silence but it’s the better of two evils, he supposes.
“I didn’t…” Rintarou starts now, suddenly feeling guilty that he’d snapped at Osamu of all people. it’s not his fault, he’s just trying to help like he always is, “If I offended you, I didn’t mean it, I’m just…”
“Tired?” Osamu offers in a voice that’s nothing but kind.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
Rintarou looks over at Osamu. He’s changed a lot, but in some ways, not at all. Osamu was always steady and solid, but he was also always impetuous and hot-headed. The impetuousness has stayed, though changed, adapted to their situation. What was once whim has become quick-thinking, sharp senses attuned and ready to change direction at any moment. It has saved Rintarou’s own life more than a few times. The hot-headedness is probably what’s mellowed the most. And at the end of it all, he’s always there as a foundation to fall back on, to keep them all grounded.
He’s changed physically too, his jaw has sharpened, as have most of his features—any last remnants of adolescent fat fallen away to unveil a strong-featured young man. His hair is longer too, only the ends are still the grey he used to dye it in high school, and it’s tied back haphazardly in a low ponytail, though his bangs hang loose around his face tonight. There’s more of a down-turn to his mouth than there used to be, like lingering sadness that never quite leaves and must make itself known, even if he doesn’t realise it. What they used to refer to as his ‘sleepy, dopey,’ eyes are now just tired, premature lines barely noticeable, wrinkling the outer corners. And there’s always a dark dusting of stubble that sometimes grows into an almost-beard when supplies run low.
He was always strong, fit—years of volleyball will do that—but he’s filled out now, shoulders broad from the exercises he insisted on since all of this began, and the supply runs where he always stubbornly insisted on carrying more than everyone else. Even Rintarou used to see how he struggled. One night, under the thick coat of darkness in a locked and roughly boarded second-floor room, as the monsters groaned and people screamed and screamed and then fell silent outside, Osamu told him the reason why.
“I want to make sure that, if I die, I don’t have any regrets. That I did as much as I could to help everyone else survive. I don’t care about beating Atsumu in how much we bring back, I just want… want to make sure that I die happy. And if straining under an extra bag of rice means everyone is fed well, then I think I can.”
Rintarou had stared at the black that engulfed them, where he knew Osamu was only by the sound of his voice and the heat emanating from him.
“That’s careless,” he’d said, and when Osamu made an affronted sound as if to continue, Rintarou cut him off. “What if you pull something? What if any number of things that could be prevented happen? Maybe you’d die happy, but we’d be the ones stuck with regret and guilt.”
Rintarou had turned over, expecting that to be it, but Osamu’s voice drifted out small and a little broken.
“Sometimes, we’ve got to be selfish.”
He was lucky, Rintarou still thinks, that he didn’t injure his back or fall under the excessive weight and snap an ankle. At the time, Rintarou had wanted to argue that there’s a time and a place for selfishness, that slowly sacrificing yourself for the sake of others isn’t the right type of selfishness. But then, he thought, what is?
Is it throwing someone, quite literally, to zombies to save yourself? Is that the right kind of selfish? Is it stealing food from people you don’t know because you care more about yourself and your friends? Is that the right kind of selfish?
Is it finding moments of happiness between all the moments of unequivocal awfulness? Is that the right kind of selfish?
Because, right now, there’s a peace that’s settled in Rintarou’s body as he sits aware that Osamu is right beside him, and it makes him want to reach out. It makes him want to smile.
“What are you thinking about?” Osamu’s voice breaks him out of his reverie, and he runs a finger over the coin again before pulling it out and trying to look at it. A euro. The minimal light reflected on it blinks up at him as he remembers finding it. He remembers picking it up among debris in a worn-down mall and remembers all his dreams of travelling the world one day. Then slipped it in his pocket because that’s what desperate people do; hope. And this was a hope to hold onto, that one day he might still get the chance.
“You,” he answers. He feels Osamu’s eyes on him and turns the coin over in his fingers.
“Oh?” Osamu asks as Rintarou balances the coin on the thumb of his right hand, then flicks it into the air gently and catches it in his left. He leaves Osamu’s question unanswered between them for a moment longer, the stillness of the night catching and hanging it between them and the stars. He carefully balances the coin on his thumb again.
“I’ve noticed myself laughing and smiling more lately—" Rintarou says and flips the coin—it drifts a little high and forward, his body automatically bending forward to catch it, and Osamu’s hand is across his stomach, securing him without hesitation. Rintarou catches the coin easily and Osamu’s hand retracts, “—when Atsumu does something stupid, when Kiyoomi is unreasonably grumpy… when I’m with you—”
His fingers slowly unfurl and he squints down at the coin.
Heads.
“—and then I catch myself and all I can think of is, “How can I?” How can I be happy when there’s all this… horror and death happening—”
“You don’t know that.”
“It’s more likely than not.”
Osamu pauses and sighs, his shoulders slumping so he looks almost small. Tiny in the grand scheme of things. Backdropped by endless space and stars blinking in and out of life behind him. A constant cycle of death.
“Things are getting better, Rin,” he says after so many lifetimes, “we’ve seen it. We don’t need to study medicine to see it.”
Osamu’s right, as he usually is when Rintarou gets like this. They’ve seen the proof that he’s right: the way the animated corpses seem to give up, how a lot of them have rotted into almost nothing—like there’s an expiration date on the virus that’s caused it—they’re slowly crumbling in on themselves, there’s less as they go on supply runs, there are fewer screams in the dark. It’s getting… better.
“Yeah,” Rintarou says and feels something in his chest pull, “and I know I should feel happy about this and that it’s okay to, but I… I’ve done some horrible things, ‘Samu. I know, I know, I know they were things I had to do to live, for all of us to live and I’m… I’m just so happy to be alive. But… is it bad that there’s a little part of me that takes pleasure in all of this because the stars are so fucking pretty and I don’t know if we’d have ever been this close if it wasn’t for this and I just… I don’t really know anymore and I get so tired of the guilt. There’s so much guilt and I want to just be selfish and ask if I can kiss you.”
Maybe, somewhere in what’s left of the world, someone’s dying, but right here, Rintarou’s falling in love.
“You… you want to kiss me?” Osamu says it so softly he almost sounds like the carefree teenage boy Rintarou first met five years ago.
“Yeah,” Rintarou says in disbelief at even himself for finally saying it and his face doesn’t quite know whether to smile or frown. “Yeah, I do.”
Osamu looks out at the city, and Rintarou can see the silhouette of his tongue darting out to lick his lips, and then he turns back to him. “Are... are you going to?”
Rintarou wants, more than anything, for life to be normal so he can say yes and he can kiss Osamu and he can fall in love normally and live a normal life. But he can’t. Too much has happened to ever be ‘normal’ by the definition they were once used to. And there’s still too much guilt.
“No,” he answers and looks back out at the city and considers how it must feel to fall, how thrilling it might be right up until the end. He already feels like he’s falling.
“No,” he says again, but lets his head fall onto Osamu’s shoulder and his body pull itself closer to him, “but… when I feel like I can without the guilt, can I kiss you?"
Rintarou feels the vibrations of Osamu’s laughter rattle through his body, and he has to hold onto the blanket to stop it from sliding off their laps. Then Osamu’s arm is snaking around his waist, warm and steady, and pulling him in closer as he drops his head into Rintarou’s hair.
“Yes,” he says and it’s muffled against Rintarou’s hair, but it's still so warm and strong and comforting, “and I’ll wait as long as you need.”