Work Text:
The fire consumes Sotoba, painting the mountain in a vivid and passionate orange. It devours all, viciously, indiscriminately, leaving nothing but a charred carcass in its wake. Toshio cannot help but think that –without the ever enclosing, asphyxiating smoke, and the ashes falling in a parody of snow– the scent of burning fir is a rather delightful perfume. Toshio hums softly to himself, cigarette dangling from his lips, trapped lightly between clenched teeth, an imperceptible smirk twisting his features. The shiki blood on him begins to dry on his skin as it turns from rich red to dull brown, he can feel it breaking into flakes when his expression changes.
He barks orders and tries to keep a tally of survivors, to get everyone who still has a pulse out of the raging inferno's clutches safely. And once he's riding the car to get himself out of this place, he feels lighter than he's ever felt in his life. He keeps this thought to himself.
It's been a year since 'the incident', 'the tragedy', 'the massacre', whatever; it's been a year since then. A year since the first bodies were found, a year since his childhood home was utterly and irreparably destroyed from the inside out due to unnatural individuals. And Toshio... Toshio has never felt better, he feels free. The guilt for feeling so well with everything that occurred, everything he did, and everyone else had to do, rears its ugly head sporadically, usually in the mornings and then late evenings, but it's only an afterthought. He's considered that maybe he's still in shock or denial, one random event away from a full blown breakdown.
Nonetheless, he got a job in a large hospital in the city, far away from Sotoba. He blends in, he does not stand out, and his relationships with his coworkers are good, if not shallow. Sadly, he cannot smoke at work as freely as he could back in Sotoba, if at all; but he guesses that's fine, small price to pay for his anonymity. He should cut back on the nicotine anyway.
Days blur together, and he stares at the ceiling, arms cushioning his head during his free time. Most of the time his mind is peacefully blank, tobacco wafting into every nook and cranny of his apartment, not a care in the world weighs him down. Other days, bad days, he thinks of Kyouko. Of her red-black eyes and the terror that twisted her face, he thinks of her when she walked in the sun, short dress lightly swaying with her. And Natsuno's cold gaze pierces him. 'We do what we do, because we must. Because no one else will take a stand'. Natsuno never explicitly said anything like that, and their partnership begun after Kyouko; but it was implied, and the unspoken words of a dead teenager should not be as reassuring as they are. Toshio was not alone then, and he isn't now, even if Natsuno is gone.
Sometimes it's Ritsuko who plagues him. She comes after a particularly joyful nurse crosses his path, her sunny demeanor and bubbly optimism at the forefront first. Then, it's her in the passenger seat of his car, with her labored breathing, asking, begging, leaving him to save the village she loved so much. He's grateful he never saw her corpse, he didn't even found out whether she came back or not. She died, her smile lost forever, and that's all that Toshio cares about.
When Kyouko shows up, Natsuno calms him. But when it is Ritsuko behind his eyelids, it's Seishin's turn to invade his thoughts, and he's not as comforting as he once was.
Seishin's betrayal was both expected, and unexpected. Since the moment his childhood friend saw him covered in blood he knew, at least unconsciously, that the other wasn't going to stand beside him anymore. He didn't expect, however, that the monk would actually aid a Kirishiki escape.
It's on the real bad days where he truly worries about Seishin and that Kirishiki girl. He doesn't want to know the answer, uncertainty is better than certainty, because certainty would mean, that in the end, it was all for naught. Certainty would mean that the fight they fought was pointless if they got away. Toshio basks in his uncertainty, he understands better the attitude the other villagers had taken then. Ignorance is bliss.
'Vampire', 'undead', 'risen', 'shiki', 'jinrou', the term used does not matter. Kyouko, Natsuno, Ritsuko, Seishin. It is all the same. They haunt him regardless of his desire to be alone. In the aftermath of the fire, Toshio consumes cigarette after cigarette, hoping for the ghosts to evaporate along the embers and scatter in the wind with the smoke.
The breakdown he expected to suffer at the dawn of every new day does not come. And he moves on with his life eventually.
It's no surprise when the cancer is discovered. It is all over his throat, on his lungs, it is everywhere it could possibly be. He wonders curiously, morbidly, if they were to cut him open with a scalpel, would he be pink-red? Or charcoal black?
The hospital he is admitted into isn't one he worked at. He hates hospitals, and doctors, he always knew this, but he trudged on in that environment all his life, so he was accustomed. And in a weird way the familiar environment and stench of antiseptic makes his restlessness for not being able to move much anymore stay in check.
One day, he gets bored and he finds himself tapping a tune with his fingers that he does not recognize at first. And when he does, everything goes quiet except for his screeching thoughts. His world halts, it tilts on its own axis so abruptly and out of nowhere that he grabs onto the rail of his hospital bed until his knuckles turn white, he holds it as if for dear life. He thinks that he can hear his heart monitor going haywire, but he can't focus on that. Instead all he hears are men whistling and singing inside a dark pipe, as they drive wooden stakes through former friends, neighbors, family members even.
He realizes ruefully, that it is on his deathbed where he finally breaks apart at the seams. When his voice is nothing more than a raspy pathetic excuse of a whisper, and breathing hurts like a thousand ice cold needles have been embedded into his lungs, he comes to the conclusion, that he's been burning all this time, the fire never extinguished has consumed him from the inside out, leaving nothing but a charred carcass in its wake. His body may have left that accursed village, but his mind remained trapped in it for years. The tears he finally sheds do nothing to soothe him.