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Aoi thinks that, eventually, they will all leave.
Enoshima left them first, her disappearance so sudden that there was no trace of her in the morning. It was the night after they escaped from Hope's Peak, after she led them through holes in barbed wire fences until they unearthed a place to sleep.
Breaking out of the school had been strain enough on her. For all her desperation when locked inside the school, Enoshima was borderline frantic when they found the switch to open the door.
“We don't even know what it's like out there!” she had said, and her worries became eerie prophecy when they all first saw the world outside.
(Aoi doesn't understand, even now, how things can stop being beautiful and become so horrible so quickly.)
Enoshima made them pull clothing over their faces before they ran around the perimeter of the school, taking refuge in blind spots, few and far between. She set them up beneath an overpass (in a world with so little traffic, it was practically a mausoleum) and told them not to get into cars with strange boys.
Then she said, without much emotion, “But we'll probably all die, anyway.” Aoi figures she must have been pretending to sleep that night, because she was gone before dawn.
Aoi can't blame her – not for being scared. Her heart is used to pounding, to being pushed to the limit by physical exertion, but standing in the ruins of a broken city and coughing on pollution that tastes like sulfur and blood.
They all left in the night to begin with. They all left without saying goodbye. Enoshima, then Maizono. Kuwata took off after they found their first abandoned grocery, taking with him a shelf's worth of supplies and a chair leg from the back office – funny, if disappointing because it was the only chair they had.
Togami's family would have resources for the promised son as soon as he could get home. Aoi cannot fathom why he wouldn't offer help, with all the resources in the country at his disposal.
At night, when they are not quite asleep, the tarp wrinkles beside her and Sakura murmurs:
“How can I protect those who are so far away from me?”
Aoi can't answer. Instead, she wraps both hands around Sakura's wrist and squeezes.
She has started dreaming about waking up entirely alone, not at the pool or the doughnut factory (the best kind of dream), but in a dark, polluted ocean with sharks colored the same black-white-red as the graffiti on the walls outside (WE PRAY TO DESPAIR; WE PRAY FOR DESPAIR).
She is the first awake every morning, after Sakura and sometimes Kirigiri, who rarely seems to sleep at all. Most mornings she will lie awake with her eyes closed for five, ten, fifteen minutes. For someone used to popping out of bed to greet the day, she sometimes thinks it would be nice to sleep in for a while, for more than a handful of minutes. A day, maybe, as long as there is no gunfire and the raiders don't come and wake her up unnecessarily.
She lies there until she remembers that Sakura will be waiting to train with her. It makes her pull the tarp away every morning. It's enough.
They found their current hideout three days ago. No one's stolen away since.
Naegi has said he thinks the military used it before they got there; it's been abandoned for a while, wherever those people went. And they went in a hurry, judging by what they left behind: blankets; gas masks; guns. There's no water but the grey stuff that sluices from the pipes in spurts, but enough power comes in from a hackney generator that some sort of purifier runs through a filter in the window. The air is still the filmy color and they still wear surgical masks half the time they aren't wearing gas masks, but it's better than it is outside.
Naegi and Ishimaru join them for training every morning now. The offer stands for everyone, but seizing cooperation is like trying to herd cats (an idiom Aoi thinks she only partially gets, but thinking of Naegi is a cat is reason enough to use it).
“I shall stick to guns, thank you.” Celestia smiles at them every morning and watches from her makeshift tea table. “Would you bring a deck of cards to a game of roulette?”
Aoi's temper is getting shorter. She would say something, but Sakura touches her shoulder and all the energy she might have spent on yelling goes into twenty more reps instead.
“I might,” Celes admits a few minutes later, taking aim at the target cans she has set up across the room without taking the shot, the best way she can practice while conserving noise and ammunition. “That was a lie.”
(That shouldn't be so funny, Aoi thinks, but they all start to laugh.)
Kirigiri is a fast runner, it turns out, and they end up going on salvage runs together. They need cleaner water and more food if they're going to stay in the old base much longer, so they clean out buildings in shifts and mark off on their map what's valuable and what isn't. They bring a weapon every time just in case; Aoi has only had to hit one raider the entire time, and she did not relish the fight.
One day, Aoi looks over to see nothing but Kirigiri's boots protruding from the wreckage of some businessman's desk.
“There's a radio here.”
It is old and the case is cracking, but the radio fizzles easily to life in a spray of popping static when they set it up back at camp that night.
For a long time there's nothing but silence.
“Maybe the game's over, or perhaps the genre's just changed? Looks like it's survival horror now! Ooooh, oooh, what will our heroes find now that it's dark?”
Everyone stops moving. They all remember the announcements. When Aoi moves her arm, Sakura is there to take her hand. One of them is shaking (it's Aoi; it's always her).
“It's just a radio program,” Kirigiri says slowly. “Probably a live broadcast, though it could be a recording.” She is the color of coagulating cement.
“Upupupu... What about a first person shooter? How many guns are loose in the city? These 'hopeful children' – they're just sitting ducks! Quack! Quack! Splat --”
Kirigiri turns it off.
“So it's useless.” Aoi doesn't know what she was expecting,
“No,” says Kirigiri, “we'll try again in about an hour. The signal might just be jammed.”
There's nothing from the radio later, and no one wants to leave it on long enough to hear the bear again.
Oowada and Chihiro leave in the middle of the day.
They are the first to say real goodbyes, not proclamations like Togami or the silent escapes of the others.
Chihiro has been eyeing potential wireless transmissions, looking for technology that isn't broken or blocked. People who don't wear Monobear masks and carry assault rifles. A radio tower that still functions. Even just jamming one of the radio waves might be enough to open up other channels and let communication through. It's a good idea, for all that it's dangerous.
Yamada pencils out two copies of each map for them and in between the sharp, perfectly scaled lines, everyone bands together to mark out helpful information.
“We'll be here,” Chihiro says, circling again and again their destination as if each mark will increase their chances of making it there. The pencil nearly snaps under the pressure. “I mean, if any of you need to find us or – or anything.”
It's worse, somehow, than being left in the night; the wound is rawer by daylight, watching them pack up and load Oowada's hot-wired bike up with whatever they can carry, with wires that are useless here but lifesavers elsewhere. Chihiro hugs everyone farewell with a grip worthy of any wrestler (Aoi doesn't know how one small person can embrace so tightly).
Ishimaru hands them both a mask for the road and says, “You should really wear your helmets.”
“Yeah, but I'm a delinquent.”
“I've still got my eye on you. Don't go breaking any rules just because you think you're out of my sight!”
Ishimaru's face is serious. He never falters once, not even when the tears start beading on his cheeks, or when Oowada starts to laugh, or when the bike rips down the sidewalk with the laugh still booming on the wind.
When they're gone, Aoi sags against the back wall of the hideout and cries, which she has done too often lately. It saps all of the energy out of her until not even a workout seems like a promising solution.
It would be Celestia who came to her instead of who she really wants. Dressed in a surplus jacket, wearing her hair down, she could be any of the girls from Aoi's old teams – except Aoi is certain she never wanted to slug any of her teammates. Eyes floodlight-wide and unblinking, Celestia kneels next to her and offers her hand with a porcelain-doll chuckle.
“Did you think we would all become friends?”
Maybe, Aoi thinks, accepting the hand in order to stand again. Maybe she did believe that, after all.
No matter how she tries to nest out a team here, it isn't the same. Aoi misses being part of one with the muted, misty sort of way she misses donuts, kissing, chlorine; everyone who's left. It's immutable but secondary, the same as an old injury aching.
That night, the radio says, “Come back. I love you. I can't bear to be alone.”
Aoi doesn't understand why Ishimaru wouldn't ride away with them (if they're all going to leave, it would be better to get it done and over with in groups).
“He is looking out for everyone's well-being,” Sakura tells her. “He thinks he will do more good here.” Aoi kisses her bicep through the surgical mask, and Sakura doesn't say anything else. It is her first kiss in a long time.
When she wakes up and Sakura is packing instead of getting ready to train, Aoi throws a water bottle at her (and regrets it immediately: She isn't a violent person).
“Did I wake you?”
“You can't! You can't go!” Aoi ignores the question, climbing to her feet with the tarp still wrapped around her, clinging to her legs like cellophane.
A water bottle isn't enough to even scratch a martial artist as strong as Sakura Oogami, but from the pain in Sakura's face she worries, uselessly, that she might have done some damage.
“Asahina, my presence is no longer necessary here. There is something I must attend to before I can go any further. You are all possessed by immense physical and mental strength. You will be safe without me.”
Aoi is so tired of crying.
“I don't need to be protected! I just need to be with you! If you aren't staying, then that means I'll come with you!” Any guilt she might be feeling for potentially excluding the others washes away with her anger, and determination is quick to fill the opening left behind.
Aoi seizes Sakura firmly by the front (determination has made her superhuman, it seems). “Maybe we all will!” she adds, and stands up as tall as she can manage to kiss her.
This kiss is different. It isn't a stowaway slipped in during the middle of the night when they are both desperate and she is near tears; it isn't her hand sneaking into Sakura's palm when no one is listening. Aoi understands completely why she is kissing her, why it is necessary, now, to do it lest everything shatter and come unwound and their entire group is lost and alone. She has strength enough in her to pry Sakura's bag from her fingers and drop it on the floor just in time to allow both of Sakura's arms around her waist.
Their raised voices have attracted some attention, but Aoi finds she doesn't mind, even if Naegi is staring.
She has never been so certain of anything in her life.