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The world ends in 2003, but unfortunately, no one had been keen to inform the Earth’s shitty axis this because it kept spinning no matter how many equally shitty zombies Kanda ends up seeing in the first week alone.
It had all started with a virus like all epidemics do. This epidemic was far different, though, because there hadn’t been time to find a cure. It had spread too fast and too far to quarantine off. So, everyone was pretty much fucked, even if the media had reassured that everything was going to be fine; that the governments and the military had it under control.
They hadn’t stood a chance.
Kanda had been eight for a few weeks before the outbreak hit the streets. He had lived in a tiny apartment in the Bronx with his parents back then, having had moved from Japan about four years before when the screaming started. The thing about widespread epidemics and big cities, is that the big cities were always hit the worst. New York was more or less destroyed in about a week and a half.
His mother and father hadn’t been spared, unlike him. The tiny family lasts about a month before the zombies ate and tore away from every piece of them and the ones who hadn’t been sustained by the flesh and blood of the only damn family Kanda had begun to go after him next. They would have gotten him too – they nearly had – if it had not been for a short Chinese woman with bright orange hair and an ax of all things. She chops at the zombies without mercy, knocking them down without even a second of hesitation. Kanda finds that he can’t look away from the carnage. He’s too shocked to.
A white man kneels near him – a distance that would give him time to react if he discovered that Kanda was infected, but not far enough to alienate. Kanda looks at the man and sees light hair and kind features. Kanda doesn’t want pity, not from this man. Not in this situation where he can hear horrifying screams and revolting squishes and empty, lifeless flops. He doesn’t want to make eye contact with the man, but he forces himself to.
“Were they your parents?”
Kanda doesn’t say a word, just stares up at the man with - probably horrified - eyes. His silence enough of an answer.
“My name is Edgar and she’s Fou.” Edgar softly explains, but he doesn’t gesture back at Fou, who is finishing up at this point. “We’re a part of a survivor-resistance group. You like to come with us if you’d like."
His parents had told him to never talk to strangers. But, Edgar had introduced himself and kinda saved Kanda from being devoured by the zombies. It was more this Fou lady, but whatever. Hell, he’d probably die with these people but he guessed that he was extending his life by at least a few weeks.
So he watches and in his hands, he clutches one of his mother’s ribbons. It’s frayed at the edges, smudged with blood and dirt now, but it’s all he has of his mother, besides his memories and the beads of his broken bracelet at the bottom of his pack. His dirty, raw, and shaking fingers fumble as he ties his shoulder length hair into a loose ponytail.
“I guess.” He grumbles, almost too quiet for Edgar to hear him.
Fou is just a little bit taller than him, but she is much older than him. She strides towards him with a simple grace that one doesn’t usually have after massacring a hoard of zombies.
“I dunno if you wanna fight or not kid, but regardless you should keep this with you.” She tosses him his father’s sword – an heirloom from their family that’s at least two hundred years old. Blood covers the sheath and it very nearly slides out of his hands. Yuu holds onto it with all of his strength, not caring that it’s getting sticky as the blood dries. This was all he had left of his father.
They bring Kanda to a large, heavily secured building that wasn’t too far away from where Kanda’s parents had been ripped apart by hands and teeth.
There’s a young boy with a bright red scar across his nose squirming restlessly. He quickly and boisterously comes up to Kanda, way too close, and introduces himself as Alma. Kanda lashes out at him in an instant. The other people around them end up having to break them up and put them on separate sides of the room. Kanda glares at them too.
It's not long until the government falls and the Black Order becomes the face of revolution.
Lenalee is taken by an organization called the Black Order – who were supposed to be just a rumor meant to keep people hopeful, they weren’t supposed to be real – two years after the outbreak.
At the age of six, she’s picked from the few survivors and dragged out of her village, away from her brother and dead parents. They drag her away before she can even find out if Komui is alive or not.
She never figures out why they chose her.
By the time she is seven years old, she's fully aware that the Black Order was nothing like the rumors that even reached the corner of her village.
Living as a test subject is not pleasant. From the scientists who test on her, to the pain of failed experiments, to the endless death and destruction, by nine years old Lenalee doesn’t see a point in fighting anymore.
At nine, she sees one of the other experimented children that had been so kind to her even if he couldn’t speak a single word - through a born disability or a side effect of the experiments, she knew not – start tearing himself apart as the experiments finally become too much for his broken body. She watches as they put a bullet in his head.
When she’s ten, she wishes she was dead. She’s one of the only experiments left now, the others having expired. The other experiments were dead, just like her mother, father, brother, and everyone she played with or talked to back home. She was completely alone.
“But you’re not alone, Lenalee; you’ll never be alone again.”
Lenalee doesn’t even dare to breathe. She turns her head slowly, terrified that this is all a hallucination and a cruel, cruel side effect from the newest experiment. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t imagined those foolish scenarios of Komui coming to save her; that he would take her away from the experiments and make it so all of the monsters would go away. That there would be no scientists or zombies and they would go back to China and live happily and it would have all been one big nightmare.
Lenalee is no fool.
This Komui is not like any of her hallucinations and doesn’t vanish when she blinks and closes her eyes so tight that her tears start to spill down her cheeks.
He's older, his hair is longer, and a pair of glasses are perched on his nose, but the man in front of her is undeniably her older brother. He reaches over and pushes her hair back from her face.
"I'm here now." His voice cracks as he speaks and a tear trails down the side of his face."I'm sorry it took me so long."
Slowly, carefully he undoes the straps pinning her to the bed and by the time he's done and wrapping his, both of the Lee siblings are a wreck.
Back in China, Lenalee couldn’t ever remember seeing Komui cry. Even while they had watched the horrific scene of their parents being turned into zombies, she can't remember if he had cried or not, though she vividly remembers the way his hands shook as he held her close and ran for their lives to this day. But here he is now, one of the strongest people Lenalee had ever known, weeping just as uncontrollably as her and holding her close to him.
Komui holds her so tight that it almost hurts and for the first time in five years, Lenalee Lee is glad that she is alive.
Things are strange in the next few weeks. Once she’s healed up a bit, Komui brings her to what has been deemed Headquarters for their little nomadic group of survivors.
At first, she only really talks to Komui and Reever. Lenalee doesn’t really know why Reever understands a chunk of Chinese fairly well, but it’s nice to have someone else to talk to. Once she actually warms up to him, that is.
Within a month or two, she properly gets introduced to Yuu Kanda.
Kanda is kind of strange and tends to lose his temper easily, but doesn't treat her poorly. Lenalee likes him almost automatically. He doesn’t really talk much around other people, but he still makes an effort to help her with her English and translating simple words from Chinese for her when her brother or Reever aren’t around. He isn't exactly fluent in Chinese, but it's enough for them to hold tiny conversations when he's in the right mood.
He's with her the first time she kills a zombie. It's scary and unexpected, but he's already taking one on all by himself. They're young still, only thirteen and fifteen respectively, but they had been separated from their traveling group. By now, Lenalee had made many friends with the other survivors in their group.
By now, Lenalee had grown much stronger than she had been two years ago,
She ends up kicking her zombie down in a reckless moment - nearly costing her a leg - but it knocks the zombie - who seems to be a middle-aged man with laughter lines around his empty eye sockets - flat on his back, giving Lenalee the opportunity to put a bullet through its head and decapitate it with an old rusty sword on the ground.
Kanda's already putting his katana back in its sheath by the time she's finished. His face looks pinched, but there's not a single mark on him. It doesn't take him long to take Lenalee by the arm and drag her away from the carnage before them.
Kanda doesn't seem to be surprised in the slightest when she finally gets over the initial shock and bursts into tears. Unexpectedly, he wraps her up in a hug. It's very stiff and he awkwardly pats her back, but it's perhaps the most comforting thing Lenalee could have ever experienced, even if it doesn't stop the flood of tears.
She knows that Kanda has been through a lot, but doesn't exactly know what. Even though she's known him for years and loves him like a brother, she knows it's not something for her to ask about. Most people here didn't like talking about their past very much.
She couldn't blame them in the slightest. But she can't help but wish better for them. She wishes with her entire heart that none of her loved ones end up dead or worse.
She'd make it happen.
These people are her family, her home. She would do anything, anything at all to see her most loved ones live.
It's selfish, but as long as she could protect the ones she loves, the world can burn for all she cares.
Lavi has no clue where he was born, but it’s probably destroyed by now.
Which isn’t really surprising, because the whole world was pretty much destroyed by the time he is sixteen years old. Any remaining humans who were living and breathing with a pulse and a working circulatory system were running on pure hope and desperation alone.
Lavi didn’t know if he and the old man were hopeful or desperate. Maybe they were neither or maybe they were both. Though, Bookman probably wasn’t either. Lavi had known the old man his whole life and he was never really one for hope, taking pride in observation and fact above all else.
When he cuts down nameless faces – people who once had lives and dreams and aspirations and probably hope too – he doesn’t think he believes in hope much either.
“It’s not our job to hope,” Bookman says, putting together his pipe. It clanks together noisily, especially as he fills it up with his favorite scented tobacco that has somehow become a sign of home for a boy who never had one over the weeks, months, years. “It’s our job to record history, in case you forgot.”
“You don’t think the world is actually going to recover from this do you?"
Bookman shrugs and takes a long drag, the smoke spilling from his lips and nose in an almost hypnotizing manner.
“How should I know?” the spry old man imparts, aloof as ever. “The human race has done unpredictable things in its history; has adapted to extreme conditions in unlikely situations. We’re just here to record what happens in case it does make it.”
It all seems a bit redundant to Lavi if you asked him, but no one did and it was better than lying down and dying in some shitty post-apocalyptic world.
Within weeks, they’re out of France and in England, though it really is a pain to cross the channel when zombies can be on board your ship. Still, it was better than going underneath the tunnels and the zombies weren’t nearly as bad at the rats. They didn’t need flees or the bubonic plague on top of the zombie outbreak.
They had been in Canada when the news of the first zombies began to pop up and things had never been the same since. Lavi had been eight years younger, but he knows that he'll remember that day for as long as he lives.
When the news hit that these symptoms couldn't be contained anymore, riots followed worldwide. Lavi had lost his eye in one of these riots, where he had been hit by half of a broken glass bottle.
Reminded him of what the human race was willing to do just to survive, even if the odds looked bleak.
Scientists tried - were still trying, if sources and common sense were correct - to find a cure, but more people were dying and becoming zombies at an extremely fast rate. If Lavi had to estimate, he would say there were only roughly three hundred million people left in the world. Sure, people still had children - which Lavi personally thought was cruel and sick, but hey, more soldiers for the desperate human race.
They were currently on the way to join up with one of the group's looking for the cure.
When Lavi first meets them, the group is melancholy. Understandable, because from what Lavi understood, they had won a battle against zombies, but at the cost of multiple comrades.
Lavi doesn't particularly understand the point of making connections and close friendships in a zombie apocalypse. He felt that, in one way or another, it would only end in tragedy.
It's here where he meets Lenalee Lee for the first time. She's more than a little bruised and she's sobbing, but when she meets Lavi's gaze, her eyes are those of a survivor, of a fighter. He's completely blown away.
Lavi finds out that many of the people here have eyes like that. No matter what Lavi thinks, he must admit they're amazing.
They laugh and tell jokes of all things. Lavi hadn't seen a lighthearted group in years.
By the time he's nineteen, he's become as close as he possibly allows himself to be to both Lenalee Lee and Yuu Kanda, though the latter doesn't want to admit that. The three of them work well together, to the point where Bookman let Lavi set off with them on watch patrols without him with confidence that the - somewhat flighty at times - redhead won't get himself killed. And if he did, Lenalee would probably defy all laws of nature - as she was fond of doing - and kick him back to life.
It's not only them that Lavi finds himself genuinely liking. The scientists in their group are perhaps the wildest people Lavi has ever met, which he means in the best way possible. He doesn't want to admit this to himself and especially not Bookman, but if he believed that anyone could find a cure and end the hell on Earth, it would probably be them.
If anyone could give Lavi hope, it was them.
And wasn’t that a dangerous thought?
As Allen nears the barracks of this particular branch of the Black Order, Neah's words repeat through his head.
'Be careful,' had been one of the last things Neah had said to him, hands on both of his shoulders and his forehead pressed against Allen's. It was almost painful, but Allen hadn't been able to bring himself to care, vividly aware that this could possibly be the last time he saw his impromptu guardian alive. 'we're going into dangerous territory you and I. What we do here can possibly decide the fate of the human race. We're going to save him.'
So, no pressure or anything.
He knows that he's more than capable of fending for himself - he had been for years before Mana came into his life - but it still felt strange not being with Cross or Neah after six years of being with one, the other, or both. And who knows when the seventeen-year-old will even see them again, if he ever does.
He reaches the guard station without fuss, considering that it's still early morning.
The guards eye him up - between his white hair, his overabundance of freckles, the jagged scar over his right eye, and the prosthetic left arm there's plenty for them to observe - like he's some sort of side show that you only hear in stories about the old times.
The situation that follows isn't ideal. The guards end up causing a fuss, which leads to Allen getting into a physical altercation with a slightly older Japanese man.
But in the end, he's brought to meet the leader by the man's sister - Lenalee, who greets him kindly, all while scolding the man Allen finds out is named Kanda. He quickly learns that Komui Lee is a strange man, but he allows Allen to stay and that's what matters. It probably doesn't hurt that he brought a letter from Cross as help.
There are a lot of scientists around. A lot of brilliant scientists, desperately looking
He probably knows more about stopping the outbreak than these people would like, but they don't can't know that. Not yet. It makes Allen feel awful, but there's no way
Time passes quickly and Allen does what he can to help, but knows that it's all on Cross and Neah at this point. When Cross came back - if he came back - it would be his turn.
He finds himself growing close to a good number of the group, both scientists and fighters alike. He finds himself in a very easy, nice friendship with Lenalee and when he meets Lavi, they hit it off famously. The three of them are more or less inseparable when they're not busy. And then there is his relationship with Yuu Kanda which is... something else, to say the absolute least. Allen doesn't know how to describe it better than that.
But because of how well he works with the three, they're often assigned to jobs together, even if Allen and Kanda do end up arguing more often than not.
It's on one of these jobs with Lavi that Allen realizes that things aren't going to be easy at all.
"You're a strange bird, Allen," Lavi says after they have a brief conversation on the subject of zombies and morality. As Allen expected, Lavi doesn't believe the same things Allen does.
But then again, not everyone seemed to have the same feelings when it came to cutting down zombies as Allen does. The reason why Allen cut them down in the first place was because they were human beings. But then again, most people didn't have experiences like he had with Mana.
Everything involving Mana was messy, but Allen had never found himself regretting anything to this day even if it put him, and technically the world, in this situation.
Allen takes a deep breath and grasps at the chain around his neck, an action Lavi notices and quickly changes the subject.
"Is that a wedding ring? Aren't you too young to be married?"
"It is a wedding ring, but I'm not married. It's...a good luck charm from my guardian."
A gift from Cross that he had been urged to keep close, but something that had made Neah nearly weep the first time he had seen it around Allen's neck for reasons the teen still didn't know for sure, but he could guess why from the fact that a matching ring was on Neah's finger. He didn't know what happened to Neah's spouse or why Cross thought to give Allen their ring was a good idea, but Allen kept it anyways, especially after Neah himself urged Allen to keep.
"You've got quite the number of secrets don't you, Al?" Lavi says, in a teasing manner.
"Well I'm not the only one, am I Lavi?" Allen shoots back just as playfully, though his stomach twists.
"You got me there," Lavi says in defeat, raising his hands in surrender and turning back to the stretch of land, leaving Allen to his thoughts.
He did have a lot of secrets - he knows this better than anyone besides perhaps Cross and Neah - but they were necessary ones. Ones that he had to keep for now, but would undeniably be revealed in all due time.
He can only hope that they don't hate him when he comes clean.