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Asahina was the first out of the Academy, and she is the first to buckle to the sickness plaguing the outside world. The gas masks don't work anymore, not for her. They haven't for the longest time.
The first cough is nothing, and it made Hagakure laugh. "Asahina-chi, I told you you'd get a cold!" With that look in his eye that said he was proud of his prediction being right. And at first that's all it is in Asahina's throat as she walks with them and does runs with Kirigiri for supplies. The end comes for Asahina on a supply run, when a raider grabs her face and rips off her gas mask, and infected breath curls into her nostrils like sweet smoke. His face, rigid and pale, pale grey, is right against Asahina's, and her heart races in her throat for a moment. Then she brings her knee up and kicks the man between the legs, but when Kirigiri kills him, it is too late.
Their eyes meet.
"Kirigiri-san," a murmur. "Don't tell them, okay?" Aoi feels so delicate, like she's going to break into little pieces at the very thought of dying out here, in the wasteland where gang territory is marked by corpses on sticks and entrails wound around barbed wire, "I'll figure it out sometime, I'll tell them myself, something, just don't do it. They're my friends, you're my friend, you're all I have left--" There's desperation in her voice and Kirigiri reels back with genuine shock in her eyes. But she does one thing right--
--she doesn't tell.
The hideout they've secured is the remnant of a bandit's camp. There's a woman strung up by her guts by the door, and it's Byakuya's suggestion to keep it there so they don't get jumped; as long as the hideout is marked as the property of Fenrir, they're safe, because Fenrir is what comes the closest to running this hell. Aoi is there when the first major coughing fit comes. The air inside the safe building is clean, there is a monitor that says so, yet Asahina feels something strange.
The air has turned to plexiglass in her throat; solidifying into a strange substance in her lungs, and she knows she's dying. She knows she's dying slowly when she reels over, and knocks the hot plate from the counter, shattering its pieces upon the ground. Her coughing, which has been steadily going for a few weeks, is suddenly so much worse because her lungs aren't working right anymore, her coughing is hard, deep in her throat, slow and guttural. It's even deeper than the cough of someone with bronchitis, and Asahina collapses to the ground, her hands scrambling at the floor. This is what it's like.
As she works like a hooked fish upon the ground, as Naegi runs to her to try to help, Aoi thinks of Sakura-chan. Vaguely she wonders if this is what it was like to die from the poison--what comes from Aoi's mouth isn't blood, but something strange and pink and with lumps of flesh in it.
She survives.
The weeks pass and she gets worse. First, food goes for her. She doesn't make runs with Kirigiri anymore, nor does she do night recon with Fukawa (recon that sometimes ended in strange, desperate kisses, Fukawa hissing quietly into her ear as she comes). Instead, she sits at camp in a strange delirium, her throat dried and jagged. When she tries to eat, she vomits it up, and the vomit is the same pink-tinged bile that comes up whenever she coughs. Some call it the despair disease--there are fliers they find about it. The disease is highly contagious, but it can only be spread by direct contact with someone who is infected after they begin the coughing, and the contact must carry the germs.
So they avoid her.
Aoi languishes as she spies her group moving away from her. Her friends, all leaving her; leaving and it is different than when Sakura-chan left, because Sakura-chan was only trying to help them all by doing what she did. Aoi misses her greatly, misses the kisses and touches and giggles...
She lays on her side on the tarp they left her, under a broken-down overpass. Her throat aches. Her intestines are being eaten up by the disease, her face flushed, a pallid grey somehow. She lays on her tarp and holds a shred of Sakura's uniform that has long ceased smelling like Sakura, and she watches as the last of them, Fukawa, vanishes over a hill. Fukawa turns. Perhaps she is sad, Aoi thinks. Maybe.
Then Fukawa raises her hand. Waves slowly. Aoi cannot return it, and she wants to--wants to tell Fukawa to tell the others that she's loved them, not like she loves Sakura but they were so special to her, but she cannot, because then Fukawa is gone and Aoi is alone.
Alone and with a bottle of water to keep her alive for a few days before she starves to death or dies from the sickness, either one.
Only Aoi cannot keep the water down.
So she instead rolls it to a little boy and his mother, mumbling in her pain that the water's safe, and the mother takes it, hugs her boy close, and Aoi waves them on. She doesn't want to let strangers see her die.
Every night she falls asleep, Aoi wonders if she will ever wake up; she wonders what it will be like to die, wonders if it will hurt. Sometimes she's bothered by raiders in the daytime, men and women who circle her and ask what she has, where her group was, but Aoi is so far gone she can't even speak to them. One of them tries to remove her clothing, but the sweat and dirt has fixed Aoi's tanktop to her skin, and when he tries to lift it away, skin comes with it.
Aoi doesn't dream after the third night alone. She just sleeps, wakes up, lays in the shade. When the shade moves, she lays in the sun. Day after day. Her ribs begin to jut from her sides, her body refuses to move, and...
One night, Aoi closes her eyes.
The morning after, she wakes.
There is no pain.
Her lungs don't rip. Her body doesn't throb in agony; she's staring at a beautiful tree, outside of a small building. The building is spartan, with a single window and a single door, a well-cultivated garden outside of it. It's been two years, Aoi thinks, since the escape, and...is this where she's wound up? Her feet shuffle forward. They don't feel hopelessly swollen in her shoes, and instead she feels revitalized.
It takes about ten seconds after Aoi looks down and sees that her knees aren't scabby and bloody to realize that she's died. She doesn't feel afraid, though. She just walks to the house, and knocks upon the door as a strange pull in her gut tells her to. Aoi knocks, and the door opens.
In the doorway stands a familiar figure, her snow-white hair draped over her shoulders, her muscled frame frozen in disbelief. They stare at one another for a moment, and then--
"A...Asahina?"
With a shriek of joy, Aoi leaps into her arms.