A/N: Thanks to my beta, voyageasia!
I stole the title and the setup from a German table top role playing game.
This is an Apocalypse-Au, which means a lot of dead people. Not Kurt and Blaine, though :) There will also be some violence, though not too graphic, and prostitution. If any of that bothers you, please don't read.

Kurt flees when the water closes in. Unlike many others, he survives the first flood, because he doesn't bother to try and salvage any of his few belongings first. He runs with nothing but the clothes on his back.

He is probably more observant than most. He watched the tides rise over the years, and he is convinced it is nothing that would just stop, as a lot of others seem to think. Seven years ago, his parents' house, once a comfortable distance away from the edge of the sea, was washed away, taking his parents and most of their belongings with it.

He built a hut out of driftwood higher up, took the first boat that was washed ashore, repaired it and tried to keep up business. Soon, however, he had to admit that it wouldn't work. Like most children, he had learned his father's trade from the cradle. It wasn't that he doesn't know anything about being a fisherman; he knows everything there is to know. He even has some knowledge about his father's side-business of boat repairs. He even is good at it, to some degree, but he found he couldn't do the work alone that used to keep all three of them busy. Even if he only had himself to sustain now.

So, soon he took up a side-business of his own. It started with a rushed hand job for the butcher behind his house when his wife, tired from another pregnancy, took a nap, and a free side of lamb for Kurt. It takes off from there. He doesn't mind much. There is a grim satisfaction when the same people that had mocked him as a child for his slight build and peculiar ways are now begging for him and panting his name. It pays well, and it isn't as hard as the backbreaking work most of his neighbors do.

So it isn't that he doesn't mind leaving his village and all his belongings when the water comes. It takes time to establish a clientele, after all, and ironically he became good friends with a lot of them over the years.

It's just that he knows he can get by anywhere, and he is pretty sure that what he has to offer will always find buyers.

So he runs. The water rises quickly and higher than anyone could imagine, and it doesn't leave again. It is always there when he turns, and closer than he would like, a brown mass of water with trees and remains of houses and a lot of bodies swimming in it. But he gains ground and soon the water isn't just a day's walk behind him, but further away. He warns people as he passes. Some heed him, some don't. There has been other alarming news: it's not just the water. In the South, the mountains explode, giving the name of the old children's game, 'The floor is lava', a whole new, deadly meaning. In the North, winds arise that soon become one strong, insistent storm that makes the land uninhabitable and destroys everything in its wake. In the West, there are landslides, burying everything under a layer of mud.

"The elements take revenge," superstitious people say. "Man has become too confident, too sure of his own importance. This is nature taking care of the problem."

Kurt doesn't know if this is true. He doesn't really care, to be honest. He runs for his life, though he doesn't know where. If there is danger everywhere, does it even make sense to run? But the alternative is to just sit somewhere and wait till he drowns, so he runs.

The things he sees during his escape aren't pretty. He sees people being attacked and sometimes killed for their coat or a piece of bread they might be carrying. Fresh graves, lovingly if hurriedly dug by people who lost a loved one on the flight, are looted for any possession that might be left on the body.

But there's kindness also, strangers taking turns carrying a small child as the mother becomes too weak, an old man declaring himself too old to flee offering his home as shelter for fugitives, people sharing food and companionship on the way.

He runs for days, weeks, and he loses count of time. He sleeps when he dares, on the side of the road, hidden in bushes, his knife always close. He doesn't think, doesn't feel anything past his exhaustion and his hurting feet, and the ever-present fear. He's too busy trying to somehow survive, and sometimes, it's a close call. Some people think he's weak and want his boots or his knife, but he's a lot stronger than he looks, muscles lean but still steeled by work, and there are still some decent people who help him fight off the attackers, who afterwards even share their food and the comparative security of a night not spent alone.

He eats what he can get. Sometimes, nothing. On some days, he finds enough on the way to get by, on others, he is entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers, which is fickle at best. He can't trade for what he needs, because he doesn't own anything, and it turns out that people who run for their lives have other things on their minds than sex.

His skills all seem useless here. No fishing; he'd have to go back to the water and there's no way he's doing that; also, he'd probably catch all kinds of things other than fish. He earns a scant meal helping to fix the broken axis of a wagon, but most people are on foot, carrying whatever belongings they have left on their backs. No singing, either. Though it's the thing he's always been best at, people at home have found it too frivolous -you can't eat music, after all. And here, it's out of place at best and actually dangerous at worst. So, no music to brighten their journey (is it a journey? Doesn't a journey need a destination?). So be it.

Eventually, the flight loses its urgency, as things are prone to do. The water is days away, and though he hears it's still rising, it is slower now. Kurt entertains a mild, detached curiosity as to how much longer he'll have to go until he first sees the earth that has buried everything beneath it. Or the lava, if he should turn south. Or if the winds in the North have slowed down too, maybe enough that people could go back and start rebuilding. Mostly, though, he avoids thoughts like this, as any thought at all that doesn't have to do with how to survive one more day.

Then, one morning, he trips and falls. The thing he trips over is a boot half-buried in the grass, and he carefully avoids looking at it, because while it might just be discarded and full of holes, there is also the possibility that something might still be sticking in it, out of it, and he very much prefers not to know. People may have stopped drowning, mostly, but that doesn't mean they have stopped dying.

When he tries to rise, he finds his ankle hurts, badly.

He knows there's not much use in calling for help. People won't answer, everyone is too tied up in their own struggle. He tries it anyway, calls until he is hoarse, and defiantly refuses to cry. He clenches his teeth against the pain and stands up, limps a few steps, finds he can bear it. Still, there's no way he can go on running like he did. He needs to rest for a few days and just hope that the pain goes before the water comes.

So, he limps on, away from the road and the suspicious boot, steadying himself on the occasional tree until he finds a stick to support him. He finds a clearing that is actually quite pleasant, but when he hears water, he panics, looking wildly around, wondering if he has gone back farther than he thought. He prepares to run for his life, the pain in his ankle be damned, but when his heart ceases to beat quite so loudly, he can hear that it can't be the flood. It's a small sound, nothing as loud and threatening like the sound of the approaching sea; more of a ripple, and behind some trees, he discovers a small stream.

That settles it. He'll stay here, just for a few days until walking doesn't hurt so much anymore.

His sense of time is vague at best, but he thinks he ends up staying two weeeks.

It's just so nice. For the first time since the water came, something is just nice. He is alone, surrounded by singing birds and the much too trusting hares that he catches and cooks, though not without regret. He washes in the stream, himself as well as his clothes, and though the already threadbare fabrics lose on substance, it feels luxurious.

He makes himself a bed out of moss and soft grass, and he sleeps a lot. Deeply, too, not on constant alert like he had on the road, with his knife always in his hand, and slowly, the bone-deep weariness that had seemed like the normal state of things subsides.

The weather stays cold and clear for the most part, and though he is miserable when it rains, he dries soon enough.

He very industriously avoids thinking about the way his world had ended, how everyone he knew is probably dead, how he has no where to go and no idea if, say, a month from now he'll still be alive.

He doesn't recognize his reflection in the stream. The put together, slight, pale young man he had been has become rugged. He is tanned, his freckles are more pronounced, and he has grown a beard that he hates but has no means to get rid of. His clothes, once simple but of good quality and tailored, are not much more than rags now.

They don't do much to keep out the cold anymore.

One night, he wakes because he is so cold, and he realizes that he has no idea how to survive outside in winter. Will he be able to find food, will there be shelter? How will he keep warm?

He doesn't know.

His foot has long since stopped to hurt, but still, he stays. He likes it here, and even if he leaves, goes on the road again, where will he go? Where is there to go?

Only then the nights become so cold he is hardly able to sleep at all, even huddled to his little fire, and the grass in the mornings is covered with white frost. And he realizes that if he stays, one morning not so far away, he won't wake up.

So he leaves.

He is alone now; the road is empty. Even the slowest of those that haven't drowned are now in front of him, gone for many days.

The water, if it is still rising, must be close now, no more than a few days behind. Sometimes he thinks he can hear it. He has dawdled too long.

Still, in some ways, it feels good to be on the road again, to be doing something. Somewhere in his mind, he is aware that his time on the meadow was nothing more than a wait for something to happen, anything, even death. He doesn't want to die; after all, he chose to run again over dying a gentle death by freezing. Now, at least he feels he is actively choosing life, even if he still doesn't know where he is going, or how long life is going to last.

He spends his lonely days on the road and his cold, miserable nights on the side of it. Now, he sings as he walks, any song he remembers, loud, unafraid. But when he curls up somewhere to try and get some sleep, more often than not he finds himself crying. He doesn't really know why (except he does, of course), and he angrily brushes the tears away before sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep.

In the end, it doesn't take long. One morning, after walking just a few miles, when the sun is rising above the horizon, he sees a town.

A city, really, as in addition to the older, solid houses, flimsy barracks are being built to accommodate the masses of fugitives that have arrived. There are people everywhere in the city.

And they are building a wall around it.