GUESS WHO GRADUATED YOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I'd meant to update about a month ago, but I've been out the country for half the summer and since getting back I've been super busy with voice acting and getting ready for university, BUT it's here now! And that's all that matters, right? Enjoy!

Sunday 9th July 2014, 06:07

Abandoned department store, Tokyo

It was difficult to push anyone from their dreams this morning. Even subconsciously we knew what we were waking up to. Looming, ominous and yet inescapable, finally we had decided to move on before our supplies truly ran dry. Tamaki, in his bid to get everyone up and out before first light to avoid detection, was setting Antoinette to madly licking every spare inch of the twins her coarse pink tongue could reach. It was odd to see so much enthusiasm still in the golden animal, thin and matted and bedraggled as she was: no amount of bare scrap meals or lack of proper exercise had dulled the brightness in her round brown eyes or the uncanny smile at her slobbery snout. Today, it seemed, the retriever's kisses were especially wet, for within seconds of her great furry form leaping on them they had shrieked with disgust and thrown themselves from the dusty sheets to the floor.

Though they and Mitsukuni put up their usual fuss at being woken up early, myself, Tamaki and Yasuchika had been up an hour already to make checks of every bag and divide breakfast rations. Takashi had volunteered himself to scout below and take care of any wandering Henkō that might cause trouble for our escape. He'd been gone nearly the whole hour, which seemed to me almost excessive - either he had decided to go after ever single creature within a many mile radius or, more believably, he was avoiding me once more. As long as the idiot didn't get himself hurt doing so it didn't matter to me what his choice of proximity to me was. All that did matter was keeping everyone alive; at this point it didn't matter about keeping anyone happy. Times had changed too much for that, considering my recent commitment to Kyoya's wellbeing.

It had been a foolish decision to kiss him, I understood that both now and at the time. Whether or not Takashi could have intruded as he did, it was ill-thought-out but nevertheless necessary. Even though it truly was no great desire of mine to be Kyoya's partner in such a way, he was too fragile to avoid reciprocation of his feelings. I couldn't risk him becoming despondent, and therefore vulnerable, as Takashi had been after Satoshi's death. While I could use Takashi's anger at my apparent 'betrayal' to fuel his energy toward killing Henkō, I knew too well that Kyoya was quite another breed of man. Athletic and action-based as he had been raised, Takashi's negative emotions transfused into aggression and adrenaline: urbane and mannerly, Kyoya's remained hidden at all times and ate him from the inside so as to never let on his discourteous thoughts. In an upbringing of poise, diplomacy and polite yet cutthroat competition, he had been trained as the perfect robot. It was more than I dared risk to short-circuit him in times like this.

He was still sleeping, as permitted by Tamaki - who had noticed too how poorly his best friend had been sleeping of late, and was allowing him one last chance of peace before leaving the sanctuary we had carved in these disquieting halls.

Grantaire murmured wearily as he shuffled behind Tamaki as faithfully as ever, his half-closed eyes twitching as his mouth stretched wide in a contagiously huge yawn. Tamaki himself was muttering under his breath to Mitsukuni, who was nodding in response to whatever the taller blonde was saying. I almost wondered what they were discussing, but even though I was almost directly beside him it was impossible to tell from the loud grumbling and swearing emanating from the twins as they moodily wiped saliva from their cheeks and necks and shoved their feet into the legs of their jeans. So loud were they with their aspersions that I thought for sure that they would wake Kyoya, who was moaning softly in his sleep not too far away, somewhat overgrown brows pressing together in an unwelcome frown.

Folding my arms I padded swiftly over to them, hissing under my breath, "Hey, do you maybe wanna shut up already? You're gonna wake Kyoya."

They paused at my arrival, exchanging glances before resuming tugging the mildly pungent shirts onto their bare chests.

"Didn't realise you cared so much," said Hikaru indignantly, though he had lowered his volume considerably. "It's not like he won't have to be up in another ten minutes anyway, we're leaving in half an hour - "

"Incidentally," interrupted Kaoru, who had slumped down onto the edge of the rumpled bed and was wiggling his foot into a boot, looking up at me with an odd sort of interest, "when did you start caring so much about him?"

"Since this whole ordeal started, for your information," I replied, quite honestly, though my tone was a shade more resentful than I'd meant to portray. Kaoru raised his bright orange eyebrows at me and pursed his lips as if doing so would keep him from replying with something argumentative, and he lowered his eyes to focus on tying his laces. Hikaru, however, was not so easily satisfied.

"Come off it, Haruhi," he laughed, not unkindly. He cast a glance over to Kyoya, who had rolled onto his other side and had an arm resting upon the empty space where I had been lying as though cradling my ghost. "It's not like you've been leaping into his bed from night one." I knew exactly where his point was going, and opened my mouth to try and cut him off but he got there ahead of me. "I always thought you had a thing for Mori-senpai."

"Not always, but - "

"It was more than 'a thing', Hikaru," Kaoru suddenly offered, done with his shoes and now standing beside me. I shot him an aggravated glare over my shoulder, but he did not flinch as Tamaki would have. "If it wasn't then there's no way you would have gone so far as to show Kyoya up at the festival by coming as a girl, because nobody puts him in his place unless there's a damn good reason. Admit it, Haruhi, you were crazy about Mori-senpai when we were at school - "

"You're not - "

" - anybody could see it," Hikaru continued, shaking his head slightly as if in disappointment of how difficult I was being. "Then, of course, there's the simple matter of you guys sharing a bed for god knows how long."

"Would you two just - "

"Oh, we're not trying to say anything bad about that," Kaoru interjected, and Hikaru shook his head again to affirm the point. "I mean, frankly, we were over the moon about that."

"We thought, 'I'm so glad they finally got their act together, took them long enough.' Right, Kaoru?"

"Yep. But then - "

" - out of nowhere - "

" - you and Kyoya!?" they finished together, fixing me with identically perplexed looks in their identically green eyes. I sighed, pursing my lips and hardening my gaze upon the pair of them.

"Look," I began, "choices like this that have no effect on you whatsoever shouldn't be any business of yours, but since you're so adamant on knowing: yes, I liked Takashi, and perhaps I still do, though he is making is pretty difficult for that to be a certainty right now; and yes, I am with Kyoya, but it is for his own good and not mine - "

"So, did he, like, force you into - "

"If you'd let me finish," I snapped, silencing Hikaru in an instant. Again I sighed, impatiently now. "I'm not doing this because of any romantic attachment, but because he needs to feel like he has something… I don't know, more, let's say, to keep fighting for. He's very weak at the moment, very scared - "

Kaoru scoffed, "Kyoya? Kyoya's not scared of anything, is he? He's - I mean, he's Kyoya!"

"He's still human," I reminded him sternly, "so yes, he is scared. Very. He's constantly on edge that something terrible will happen to any one of us, because we are his only friends. We're all he's ever had." The twins had seemed like they were about to make another quip, but at these words they appeared cowed. "Despite the way we've interacted with him in the past, calling him a demon, and cruel, and this, and that, and all the nicknames we pressed on him that we wouldn't think to call anyone else, he loves us. He treasures us like he hasn't treasured anything else, because we never asked him to be the perfect boy the rest of his world forced upon his shoulders. You only think he's not scared because he's never known how to express it. Or maybe it's because you're so wrapped up in each other that you don't notice or care when your friends are in distress."

At these words I left them, not wanting to start the day with anymore pessimism. As I walked back toward the others, I heard them quickly following and felt a hand grasp my elbow.

"Is that…" Hikaru said, in a surprisingly anxious voice. "Is that really what we seem like now?" I turned slowly to look at him. He and Kaoru looked pale, nervous. It was a different kind of worry than that which usually twisted their mirrored features; it was not the concern of impending doom, but more that of a child who knows they have done something bad and is facing up to the disappointment of their parent. "Does it actually seem to you like we don't care about you anymore…?"

It was strange, but looking at them now it all seemed to flood back to reason just how young we all were. The twins were sixteen now, because now it was some time in July and their birthday was in June; but still, sixteen was… barely anything. To think what we all had been through up til now, and yet despite that I had been silently disparaging these two almost as if they hadn't been through the same as I had. At the look in their eyes I felt my stomach contort, as if trying to shred itself in my shame.

"I… don't know," I answered, my understanding of my own thoughts suddenly unclear and jumbled. I frowned. "I suppose… just a little bit… You're just not yourselves anymore: you don't tell jokes as much, or smile, or do… anything…" They looked at one another, crestfallen. The three of us were silent for a while, able to hear Tamaki garbling away in French to Grantaire.

"We're sorry," they said together, and it sounded like they truly meant it.

"We'll try to be more involved," Kaoru mumbled, rubbing a hand awkwardly at his neck.

"Yeah," Hikaru nodded. "We will."

"And we won't say anything to Kyoya or Mori-senpai about… well…"

"Thanks," I whispered, just barely smiling. I put out my arms and pulled them both toward me to hug them. It was nice to do so, when I hadn't for so long. It was almost funny to me, too, because back at school it had always been the other way around: I mused on how they had chased me up and down and on the ceiling around Music Room 3 to pull me into bone-shattering hugs or kiss me on the cheek just to see me get annoyed or throw me into some crazy costume; things certainly had changed if I was the one seeking their closeness when once I had begged for just one afternoon of quiet.

"We're gonna get through this, though," they said as we let go of one another.

"I know we are," I said, smiling up at them as my stomach eased itself out of its self-destructive knot.

"There's nothing this family can't do," Kaoru grinned, to which I nodded and Hikaru raised his eyes.

"Incest included," he commented, folding his arms, "if a mother is in some sort of a relationship with her daughter…"

To this I had no verbal response to give, so instead I punched him in the arm. Still I was glad that he was already seeming more like himself, so my face was split in a broad grin as the three of us made our way over to Tamaki and the rest, Hikaru rubbing his arm gingerly while Kaoru sniggered.

Tamaki was bent over Kyoya, gently nudging his shoulder and cooing, "Kyoya… we have to wake up now… Kyoya… wakey wakey… Kyoya… Mommy…"

"I'm not your mommy…" came the disgruntled response, and Kyoya's steely grey eyes flashed open to fix the blonde with an imperious stare.

"Always works," Tamaki chuckled as he straightened up, winking at me across the bed. He seemed cheered by my smile, for he didn't immediately move off to busy himself again, as I had come to associate with him being nervous. Rather he stood by and watched in mild amusement as Kyoya's rumpled nest of a head rose as he sat up indecorously, pulling up the drooping sleeve of his overlarge green sweater in a manner of utmost irritation. Normally he was not this bad to awaken, though never exactly pleasant. Today, as was to be expected, was a pestilential morning for Kyoya, because it meant we were finally to be exposed to the much misshapen universe. It was Kyoya's worst nightmare for us to so willingly walk into such a position of vulnerability, cowed as he had been the night we had announced our oncoming departure.

I eased myself down onto the mattress beside him, holding out his cracked spectacles for him to take. The comparative gentleness with which he accepted them was all the thanks he was capable of in what we called his 'morning state'. He slid the lenses up his thin nose, grime caked at the edges of the frames and under his fingernails. With a heavy sigh, as though resigning himself to the most arduous task in the world, he threw off the covers like they were attempting to suffocate him and stood up.

"Breakfast," he muttered, which - in regular Kyoya speech - translated roughly to 'We ought to have breakfast before anything else, shouldn't we?'

"Yes, we should," Tamaki agreed, being almost fluent in the language of morning state. "It's not much, but we'll need it for today." The rest of us nodded or murmured in assent, following him to the bed where he had laid out the half empty box of stale breakfast cereal and bottle of water the nine of us had to share. As we took our handfuls of brittle squares of wheat and nuts, Antoinette lay at Tamaki's feet and whined pathetically, her enormous eyes gazing mournfully up at the food we could scarce afford to spare her. Though it broke Tamaki's heart to do so she was to be fed only once every two days to conserve rations, yet water was something she couldn't go without. Allowing her to drink wasted more water than we would have liked however, for it was extremely difficult for her to contain her excitement when she was presented with a cupped pair of hands filled with water, that huge pink tongue lapping so frantically that she spilled more water than she consumed.

"Shouldn't we wait for Takashi-kun?" Yasuchika asked as the rest of us nibbled gratefully at what little we had. We paused, exchanging looks, save for Kyoya, who wasn't it the mood to be fussed about table manners.

"He said he wasn't hungry," Tamaki replied, "but he'll be back soon. We've saved his portion for later, when he does want it."

"If you say so…" the boy grumbled, chewing dryly. "He's been gone for a while, though, hasn't he?"

"So he ought to be back soon," Tamaki repeated cheerily.

"But what if something happened to - "

"Yasuchika," Tamaki interrupted, suddenly harsh, "he will be back soon."

Almost as soon as he said this came the sound of footsteps, and we all looked round. It was Takashi, covered in the same thick, dark, purplish blood that so regularly haunted my nightmares. But now it was the boy himself who looked like a waking nightmare, tall and gaunt and pale with exhaustion, both he and the rusted scythe gleaned from the gardening store dripping with gore. After looking at him I no longer felt the need to continue with my pitiful ration.

"Fun morning, was it?" Hikaru called, but we were in too great a state of shock to laugh. Takashi discarded the long gardening tool upon a bed nearby and stripped off the shirt that clung to his skin as though doused in very dark water, bundling it up and throwing it to the floor. Wordlessly he ripped off a bed sheet and used it to towel at his face and hair, stained the crumpled fabric as if with a dye. His bare chest rose and fell heavily, still panting as though he had been running a very long way. When a he dropped the sheet once more he ran a spattered hand through his fringe and pushed the overgrown hair back from his eyes, approaching us at last. In the palely orange light from the very crack of dawn the whites of his eyes glowed with adrenaline.

"They won't bother us," he announced breathily. "Not for a while."

"You didn't have to blitz the entire country, if that's what you were up to," the twins mused, but he ignored them, instead looking to Tamaki.

"Where are the bags?" he asked. Tamaki pointed to just beyond where I sat upon the floor, and Takashi looked distinctly over my head as he walked to the indicated spot. There was silence between us as we attempted to resume eating, in which we heard him rummaging through the tightly packed bags, and then the gentle rustling of fabric. Soon he reappeared in my peripheral vision, a fresh (yet still very dirty) sweatshirt over him.

Neither he nor the rest of us spoke again until what little food we had was gone, at which time Tamaki got to his feet with the air of nervousness rising with him.

"Guess we should… well, make a move, then."

They were the words we didn't want to hear but knew we must. Silence returned crushingly as we slung the backpacks onto our shoulders, gathered our weapons, prayed wordlessly, and made our way down the floors to the gaping entrance. It was a cold day, too cold for the season, and it was discouraging to step outside what had kept us safe thus far to be met only by the long, frightening shadows of dawn and the bite of a wind that seemed foreboding of something truly terrible - maybe not here, but somewhere else, almost carrying a moan of misery as it went. More ominous was the notion that I may never set foot in that building again, after I had trusted it with my life. It seemed strange to be so attached to a tower of ugly brick and plaster, filled with nothing at all but the ghost of a life and purpose that seemed centuries away.

Once outside it was as though none of us wanted to take the first step away, all of us huddled by the large front doors and surveying the soulless streets around us. Nothing moved, nothing breathed but the breeze. We were so alone, almost like the only ones left on the earth. Antoinette whined.

Steeling myself with a deep breath in, I reaffirmed the grip of my katana and began to walk into the unknown forest of concrete.

Sunday 9th July 2014, 12:19

Noboru private laboratory, Mt. Warusawa; Shizuoka

Cho pressed the cotton daub to her arm, stemming the thin trickle of blood that oozed from the puncture mark. She swayed ever so gently in her seat, eyes closed and brows knit together to fight back the headache. By now she had lost count of the needles, the extractions, the tests. She'd never been scared of them but nevertheless didn't exactly enjoy them, as few people did: more, it was the fact that she couldn't eat before having blood taken, which weakened her more than she already was in her precarious state.

She had found that the anxiety of potential pregnancy on top of everything else to be the particularly sour cherry on the top of a terribly dry cake. It kept her awake longer at night than before, waking her up earlier from the vomiting it induced. Never before had she felt quite so exhausted, not even in the first few manic days of the outbreak where none of them had slept a wink. Half the time she felt like an overfilled plastic bag, stretched taught and fragile, handles straining.

But she must be strong, she told herself. She was the only one who could help her sweet Jiro now. She looked over to him a few desks over, siphoning her blood from the hypodermic phial and frowning in concentration as he used a pipette to separate it between various Petri dishes and test tubes. There were so many things they had to test, so many potential outcomes the blood would have on the serum. But maybe just one could lead to the antidote. Yet still they didn't even know if she was immune herself, for she had never been bitten to find out.

Cho shuddered at the thought of this, and then again at a darker alternative; what were they supposed to do to determine what woman was immune and who was not? Were they supposed to gather any female they could find and set them all out to be bitten by those monsters, testing them like rabbits in a shampoo lab? And yet without that kind of experiment, were they simply wasting their time testing blood that may or may not even be resistant to the contaminant? But, she supposed, at least they still had the monkeys below…

They had been oddly quiet of late, truth be told. She half-heartedly wondered what could have happened. Most likely they exhausted themselves from their unerring riots and were now collapsed and hoarse. Jiro had told her, however, that this was a good thing: if what he hoped to accomplish from today's blood sampling came to light, he predicted a test of an antidote sample on one of them within the next three weeks. It made her a little sad to think on that, despite the hope that it might instil if the antidote worked; she had always hated animal testing, but for the sake of saving the world she would allow this. Besides they were only monkeys, right?

Sunday 9th July 2014, 21:33

Matsuzaki, Shizuoka

The girl wandered the harbour, treading cautiously upon hearing the muffled moans from the streets beyond. She was trying not to breathe, not even out of fear at this point but because of the stink of fish - hardly aided by the heavy net over her shoulder caging the still wriggling carp. The whole town smelled like the inside of a halibut, salty and pungent. It even looked like it sometimes, strewn with bones and blood and remnants of meals left by those freakish things. She still didn't know what to call them, though she had decided a while back not to call them anything at all: naming something and fearing to think of that name only increased the fear of the thing itself. And she was determined not to be scared anymore; there was a limit to the pessimism you could bare to live with, and if she was to make a path in this bleak new world then she would do so by making it at least seem less bleak.

Her waterlogged shoes squelched at every footfall, cold saltwater dripping from her tousled brown hair and once-white uniform. Her knuckles shone white in the pale strips of moonlight that just barely crested over the not-so-distant Mount Warusawa, straining to keep hold of the net that cut into her fingers as it tried to maintain the great gasping grey fish. It had put up enough of a fight to even get in the net in the first place, she mused irritably. She wondered whether it wouldn't have just been easier to smash its head in with a rock as soon as she caught it to save all this trouble. But then the blood would have attracted the things to her, and that was the last thing she wanted; especially since Ayame was waiting for her. She had only been out and hour, maybe two, but that silly girl would go off her head if she was late in returning, or didn't at all, and there was no way she could fend for herself in a time like this.

The thought of Ayame cheered her, and she quickened her pace to hurry her return. Although the two girls were sick to death of fish by now, at least Ayame and her bright blue eyes made the days seem worthwhile. She was the only reminder of a happier life left in the world.

They shared a shack near the foot of the mountains, apart from the main sprawl of the small white bricked town. It was not very well protected, from the elements or from the things, but that was why it was so safe for them. The things seemed to have some sort of human intelligence, by which they recognised large buildings and build-up areas to be more likely to be inhabited with prey, and so a run down hovel with a concaved roof and overgrown with shrouds of ivy didn't seem so much of an all-you-can-eat buffet by comparison. As long as they didn't let the tiny pit fires they used to roast their food get out of control, diligently fanning away the smoke so they didn't give themselves away, they could survive right under their ugly grey noses; as they had done for almost four weeks since fleeing their previous holdfast.

She encountered only two of the things on her way back, defeating the first with a skull-crushing swing of her heavy wooden bokken and the second by knocking it down a set of stone steps with a smack from the carp and dashing its brains as it fell. After that the enormously fat fish struggled considerably less, clearly dazed and now almost totally suffocated. By the time she neared the crumbling structure they now called home she would have thought the sounds of melancholic moans would have been distant, but not so. As she put out a hand to grasp the rusting door handle, a chill coursed down her spine that was colder than the ice water of the sea that still clung the uniform to her pale, dirty skin.

She paused, listening intently. Beyond the fading green paint of the door, the girl within sounded to be in great anguish, pacing about the small enclosed space with an oddly shuffling gait.

"Ayame…?" the girl called, and suddenly the footsteps stopped. "Ayame, are you - aargh!" She had made to pull open the door, expecting to see the sweet round face turning to meet hers, maybe a kiss for her return, but instead both girl and fish were buffeted back and sent sprawling onto the grass as the peeling wood crashed open into her face. Crying out in shock and pain, the girl clutched a hand to her bloody nose as she rolled onto her back. Her dark brown eyes dilated in horror.

"No…" she whispered, transfixed by the hunched girl in the doorway, her blue eyes faded to a pearly white glare, almost hidden behind straggles of dirty blonde hair. Blood flecked her filthy white and blue uniform, a large stain swelling from an open tatter on her forearm. The skin beneath it was torn open with a vicious bite mark. "No!" she repeated in a scream, snatching up her fallen wooden sword and scrambling to her feet as Ayame staggered toward her. "No! No, no - "

Carving the weapon through the air, she caught Ayame on the ribs, the force of her swing throwing the blonde to the ground, where she screeched and snarled in rage. She wheeled around, snatching at the girl's legs, "No!" She lashed out with her foot and it connected with Ayame's face, and she fell back once more. "No!" Rage fuelling her, the girl kicked down hard on the back of Ayame's raised knee, a loud crack punctuating the break of the socket. The immobilised creature yowled in pain, turning her face up to glower at the girl standing over her, sword raised. Once it had been a sweet face, round and bright and silly, but it was no longer a face she knew. And it could never again be the face she loved.

Gritting her teeth, wishing she could close her eyes, she brought the sword crashing down upon its skull. Blood spurted up and out like a morbid fountain, and almost instantly the creature stopped moving. But the girl kept going, raising and dropping her sword again and again and again, mashing the skull, the face, anything she could reach, to destroy any last trace of what had become of the girl she loved. As she continued, her attacks grew more and more violent, her eyes burning with tears of rage and self-hatred for having let this happen.

It was her fault. It was all her fault! If she had just let her come with her, if she hadn't told her to stay put because of her sprained ankle, if she had left her with the bokken, if she had just…

She crumpled. Dropping the sword, she threw herself down to her knees and screamed in agony, ripping the sky in half and poisoning the air. She could not breathe… could not move… her mind so full of ifs and whys and hows that she wondered if she might go insane from the noise within her own head.