#but in the end Ann 'won' the metaphorical coin toss because the image of her and Carmen going out behind a wall of flames was too powerful

[kiaroscuro]

Warnings: descriptions of violence, major character death

Rating: Mature

Main Pairing: Ren Amamiya / Arsene

Main Tags: post-canon, zombie au, angst, hurt / comfort, road trips

Warning: mentioned MCD (not only Mona this time!)

· · ─────── =^.^= ─────── · ·

Tokyo as a whole is just so full of people -- Ren and Arsene take to the train tracks again, but now that they're past the danger-zone of random flash-floods, everywhere they look, there's people: little communities living side by side, some turning into larger settlements, some forming loose alliances with each other. It's fascinating, to see how many survivors there are just wandering between wards and districts as well, when Ren's been counting them in the single digits for most of their travels before they reached some invisible-seeming border near Shizuoka, and the population started to pick up again.

Ren thinks that the number of people could easily reach Nagoya's settlement, or whatever numbers Tsu-Aki has now, and they're just barely halfway-through Bunkyo. It seems to be a fine line they're walking, between being large groups of the living and large groups of the mutated. The landscape of Tokyo is both familiar and not, many of the buildings broken apart or overrun by nature, green flashing between all of the urban areas, sometimes making Ren gag with the phantom-memory of Takuto. They'd started their journey at dawn with hope in their hearts, and by the time they finally spied the Sunshine 60 skyscraper from Toshima station, it's past noon and Ren's got his gun drawn because around every corner, the meandering footfalls of infected can be heard. They grabbed a pamphlet with information about their goal before continuing onwards, Arsene leafing through it between calmer moments.

It's as nerve-wracking as his days near Osaka had been, where the dead had outnumbered the living by too much to count, and both he and Arsene are tense, this close to their goal. They take out large clusters of mutated on their path, until they start reaching barricades and stakes that are clearly man-made. Ren eyes them suspiciously, noticing the faint agi spells that made the fires flicker on some of them, and carefully walks past them with Arsene, more alert for area-of-effect spells now. Not even the angels had warded their settlement like this...

Though, it is possible that we've simply missed the wards due to how quickly we were noticed. These support spells stretch much further.

Mh. Ren agrees, nimbly stepping around debris that seemed to be placed there on purpose. They're quickly approaching the skyscraper, dodging around around lingering spells and obstacles as if they were in a palace, and it doesn't take them that much longer before they arrive around a corner after which seems to be a stone wall, revealing itself as molten rock and metal fused together, with chicken wire secured on top, about twice as high as Ren. Spikes out of wood and metal both are placed before the wall, and there's a few spaces that might be lookout posts, and Ren has to take a step back to take in the whole structure that turned Sunshine City into a palace.

"...god," Ren exhales, suddenly and inexplicably longing for their little hotel room back in Nagatsugawa. The grip on his handgun tightens, and they glance at each other.

A white flag might just be a good idea, Arsene surmises, glancing down at himself; he's threatening-looking on the best of days, and today's not one of those. "Maybe." Ren agrees. "We have some leftover bandages, right?"

"Oui," Arsene murmurs, quickly magicking them out of one of their shoulder-bags, before he frowns and glances around for something stick-like. They find something that looks like a discarded arrow, quickly turning it into a makeshift flag, before Arsene sticks it out as far around the corner as he can. When nothing fires at it, they carefully step around as well, walking over to one of the little lookouts while constantly waving the bandages. Ren tries calling out, not too loudly, and then--

a head pops out of the lookout, pale lilac hair and a red eye the only thing Ren can make out. "Hello!" The stranger calls out, a shotgun dangling between her fingers as she leans further forward. That's as clear a warning as Ren's ever seen. Arsene frowns, next to him. "Are you guys friendly?"

"Yeah!" Ren calls back. "We're looking for-- Futaba Sakura! We're family! Is she with you?"

She blinks, clearly taken aback, before eyeing them over anew. "...right. What're your names, and more importantly: are you wounded?"

"Amamiya Ren and Arsene Lupin, and we art not! Only superficial scratches!"

She eyes them over, frowning, and Ren knows they look a sight. "...are you a shadow or a persona? And my name's -Erina, by the way," Erina introduced herself, pausing oddly over her name.

"A persona!" Arsene calls back, and Erina's shoulders slump in relief. She tells them that they have follow the barricade around the next corner where one of the entrances is located and they do after her hair disappears from the lookout. Once by the door, they're led through what seems to be a repurposed container unit with multiple windows. A voice tells them to "Wait there!" Some kind of shadow going by Arsene's bristling feathers, and then Erina slips into the room. She's wearing something that looks like it might be a cosplay military coat, fingerless gloves, a red skirt and combat boots rounding out her outfit, looking every inch a fighter. She's smiling at them, thinly.

"Let the mu shuwuu and fuu-ki run a diagnostic and seal your skills for now," she says, and Ren tenses up because that would leave them effectively defenseless.

"Thou've had bad experiences in the past?" Arsene asks, the faint green glow of a navigator-type spell falling over him (and Ren, to a lesser extent). It makes all of the wounds that Arsene's sustained more visible for a blinding moment.

"You could say that," Erina says, dryly. She shifts around, and Ren notices that the eye he assumed hidden by her hair simply... wasn't. "A woman, her child and a barong had arrived a few weeks ago; they claimed to only be 'scratched' and we let them in--"

(Ren flinches.)

"-- needless to say, we lost three people and a shadow that day; one of our best nurses at that." Erina finishes.

He doesn't object to them sealing their abilities anymore.

Once that's over and done with, they're allowed out of the container and into the Sunshine City proper: three skyscrapers with ---

Ren barely has any time to inspect everything, though, because a familiar presence settles at the back of his mind, a soft "Welcome back, leader-unit," echoing through Arsene and him before someone tackles him. Instincts snap into place, and Ren hugs back Futaba even while she's burrowing into his neck with a hiccoughing cry of "Ren!"

"Oh," Ren says, overwhelmed, before he blinks back tears and starts to buckle, strength suddenly leaving him. Necronomicon's tentacles curl around his middle and soften his fall into a controlled sink to the ground-- right, that was Necronomicon's voice earlier--

Arsene's moving towards other approaching figures, four of them, out-of-focus to his blurry vision but distinctly familiar, and they're surrounding the persona and touching him before they double in numbers, and Ren's awash with the phantom-feeling of the hugs of his team while everyone somehow starts piling around him and Arsene.

He's crying now, earnest, a tension leaving him that's been with him ever since the whole world went up in flames, and he hugs Futaba back even fiercer and squeezes his eyes shut when he feels Ryuji's hands on his shoulder and Haru's comforting weight at his back. "...we're back," Ren murmurs, amazed.

"You-- you made it-!" Futaba wails. "I can't believe you, you reckless idiot--"

"Yeah," Ren says, softly. He gets tugged to the side and against Yusuke, and now Makoto's hand is on his shoulder, and Futaba's not let go of him. Ren is buoyed in joy, happy, when he catches a snippet of conversation from the persona, still keyed into their broadband:

--Carm en?

She'sgo ne, mate. Sacri ficedhe rs elf.

__

Its flavor is distinctly alien because Necronomicon isn't filtering their conversation properly, having forgotten that it had greeted Ren earlier, the mental 'language' much more melodious than one would assume. Ren's used to it after a whole year of thieving, though, and he freezes up, softly detangling himself from Futaba.

"...where's Ann?" He asks, grief already settling into his bones.

The others are silent for a heart-rending moment. "Dead," Makoto says, eyes squeezed shut as if in pain. Ren stares at her in disbelief. "Before-- before we had the barricades... in the beginning. A big group of survivors..." She trails off. Yusuke picks up:

"If it weren't for Panther, myself and twenty-one people would be dead. Carmen erected a wall of flames that burned for hours, both of them on the other side of the conflict." He takes a rattling breath. "...in the end, they burned themselves out, along with over fifty infected. She always believed you would reach us in the end." Yusuke finishes with, and Ren stares, ears ringing, a hand coming up to his collar unconsciously as he looks over to Arsene, whose own grief is trailing down in golden streaks over his mask. Goemon and Kidd have their eyes averted, while Milady is still, and even Necronomicon's dropped lower.

"Oh," Ren says, at a loss for words. Haru sees where he's touching, but even before she can say anything, Ren nods. "Morgana, too. He... his body was so small. It couldn't fight the fever. I-- held him, and then we buried him, and--" Grief chokes up his words. "My parents didn't even-- they didn't even make it out of our hometown, and. And-- I didn't know if we could make it, but sometimes. It was the only thing keeping me going, and I--" he stops, unable to continue as they hug him tighter, the persona also coming closer to the pile, and Ren lets his grief and terror over the past half-year wash over him, tries to forget that a year ago at roughly this time he'd been spending his last few months in Tokyo before leaving for Hasetsu, his friends having just gotten him out of juvie.

"You're-- here now," Futaba says, voice teary. "We're here, you're here, we're all-- all together now, so everything's going to be-- okay. Just you see, Joker, everything's gonna be okay."

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