#my own teenage-fascination with gore is coming back ooops

[kiaroscuro]

Title: as the world caves in

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: gore

· · ─────── =^.^= ─────── · ·

Four days later has Ren finally finding success, body weary and battered. After continuing on further north-east, Ren's managed to track down three garuda, circling lethargically in the air until he attracted their attention, after which they started circling him like vultures. It had been raining for the past day, and Ren's soaked to the bone and dragged down by the weight of his clothes, but he doesn't stop his relentless pursuit of the mutated until he managed to clip the wings of two and dismember the third, his sniper rifle still hot and smoking at the muzzle before he hurriedly stoves it away next to his things -- hidden in a tangle of brambles.

He engages the bird-like shadows with his dagger and handgun, tries his best to wound and not kill, hopes that at least one of them has enough brainpower left to use a healing skill targeted at the group so that Ren can benefit from it.

He stumbles as one lunges for him, catching his side with its beak before they crash, and Ren has barely any time to ram up his gun to catch it before it tried to go for his neck, eyes empty. There's flowers lodged in its throat, the petals falling past the gun and onto his cheek with its saliva, and Ren closes one eye while he struggles to move the arm pinned underneath its foot, dagger in a reverse grip. The other two are approaching, one of them dragging itself on the ground because he'd gotten its leg, and Ren panics and rams his knee into the groin of the one that is trying to bite him, dislodging its foot before he guts it open, gore splattering into his front as it falls to the side, limp.

Ren breathes heavily, rattled, jumps to his legs before kneeling because he's out-of-breath, aiming his handgun for the head of the closest approaching one, the echoing bang-! loud in the silence of the forest. "...come on, heal yourselves...!" Ren mutters, clutching at his sluggishly bleeding side, vision growing wonky because of his exhaustion and the harsh rainfall. "Please," he adds, kind of helplessly. The gutted one is dying, he's blown out the brains of another, and only the one that was dragging itself along is still close to being 'fine' -- if they don't cast the spell, Ren will have to find others, and he doesn't think he can survive another week of stark silence without going completely mad.

The last garuda groans, drags itself close enough to Ren's side that he's readying his dagger already, before the soft glow of Amrita Drop surrounds it. Ren watches in fascination as some of the flowers seem to peel off of them, watches as wounds try and fail to close -- it's a spell against ailments and not physical injuries, after all, though it helps with alleviating pain -- and then finally feels it wash over himself.

Ren's breath gets struck in his throat as he waits, silently. A beat passes, then two--

static crackles in the air, a mazio unloading, and Ren's muscles tense as he watches in disbelief how the one-legged garuda shrieks as it rights itself up, pain visible in its dull eyes. He feels the electric-type damage wash over his skin, hyper-conducted through how wet he was, feels it travel over his shoulder and his shut eye and--

the static drops as quickly as it had appeared, and Ren curls into a ball with his forehead to the ground because his whole right side hurts, tears gathering in his eyes. Something sharp touches over his curled spine, but Ren's unresponsive, muscles spasming and side burning, his eye feeling as if it was cooked out of his skull. "Oh Ren..." Arsene's voice murmurs, low and sad but there. "...what stupid thing did thou do?" He asks, his claws pressing deeper against Ren's spine. Ren whines, fingers clutching deeper against his side, the pain making him delirious. But Arsene was there, Arsene was back, and --

Ren loses consciousness while he feels Arsene shift, feels the claws travel towards his chest and the persona's other hand towards his knees before he blacks out, welcoming the bliss of a painless silence.

--

He'd been able to see everything that kept happening to Ren as if through a kaleidoscope, impersonal and not-quite-there, sometimes missing hours if not days while he tried to stay aware, unable to interfere through the thick molasses of their addled mind, could do nothing but watch until Amrita Drop washed over them and broke Arsene free of the shackles, only to see his user--

Arsene sighs, cradling Ren closer to himself, the human's skin fevered with flush and bleeding from too many cuts and wounds. The persona had surveyed the grounds of slaughter before he'd carefully ambled over to where Ren's hidden his supplies, awkwardly grabbing everything and adjusting it onto his form without leaving his human out of his grasp, before he re-oriented himself into a north-east direction and started walking, his innate sense of direction as precise as a compass. Ren is burning up, whimpering at every movement, curling himself tighter against Arsene's chest in a feeble effort to feel safe even in his dreams, and Arsene mantles his wings over Ren to the best of his ability, the rain making the soft down stick together while it pearls off in rivulets. His fire burns low, a flickering thing while he continues forward, and he doesn't notice that he's thrumming in worry until Ren unconsciously smooths the palm of his hand over Arsene's chest as if to comfort him.

Warmth seeps into the persona at the connection point, something soft curving the line of his back, and he feels both incredibly fond and also unbelievably disgusted with himself, for not noticing the danger that the Nagoya settlement had turned into. Arsene chirrs softly when the rain turns to hail, glancing heavenwards and wondering where he should take Ren to, where there was a dry shelter the human could rest in. He's wary of any groups, be they human or shadow, would rather squirrel away his user and hide him from all of the hurt of the world.

The hail plinks against his mask, the break in his horn starting to smart from the cold, but Arsene soldiers on with his senses wide open and wonders.

An hour later something rustles to his right, the structure of the overgrown forest giving way to cliffs and sparser trees, conifers starting to dominate over the leafy ones. They're entering something of a more regular forest, the scent of magic subsiding as they pass whatever invisible border mother nature had decided was enough for her megafauna to terrorize, and Arsene can hear the soft chitter of regular animals instead of the groaning of the infected.

A shadow emerges from the tree-line, soaked through and with its armor in disarray, a little cat-shaped samurai. It is uninfected, but stares at Arsene as if he's the mutated one, though he probably showed a sight. "Greetings, shogun." Arsene says, inclining his head even while his claws tighten in the fabric of Ren's clothes and his wings press closer, until he can feel the hot fever past his feathers.

"Hullo. You're not sick," it says, eyes wary. Arsene nods.

"We wish you no harm; we're only seeking shelter," he murmurs, voice catching and throat smarting. Speaking loudly scrapes at his wounded throat, and he can feel blood and ichor amass behind the seams of his mask the more he speaks with the cat, doesn't know how much of it is physical and how much is psychological pain. But Ren needs somewhere dry so that Arsene could inspect his shoulder and his abdomen before the fever turns into an infection, so he will try.

The cat frowns, and something behind it moves, another neko shogun appearing. A nekomata follows, as does a bugbear and an alice, and Arsene finds himself tense as he notices that he's run into a rather large group of survivors. "Where are you headed?" The nekomata asks, one of her ears missing.

"To Tokyo."

"It's dangerous to cross over the forest. Stick to the human ruins." The first shogun says, and Arsene nods. The hail still falls, but it has stopped its relentless assault. Still; Ren's clothes are completely soaked.

"The city is in shambles, but there's survivors banding together everywhere, be they human or shadow." The nekomata continues, and his fire purses into a thin line.

"Thou've been there?"

She nods, tail swishing. She looks frightened, malnourished. "Near Odaiba. Everything went under when the bay expanded two months ago; I fled and ran into bugbear. It's a long way to Tokyo, and winter is close, avian. Now we only wish for a shelter where we'll not be separated."

He nods, aware of the impending winter that they hadn't managed to out-journey. "Stay as far away as ye can from Nagoya's settlement; it is a cannibalistic cult particularly unfriendly to shadows." Arsene shifts, clutches Ren closer to offer what little body warmth that he can, the steady rise and fall of his user's breath the only balm on their shared soul right now. "There's a camp near Tsu called Tsu-Aki that takes in shadows and humans alike." He offers, because these shadows had given him invaluable advice about the road ahead.  

The group glances at each other, before the nekomata and the shogun bow. Arsene inclines his head, thinking their amenable exchange over, but the alice speaks up next, her dress soaked dark and her hair cut uneven. "We've taken shelter inside an abandoned airplane wreck some two days' foot-journeyfrom here, further uphill. It's been rapidly overtaken by nature, but it should be a useful shelter to wait out the next few days of rain and hail." She eyes his wings. "It might be dangerous, but flying should cut you down to only a few hours. That human of yours looks to be in a bad shape."

Arsene stares. He's not used to kindness from strangers they encounter on the road, his own throat and broken horn a testament to that. "Thank you," he chokes out. The alice smiles softly, curtsies, and then they're off. Arsene hopes that they'll make it to Zenkichi, suddenly full of sentiment. He's not been in existence for even two years, though the past months feel like a whole lifetime. Some of these shadows are multiple times his senior, have seen the cruelty and whimsy of humanity in a way he as a persona never really has, and they still try to help Ren because he's cradling his human close. He wishes them the best before carefully shifting around the packs -- the backpack is resting awkwardly on his back, and Arsene's never been as glad that his wings set out from his lower back than now -- but he manages to somehow get airborne after a few embarrassing starts and sets out to find this airplane wreck in the hopes that it's at least somewhat dry.

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