Clairaudients [Wild Adapter, PG-13]
Clairaudients
Wild Adapter // Kubota/Tokitoh, PG-13
1412 words
Based on Minekura's 2005 Christmas Special AU. What happened after.
Powdery ash, its texture oddly silken like fur or feathers, carried on the wind more easily than the heavy wetness of snow. It collected like silt, painted the road in a soft, whispering layer that muffled footsteps and stirred into a gentle, cloudy wake. It blew in from the north, carrying with it the sharp scent of flame and soot, of grease and metal. The south was hazy and empty, its horizon drifting in and out of focus. Beyond the wasteland, through the curtains of cloud and smoke, was a place where it still rained, where the sky was blue and things still lived--birds that were not greasy clumps of feathers cooked over a fire, cats that weren’t vicious, half-dead things made of jutting bone and sinew. There was real wilderness, real trees, air that wasn’t difficult to breathe. South, there was the sea.
They went south.
The air made the boy sick after the third day, and he coughed and coughed, spitting thick black phlegm to the roadside, his eyes streaming. His hair was dusted with ash, his skin sallow in the weird half-light. Kubota rubbed his back and watched the sky and when he had stopped hacking, forced the canteen into his weak fingers. He dampened a cloth and wrapped it over the boy’s face, covering his mouth and nose, and helped him up, hands over knobby elbows and winged shoulder blades.
There was a town, bare steel struts stabbing up like teeth. Barbed wire curled at the edges of the road, and the ground beyond was churned into waves. The sidewalk was cracked and lined with straggling grass, power lines snaking over the road, their telephone poles splintered and listing sickly over the road. Black licked at aged brick, empty windows gaping and lined with jagged glass. Kubota peered into doorways, one hand on his gun, hefting their supplies over his shoulder, until he leaned into one and there was a crumpled body slumped in the shadows, feet askew, and he glanced back to see the boy whiten, the fingers of his good hand clutching at the too-large jacket slung over his shoulders.
They found a supermarket, its aisles burned out and shelves collapsing. Dust and an old spill slicked the floor in a mucky coating. Kubota crept from one corner of the store to the next, sliding past cash registers, their drawers yawning open, and as he examined each dark stretch of aisle, the boy trailed after him, wobbly and stumbling.
The market’s storage room was dark and musty, a cloying, heavy scent hanging in the still air. When Kubota nudged at a rotted wooden crate and it fell to the filthy floor and cracked, there was an oily mass of matted fur beneath that did not move at the sound or the impact. Kubota peered at the rat and shook his head, moving to prowl at the stacks of boxes and crates against the wall, water-stained cardboard and warped plywood.
In the one closest to the wall, its nails rusted and twisted into the wood, untouched by anything but time, he found twelve battered cans of soup. He looked up and caught the boy’s eyes, glittering in the weak light from the door, he so thin in the dust they had stirred, his face anxious and pinched, and Kubota smiled.
They slept in one of the upper levels of a blown-out department store, surrounded by the skeletons of clothing racks, huddled against the shelter of the escalator’s cracked glass guard where Kubota could see the street from the darkness of the store. The boy shivered against him all night, feverish and weak. The morning dawned cold and dark, and Kubota rose, but the boy did not. He pressed his hand against the boy’s forehead, felt the pained rise and fall of his chest, and the boy curled into him and made a pathetic sound, his forehead glazed in sweat, his peculiar beast’s hand clutching at Kubota’s jacket.
(Even if he didn’t complain, even if he was all coiled, scrappy muscle and cat’s eyes, strong lines of jaw and mouth, he seemed very sick. I don’t know who I am, he had admitted, deliriously, as they traveled the road. Kubota thought he would make a very poor weapon.)
He stole down to the street and walked for a long time, taking care to step on the pavement where the ash had blown away, to leave no trace of his passing. The town was still and dark, the sky lightening to a dull grey as he finally forced his way into an old apartment building. The first apartment he broke into was empty, the floor light-bleached in patches, dust over everything, and the the faucet knocked and hissed when he tried it. The second was not, and he fought past the clinging reek of human filth, stepping over washes of silt on the moldy carpet and listening hard for movement further inside. The faucet’s water ran murky at first, and then, after he left it on for a solid minute as he crept from room to room, clearer, and he filled their canteen. He slipped out and left the desiccated corpse that laid stretched on the living room couch untouched.
The department store was silent when he returned. At the foot of the escalator, there was a pile of newspapers scattered in shards of glass that crunched dully underfoot, tattered pages sliding in a whispering rustle. Dusty remnants of the lives here, sale and weather and obituary. He plucked a few from the stack and climbed the steps. The boy was curled in a ball, panting and pale, and Kubota lifted him to drink, cradling his head and smoothing back his hair.
“You came back,” the boy said as he blinked and focused, his voice raspy, surprised. Kubota tipped the canteen against his lips, slowly, the water running at the cracked corners of his mouth. The boy struggled up and drank, his throat jerking, and when he slumped back he squinted at Kubota and said again, “You came back,” and now he was confused, his voice clearer.
“I wasn’t leaving,” Kubota said, and brushed his hand against the boy’s hair again. “I won’t.” He could feel something bottomless in the pit of his stomach like falling, but he only smiled and pressed his hand to the boy’s bony chest, his fingers spreading wide, and finally, the boy make an exasperated, scoffing sound in the back of his throat, his mouth twisting, and he curled his back against Kubota and slept again.
“Tokitoh,” Kubota said. “That could be your name.” He shifted the pack on his shoulder, cocking his head to give the boy a sideways look.
“You’re crazy,” the boy grumbled, watching his feet as he stepped over little slopes of ash and silt. He kept his bad hand close to his chest, wrapped in rags as though it were a wound. “What kind of name is that?”
“You don’t like it?”
At Kubota’s smile, the boy looked away, and his good hand pressed the damp cloth closer over his nose and mouth. “It’s all right,” he allowed with a roll of his eyes, and the ash and soot smudged over his cheeks looked like bruises, blooming wide in the pallid light.
“Tokitoh, then.”
Later, as they neared the edge of the town, the buildings wearing down to rubble and lurching bridges of concrete and metal, there was a distant rumble that echoed over the overcast sky. Kubota ducked into an alley, dragging Tokitoh after him and murmuring quiet, and he peered through the spidery tangle of black metal, the vestige of a fire escape torn from its anchors and lodged between the buildings. The rumble grew to a roar, and as a jet screamed overhead, he pulled Tokitoh close against him.
He could feel Tokitoh’s heart hammering in his chest, the tremble that went all through his body, and they stayed crouched in the alley a long time after the jet was gone, its thunder still fading from the air.
“Are we going somewhere safe?” Tokitoh said finally into the stillness, swallowing. His hands were clenched into fists at his sides, but he made no move to jerk away. His spine was rigid and he did not look at Kubota.
“Maybe,” Kubota said, pressing his hands to the ridges of Tokitoh’s shoulders, light like birds’ bones, so sharp and fragile. “Maybe.”