#qkwrites

[quirkle2]

my wbk fic is up <3 tumblr links aren't working and they want me dead personally

[quirkle2]

[quirkle2]

more zombie au :] (1.2k words)

The odor of rot has joined the damp growth of life from pots. Even if some things die off without human aid, there are always stronger elements that thrive in their absence.

The aisles are overgrown. Ritsu brushes past the vines as gently as he can, wooden floor groaning under his worn soles. There’s a gap of empty space in the middle of each aisle that he slots through, eyes roaming the shelves of largely useless things. Stronger stems snag onto his backpack and he tugs distractedly while perusing the labeled pots along the tables.

The barn is quaint, and Ritsu thinks he would love to stay. Moss eats at the boards under his feet and bugs swarm around him in the hot air incessantly, but it’s peaceful and there’s a constant sprinkle of sound to his ears that have grown so used to silence. Whoever owned this place beforehand put up a few wind chimes indoors—they must’ve always had the front entrance open for customers.

It’s a quiet little homemade garden center, or something similar, on the side of the highway. It’s an overgrown property with something dead in the backyard that Ritsu refuses to acknowledge or let Shigeo near. The shingles and boards in the roof have been replaced with polyethylene sheets—a barn-turned-greenhouse, uprooted from the hay and cattle it likely used to house and settled back into the Earth to be a paradise for plants.

There’s a large branch hanging through a hole poked into the plastic overhead. It sways with the wind and the chimes that follow, and Ritsu whistles with the leadless melody and gives it a direction while he studies old seed packets.

They didn’t stop here for any particular reason—a garden center doesn’t have much for apocalypse survivors, but Shigeo has always liked overgrown things. He’d always enjoyed taking care of their mother’s plants back home, and then Reigen’s at the office. His brother likes the humidity of greenhouses and the smell of soil and dirt and must.

He sees the top of Shigeo’s head over the aisles, across the barn. He walks past a shovel hanging on the wall and yelps out a grunt when it clangs to the floor behind him. Ritsu shakes his head and smiles, running his fingers along faded price tags.

The feeling of greenhouses has always had this… wet fullness, to Ritsu.

When he breathes in it’s like he can taste the life that breathes out and it feels like a conversation, a question and an answer, both of which he’s not sure how to articulate. The leaves wave to him and he waves back, the once-active sprinklers pepper his skin with dots, with compliments, with proclamations they are eager to share. The vines weave between fencing just to reach him, just to talk.

He understands why Shigeo likes it, and why he’d always asked to accompany their mother on trips to get new seeds. Ritsu hadn’t really understood, then, how pretty it could be, how full it could feel.

Shigeo had always been right about loving the little things. Ritsu wishes he’d seen that sooner.

His brother ambles down the aisle ahead of him and he listens to the quiet patter of his sloppy footwork, moving around a table of seed trays. His whistles carry across the barn, sort of aimless in their own right instead of leading the wind and the chimes somewhere worthwhile, but the sounds soak into the overhead plastic nicely, so he keeps going.

He pulls back a layering of vines and leaves to scan the contents of another shelf, and then he notices Shigeo stop in his peripherals. His dirty shoes stay planted in the corner of his vision, leaves burying the toes, and Ritsu looks away from the products.

He means to say something, to ask him what’s up even if saying things to Shigeo very rarely results in productivity, but he stops when he realizes his brother’s head is… tilted.

He’s looking at him with as much inquisitiveness as his dulled down awareness can muster, pale eyes flickering across Ritsu’s face like he’s working out some puzzle. He instinctively stops whistling, brain lagging behind on this new info of this new behavior, and the sound fizzles out into a little huff of air that leaves the greenhouse feeling oddly empty.

Shigeo studies him for a moment longer, blinking slowly, and then he straightens his head out as Ritsu stares back. His brother’s gaze lingers there on his mouth, like he’s still confused, like he still expects something to happen.

Ritsu blinks once, twice. The wind chimes call as wind pokes at his greasy spikes, as it prods at the ends of his jacket and fills the silence with a different flavor of itself. The interest in the zombie’s eyes fades a little, gaze straying to the vines around them.

Very tentatively, Ritsu wets his lips and blows. The whistle grabs his brother’s attention immediately, and he’s suddenly tilting his head like a curious dog.

He can’t help the laugh that spills out and makes the whistle a mess of exhales. His shoulders shake a little and he hurries to keep the tune steady and consistent; a few seconds pass and Shigeo tilts his head the other way, exhausted eyes big and more alert than they’ve been in days.

Ritsu experiments, and ventures around with the sound—goes lower and higher and watches his brother twist his head back and forth like he’s trying to understand calculus. There’s something very innocent about it, about the look in his eyes that reminds him of when they were kids and their father would show them magic tricks.

It’s muted by the ever-present fog there in his pupils, but Ritsu thinks he sees a spark of that life in them, of that curiosity born from a mind that knows little. He gives him a simple sensation, a simple experience, and his brother is eating it all up like he’s four again, like he’s new and everything is colorful and unknown and big.

Ritsu watches Shigeo tilt his head back and forth, watches the rusty gears behind his window panes move. He changes tactics, because some sad part of him tells him to, and whistles Shigeo’s favorite song instead.

He remembers the name, but he doesn’t need the name because when he thinks of the tune he thinks of his brother, and that’s all that matters. It’s happy, because Shigeo likes happy music. It’s chipper and yet it meanders, like it’s willingly getting lost, like it’s wandering where it wants to and it’ll eventually find its roots again. It’s happy the whole time. The whole adventure.

Shigeo stops tilting his head, and the gears behind his eyes churn a little bit faster. His gaze clings to Ritsu’s and his brother makes actual eye contact, sinks his own being into Ritsu’s head when he’s least prepared for it. The recognition in his gaze has his soul souring.

He keeps whistling. He doesn’t want to stop, because Shigeo feels like Shigeo right now, and he doesn’t want that to stop.

His brother stares. Ritsu’s grief tints the music.

[quirkle2]

[zombie au] the written version of this post but like.way more harrowing (3.5k words)

It’s been a long time since Ritsu has seen the stars.

When he and his brother were little, stars were very important to them. An obsession from one brother meant it was an obsession by association for the other—Shigeo would listen to Ritsu ramble about types of stars and facts about comets for hours. He’d always be so patient about it, even if Ritsu stumbled over the big words.

Ritsu has always loved space, and the imagery that comes with it—his favorite planet has always been Neptune ever since he learned of the existence of its rings. He finds supernovas fascinating, nebulae even more so; the cycle of life for bodies so beyond his understanding had never failed to capture his attention and hold it until its last breath.

At six years old, his father had taken him and Shigeo on a camping trip. His brother had gotten carsick on the way there, their father’s card had been declined when trying to pay for gas, and Ritsu had nearly caused a crash the way he suddenly screamed about a spider in the seat with him. Looking back, he’s sure the journey had been about eighty percent stress for his father.

For Ritsu, it had rewired him.

It’d been the first time he’d ever seen so many stars in the sky. It’d been the first time he’d ever been outside the city to begin with, the first time he could look out over the horizon and not see the treeline replaced with geometric, manmade light. He’d been so enamored by it his neck hurt the next morning from straining to drink everything in.

His brother gave it all that subtle smile, that surface-level spark of appreciation, and then he’d gone to bother their father about s’mores—he’d left him there in front of their tent to gawk at the expanse, at the majesty. Their voices had been far away, and the stars had felt so close.

That same majesty had blanketed him when they’d escaped the city, after the start of the apocalypse, but despite his lifelong love for all things space, he hadn’t found it in himself to enjoy it. Before, it’d been light pollution to fog his obsession.

Now, it’s… well, it’s a lot of things.

The air is crisp in his lungs, and dry against his cold fingers. The plastic of the truck bed against his back creaks and wobbles when Tome shifts in her spot. The crickets are loud in the absence of conversation, but Ritsu appreciates the songs they play—he taps his collarbone with two fingers to the beat of their melody, never having been much of a music lover in the past, but slowly learning its importance.

He senses Tome lean and angles his head down to watch her loom over his brother, squished against his side. She observes him for a moment, studying, and then her eyes flick to Ritsu’s and she’s mouthing something to him in the quiet.

He catches something like sleep and it’s all he really needs to get the gist. Ritsu lifts his head from the bed of the truck, double-chinned, to peek at his brother’s face.

Cheek smooshed up to his hip, limply hugging his thigh, and probably drooling on his t-shirt. He eyes the edges of his silhouette in the dark, watches the rise and fall of his chest and notes how it’s slower, and steady.

For the past few days, everything about him has been… droopy. The lids, the nonsensical speech, the sloppy movements, the slurred cracks of saliva in his throat when Ritsu takes something out of his mouth. Before they’d found this truck, abandoned on a dirt backroad they’d been walking along for hours, Ritsu had seen the pure, glassy exhaustion in Shigeo’s eyes and prayed for a decent place to settle down.

The bed of a truck that has a bloodied backseat and bullet holes in the rear windshield isn’t necessarily a decent place, but it’s passable.

Shigeo’s eyes are closed, and when Ritsu shifts his leg, his brother does not rise. He breathes out a sigh that feels heavy on his soul, but the sound is made of relief and Tome sags too.

The tension pressing down on the truck bed releases, and Ritsu assumes it’s his imagination when they seem to lift an inch from the weight taken off the flat wheels. They’re left in a silence that, for once, feels empty in a calming way. There is little substance to it, little to complain about in the moment, and Ritsu can tell he’s not the only one basking in that shallowness.

“Thank God,” Tome mumbles into the dark. Neither of them are particularly afraid of waking him up—once he’s out, he’s out for a while and dead to the world during it. “It was starting to make me tired just looking at him.”

Ritsu cannot help but agree, but somewhere in his own long-lived exhaustion he forgets he’s supposed to respond and instead just stares while Tome adjusts. She wraps her knees with her arms and stilts them up to make an X, stares out over the truck siding and traces the edges of the cornfield around them.

The crickets fill his lack of reply with croaks and chirps, and Tome seems used to his odd stints of silence. It’s a bit of a lullaby, and Ritsu finds himself drooping too, yet he’s unable to close his eyes and give into it.

Instead, he stares with a fuzzy gaze at the stars directly in his line of sight, and realizes they’ve been there the whole time. Of course they have, he thinks, and it’s one of those obvious things that hits him much too late to even stifle it, and he’s left with a thrum in his mind that’s of a vaguely embarrassed timbre.

He sees the stars every night. It’s just been quite a long time since he’s seen them.

There is something about the quiet, modest glint to them that funnels all that nostalgia to the forefront. The smell of s’mores and campfire smoke, the dust on old library books and the ache in his muscles that came with carrying too many nonfiction copies in his little arms. The cold, factual tone of documentary narrators over the coolest computer animations Ritsu’s ever seen, no matter how low quality the textures were.

His mother leaning over his shoulder, kissing his scalp and humming out a laugh when he pointed at all the comets crudely drawn into his looseleaf. His father bringing home science books that’d get more and more complicated as Ritsu grew older, but he soaked them up and memorized each paragraph like it was his duty to recite them perfectly.

Shigeo, eyes seemingly sparkling whenever Ritsu even opened his mouth and so, so incredibly patient, nodding in those little excited bursts when he’d explained how stars were born. Giggling when Ritsu threw his arms out under their little blanket fort in his bedroom, reenacting those supernovas he loves so much and spilling the blankets on their heads.

Ritsu realizes that maybe it isn’t nostalgia, because it feels quite bitter on the tongue. It’s something close, but it’s too… aggrieved to be nostalgia.

“So what’s your take?” Tome speaks over the crickets, over the crisp air that makes her shiver as she scoots down the truck bed to lie on her back. One of her arms is pinned under Shigeo. She doesn’t bother to yank it out from under him.

“On…?” he mumbles lazily, exhaustion peeling at his patience. He fights the urge to close his eyes because if he does he knows he’ll pass out on her instantly and he needs her on his good side.

Tome’s hair pillows under her head in a spiraled, jumbled mess while she loosely copies his position. He just knows she’s going to complain about the knots in it for the sixtieth time tomorrow morning, and he starts mentally preparing for that.

“How the apocalypse started.” She tilts her head toward him while she talks, but her eyes stay glued to the stars. “Got any good theories?” 

Ritsu slowly slogs through the question, wishing he were asleep instead. Maybe he should just pass out. “Mh… I dunno,” he shrugs noncommittally. His legs ache, and he shuffles them around to press his calves against the rough plastic of the bed. “I don’t really think about that stuff.”

A partial lie; he occasionally feels ungodly amounts of hatred toward whoever started it—if a human being even started it at all—and occasionally wanders if it would be morally incorrect to shoot the fucker between the eyes if he ever meets them.

“Oh c’moooon,” Tome drawls, tilting her head as far back as it’ll go against the rivets underneath them and finally looking his way. There’s an odd weight to her gaze, like she’s looking for something in his face a little too closely, and he suddenly, inexplicably feels vulnerable.

Her free hand comes up to gesture just above her stomach, flippant. “You’ve gotta have something!”

He considers fabricating some ridiculous answer, but he finds he doesn’t have the energy to. That knowing glint in her eyes has him backstepping a little bit, and he scratches at his neck habitually and shrugs out a reply. “Not really.”

Ritsu moves the hand on his collarbone and flops it above his head, the zippers of his backpack sliding along his knuckles. He searches for the dangling pull to fidget with, and he senses Tome look away from him and back to the sky.

She then says, quietly in the air, “Well I think it’s aliens.”

Ritsu blinks slowly at the stars, lagging a little, and then the words catch up to him and he can’t stop himself from side-eyeing her hard.

“Aliens?” he echoes, a disbelieving lilt to his voice that borders on hilarity.

Tome nods matter-of-factly, comically genuine about it, and for a moment he doesn’t know whether he should openly be a dick and brick her dreams, let her down softly, or allow her to float.

There are a lot of things he could say to this, and he decides to settle for somewhere in the middle of all three. “You need to be medicated.”

It’s poured out over a tired grin and lazy, wandering eyes that trail the sky, soft and a little prudent. Tome grins back, like she was expecting that answer. It’s sharper than his fuzzy, weary edges.

“You need way more medication than me,” Tome teases, “I’m serious about it and it’s true.”

“Nevermind,” Ritsu breathes, lifting his head to pillow it under a hand, “I actually don’t think medicine can fix you.”

“Aliens are real.”

“Okay,” is calmly fed back, unperturbed but not convinced.

“Nobody ever takes me seriously after I say that,” Tome rolls onto her side, facing him, hair draping over the hand that’s propped against her head. Shigeo is jostled, but stays still and silent.

“Wonder why,” Ritsu deadpans.

“They’re scared of the truth!”

“Mmmmh. Sure.”

“They don’t wanna admit it.”

“They don’t.”

“And neither do you.”

“And neither do I.”

“Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“Doing that—stop just agreeing with me.”

“Okay. You’re wrong.”

Tome tsks in a funny gauh sound, gesturing to the sky and shaking her head as if it’ll help her, and then, “Shigeo would believe me.”

Ritsu can feel her freeze up, even if they’re not touching. He can feel the way the air gets a degree colder and that weight comes back down to press against the truck bed and their chests. He breathes through it—he doesn’t think Tome even tries to.

She waits, breath baited, balancing on those eggshells she usually stomps on. She’s never been one to shy away from kicking him while he’s down, at least in the past. Those little pokes and jabs are something he simply had to get used to, if he wanted that much-needed help.

He thinks about the look she gave him earlier, the one that left him feeling centered in her claws while he stared at the stars and reminisced. He wonders what changed her demeanor. He wonders if his increasingly exhausted eyes lately have anything to do with it.

She’s waiting to see if she’s toeing a line, studying his face with sharp basil and calculating exactly how many eggshells she’s stepping on, listening to the crackles. Ritsu counts with her and finds it odd that he doesn’t already know the answer.

“No he wouldn’t,” he hears himself say, just to have something in the air between them that isn’t tension. He’s unsure if it’s true—it’s so silly he doesn’t even bother fact checking it. He’s too focused on the fact that Tome seems more attuned to what he’s feeling than he does. “You know nothing about him, you’re walking right into failure here.”

Something like relief flashes there in her irises, and the substance to the air dissipates a fraction. A brief moment of mischief and a close cousin of anger follows it, and then she swallows back the righteousness and smoothes out that sharp edge to her smile. “Okay, Mr. Genius. Maybe it’s time I ask The Question, then.”

Ritsu’s grin disappears, quickly at first, and then it floats down into a numb line and they’re suddenly in a much different kind of quiet. It’s still, almost suffocatingly so, but the crickets carry that old, childhood sense of safety with their song. The world loses that presently sharp, shiny finish and everything in existence suddenly feels matte against his atoms, flat and smooth and dry. Distant, and unreal.

She says it with a capital T and a capital Q, and despite how bold the statement is in the world of their little war between each other, she looks at him with an invitation to back down. It’s offered up like a challenge at first, but as she leaves the implications of it to marinate he can feel her confidence slipping. Her gaze is open and curious, but it’s poised for disappointment and acceptance of the fact.

If he searches, he can almost see the apologetic look hidden beneath it all, like she’s sorry she even asked him of such a thing.

The Question has gone unspoken, until now, but Tome continues once she feels she’s given him ample time to cut the cord on it all, and then she lets it out. “What was he like?” Quiet words, with such deafening reminders.

Ritsu stares, and he tries to think about how to summarize somebody he loves so much.

To Tome, he has been nothing but a kid who was bitten a long while ago. To her, he’s a husk, of a stranger, of a boy who’d often been a stranger even to people close to him. To this girl, Shigeo is one zombie in a crowd of billions, and the little sparks of personality in that dying flame of his core probably seem quite feeble and unimpressive.

To Ritsu, that all means everything.

“He was,” he stutters out, stilted and slow, as his racing mind jams every messy thought to the forefront, “quiet. He was really quiet, in everything he did, to most people. Sometimes you’d have to strain to hear him.”

He keeps his eyes on the edge of the truck bed, because if he doesn’t, he’d have to meet Tome’s gaze and he doesn’t think he’s capable of that anymore. “Really soft-spoken. Really gentle, but he could get intense when he wanted.”

In the silence, he’s very aware of his breathing, and the slow, steady bobbing of his own hand resting on his diaphragm. He works to keep it that way. “People ignored him a lot—said they barely registered his presence,” he says, with just a touch of sourness to his tone, “A lotta people would say most of him felt… ‘muted.’

“But I never understood that, cuz…” Because it was so wrong. “Cuz everything he did, he did it with all he had. And that was loud to me.

“He’d stay up all night in calls with our friend Teru, when he was upset. He’d bring home cookies for me if he knew I had a long day.” The twinge of a smile on his face is despairingly bittersweet. His breaths are steady. “All of the kids at school thought it was cool to hate your parents, but Shige looked sad when they said stuff like that and he came home and hugged them longer than usual.

“He’d cry if he accidentally stepped on a ladybug. He’d wave to frogs he saw on the sidewalk like they were his best friends,” he chuckles, and it brings a delicate little grin from Tome. It all feels very brittle. “He was the gentlest guy you could ever meet, and he loved everything.”

Ritsu swivels his head to look at the stars, and wonders why they’re staring at him so innocently. Wonders why it makes him want to cry. “Everything, even the stuff nobody else did,” he mumbles, voice small, “He picked bruised fruits from the store baskets cuz ‘nobody else will want them.’ He forgave his bullies instantly, even if they didn’t deserve it, even if Shige was still mad at them. He was too nice, sometimes. He let people walk all over him.”

He lets his teeth show a little, bares them in a shaky display. He remembers a day in class where Shigeo defended a kid from a couple brats, and then they all turned on him instead, including the kid he was defending. The next week Shigeo had helped that same boy pick up his books, and he’d been shoved to the tiled floor instead of thanked. Ritsu couldn’t decide whether to be mad about the cruelty, or mad about Shigeo’s selfless, stubborn character who didn’t seem to learn any lessons.

His throat feels sore. There is something sweltering and lumpy forming in the back of his mouth and he swallows it down. “He was really shy and talking to people was hard for him, but he stood up to people when others were being made fun of, even if his voice shook.”

A little Shigeo’s tiny words, trembling just like his hands. Feeling everything on Earth when they all said he couldn’t. Quietly, silently bearing it when the world kicked him down, and all he ever did back was be kind to it.

Ritsu learned from Shigeo’s mistakes, and he never defended any bullied kids, never tried to be kind for the simple act of being kind. Shigeo didn’t view them as mistakes at all. Maybe he’d been right about that.

“He was the only kid I’d ever known to be genuine about stuff. Compared to Shige, everybody else’s achievements seemed… shallow,” Ritsu bares his teeth again, at the world, at the stars, and they stare flatly back, “People told him to ‘get a clue,’ ‘get a personality,’ and I never understood why they did that, because Shige seemed like the smartest one there, to me. The richest in personality.

“Maybe not in an academic sense, but he already knew how to love things.” The hand on his chest bobs unsteadily. “He knew how to love life before he was taught how to walk. And above that, ya’know… what else matters?”

He’s too afraid to glance at Tome, because she is eerily silent and he doesn’t have the bravery to tear his gaze away from the sky. It hurts to look at that too, but he doesn’t know what else to stare at.

His breaths are steady. His breaths are steady, and the bottom of his vision is clear. He smiles again, bittersweet. The bottom of his vision is clear.

“You know what his favorite planet was?” he asks with a little voice, stifles a sniffle.

Tome takes a few beats to respond. “Mh… he seems like a Jupiter kinda guy.”

Ritsu shakes his head, and the smile he gives is not happy. “Planet Earth,” he croaks.

It sits for a beat, and in the air he can feel it, the common hesitance. “Yeah. When people first hear that, they usually go… ‘really? Earth?’” he chuckles wetly, moving his hands to copy their gestures, “Like… of all the cool, alien planets in our solar system, you chose Earth? The one we already know so much of, the one we’ve already studied inside and out? The one that feels so… mundane, to us?”

Ritsu’s favorite planet is Neptune, for its rings and its blue coat of paint. Shigeo’s was Earth, for its everything.

“But he loved the mundane. He showed love to the things people took for granted, to the uglier sides of them,” he breathes. It is not steady. His vision smears the stars into streaks. “He always did that.”

The crickets do nothing to cover his unsteady, long inhales, and the wetness of his cheeks and along his temples is cold against the air. Tome speaks after a few long, long beats, and her voice is quiet.

“... sounds like he’s got a heart of gold,” she whispers, and when Ritsu swivels his head to look at her, something like a supernova goes off in his own chest.

He cannot help but notice that she refers to Shigeo Kageyama in the present tense, and Ritsu does not.

[quirkle2]

wip, ignore the barebones feel <333

Reigen tsks and it flares something up in Ritsu’s chest. He watches him let one hand down to fix the collar of his trenchcoat, the other rubbing at his nose as he flexes his face around. "What could I possibly tell you that you haven’t already gathered through eavesdropping?" Ritsu’s squared shoulders drop. "I haven’t eavesdropped," he says neutrally, a little too quickly, and Reigen blinks and then has the gall to point at him and grin. "Oh my god—you have! Hah! Wow, okay, I think I’m startin' to get the hang of you." Ritsu sputters. "That’s not—shut up! Don’t act like you know me!" He flips a hand, untethered. "Ah, c’mon, everything Mob tells me about you is kittens n’ rainbows and then I meet you and you’re the biggest brat on the planet," Reigen grins, awfully confident for a guy who just got knocked in the skull by a barrier. Reigen points at him, eyes lidded flatly. "You’re not as hard to figure out as you think you are."

[quirkle2]

who wants zombie au writing. don't answer that ur getting it anyway (1.6k words)

His shoes knock against the old flooring of the house, wood creaking under rubber soles that slide over the woodgrain. He drags them a bit, lifts his limbs up no more than he strictly has to, and they lead him to the nearest sittable surface.

The couch is old and dusty and has likely gone untouched for months, much like everything else nowadays, so he watches the thin cloud of dust billow off the cushions largely with disinterest. He collapses into the fabric heavily, feels the whole thing scoot back an inch and hit the wall behind him. The sound echoes, carried by lifeless rooms, while he unceremoniously drops his backpack to the floor by his feet.

The breath he lets out is slow and methodical and born of pent up muscles, aimed at the ceiling where he rests his neck against the back of the couch and relaxes every limb one by one. It’s a process he forces himself through, if only to rid the constant ache beneath his skin.

Slow, sweeping footsteps meander around the room in front of him, and Ritsu angles his gaze down from his craned back position to look at his brother. He wanders, like he so often does—seemingly aimless, but there’s something procedural about it that he’s convinced he just hasn’t figured out yet.

Shigeo’s empty eyes crawl along the hearth of the fireplace, explosions of ash sprayed out across the red brick. His head tilts up to trace his attention around the angular lines of the television, hung on the wall and screen grey with dust. He flits back and forth between the roundness of the bricked mantle and the sharp edges of the screen, like he’s taking notes.

Shigeo paws the television. Four lines of muck are cleared. The zombie blinks, paws at it again with dusty, curious fingers. Ritsu watches him make a mess of the television screen in silence, blinking tiredly.

He almost closes his eyes, but he fights against the urge and moves his fingers down his lap to reach for his bag. His middle hooks around the loop at the top and he lugs it up and into his lap, where he unzips it and peers into the shadowy contents.

Ritsu fishes out the water bottles. He finds the one with the messy R scribbled along the cap in sharpie and takes a big swig of it. It’s warm going down, constantly insulated in a bag of old, sweaty clothes. He feels like he can taste the odor in it, but it clears the grain in his throat from stomping all over dirt roads today, so he’s still grateful.

He holds out the one labeled S to Shigeo. “Thirsty?”

Shigeo looks at him from where he’s crouched down to the floor now, inspecting the soot along the hearth. Unfortunately, he sees handprints in the black already, and when his brother reaches a hand out to take it, his palm is covered in soot.

He lets him have his fun and settles his own bottle back in the mess of tangled clothes and rolls of bandages. Ritsu rakes his fingers through their stock with no real purpose—he knows exactly what’s in here, and none of it is useful.

They’d been searching all day; Ritsu doesn’t really know how far they’d walked, but it had to be a lot of miles. In and out of stores, up and down empty houses, weaving between warehouses—they didn’t really stop for a break. Not when Ritsu can hear Shigeo’s stomach from here and he himself has shaking hands. They can’t afford a break.

Nothing, though. Not a single goddamn thing worth taking. A settlement must have come through here long ago and swept the highway. They’re in the countryside, where houses are spaced out acres from each other and there’s entire cow pastures between properties. And yet every house they’d seen and entered provided nothing.

Ritsu stares into the negative space in his bag where there should be supplies. His stomach cramps and if he smells another whiff of that godawful sweaty, bloody sweatshirt he still carries, he’s going to throw up bile.

He leans away from the open pouch, eyes wandering to his brother who draws… something into the soot of the hearth. His water bottle sits on the floor, abandoned and still unscrewed. Ritsu leans forward with great effort and a grunt, leaning over his bag to grab at the top of it.

It takes him two tries to get Shigeo’s attention, and one more for an answer on where the cap is. It’s then placed in his palm, covered in soot and also saliva. Ritsu swallows down the nausea that rolls up his throat and wipes it off with his frankly already disgusting sleeve, and screws it back on.

He leans back again, succumbing to the urge to let his eyes rest, and he listens to the very subtle swipe of his brother’s hands across brick. There’s birds outside, chirping, and even though it’s still very much a common occurrence, Ritsu cannot help but feel nostalgic about it.

If he ignores the awful hum of silence, and the distinct lack of an electric thrum throughout the walls, and the fact that this is a stranger’s couch and not his, he can almost imagine normalcy. He can almost say this feels like those quiet moments after school, when he settles on the couch and scrolls through his phone in a house that only holds him and his brother because their parents simply aren’t home yet.

He can almost hear the creak of wood from Shigeo walking around his room upstairs. He can almost tap his fingers on the couch cushions to the pattern of his brother making his way down the steps. He can almost hear the fridge opening, and the sound of milk being poured into glass.

Almost. But Ritsu listens to sharp silence instead, and he tries not to think too hard.

He drifts for a while, feels himself truly sink into the couch and let the cushions claim him, and he thinks about nothings because if he doesn’t, then he’ll lose it. He carefully sifts through the nothingness of his mind, through the passing thoughts that have no bearing, and he focuses on that, on the lack of substance. His head is too full of things that have too much substance.

He misses boredom. He tells himself he misses boredom—the complete insubstantiality of it—because if he lets himself think of what he really misses, it’ll drive him insane.

The cushions move, and Ritsu peels his eyes open and lets himself get pulled from liminal mindspace. The cotton in his head recedes, and he blinks, and then he’s swiveling his head to look at his brother who sits in the cushion right next to him.

His hands and the cuffs of his hoodie are smothered in black. Shigeo sits hunched, gaze still wandering even when there’s not much decoration in this house to look at. He studies the off-white walls, the chips in the paint, the holes drilled in where there maybe used to be photos hung.

Ritsu gazes at him quietly, chest instinctively rising and falling to match his brother’s rhythm. He watches the expansion there, under his hoodie, in the subtlety of the folds and the way they warp over the movement. It’s slightly quicker than what he’s used to, but Ritsu knows his brother’s heart rate is much slower. He’s felt it before. He’s listened to it before, with his ear against a chest.

Ritsu’s attention moves to his eyes, and the heavy bags underneath them, and the paleness of his pupils and the ghostlight of him underneath that. He stares into them, looks for stray, familiar thoughts that might enter his head. Looks for old memories that might shine through in the form of recognition when he sees furniture layouts, and candy wrappers, and ads for soda.

Ritsu looks for it all the time, that glint of familiarity. And he finds it, sometimes. And really, he thinks that’s keeping him going more than food ever will.

Shigeo turns his head, and looks at him. Sometimes, when his brother looks at him, there’s not much there. No substance, no anything. And Ritsu finds it a bit evil that he craves silence in his own head, and yet noise in Shigeo’s, and often times it is the other way around.

His brother looks at him now, though, with that comforting recognition. That growth of the pupils, that softening of the hard edges of his face where unknown stressors have gotten to him. Ritsu wonders what zombies get stressed out. He figures it’s the same deal with humans, considering they’re largely alike.

Ritsu wonders if Shigeo knows he’s sick. He wishes he could ask him. He wishes for a lot of things. Silence in his own head is one of them.

Ritsu swivels his head away and stares at the ceiling, if only to force the thoughts to pause. He studies the popcorn ridges above them, traces the peaks with his gaze. It calms him, gives him something to focus on. He looks for patterns in the shadows they make.

Shigeo shifts next to him. And then he shimmies down, settles into the cushions, and plops his head right down on Ritsu’s shoulder.

Static roars in his mind and his heart stammers. Ritsu swallows the lump in his throat but that just makes it bigger, so he clamps his mouth shut and breathes carefully through his nose.

The tears cut through the grime on his face. He plops his own head down against his brother’s, and lives in the noise.

[quirkle2]

fic is now done :]

[quirkle2]

Reigen opens his mouth. “... Are you okay, Mob?” he speaks, just above a whisper and incredibly solemn. He hears Serizawa stumble over something in the kitchen. Teruki keeps his fingers running along the shorter hairs just above Shigeo’s neck. His first instinct is to say yes. Yes, I’m fine. Yes, I just lost track of time. Yes, I just like the rain. Yes, there is nothing wrong with me. Yes. Yes. He doesn’t. He dips his head down, stares into the stitching of the couch, and he whispers, “I don’t know,” instead. Oddly, it feels like a victory and a loss all at once.

[quirkle2]

“You haven’t been yourself in months. I miss my fuckin’ brother.” That had hurt. That had hurt more than anything, more than Ritsu spitting out that the events of last winter are just going to happen again if this keeps up. It hadn’t hurt as much in the moment, but the implications of it keeps on building until it’s all he can think about, like a slow pursuit. He might’ve been too exhausted to not sleep through it last night, but he knows he’ll be thinking about it in bed for the rest of the week. Ritsu sees him every day. Ritsu misses him. Ritsu misses him. Ritsu sees him every day. Shigeo drifts to the clock ticking through molasses.

[quirkle2]

“Still kickin’?” the spirit calls, gentler than Reigen has ever heard him speak, “Hey, Shigeo, look at me.” Reigen still has his hands cupping the kid’s face, and even though Shigeo blinks through the agony in his eyes and moves his gaze around to look for Dimple, he can’t find it in himself to remove his hold. They stay there and Shigeo seems fine with that, even leans into the touch as he sees Dimple and attempts to keep his wobbly attention on him. Something in Dimple’s face cracks. “You have to tell him, kid.” Heart hammering in his throat, Reigen looks between them both, feeling miles away. Shigeo, still breathing hard and still looking unsteady in terms of consciousness, takes a moment to register the words, but when they drill through his head his glazed over eyes widen just a little. The no that eeks across the room makes Reigen want to cry, it’s so small.

[quirkle2]

hi who wants excerpts from my wip fic recondite. don't answer that ur getting them anyway

Tome tuts, juts her lip out a bit into a pout as she stares at the rusted ceiling, arms crossed over her chest. Shigeo watches her watch the leaves sway there, hanging onto vines with skinny stems that the breeze pecks at. “Of course I’m a genius, I know this. It’s just… frustrating. It’s like I don’t even know what I don’t know.” Shigeo feels something in him pause, and he finds himself understanding those words in a visceral, molecular way, but he feels he’s linking them to unrelated things. Things that have nothing to do with math.

-

The energy in the room coils and bursts out like a water balloon, hard-hitting and sharp. Reigen yelps from behind him over the ear-splitting whine. Shigeo can feel an odd prickling of static along his skin in little dots, like acid spraying out from the fissures in the spirit’s bloated soulskin. Somehow he tastes every splatter even when none of it reaches his tongue—it’s a motley of sparkling water and freon, cold against his skin until the aftertaste gets uncomfortably warm and sweltering in his joints. His palms feel like dry ice. He hears Reigen make an odd noise, something between a whine and a gasp, as the rustling of clothing spells out one of his strange, quick squirms. “Holy hell, Mob—you didn’t have to go that hard!” One of the cardboard boxes in front of him sizzle and crack at the edges, some unknown chemical interaction between corrugate and psychic mana. A flap along the top falls off and hits the ground pathetically, smoking from pure heat and making a low crumble sound in his ears that sounds quite alien. He didn’t. And judging by the ever-so-slight tremor of the building, he’d say he shouldn’t have. He hadn’t even meant to, is the concerning thing.

-

“I just mean my powers… I didn’t mean for that to… ya’know,” Shigeo explains, and Teruki’s goofy persona softens into something more genuine, “They’ve been kinda weird today. I don’t know why.” His partner hums, sitting in the quiet music for a while. His fingers drum against Shigeo’s knee to the beat. “You have seemed… preoccupied, lately.” Shigeo cannot help but notice that he says it carefully. Like he’s afraid of using the wrong word. He can’t think of a synonym for preoccupied that could possibly offend him—he’s heard it all before, anyway, from other people. From people who didn’t care nearly as much as Teruki. No, Teruki isn’t like that. Teruki doesn’t think he’s oblivious. Something ugly pierces his gut there, at the thought, at the idea that Shigeo could think so lowly of his partner like that. Not everyone is out to get you.

-

“Are you doin’ alright?” Ritsu utters slowly, softly, and Shigeo thinks back to a few weeks ago, on Teruki’s (Reigen’s) couch, and how the answer he’d given to a very similar question had apparently been the wrong one. Ritsu asks this question a lot, though. And Shigeo never answers with anything but affirmatives. “Yeah,” he gives, because it feels impossible to say anything else. This feels like a ritual to him—Ritsu asks, Shigeo lies, they part ways. He doesn’t have it in him today to disturb the peace. “I’m fine.” He lets the answer hang in the air between them for a moment, lets it settle atop their shoulders like it always does, because the answer is light and made of helium and Shigeo wants it to retain that nothingness. It’s a nothing answer. It’s a nothing answer to a question about a nothing problem. Simple, really. He counts the seconds it takes Ritsu to say it. He makes it to seven and a half before his brother opens his mouth. “If you’re sure… but I’m always h—” —ere if you need me, Shigeo finishes in his head, recites it by heart. He knows. He knows Ritsu is here if he needs him. He appreciates it, he really does. But it’s a nothing problem, and it therefore needs a nothing solution.

[quirkle2]

Teruki blinks at him, and then he’s chuckling again and bowing his head down so he only sees the beginnings of brown roots coming in. When he lifts his head again his eyes are wet, but the pinks in his aura are soaking into his soul so much that he finds it really hard to be alarmed in the trance of it. “Please don’t apologize,” Teruki whispers, blinking away the shine that reflects the slit of sun from the window. His voice wobbles and hitches at the end, and Shigeo shifts, widens his eyes a little, but then his partner is moving. He leans over Shigeo’s chest, arches over the cracks that seep with energy carefully. Both of his hands are suddenly around his face and Teruki’s clamping his eyes shut and pressing their foreheads together, nose to nose, soul to soul. His hair tickles Shigeo’s jaw and his knee digs into his thigh, but it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t mind. The coral hues sing; the golds roar. “Please don’t. Please don’t do that to me,” his partner teeters, and the watermelon seeping into his skin is now tainted with harsher reds, deeper magentas. He can tell Teruki is trying so hard to keep it light, to keep it gentle and comforting for him—controlling an aura when emotions are high is one of the hardest things in the world. And yet he’s holding his partner, who is crackling apart at the seems in every sense of the word, and all that seeps from him is a little fear that get snuffed out instantly upon exit.

[quirkle2]

He’d believed that if he said it enough times, people would believe him. But the evidence against that is everywhere, all around him, and Shigeo doesn’t know how he didn’t realize it sooner.  The more Teruki had lied about his living situation, the more Reigen and Serizawa had gotten involved. The more Reigen lied about being an ESPer the more reasons Shigeo was given not to trust him. The more Dimple lied about loving godhood, the more Shigeo knew he was getting lonely. Still. Still. Telling the truth is so much harder. Shigeo opens his mouth, the beginnings of it on his tongue because he’s tired and he simply doesn’t have the energy to do anything hard, but then he stops. “Don’t fucking tell me you’re okay. Don’t lie to my face like that through your goddamn teeth. Stop doing that!” Shigeo grips his bowl in both hands, the heat from the ceramic soaking into his skin until it stings. “Mob… I’m worried here. Please, kid, don’t lie to me.” Since when had Shigeo become a liar?

[quirkle2]

more haikyuu <3

“I know how to pick my fights,” Tsukishima replies easily, smirk annoyingly simple on the surface, but that look in his eyes is still oozing, still ossifying, “You…” Looking down at his nails, like this conversation is just background noise. Kageyama hates this guy. “... don’t.” Kageyama removes his hands from his blazer’s pockets when they itch to lunge for his neck. He makes them stay at his sides obediently. “Just how big is the stick up your—” “It’s interesting that you said we,” Tsukishima interrupts, flicking his attention up from his hands and pocketing them. He meets his gaze steadily, and somewhere in the back of his mind Kageyama registers that this look is different—it’s not hostile, nor bitter. If there’s anything at all in there, it’s a thin, thin layer of annoyance, but beyond that, it’s remarkably neutral. Kageyama notches his head to the side, narrowing his eyes at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?” He doesn’t answer right away, simply searching his face and running his thumbs over his own knuckles. “Tell me what you think the ratio of you to the rest of the team is.” Kageyama tilts his head. “What?” It earns him a sigh. “How much is it ‘we’? What percentage of the team do you make up?” He thinks, first on whether or not this is a trick question, and then on whether or not the nerd is just trying to get him to say something stupid about math. “Uhm… I don’t…?” he shrugs, “Like… fifty percent.” A beat. “Fifty percent,” Tsukishima repeats. “Fifty percent.” Is this a pop quiz on math? “... That’s half the team,” Glasses reiterates, motioning a slice of air between his pointer and thumb, “You’re half the team.” Kageyama stares. Tsukishima stares back. “Yeah.” The blocker’s jaw juts to his side, annoyance sparking beyond his lenses.

[quirkle2]

Still, he grins with Shigeo’s face, red surely along his cheeks, and brings his new hands up to look at their blurry, greyed outlines. “See, Shigeo?” he says with the kid’s vocal chords, his own timbre coming out instead of anything that sounds like a child. He can feel the palpable relief from Shigeo in his middle, something so massive the emotion almost comes out of his mouth in a choked laugh. “Told you it would be f—” His senses blink in—he sees the room, he smells the distant soapy water from Ritsu’s shower down the hall, he hears the crickets, he feels socked feet against the floors. But something else much, much more important comes and hits him like a truck, zips up his spine like it’s electricity aiming to fry him. There is something incredibly wrong here. (...) No. He can feel realization from his middle, from Shigeo’s being balled up in the backrooms of his mind, can hear the yelling of garbled words and panicked scrambling, and Dimple raises a hand to his chest and feels something unnatural through the fabric of the shirt there. He feels raised edges of red and irritated skin, feels something otherworldly between them, something he’s never felt before. No, no. No. Shigeo’s vessel is breaking.

[quirkle2]

who wants a haikyuu fic snippet about kageyama being fucking smitten for the usual moron but he has to get past the wall that is hinata's secretly protective step brother, tsukishima. i read a fic a while ago with tsukki and hinata as adoptive brothers and it rewired my mind

anyway, 2 teenagers playing 4d chess over a kid who does not want nor need this:

Much like his play style on the court, Tsukishima remains strictly efficient. He seems to adopt a no-nonsense policy, and is pragmatic in his train of thought—he thinks up the branching possibilities, weighs their likelihood, and counters simply and effectively. Kageyama would not, however, call this behavior pragmatic. This is born from either a hatred for Kageyama, a love for Hinata, or a mix of both. It’s emotionally driven; Kageyama might not be the best at reading social cues, but he reads people’s faces just fine, and as guarded as Tsukishima is upfront, he’s been around him long enough to tell the difference. This is a Tsukishima that is after something because he wants it—this is a Tsukishima putting in more than the bare minimum. This is emotionally driven, and when people are emotionally driven, they are vulnerable. Kageyama is not scared of Tsukishima, he is scared of Hinata. In the same way he’s scared of his own team, in the same way he’s scared of his own mother, his own father, his own time on the court. Tsukishima is the one person in the midst of this that he is not afraid of—whatever he does, whatever punches he throws, whatever words he says, nothing Tsukishima Kei can do will ever rival that abandonment, that echo of a ball against empty floors. Tsukishima Kei cannot eclipse something that big, so Kageyama lunges.