Work Text:
For the last seventy days or so, the Futurum soil has housed Takumi and the hefting weight of his decisions. Being a traitor, he does not have the luxury of having the same room with which to retire to every evening, nor does he have the luxury of familiarity and stability that is oft associated with consistent housing. He and Eito, whenever necessary, pack their rucksacks full and traverse from one crumbling home to another, picking up roots and shoving them into the soil and then repeating the process whenever they feel too comfortable with any appointed location.
There is no luxury in a lack of permanence, but the setup they have adapted has its own treasures. What they have lost in constancy they have made up for doubly in companionship, and in a manner that Takumi had not believed existed, especially not with the special defense member who stands tall and greyish and alone. Eito is something of a force of nature: when separated from the grounds of the schools, his personality presents itself as if he had long familiarized himself with the quiet forests and coastlines. He, unlike Takumi, makes decisions with logical gusto, with explanations attached, with sentences that wind and twist to a fantastical foundation.
What a shame it is, then, that they have failed and lost in this iteration of their wild companionship. In a leatherbound notebook having originally belonged to Eito, they keep track of the passing days as to have reference to the bomb of Day 100. Today, with the fanfare of birds twittering in the trees in the morning, is Day 99.
They elected to spend the final ten days in a tent in the forest, having long been aware of their miserable loss. Takumi awakes in the tent and finds that he is alone: Eito's sleeping bag and blankets have been shuffled out of, leaving proof of his body behind in the form of stray hairs, silvery against the dark of his stolen blanket. He had insisted upon taking it along when they were initially fleeing from the academy, having bundled it up into a big lumpy ball. What a pain it has been to transport.
From the tent Takumi emerges. The sky is a still blue, and not a single cloud dots its canvas. He knows where Eito will be and takes to him like a magnet, easily locating him standing by a small cliff's edge. The drop from the edge of the cliff to the ground below is not far, and falling would hardly break more than an arm or a leg depending on the descender's position. It's a nice, quiet spot, and Takumi understands why Eito likes it so much. Here there is no danger of interruption by enemy nor are there blindspots for them to hide in. When it is windy, the gusts tickle the grass, send them brushing against one another intimately, whispering as they dance and sway and then hush themselves back to stillness.
Takumi's favorite part of the scenery, however, are the speckles of color provided by the flowers. Although they are not flowers that are identifiable, they appear similar to lilacs, calla lilies and zinnias. He is sure that, were the Boy Made of Undying Flames here, the flowers would be identified appropriately.
"It's me," warns Takumi as he comes up from behind. He does not need to do this, as his repulsive scent is enough to signify his presence, but he does it anyway. He is the champion of his own decisions.
Eito does not turn around. He stands, dressed in his large coat and trousers, with both hands held behind his back, elbows bent like a pensive sergeant. He does not wear shoes nor socks. Where Takumi once found this subtly unpleasant—the act of having to look at someone's feet, that is—he now cares not. On their first day of escape Eito had scrunched his toes into the grass of a different location, had said the ground feels so much nicer out here than it had in my cage. Takumi left well enough alone.
"Good morning, Takumi-kun." A pause is tethered. "Today is Day 99. I've already marked it in our journal."
"Yeah, I know," says Takumi, joining Eito up on the little cliff front, peering out at the horizon. This particular view offers no sight of the academy. It is not a place that Takumi wishes to be forced to look at. "Are you still feeling confident about our plan?"
Eito nods, sighing. "I am. Unless V'ehxness suddenly rises from the grave and attacks the academy again today, I don't see why the bombs won't go off tomorrow like you've explained. If only we had about twenty more days—then maybe we'd be able to retaliate in the way that I want."
"Shizuhara is a better leader than I could have ever imagined," mumbles Takumi. When he and Eito had defected from the academy and, by association, the defense unit, it was Hiruko who stepped up and assumed her rightful authoritative role as new leader. How she killed and killed and killed! If the entirety of the planet were not one day away from being wiped clean of all life, she would certainly live on in history as an entity crueller and more warped than V'ehxness herself. "It's not even worth trying anything last-minute."
"No, and we don't need to. I already told you: if I can't get revenge on humanity for its filth in the way that I've always envisioned it, then I'd rather just go out on my own terms." Eito turns slightly, acknowledging Takumi. "Besides, I'm a little excited for the idea we've come up with. It's fun in its own way, isn't it?"
Takumi, against his will, flushes a bit. Chalk it up to the cold wind. "You're the only person who could be excited about this kind of thing."
"Are you not excited?"
"That's not how I'd describe it, no." Takumi shrugs. "Relieved, maybe… because I'm tired. But not so much excited."
Eito hums. It sounds thoughtful rather than patronizing. "You're regretting your decisions again."
The word again weighs heavy. Eito does not shy away from telling it like it is. Whereas once Takumi might have believed that, even if it was an act of circusy, ultimately, Eito possessed a fascinating ability to mold his words to calm a situation down, he now understands that what Eito controls about his language has nothing to do with managing situations. Instead he manages the mask he wears, sometimes kind, sometimes ruthless, and instead uses that mask to change outcomes. He changes himself, when needed.
What is comforting is that Takumi does it too. It is a fact of life, he believes now, that humans and human-adjacents will change who they are in order to guarantee a particular outcome. Wear a brave face, wear a frightened face, make oneself big and then small and then confident and then tired. In one hundred days—no, in two hundred days—Takumi has seen to wearing many, many different faces.
"It's too late for regrets now," he claims, watching a tree billow in the distance, its narrow trunk not made for even a moderately strong wind. It is not something to lament over. Tomorrow, that tree will die and its weakness will not matter. "So even if I have them, it doesn't matter."
"Sure it matters. I have my own regrets. You know what they are. You're a part of those regrets, because you've decided to join me on my journey to carry them out. You're a part of my failures."
"When you put it like that it makes me feel like I've been nothing but useless." Takumi pouts, lip curving down.
Eito puts a hand on the small of his back. He is tall. He is overwhelming at the best of times and inconceivable at the worst of times. Where his hand makes contact with the fabric of Takumi's clothes, it then circles slowly. This touch is unlike anything predictable in the prior timeline. This touch only exists because Takumi took a chance in this timeline, because Takumi chose Eito. The probability of this touch is humorously low in all contexts and yet here it is, the hand of an angel over spinal cord. "You haven't been completely useless, Takumi-kun, don't talk down to yourself like that. You've taught me a lot of things that I didn't know were possible. Or—well, it's really that you've given me access to emotions I didn't believe were available to me."
And that's a higher honor than any military success of failure. Takumi only wishes that this could be more than just temporary. All of these moments, inconsequential where they blip across the spectrum of Time and Space, will be forgotten forevermore, as the only two people present to witness them will soon die with them.
If nobody else will witness these moments, then fine. Takumi knows he must cling extra hard until there is no more time left to nurse his heart's big and complicated feelings. "That's nice of you to say."
"I'm not trying to flatter you," says Eito. "I'm being honest. Why don't you voice some of your regrets? Maybe you'll feel a little better."
How utterly calm Eito is. Eito Aotsuki with his miserable, hardened soul, with his desire for human extinction, with his bloodlust for his humanity, with his cursed sight and doomed fate, stands here now with the serenity of a Great Egret. To the untrained eye, one might even believe that the hatred inside of him has completely vanished, instead having been replaced with the fetal curl of Takumi's warm body.
It is difficult to acknowledge this significance. Takumi has only ever been his own person before, never the ticking internal organ of another. He shivers and Eito's fingers curl into his back. His fingers say: I can't believe I can only say goodbye.
Takumi wants to feel better. "I regret… contributing to this failure," he says softly. "I regret not killing Shizuhara when I could have. I regret not killing SIREI when I could have. I regret being weak-willed. I regret not listening to you better. I regret when I've caused an argument between us. I regret not being able to see Kirifuji at the end of everything. I regret… that the last time I saw her, she had to look at me with hatred. Even though she's going to be safe, I still regret it. I regret being unable to stop the planet from being wiped out. I regret being obsessed with my own shortcomings."
The hills and the trees and the flowers listen to Takumi as he shares his woes. Eito slips his arm around his shoulders instead, and where he leans onto the musculature of shoulder, Takumi takes it like a weighted vest.
A cloud, overhead, manifests. It rolls by slowly.
"Do you feel any better?" asks Eito. The cloud has tumbled far away.
Takumi, in a fit of emotion, has stood with his knees hyperflexed for far too long. When he straightens them out he grunts quietly, and Eito looks at him curiously. "Well? Do you?"
"Not really," says Takumi, squatting down and then standing back up again. "But it was nice to say everything aloud, I guess. I think we've stared at the hill long enough."
A little smile takes form on Eito's features. "That's right. We've got hunting to do."
As they hunt, two pairs of legs rumbling across the grassy hilltops, Takumi cannot help but marvel at the beauty of the weather on this last day.
The sky is so very, very blue.
A hunt is not complete without a feast. Together, against the warm canvas of a setting sun, Takumi and Eito work as two bodies cooking their last meal together. They have captured an unopened bottle of red wine, so it seems, and while Takumi flips over their little mushroom and meat skewers, Eito takes care of popping the cork out.
They sit in the grass and eat off of two flattish stones. One stone is grey and jagged whereas the other is rounder and darker in color. In spite of having consumed some of the wine, a deep silence takes a third space at their last supper, only interrupted by the sounds of teeth ripping apart sustenance and then swallowing.
The wind picks up well into this evening. It rustles all of the organic matter in the surrounding area. The leaves and the thin bushel branches and the curtaining ivy all dance in a harmonious choir, unaware of the fate that will meet their brothers and sisters in the morning.
The sky smudges pink and orange and lavender. It is, by all accounts, a painting.
When night falls, Eito returns from a walk with a hand extended to Takumi, who stands and accepts. They traverse to a nearby pond. It is here, underneath the black of night, that they strip bare, innocent, and swim together in the pond. The stars are reflected in the shimmering water and, despite being so many light years away, they bare witness to this moment so that it will not be forgotten even when its two participants are dead.
Takumi slinks through the water. His feet slip against underwater tundras of cold moss and algae. Reeds tickle the leg hair on his calves. His teeth chatter where he fits himself, like agonist to neural receptor, against Eito's long body, knee to knee.
"I was thinking about the regrets," says Takumi.
Eito tilts his head. His eyes droop with the effects of alcohol. The starlight shines on his collarbones. "Oh? Do you have another?"
"No." Takumi shakes his head. "No, because I'm going to put it to rest before it becomes a regret."
Eito leans into the body of reeds he is pressing into. The reeds tell the pond hush, hush and then Takumi kisses Eito in the thoughtful quietude.
Against the heat of Eito's mouth, he can feel a pulse. Takumi recognizes that pulse as his own, as the driving mechanism keeping Eito alive to the day of reckoning.
On the hill where they have set up their tent, Takumi and Eito lay on the itching grass.
The wind has stopped. The planet is still. The sky meets sunrise, flaring a fantastic pink and yellow in the dimness of dawn.
"I'm ready, Takumi-kun," says Eito, his voice soft and reborn. He shifts to meet Takumi, to look him in the eye as they dry on the hill.
Takumi has procured a set of twin kitchen knives, sharpened just the other day. He passes one into Eito's hand and takes the other for himself, catching his reflection in the shimmering blade. "I'm sorry it didn't work out."
Eito sighs. "That doesn't sound like 'I'm ready.'"
Takumi smiles, pitiable. He presses the tip of his knife against Eito's stomach. "I'm ready."
Eito says, good boy. They then carve out big, glistening holes in one anothers' stomachs. Blood oozes out and seeps into the green grass, the brown soil. It is a last-minute marriage of flesh and blood. It is goodbye.
Eito shoves a hand through the hole in Takumi's stomach and up into his chest cavity. Here Takumi does the same, wrapping his hand around the distinctive shape of Eito's pulsating heart. He feels Eito on his own.
It is only then that Takumi can sense it: how Eito is a moving force within himself. Every echo of his whelkish heart is propelled by this fiendish, terrifying traitor. It must have been this way for a long time.
He looks at Eito one last time and closes his eyes.
In the singular, unwitnessed moment before the planet of Futurum is engulfed in Undying Flames, the wind does not blow and the grass does not whisper. There is only silence on the hilltop with a small cliff.
How blue the sky is.