Chapter Text
The world didn't end all at once.
There was no warning siren, no mushroom cloud on the horizon, no single day people could point to and say that’s when everything went wrong.
It happened slowly.
First came the stories.
Rumors about people being seen after their funerals. Loved ones appearing at doorsteps weeks after they’d been buried. Shadows moving through abandoned neighborhoods wearing familiar faces.
At first, nobody believed them. Then the stories became impossible to ignore. The dead were coming back, but not as themselves.
When a person dies, they eventually return as a demon, more commonly known as an entity; a twisted reflection of whatever emotions consumed them in their final moments. Grief. Fear. Rage. Regret. Love.
The stronger the emotion, the more horrific the transformation.
Some become little more than animals driven by instinct and hunger. Others wander endlessly through the ruins of cities, trapped in memories and emotions they can no longer escape. A rare few can still speak. Some can even remember fragments of who they once were.
Nobody knows how much of the original person remains beneath the monster. Nobody wants to find out. Death stopped being an ending, instead it became a question.
Eventually, humanity discovered a horrifying truth: when an entity is killed, the emotion sustaining it does not disappear. Instead, it transfers into the body of its killer.
For most people, the process is fatal. The overwhelming emotion consumes them from within, and before long, they die and are reborn as entities themselves.
Yet there are rare exceptions.
Scattered across the world are individuals capable of surviving the transfer and carrying these emotions within themselves. They became known as Hosts; humanity’s greatest weapon against the entities.
But even Hosts have limits.
Each emotion they absorb adds to the burden they carry, slowly destroying their minds and bodies. Sooner or later, every Host reaches their breaking point. Some descend into madness, others simply collapse beneath the weight. In the end, every Host becomes an entity themselves.
Every Host except Sunny.
Sunny and his friends grew up hearing stories about Hosts. Like everyone else struggling to survive in the ruins of the world, they prayed that one day a Host would reclaim what the world had lost.
What none of them knew was that Sunny was a Host himself. And unlike every Host before him, Sunny possessed no known limit to the emotions he could contain.
No matter how many entities he killed, he endured. No matter how much grief, fear, rage, or despair he absorbed, he remained standing.
The truth revealed itself during a journey to establish a new settlement.
While traveling, Sunny’s group encountered an entity.
The fight should have ended in tragedy. When Sunny struck the killing blow, everyone expected the same outcome they had seen countless times before: the emotion would transfer, and Sunny would die.
But he didn’t.
The emotion flowed into him and nothing happened. Sunny remained alive. So he killed another, and another, and another.
While any ordinary person would have been consumed after a single encounter, Sunny continued forward as if nothing had changed.
—
A few years into the apocalypse, Mari led a small group of survivors.
Hero, Kel, Sunny, Basil, Aubrey, Thomas, Niru, and Ronin.
A family forged through necessity and loss.
Everyone had their place.
Mari and Niru typically stayed in the backlines. Neither could safely participate in prolonged combat, so they focused on support, coordination, and keeping everyone alive. Hero provided long range cover whenever fights broke out, often working alongside Thomas, whose instinct was always to protect others before himself.
Kel, Aubrey, and Ronin were the group’s frontline, and the heart of it, too.
Even at the end of the world, they somehow found ways to make people laugh.
Kel would start an argument over something stupid, Aubrey would immediately rise to the challenge, and Ronin; who admired Aubrey more than anyone else on the planet, would throw herself into the conversation solely to defend Aubrey’s side.
It didn’t matter whether Aubrey was right, Ronin had already picked her team.
The arguments never solved anything, they weren’t supposed to. They simply reminded everyone that they were still human.
Sunny and Basil worked behind the scenes; planning routes, mapping scavenging runs, tracking supplies, calculating risks.
In a world where a single mistake could get someone killed, strategy mattered just as much as fighting.
Basil handled most of the work. Sunny could do it when he wanted to. In fact, when he actually applied himself, he was frighteningly good at it. The problem was getting him to care.
Most days, Basil would spend hours hunched over maps while Sunny sprawled nearby looking half asleep. Then, without warning, Sunny would point out a flaw nobody else had noticed: A missing exit, a blind spot, a supply issue six days in advance. It became routine.
Basil planned and Sunny corrected.
Together, they kept people alive.
For the most part, they avoided fighting entities whenever possible. Every encounter carried a risk, and nobody was eager to take it. But when there was no other option, Sunny always had to land the final blow.
If he didn’t, someone would die.
The others weren’t capable of truly killing an entity anyway. Their weapons could wound them, slow them down, even tear them apart, but finishing one off required Sunny.
There was no alternative.
It was a reality that weighed heavily on Mari. She hated being forced to stand by and watch her little brother confront things that terrified even seasoned survivors. Every time an entity appeared, she found herself wishing there was another way.
There never was.
Fortunately, entities weren’t the group’s most common problem.
Most days were spent dealing with griefers, raiders, and opportunists; people who took advantage of the apocalypse and preyed on those too weak to defend themselves.
People died every day.
Yet, aside from losing their parents, Mari’s group had never experienced death among their own, and Mari intended to keep it that way.
The fights themselves rarely pushed them that far. They defended settlements, drove attackers away, and protected survivors whenever they could. Somehow, despite everything the world had become, they’d never had to resort to murder.
Mari made sure of that.
Whenever possible, she kept both Basil and Sunny away from direct combat. Basil was too valuable to risk, and Sunny… Sunny was still her little brother.
So while the others fought, Basil and Sunny remained behind the scenes. Technically, that arrangement was Mari’s fault as she had assigned everyone their roles herself.
And whether anyone wanted to admit it or not, Mari had always known exactly where each member of the group fit best.
—
It didn’t take long for everyone to realize something was going on between Sunny and Aubrey. Neither of them ever confirmed it, that would’ve ruined the fun.
Instead they exchanged secret smiles, disappeared together whenever they thought nobody was paying attention, and acted completely innocent whenever someone tried calling them out.
Even at the end of the world, they found room for something that looked suspiciously like happiness.
Then Aubrey died.
The details aren’t complicated. A group of griefers; survivors who preyed on others for supplies, amusement, or whatever they felt like taking. They ambushed her while she was separated from the group. By the time Sunny found her, she was already gone.
Everything changed after that. Sunny took her jacket and nobody tried to stop him, no one even considered it.
Loss was common in the apocalypse. Everyone carried scars, everyone had buried people. But Aubrey wasn’t just another survivor, she was family. And whether Sunny ever admitted it aloud or not, she had been his.
Not long after her death, he dyed portions of his hair a faded reddish-pink. Whenever someone asked about it, he shrugged and simply changed the subject. The truth was simple, he was terrified. Terrified of forgetting the exact shade of her hair, terrified of forgetting the sound of her laugh, terrified of forgetting the way she always seemed larger than life.
If he woke up every morning and saw that color staring back at him in the mirror, maybe the memories would stay. Maybe she would too; but grief is rarely content with remaining grief. Eventually it becomes something else, and for Sunny, it became pure, unbound hatred.
Then obsession.
Every rumor involving griefers caught his attention, every encounter with hostile survivors became an interrogation, every scouting mission became an excuse to search for the people responsible.
Mari argued with him and Hero reasoned with him.
Kel tried distracting him whenever he noticed the spiral beginning again.
Nothing worked.
Sunny called it justice.
Everyone else called it what it was.
Revenge.
The worst part wasn’t that Aubrey was dead, the worst part was not knowing what happened after. Because in this world, death was never truly the end. Somewhere out there, Aubrey might still exist. Maybe she wandered alone through abandoned streets, maybe she’d become something monstrous, maybe she remembered them… Maybe she didn’t.
Sunny never found an answer. The uncertainty hollowed him out from the inside.
And little by little, the boy Aubrey loved began disappearing.
In his place stood someone colder. Someone angrier. Someone willing to cross lines he never would’ve considered before.
A strategist became a fighter, a survivor became a hunter. The butterfly knife at his side became permanent, the pistol he carried became an extension of his hand.
Nobody knew where he’d gotten it, nobody knew about the group of griefers he’d slaughtered during one of his hunts and he preferred it that way. The less they knew, the less disappointed they’d be.
Everyone struggled with the change.
Everyone except Basil and Mari, not because they weren’t affected, they were, probably more than anyone realized. The difference was that they never stopped trying when everyone else had.
Sunny snapped at them.
They stayed.
Sunny ignored them.
They stayed.
Sunny disappeared for hours chasing dead end leads and came back bloodied and exhausted, and there stood both Basil and Mari, always there when he returned.
Waiting with bandages, food, a blanket, a quiet place to sit. No lectures, no judgment. Just two people waiting for him to come home.
As Sunny withdrew further into himself, Basil quietly picked up the pieces he left behind.
He handled the planning, supplies, schedules, routes and even group morale.
Someone had to keep everyone together, at least, that’s what Basil told himself. So he smiled, he made jokes, encouraged people, reassured Kel, supported Mari, checked on Hero, comforted Ronin, sat with Thomas when Hero couldn’t, gave Niru hope when he was running out.
And every night, whether Sunny wanted him there or not, he checked on Sunny too.
Over time the smile stopped feeling genuine, it became necessary.
Mari noticed first.
Basil was so busy carrying everyone else that he’d forgotten how to carry himself, but Basil didn’t care. Because as long as everyone else was standing, he could keep standing too and most importantly, Sunny was still standing with him.
For now, that was enough.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Basil and Mari both began teaching Sunny something he’d forgotten: How to live, how to laugh, how to be something more than just vengeance taken human form.
Not through speeches, or through arguments. But through small things; a game played on an old console they found in an abandoned house. A late night conversation during watch duty, a shared meal, a stupid joke, a reminder to sleep, a reminder to eat.
And a reminder that there was still a world outside of Aubrey’s death.
At first Sunny hated it.
Then he tolerated it.
Then he started looking forward to it.
Without realizing it, Basil and Mari became the people keeping him grounded. The people reminding him that there was still something worth living for. Then eventually, what started as friendship between Sunny and Basil slowly became something deeper. Something shared only between the two of them.
Not because Aubrey was forgotten, she never was. Neither of them would ever allow that. Her memory remained woven into every part of their lives. Into the jacket Sunny still wore, into the stories they still told, into the grief they still carried.
She wasn’t replaced, she wasn’t erased, she was loved and always would be, by everyone. And because she was loved, they kept moving forward.
The anger never disappeared completely, the grief never left for the most part, but Sunny slowly stopped letting himself be overtaken by the pure rage and hatred he felt for the people who did this to him. To her.
He never truly healed, but his attitude and resentfulness started to dwell a little, and every step of the way, Basil had stayed there to calm him, take care of him when he refused to take care of himself, and then.. he was there to love Sunny when Sunny felt he’d never move on.
Basil would crack jokes with Sunny, laugh with him, spend more time with him than usual, and keep the energy for not only Sunny, but the whole group too. And over time, after he bonded with Sunny, it felt less like a chore to Basil and more like a reward.
And for the first time since Aubrey’s death, the future no longer seemed impossible to him.
Then Mari died.
Just like that, no warning, no time to prepare. One moment she was there, the next she wasn’t. The person who held the group together, the person who had given all of them a home. And the worst part of it all, she was Sunny’s big sister too. One of the only two people keeping Sunny grounded. Just like that, gone.
All it took was a single midnight raid, a single mistake.
One night where Kel was too exhausted to keep his eyes open until the end of his watch. One night where Hero wasn’t awake to quietly cover for him like he always did. One night where a group of desperate people decided that what Mari’s settlement had was worth killing for.
By the time everyone realized what was happening, it was already too late. The attackers were driven off, the settlement survived, most of the group survived.
Mari didn’t.
And somehow, that made it worse. Because there was no glorious last stand, no overwhelming force, no impossible enemy. Just one bad night, one lapse in judgment, one moment of weakness.
The kind of mistake any human could make. The kind of mistake that would haunt the survivors for the rest of their lives.
—
The grief hit everyone differently.
Hero stopped speaking.
At first, nobody noticed. The first few hours after Mari’s death were chaos, people were injured, supplies needed to be gathered, the group needed somewhere safe to stay. There were too many immediate problems for anyone to notice Hero hadn’t said a single word.
Then hours became a day.
A day became two.
And suddenly everyone realized that Hero, the person who always knew exactly what to say, hadn’t spoken since Mari died.
Not once.
He still moved when people asked him to, still treated injuries, still cooked meals whenever someone forgot to eat, still performed every responsibility he’d carried for years.
But it was like his soul had left with her, and sometimes people would catch him staring at the empty chair across the campfire.
Sometimes they’d find him reaching for a second plate before remembering there was nobody left to give it to.
Nobody knew what to say to him, because Mari wasn’t just his leader, she wasn’t just his friend, she was the future he’d never gotten to have. The lover he wanted to spend his life with.
Kel broke in quieter ways.
Everyone expected him to cry, to scream, to finally collapse under the weight of everything.
Instead, he smiled, and somehow that was worse. If anything, Kel became even more withdrawn, just like his big brother Hero. But the difference was that he kept going, he kept providing, he kept fighting like his life depended on it, because it did.
Sometimes he could be caught crying in the middle of the night. Not loud, or eccentric in any way. Just quiet sobs muffled in places or times where he thought no one could hear him.
Mari had always been there, not just for him, but for everyone. She taught him to fight, taught him to defend, his perfect stance was thanks to her. His big brother’s love.
Ronin took it the hardest after Hero and Sunny, Mari had saved her, given her and her brother a home, a family, given her something worth believing in. For years, Ronin had looked at Mari like she had all the answers, like she was invincible, like nothing in the world could ever truly hurt her.
Then she died, just like everyone else.
Ronin cried until she physically couldn’t anymore, then she sat silently beside Mari’s grave for hours. Days. Sometimes people would wake up and find her there before sunrise, and sometimes she’d still be there after sunset.
She never said much, just stared, as if she was waiting for Mari to come back, as if she was still trying to understand how somebody so important could simply stop existing.
Niru became quieter, which shouldn’t have been possible. He was already the type of person who preferred listening over speaking, but after Mari died, even that disappeared.
He withdrew into himself completely, because Mari wasn’t supposed to die, not Mari. Mari was the one who saved people, the one who took him and Ronin in when she didn’t have to, the one who gave them shelter when the world had abandoned them, and the one person who always seemed capable of finding a solution.
Her death shattered something inside him. Not loudly, not visibly, but permanently, nonetheless. And for the first time in years, Niru found himself wondering whether survival was actually enough.
Thomas understood loss better than most.
He’d lost people before, he lost the girl he loved more than the world itself, lost his dreams, lost pieces of himself. Yet Mari’s death somehow reopened every wound he’d spent years trying to heal.
Because grief doesn’t stack neatly. It compounds. Every loss carries the weight of the ones that came before it. Mari’s death wasn’t just Mari’s death, it was every funeral, every goodbye, every person he’d failed to save, every person he’d watched disappear. It all came rushing back at once.
And suddenly he felt exhausted, not physically, spiritually.
Like he was tired of surviving. Tired of losing people, tired of pretending he could handle one more funeral.
But he was there. He was there for Hero, the best friend he ever could have asked for, the person who saved him when he lost his love. The person who brought meaning back into his life after so long of nothing but grief.
He chose Hero, he chose his new family, he chose the happiness of those around him, because in reality, that’s all he could have done anyway.
Basil was devastated.
For a long while now, he’d quietly become the emotional backbone of the group. The person holding everyone together, the person checking on everyone else’s wounds while ignoring his own.
Mari had always been the one person he could lean on when things became too heavy, the one person who understood exactly how much responsibility he carried.
Now she was gone, and suddenly everyone was looking at him again, waiting for him to fix things, waiting for him to smile. waiting for him to keep everyone together.
But Basil didn’t know how; not this time.
Not when the person who taught him how to stay strong was lying in the ground, 6 feet under with no guarantee she’d stay gone the same way Aubrey seemed to have.
For the first time in a long while, Basil felt genuinely lost.
But none of them were as terrifying as Sunny; because Sunny didn’t cry, he didn’t scream, he didn’t break anything, didn’t say a word.
He just stared. The same way he had when Aubrey died with the same empty expression. The same hollowing silence. The same look that made everyone’s stomach drop, because they’d seen it before.
They remembered what came after. They remembered the blood, the violence, the months spent chasing revenge through a dying world.
Mari, along with Basil, had spent all that time helping pull him back from that edge. Months helping him become someone Aubrey would’ve recognized again.
And now she was gone. The person who raised him, protected him, believed in him. The person who had always been there. Gone.
Sunny sat beside Mari’s grave long after everyone else had left.
Hour after hour, night after night. Never saying a word and never moving. Just staring at the dirt.
And every single member of the group found themselves thinking the same thing. Not “how do we survive this?”
But, instead,
“Can we survive if Sunny doesn’t?”
