nap of a star — nishimura riki. best friends to lovers. eventual established relationship. zombie apocalypse au. fluff. heavy angst.
synopsis. nishimura riki was sixteen when you taught him what love was. he is still sixteen when the universe teaches him of loss and rips you out of his hands. (1.9k words)
Nishimura Riki was sixteen when you taught him what love was.
It was confusing at first. He didn’t understand why he felt funny whenever you would bump your shoulders with his, why his eyes would trail towards your direction after he would tell a joke, why he’d search for your face in every room, and why he was more aware of his actions when you were around.
You’d approach him, he’d start to sweat. You’d talk, and he’d notice the way your lips would curve up. And even though he didn’t know it yet, love was residing deep in his bones.
And he swears he didn’t intend on it; he’s only sixteen years of age and more often than not, he found that he didn’t care much about anything. He does things when needed, he only says what he needs to say, only listens when it interests him, but with you, he finds himself smiling at the most unexpected times.
He’s so drawn to you, with everything that you do. And suddenly, everything is about you.
The flower he sees while walking to school reminds him of that time the two of you had visited the flower shop and he had placed one on your ear. The shell he finds at the beach reminds him of your favorite pearl earrings. He was in love, and maybe it was because he hadn’t known love otherwise that he never truly realized it before.
He supposes he should feel embarrassed that you’ve managed to seize him entirely, but somehow it didn’t matter.
It’s a Sunday when you find one of the rare photos you had together with Riki displayed on the lock screen of his phone.
“Riki?”
“Hm?”
You still remember the day it was taken. It was after the both of you spent the entire day visiting downtown thrift stores and eating at your favorite stalls, the same day you stayed up talking on the phone until dawn.
You were the one who took the photo, smiling with him at the camera while the two of you wore the most absurd pieces of clothing you found at the thrift store (you had shoved a handful of clothes in his direction and asked him to wear it. How could he refuse when you looked so happy handing them over to him?). There’s a light tint of pink on his cheeks, and it’s obvious he’s trying to hold in a smile by covering his lips with a peace sign, and you had your face squished with his.
“You have us on your phone screen?”
It’s almost record-breaking time when his face flushes red. And he’s trying, really trying, to ignore your eyes because he hadn’t meant for you to see that, but it’s difficult when you’re smiling at him like that.
“You weren’t supposed to see that.” He grabs his bag from you, and he’s just standing there, but it’s clear he’s getting shy and flustered because he had just been caught red-handed.
“It just reminds me that no matter what happens, I have you,” Riki mutters quietly, eyes shifting towards your bedroom door as if it was the most interesting thing he’s ever seen. “Do you like me?”
The absurdity and straightforwardness of your question has him choking on his own spit, and he looks at you with wide eyes. He swears he can hear everything in your room, including the loud thuds of his heart beating through his chest.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while… if you like me or not. I mean - it’s not like you’re really trying to hide it.” Riki’s mouth drops open and he’s quick to cross his arms defensively, shaking his head and trying to unconvincingly persuade you that you were wrong.
“For what it’s worth, I really like you too. A lot.” Your voice grows quieter and Riki immediately drops the hands he had folded over his chest. “Really?” A soft smile tugs on his lips.
“Yeah.”
Riki spends the entirety of sixteen being in love with you.
+
Nishimura Riki is still sixteen when the universe teaches him of loss and rips you out of his hands.
“Are you okay?” Riki asks. He sounds horrendous.
You’re propped in a makeshift bed he had made you two nights ago after he had devastatingly found out you had been scratched. He didn’t take the news well - sobbing in your arms until he fell asleep. The events of that night are a blur, but you can still remember the haunting words Riki had repeated, “I can’t lose you, please… please tell me this isn’t real.”
The virus was taking an abnormally long time to overtake your system, and every night, Riki stays by your side to hold onto the last moments you will probably have together.
You’re able to see out the window to your left from where you’re laying, where the school grounds had been broken and vandalized, and where people you used to call your friends roam freely on the grounds - barely recognizable. You remember thinking of how you were going to be one of them soon in what you thought were your last hours.
On the first night, you and Riki talked about the day you had slipped out of your house and into the darkness outside to spend time with each other. You had class the next day, but you chose to spend the entire night in a park, a secret to the sleeping world around you. You recall holding onto each other and watching the sun rise. Riki remembers the tiredness weighing down his eyes, but he’d stay up another hundred hours to do it all again.
He falls asleep crying and holding onto you until all he’ll ever know is you.
On the second night, Riki cries again. He repeats, “please don’t leave me” as you tell him about the day you held hands and raced through a crowd to get on your favorite rides at the amusement park - your very first date. The sun was beaming, and the day felt timeless. He sang you to sleep on the way home.
Riki curses to Whoever is Above as you cry into each other’s arms. The both of you fall asleep exhausted, and you make him promise to try and get out of there alive, for the both of you.
Tonight, he lays beside you on the little table he had laid you on to rest. You had become a little more unresponsive - you knew it, and he knew it. There was nothing left he could do.
And you don’t know how hard it is for him not to cry again when every part of his body was screaming for him to do so because he was so afraid. He wasn’t ready to let you go. You were still so young. He had practiced not crying earlier while he was out looking for food and water at the school’s abandoned cafeteria, but nothing could ever prepare him for this.
When he finally speaks, his voice comes out broken and small.
“I’m gonna miss you.”
You have your head rested on his chest, and you let yourself absorb the gentle rise and fall of it. He feels the faint pressure of your hand holding onto his, and when you squeeze onto his hand, he knows you’re telling him it’s okay to cry.
“I’m gonna miss you so much.”
His next words come out in a sob. Riki shuts his eyes closed, running a hand through your hair and breathing in your scent. He tries not to think of anything else, he tries to just be with you. He doesn’t speak anymore, he just allows himself to cry and feel as he holds onto your limp body. Amid everything that was happening, he still felt it deep within his voice.
He still felt love.
And then he hears your voice.
“Sing for me?”
Riki takes a deep breath, and he tries to sing for you, like he always did before, despite his voice being a little wobbly and broken. “I can see even if you’re not by my side. I feel you even if you don’t say a word.”
It’s just the two of you in that room, with time stilling in that tiny room as he sings for you, pressing gentle kisses on the top of your head as if it was the last time he’ll ever be able to do so. “Even if it’s just in your memories, my heart is always dancing, just like before.”
You didn’t say much as you listened to his quiet singing.
“I want to be your nap so I can dream with you no matter when, as if nothing had happened. The moments that felt like magic and the brilliant night sky, they’re on my mind.” When Riki finishes singing, he lets out the most pained noise you had ever heard. As if it was finally dawning on him that he had to let you go soon. His first love, maybe his only love.
“Don’t be sad…” You try to lift your hand in a weak attempt at cupping his cheek. “Riki, you are the best thing that has ever happened to me.”
There’s a long silence before you see Riki’s face visibly break. You see the way he slowly loses composure of himself until he’s reduced to a sobbing mess. He buries his face deep in your hair, embarrassed. He doesn’t want you to see him like this, he doesn’t want this to be your last memory of each other.
Everything is so overwhelming, and it hurts everywhere. In his head, in his head, in his eyes. Everywhere hurts.
“Hey, it’s okay. I’ll visit you in your dreams.” He keeps his eyes shut closed when he feels your lips press softly on his chin. “Riki, look at me. Please…”
He couldn’t.
“Riki, please… for me?”
He wills himself to open his eyes and look at you, but the moment his gaze meets yours, he finds himself tearing up again. He knows he’s running out of time. He takes a breath too big for him and he’s reduced to a coughing fit.
When he meets your gaze another time, he realizes this could possibly be it. He tries to regain his composure before pulling you closer to his body.
Riki traces a finger on your face, watching you silently and studying your every feature before leaning down to place multiple kisses on the spots he had just traced. “Thank you for teaching me to love, and for loving me in return.” A quiet whisper.
He sees blood dripping down your nose.
“You’ll be okay, right?”
He knows he won’t be. He knows he’s so afraid of living without you, he knows it’s going to be difficult finding the will to survive the undead when you are no longer by his side, but he promised you he would try to live, so he puts everything into the lie that slips from his mouth.
“I’ll be okay.”
“You have to let me go now, you know what to do.” He feels you loosen a big breath and he nods his head understandingly. Riki places one last kiss on the corner of your lips as he breathes out a final ‘I love you’.
Synopsis:You’d follow him to the end of the world, you promised, only to realize how silly the words sounded with the current state of life- not to mention, you had said the same to Petra, a girl that met her fate with zombies gnawing the flesh of her thigh.
Word count: 2k
Warnings: zombies, gore, blood, minor injuries, explicit language, mentions of death
When you were twelve, you promised Petra you’d follow her to the ends of Earth, even if the world had gone to shit- you’d follow her.
Looking below you now, growling corpses walking the streets of Paradis; one of the most populated cities, it began to feel almost taunting. Had you manifested this? Of course not, you were a naive twelve year old, but it was too ironic.
Petra walked in front of you, baseball bat clutched tightly in her scar riddled hands. The wind caused strands of her golden hair to fly to the right, escaping the messy bun she had done hours ago. “Hey, wait up!” you called out, having fallen behind more than what you considered comfortable.
She came to a halt, turning as the corners of her mouth lifted, “Aren’t you afraid of heights?” Throughout the whole ordeal, Petra had never lost her smile, you admired her for it; you lost yours on the second day. “Keep up, we only have so much sun, y’know.” and off she was, continuing with her fast pace, leaping from roof to roof.
You groaned, fighting the urge to claim the cement floor beneath you and sleep, but Petra was right, she had never been wrong. “Alright, alright.”
The gaps in-between roofs were small due to the sheer amount of buildings they had stuffed together, but still big enough that one slip would leave you a soon-to-be zombie. “Be careful not to fall,” a useless warning, but it became tradition.
A few rooftops away from home, your leg lost balance, the slant of the roof propelling you forward as your hand desperately clawed the ground, tearing the end of your nails off as a terrified scream fell from your lips, “Petra!”-but it wasn’t enough as you hit the edge, legs rolling over and off the side. “Fuck,” you cursed, bloodied fingers digging into the ledge as you tried to pull yourself up.
Zombies piled below you, the scream from moments ago attracting them. Their groaning and growling added to your fear, one slip up and you’re zombie chow.
It was inconvenient, but you were able to graze your tip toes over what seemed to be an edge on the building.
The yell of your name pulled your attention back from the hoard below, you saw Petra running back to you, skillfully jumping over the openings. “Are you okay- Holy shit, your hand.” she mumbled, dropping to her knees as she hastily pulled you up, careful of causing any more damage. “Shit,” her eyes ran over your fingers, the blood made it look worse than it felt. “you okay? What happened back there?”
Her worried questions fell upon deaf ears- you’d almost died, moments after telling Petra to be careful, you almost fucking died. “How far are we?” your eyes met her wide ones. “I don’t think I messed anything up too bad, my damn fingers hurt, though.”
A strangled laugh forced its way through her as she looked behind her, a sloppy trail of blood from where your fingers tried to catch flat ground showed, “Yeah, I bet.” she held your head in her lap, fingers brushing through your dark, matted hair, looking down at you with a small smile. “Just a few more roofs away, I’d say five more minutes.”
The sun blinded you, Petra’s head doing little to block it out. It was a beautiful day, couldn’t have been less than sixty degrees.
You brought yourself to your feet with the help of Petra, blood staining the front of her pale blue shirt, you shot her an apologetic glance. That was one of the few shirts she owned.
“If I thought I was over my fear,” you started, examining your fingers: the tips had stopped bleeding, but it looked like someone had taken a cheese-grater to them. “Then I was dead wrong.”
Your pun flew over her head or she just didn’t find it funny. Either way, your laughter was cut short as you looked up.
The sky was a light orange, any other circumstance and it would have been beautiful; but with the world burning below it, you couldn’t help but curse the universe and its ability to create something so pretty at a time like this.
“Let’s get home,” she urged, the darkening sky made it harder to spot the openings between buildings and with your luck, you’d fall through. “Don’t want to have to sleep on a roof, again.”
It was meant as a joke, but the silence following showed neither of you took it as such.
Right before you found the apartments, there had been one other in your small group: Annie. The three of you felt unstoppable, spending all your nights sleeping on whatever roof gave you the best ocean view.
In the end, it seemed zombies always won, taking away the people you love with no second thought.
Thinking about her brought tears to your eyes, she was your best friend of fifteen years and you killed her, or at least what was left of her after the zombies had their taste. “Fuckin’ zombies.”
Petra agreed. It was a loss for her too, having known Annie for the better part of ten years. “Fucking zombies,” she repeated, picking her bat up from the ground.
Trailing behind, you watched stars appear in the sky, one by one. Now that there was less pollution, the stars were brighter; one of the few rewards of the Apocalypse, if you could call it such.
A full moon lit the sky, marking the completion of a cycle. Soon there will be a waxing crescent moon, one of your favorites- you can only hope you’ll live to see it with your best friend by your side.
“Last one,” Petra announced, jumping over the opening. “Your turn, be careful.“
Launching off the edge with your right leg, you landed on your left, falling straight to the cement with a hiss, hugging your knee to your chest. “Ouch.”
A few moments of you not moving later, arms wrapped around your waist, pulling you to your feet. “C’mon, wanna sleep,” Petra whined, pushing the green, metal door open.
The sound of metal against concrete was unpleasant, tonight it seemed louder than usual.
Twelve stairs ascend down from the green door, you’d memorized the number the first day in case of emergency. “I’ll help you,” an arm wrapped around your waist, allowing most of your weight to rest on them as you walked- no, limped down the stairs.
One
Two
Three
Four
Fiv-
A clunking noise sounded from the floor below, echoing up the stairs. Metal against metal you noted, nothing a zombie could make.
“Did you hear that?” Petra whispered, arm tightening around you, ready to take off and drag you to the roof at any given moment.
Your breath was caught in your throat, heart hammering against your chest.
“Maybe something fell over?” The thought did little to soothe your fears, knowing even if something had fallen, someone or something was prowling too close for comfort. “Let’s just get inside our room, lock the doors, and put a chair up against them.”
“And trap ourselves!?” she yelled in a hushed tone, brown eyes glued to what little you could see of the staircase through the barricade. “I say we roof hop, find a new place. Mayb-”
You silenced her, shaking your head as you spoke. “No, our room is right by the ladder, remember? Anything happens, we can leave- but I’m in no condition to be traveling.”
God, she hated it when you were right. “Fine, but I hear it again and we are gone. Understood?”
A compliant ‘yes’ left your lips, Petra was the unofficial leader.
Rarely had there been a disagreement between the two of you. Ever since Annie, she had taken it upon herself to keep you safe, seeing as you were the youngest at twenty. Annie being twenty-one and Petra twenty-three.
She reminded you of your mother, occasionally. The way she doted on you, checking you for injuries every time you went somewhere.
Chairs stacked against the doors, underneath the handles. Petra worked tirelessly to secure the rooms and doors, making sure no one could kick them down, convinced the noise was caused by the living.
“I swear I heard talking, the living aren’t like how they used to be,” she rambled, locking the bedroom door and placing a black, wooden chair underneath the silver handle. “They don’t have laws preventing them from killing- there isn’t a justice system for them to fear.”
The wall behind you was cold on your exposed back, the ridges in the paint poking at your skin.
Turning to Petra, you let your head fall against the wall. “Tra,” you sighed, breaking her from her nervous pacing. “Why would people clear every floor of an apartment building? Not even we did, for all we know some dead fucker knocked something over.”
“The voices- what about the voices I heard!?” Tears pooled in her dark eyes, she was having a panic attack. “You’re injured, can you even climb down the ladder- oh my god, your fingers.” Words flew from her mouth, worries spilling out like a broken faucet.
Your hand caught the back of her shirt, tugging her onto the bed. “Calm down, I can climb and run if I need to and my fingers,” you held them out, blood staining the skin around the nail. “are fine, some rubbing alcohol and a hand wash will fix ‘em up, Tra.”
Her fingers tangled in her hair, palms pressed flat against her face. Blonde fly-aways blowing forward, the open window allowing a breeze to pass through the room. “I just..” she paused, looking over to you. “I worry about you, about us.”
The quiet rustling and groaning of the zombies below became somewhat comforting over the months, it was a constant in a life of variables.
“I am twenty years old,” you giggled, attempting to lighten the mood. “Not a reckless fourteen year old. I can take care of myself, too.”
Blonde hair clouded your vision, Petra had placed her head on your shoulder, hand intertwining with your own. “I know,” she mumbled, “But after Annie..” she didn’t have to continue for you to understand: she couldn’t lose you too.
Change the subject, you thought. Focusing on Annie for too long will make you cry, the wound was still too fresh. “What do you think…y’know, started all this?” It was a frequent conversation you had, each time leading closer to an answer. “I still think biological warfare.”
Silence coated the room, hanging heavy in the air. “I feel like it was just an experiment gone wrong, like someone mixed the wrong vials or something.”
Your back slid down the wall, meeting the softness of the mattress underneath the purple sheets. “That’s so boring,” you groaned, looking up at her. “Besides, this feels intentional. Like, how do you not only ‘accidently’ make a zombie, but spread the virus too?”
The bed creaked as Petra moved down, becoming eye level with you. She watched you with her honey colored eyes, studying your face- memorizing every dimple and divot.
She placed her thumb on your cheek, caressing the skin, noting the scar underneath your eye: small and delicate, thin like a paper cut.
To the right of her thumb, there was a scar, you could feel it as it drug against your skin. If you had to guess, it was within the last seven or so months, seeing as Petra had smooth hands before the Apocalypse.
“One day, you’ll find out,” she paused, eyes closing- pulling her thumb away from your face, before continuing. “I’m sure of it. Now get some sleep, I’ll listen for new noises.”
You smiled, an act reserved for Petra alone. "Love you, try not to stay up all night” you whisper, pulling the gray, wool blanket close to your face.
“No promises,” she grins, moving closer to your body. “Love you too.”
Synopsis:You’d follow him to the end of the world, you promised, only to realize how silly the words sounded with the current state of life- not to mention, you had said the same to Petra, a girl that met her fate with zombies gnawing the flesh of her thigh.
Warnings: Eventual smut, explicit language, zombie apocalypse, minor character death, blood & gore, violence, weapons, minor & serious injuries, hurt/comfort
So I commissioned the incredible @polar-biscuit to draw this piece as a token of appreciation for my friend @burningpainting. Thank you for spending a year writing aca-nerd-filled adventures with me!!
Beta:N/A Rating:16+ (I would say all but just to be safe) Genre: Angst, Action, Drama, suspense, thriller, horror Words:2.5k
Summary:In a world where you feel cold. The world has ended and everyone is trying to stay alive. On a mission to save there friend from the monsters before it is too late.
The journey felt hopeful and had a sense of togetherness as the members found each other and continued their search for Jimin, but the ending-…the ending is mindboggling and gave me pause. The ending made me reconstruct the members’ journey in my mind—made my perspective of their journey do a one-eighty. But by then it was too late…the tears were already a steady flow :’)
I love this style: the location of each member as they’re found, the short first-person blurb that focuses on the member’s theme (which ties up well with the ending, so much so that I was mindblown with each revelation), then the continuation of the members’ journey to find Jimin.
~*~
and that’s the Tea by tor-mon
Ahh thanks Readers Tea, this was honestly so sad to write I was in tears the whole time myself. But it was so interesting the wording I had to pick and choose for things to make sense both ways haha.
I am glad you like it and that’s again so much for such a nice review. :)
