Are We Alive?

Twenty-Six: Pink Camellia

Pink Camellia-Longing for you.

Time for another time skip because nothing particularly interesting happens for a good while. You all know what that means 😄: Time for bad things to happen!! Hope y'all enjoy!

(And here's the song that inspired the idea of this series once more)

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The day dawned early and bright, the cool fog lifting to let the summer heat start making its way across the farm.

Rin rolled over in bed to tuck his face into pale collarbones. An equally pale arm wrapped around his waist and pulled him closer.

They lived somewhere in Pennsylvania, according to Amaimon and his amazing sense of direction when it came to land. They'd made a home for themselves in an old Factory where their living space was only accessible by ladder on the second floor and the first floor was used to store things and for training grounds(this was a temporary place to live in until they finished building actual houses). They'd started a farm and had several healthy patches of crops, along with three cows(one pregnant), pigs, two horses, a dog that hunted with them when they went out, and a cat that hunted rats and mice around the farm for them and liked to drop the carcasses at their feet, sometimes bringing back a bird. They'd somehow trained the cat to drop the dead rats and mice on a piece of old towel in one corner of the first floor so they could wash, skin, cut up, and cook the rodents later.

Things were going wonderfully, which was always unnerving.

The last time Rin had settled down and started making a life for him and his group, it had seemed so surreal and yet so exciting. And with just one mistake, it had all crumbled to the ground, burning throughout a night and a day, screams and sobbing and heavy smoke and the deafening collapsing of buildings drawing the dead to the commotion and ruining the home they'd made.

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Rin's group had begun to take in survivors once they got their crop fields actually producing things they could eat. They were able to make houses old-style- small tree trunks, a mix of mud, hay, and carefully made clay tiles for the roofs. It took them a good while to make all the houses and the rooms in the houses, but they managed. They even made several outhouses by digging pits(a distance away from where everyone slept), then digging stairs, then erecting walls around the pit and making a door.

Every two weeks, either whoever had a punishment due or the ex-druggie named Scottie with no sense of smell that they'd given a home to would shovel up the waste in the outhouses and fertilize the crops with it. It was the only way they could keep such huge fields growing so well at the same time. They made use of everything they could.

With more people came more helping hands and more of a system. After a while, the strain got too much for Rin on his own, so he formed a group that would vote on decisions they needed to make and the best ways to do them. It had consisted of Rin, Ryuji, Shiemi, Izumo, Konekomeru, and a woman named Lilith. She'd been a ballerina and they'd found her ballet dancing while gracefully taking out the dead around her with a crowbar, but she'd grown up on a huge farm and knew how to operate one, how to shoot guns, how to fight with weapons like farm tools, and she was very nimble and fast. She'd helped them make the crop fields and place the outhouses, and she'd been the one to point out that human waste was still fertiliser, especially since there weren't really any toxic substances in anyone's system after the apocalypse began and they'd been forced to adhere to a diet of animal meat and whatever plants they could find that were edible.

They got big enough to take in people. Shura, Shima, and Kinzou went out to find people and brought them back after judging whether they were dangerous or not.