Death Mask ((Kamukura X Komaeda One Shot))

Death Mask

I shifted my feet nervously, casting my gaze across the room to each arguing person.
A fist slammed on the table as a man with glistening golden locks sat up,
"Silence with your bickering! The Black Plague has taken every doctor that steps foot in this village. If we try to continue through winter without support at this rate, we'll all be dead by the first spring rain,"
The man, so elegantly named Byakuya, furrowed his eyebrows with anger. He wouldn't meet anyone's stare, nor their paranoid tapping or fiddling.
"Our horses are weak and sick, they couldn't make a walk around the town let alone a journey into the distant cities. We're low on food, blankets. The mass graves are filling up and our water is fueling the plague."
"Then what do you want us to do, Byakuya?!" A girl jolted up this time, her long dark hair tumbling down her back, "We can't make any journeys and we're dying in mass, we get it! I guess we'll just become another ghost town, right?"

The blond man rolled his eyes, shaking his head with irritation,
"Leave it to Tenko to take one thing I say and turn it into a whole new argument. I didn't say we can't leave, I said we can't leave on horses."

Some people in the counsel looked around with confusion before another piped up, the girl raising her hand to speak,
"Sir, what is your plan if we can't leave on horses?"

I swallowed, shifting myself once again. Why was I here again? I didn't belong in a town meeting among the remarkable voices of the population, but nobody had objected to me yet. What input could I give anyway?

Byakuya huffed as he held his hands behind his back in a stance of power and disapproval,
"We leave on foot to find help. Only one though, if we send any more, the risk of spreading the Bubonic plague beyond our borders grows dangerous."

"Impossible!" Another swiftly objected, "One person traveling so far is suicide! They wouldn't survive!"
"We need a new doctor! We need medicine! We're desperate!"

Byakuya's hand came down on the table once again, shushing the room once more,
"Silence! We don't need to travel as far as the cities. There's a ghost town not far from here that was taken by the plague long before it reached us. The area is unlikely to be contaminated anymore, but they might have had a medical facility, we can't ditch the possibility of new people arriving to take over the area, perhaps even a doctor."
"That's insane!" A new boy cried out in disbelief, one I distinctly recall being named Shuichi, "You want to send someone to a town destroyed by plague, in hopes a doctor would just suddenly be there? They'd have a better chance of meeting the sharp end of a bandit knife!"

The arguing erupted once more, too jumbled to make out any single voice. Byakuya allowed the crowd to fight this time, letting them get it out of their systems before he finally sighed, his shoulders falling in annoyance and dejection.

I'm not sure what came over me, but I believed in Byakuya. At least he had an idea, a ray of hope for this deadly winter. I pushed myself up, nearly knocking my chair back as I stood,
"Byakuya, sir, I'll go!"

That's how I found myself standing at the edge of a desolate village, shivering from the nipping cold. It was silent, too silent. The air smelled thick and musty, and plants were growing into the village paths already, against a forest trying to reclaim what belonged to it.
No humans have been here a long time, just as Byakuya said. It could still be risky though, nobody knew what caused the plague. Maybe it could be evil spirits at this rate, that would be logical after how horrific it tore apart lives.

Damn it, why did I even volunteer? At the moment I just wanted the arguing to stop and to help as many lives as I could, but now that I was here, I was cold and afraid.