disclaimer: disclaimed.
dedication: to Les, because this is still her fault.
notes: talk shit hit everyone with a goddamn bat
title: no one's getting out alive
summary: They were almost out of gas, there were zombies everywhere, and Sasuke's kid sister was sitting in the passenger seat. This was not a good day. — Karin, Kiba.
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"I hate you."
"Shut up, Karin, it's too early for this shit."
"Whatever, I still hate you!"
Kiba ran his fingers through his hair. The sun was up, burning away the early morning mists, and already she was bitching about something. That was nothing new; bitching was what Karin did best, especially at obscene hours of the morning when he'd been driving for six hours on an empty tank of gas and hadn't had a decent cup of coffee in longer than he'd like to think about. Three weeks was killing his addiction, but man, the withdrawal days had not been fun.
"Shit," he muttered, more to himself than to her, "we're so fucked, we're in the middle of fucking nowhere and we have no fucking gas—"
"Language," Karin sniped at him from across the stick shift. "We'll just stop somewhere. Didn't we pass a—van? Was it a van?—like ten minutes ago?
"That was four hours ago, kid," he said. Kiba grinned, bone white in the reflection off the windshield. "You sleep like a fuckin' rock."
"Shut up, jerk," Karin murmured. She rubbed at her eyes, dried blood crusted beneath her nails that flaked away as she moved. Day a hundred and thirty-nine, and they still hadn't found a single other soul alive.
"Go back to sleep, Karin," Kiba said gently. "I'll figure something out."
"You always say that," she said.
He reached over to ruffle her hair. Karin squawked, indignant, and the rumble of the Jeep was drowned out with their laughter. It didn't last long, because she habitually played with the radio when he drove. Sometimes, if they were lucky, it would pick something from a time gone past up.
Bubblegum pop spilled from the speakers, haunting in its happiness. The music would play on repeat, the kind of thing that simply didn't happen anymore.
Regardless, Karin sang along as loud as she could.
Half an hour later, the vehicle sputtered beneath Kiba's hands.
"Shit," they both hissed at the same time.
"We have to pull over," Karin said. "We don't—"
"—have a choice. I know," he said, grim.
Karin couldn't remember when they'd started finishing each other's sentences. Probably after she'd knifed an Infected in the throat to stop him from getting turned. Whatever. It didn't matter, now.
They took the next turn-off.
"Keep your gun out," he said.
"Do you think I'm stupid or something?" Karin asked idly. She pulled a handgun from the glove compartment, clicked the safety off. It felt right between her hands, and wasn't that just an irony?
"Be careful," he said, as he parked in front of a gas station. The moans from the Infected rattled the windows.
Karin smiled like a razor. "Don't die. You owe me a burger."
Kiba rolled his eyes, and then the doors were open, and they were all out, guns blazing.
Karin never knew about guns before the virus.
Well, okay, that wasn't quite true. She'd played video games on the nights she'd crashed Sasuke's little sleepover (and no, fuck you, they were totally sleepovers—her brother and his friends didn't sleep and shit talked each other until the sun came up. That was a sleepover, Sasuke, deal with it), so her aim wasn't bad. The sight of blood didn't send her into a panic attack the way it had done to some of her friends.
She wasn't completely useless, duh.
But that was why she was so unprepared for the reality of it.
The reality of shooting a gun was very different than the movies. The smell of gunpowder and metal never left your hands, stunk acrid even as it turned your skin into a forge of bloody miser. The recoil hurt, hurt more than anything, snapped back against her every time she pulled the trigger.
She was elbow deep in zombie gore before she thought to look for Kiba. Karin wiped rotting flesh off of her forehead (ew, she got it in her hair), and whipped her head up. She couldn't head the shuffling moan of incoming Infected, but that didn't mean they weren't there. In fact, it probably meant that they were just munching on some poor unfortunate soul.
But there was no one there. No Infected at all.
Just Kiba, leaning against the butt of his shotgun. He was smirking at her, but what else was new. Disgust rolled over Karin in waves, strong and dangerous as a summer storm. Ugh, she hated him.
"Look who's still alive," he chuckled.
"No thanks to you," Karin flung her gross hair over her shoulder. It was the best dismissal she knew, but of course she ignored it. It was no wonder her stupid fucking brother liked this douche so much, they had all sorts of assholery in common.
He slung an arm around her shoulders, fingers curling over the sharp jut of her clavicle.
"What are you doing?" Karin demanded.
"Making sure you're okay, kid," he said, quiet, into her ear.
"I'll be better when I've had a shower," she muttered, grumpy.
"Yeah, you're pretty gross," Kiba laughed. His fingers dug into her shoulder, sharp, bright points of almost-pain that she could focus on to keep her distracted from the scent of rotting flesh that seemed to soak the air. It was a good pain, though, burned all through her to banish three weeks of melancholy to the ends of her earth. It's good, and she hates it.
"Not as gross as your face," Karin sang back at him, sweet-sour. Her lips pinched up like she just bit into a lemon, all lines around the mouth, nose wrinkling right across the bridge. "Get off of me, and just—can't you leave me alone?"
She shoved his arm off—because even after the world ended, she was still Karin, and this was still not okay—and stalked towards the Jeep.
"Hey! Hey, Jesus, what the fuck, wait! Karin!"
His hand curled over her shoulder, and everything inside Karin squeezed.
Don't flip out, she told herself, oh my god, Karin, don't flip out.
His breathing came hard, and he spun her around to face him—jaw twitching like she'd just slapped him, and maybe she ought to have. He had deep dark shadows beneath his eyes, and she wondered maybe this isn't the time.
"You know I can't," he said lowly. "You know why I can't."
But the thing was that Karin was seventeen, and she couldn't keep her mouth shut if it killed her. It was probably gonna be the end of her one day (maybe even today, but she was so tired and hurt and everything inside felt wrung-out and hollow in the way of day-old laundry
"I'm not my brother, Kiba!" Karin exploded. "I'm not him, and I don't—I don't need someone to look after me!"
He just looked at her, lines around his mouth that Karin didn't remember being there a month ago. He looked too old for twenty-two but still not old enough to have his best friend's seventeen-year-old kid sister on his hands. She wasn't fucking dependant, no matter what he thought. Because she could shoot a gun and cook food and because she wasn't fucking afraid to kill someone if she needed to. She'd done it before. She'd do it again.
Kiba blew out his cheeks. The tattoos looked like old blood beneath the dirt, stretched and distorted. She didn't know where he'd gotten them—didn't know why he'd have wanted them in the first place. He was so quiet. "I know you're not."
"I don't think you do," Karin said bitterly. She didn't spare him another look. The Jeep was unlocked, but her fingers didn't work right. She wrenched the door open, and slammed it behind her hard.
It took him ten minutes to pick the lock on the other side.
"Bitch move, kid," he said.
"Fuck off," Kiba," Karin said quietly.
But he wasn't looking away, and the words bubbled in Karin's stomach thick like acid. She shook his gaze off, and curled up against the window because it felt like heartburn; it was exactly like the scratchy feeling in your throat before you burst into tears in public. She stood in front of her brother's best friend, about to completely lose her shit, and it was awful. She'd never felt like this before, but the virus had changed a lot of things.
"I get it, okay," she said. "I know you love my brother—love, Kiba, not loved, it's present-tense, it hasn't gone away—I know! But that's not, it's not, I don't need you to—ugh. It's not a reason, okay, it's not."
"It's not because of that, Karin—"
"Oh my god, yes, it is! I know that if he hadn't told you to look after me, you wouldn't be here! You'd, god, you'd probably be dead because you'd probably have gone running after Sasuke when the first wave hit because that's what people in love do! It's what my dad did for my mom, and I saw, and I know, I get it, I get it! Okay?!" and the words came out heaving, so angry that she could taste bile and blood at the back of her throat. Because it was true, it was so true, and ew, why did she even care?
After a long moment, he went "…Can I touch you?"
"No," she said, wrapped too-thin arms around herself. She shook, but he didn't touch her and that was nice. She always liked that about him, that if she didn't want him to touch her he wouldn't. An apocalypse and a half later and that hadn't changed. Karin could appreciate that, zombies or no. "Kiba, you don't even like me. You try to keep me safe because he'd never forgive you if you didn't, and you can't even—you can't even take that, so…"
"It's not that I don't like you, Karin," he sighed.
"Then what the fuck is it?!" Her voice cracked and broke into nothing on the last word.
Kiba ran his hands through his hair. He had a week's worth of stubble on his face, wild and a little unhinged. His throat was working, too, Adam's apple bobbing up and down with the force of all the things he wasn't going to say. Karin knew he was trying to find the right words, too, but there was nothing right anymore.
"You're right," he said at last. "Jesus, fine, you're right! Your brother makes me crazy and you, fuck, you make me crazy too! I promised I'd get you out, Karin, jesus, you're a fucking kid, you're a goddamn child, and I wasn't—!"
"I am not!" the words seethed out through her teeth. She felt about five years old under the heavy look he settled on her shoulders.
"I think you just proved my point," Kiba said wryly. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his grimy jeans, stared down at the scuffs on his sneakers. He voice when a little hoarse. "And fuck, yeah, of course I fuckin' loved Sasuke. Of course I did."
Karin ducked her head down, cheek pressed against the window pane. It left a long bloody smear along the glass. She was suddenly too tired to care. "Ino didn't."
"Ino was something else," Kiba chuckled, and yeah, that was true. Ino had been something else entirely, and Karin remembered braiding wheat-blonde into long braids, hair like precious silk-spun gold in her fingers. Her heart clenched, because Ino was gone, now, too, probably dead, just like the rest of them.
"You're a shitty person," she said, instead of an actual answer.
"So are you," he said. The cheerful grin on his face made her want to punch something, break the windshield with his face. "At least we're alive to be shitty to each other."
"Shut up," Karin said. She couldn't help the smile. "I wan an actual bed. And a shower. And food."
"Two outta three ain't bad," Kiba said mildly.
Karin shoved him across the stick shit, and everything was okay again.
(For now.)
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fin.