A/N: I would like to thank FS for her help in betaing the fic, she really went hard on the grammer and things turned out better for it.
Also shoutout to Momo Cicerone, this fic is your christmas gift. Yeah, uh remember the zombie apocalypse au we talked about like a year ago? Well I kind uh, went ahead and sort of started it. Hope you like it.
Ai has no reason to believe Gin exists. All she has are stories filtering from the West, tales of a zombie hunter so great he can freely wander the infested plains with nary a scratch, the monster even the mindless undead fear.
There's something about this land, she muses, the endless rolling plains, the dust that never truly settles, the desolate nights, which coaxes these stories to pop up. A civilization was built here, brick by brick on this inhospitable land, and it told myths of heroes carved out of iron to match.
With the collapse of America and the collapse of the West, it made sense new myths would pop up. Gin might even be one of these myths—several zombie hunters conglomerated into one, exaggerated to give the survivors of the apocalypse the hope that something, anything could survive outside the besieged walls of the towns, that someday, the world would open up to them.
Ai Haibara would be really and truly fucked if he didn't exist because she had no backup plan. She needed someone who could get her to ground zero of the outbreak, someone who could sneak through the miles and miles without endless chain of zombies that wander the plains ever gathering numbers as community by community, cut off from the outside world, falls.
Ai Haibara needed Gin to be real. And so she did something that went against her very nature as a scientist, an act that bucked 25 years of lived experience.
She hoped.
In the end she finds him following whispers. He was only ever spoken of in a strange mix of fear and awe, as if he were Death himself. The job of putting the dead to rest was a necessary one, but not a particularly well-liked role. He was still emptying bullets into people's grandmothers and pet dogs, even if they were only a mocking facsimile of what they once were.
She does not need someone to point him out to her — she knows him when she sees him. The stories of Gin the Hunter fit the man like a well-worn second skin. There's a predatory grace to his steps that mark him as a lion among sheep, a heavy-set coldness to his face that reminds her of a shark.
He heads to the tavern, blood still on his cloak; she follows. She feels nervous, like she's tailing a wolf fresh from the kill.
He orders a drink and she watches him. He chugs it down hard, and slams it on the table. It is so out of character with her initial impression that she concludes it's a mask. The hard-drinking hard-living character he has become in the bar is a mask behind which the predator lies. She does not know why she is so certain of this, nor does she particularly want to question it.
The man turns to her and motions for her to approach. It is such an imperious gesture that her first instinct is to resist, but she then chides herself. She needs to approach him sometime after all.
She sits next to him at the table.
"Do you have some sort of problem with me, little lady? You've been following me for a while."
He speaks with all the condescension she's come to expect from Westerners, except there's a tinge of menace laced in his voice, poking through his accent and manners.
"I've heard about your skills, and I want to hire your services for a very important mission. One that might help ensure the survival of humanity."
He purses his lips and gives her a thoughtful look.
"You seem familiar, have we met before?"
"I don't remember ever seeing you," Haibara says carefully, a statement both true and misleading. She has few memories before the zombie apocalypse, and they are very disjointed; so she might've met him before, when she still went by Shiho Miyano. But well, from what she remembers, Miyano Shiho had not been a very good person, and the people she knew were probably best left forgotten. Besides, if she keeps quiet, he might fill in the blanks on his own.
She is disappointed.
"Ah, my mistake, you bear a striking resemblance to someone I used to know," he says, and to anyone else it might've seemed like an honest mistake. To Ai Haibara, two things are clear: The entire exchange was calculated, and Gin got some very interesting information out of it.
Gin smiles, clearly pleased with himself. Well, it's less of a smile and more of a slight twitch of his lips, but to her, it is as clear and unmistakable as a hyena's grin.
"Back to the matter at hand," Haibara says, keeping her annoyance at the interruption in check, "I want to hire you to take me to ground zero for the APTX4869 zombie virus. The researchers might have created an antidote. Even if they didn't, notes on how they created the virus and the molecular schematics of how it works would be very helpful."
Gin raises his eyebrows at that.
"You do realize that's where the undead are densest, right? I can probably get in there by myself, but having to drag you along? Forget it!"
"Yes, it will be more difficult if I come along —I acknowledge that— but you wouldn't know what to look for anyways. I have to come."
"Fair enough, but it will cost you."
"Name your price."
"Your life," Gin says, and the words ricochet through her skull like a bullet.
She tries to step back, but Gin keeps a tight grip on her arm.
"Is the research not worth that much to you?"
"I can't," she stammers, "I don't know how much the data is worth, and I'd still need to synthesize the cure, and I still have years to go."
"What if I say I can wait 'til all of that is done? Is the answer still a no? Is this not worth your life?" His eyes are intense, and she feels like she's gazing into an unending spiral of madness. He is serious, she can feel it in her bones. Before her is not a man but a wild deranged beast that will devour her. She squares her shoulders, lifts her chin up and looks him in the eyes.
"Once I'm done with the cure, I'll give you my life," she says softly.
Gin gives her a cold smile, and the madness in his eyes vanishes.
"I was just kidding," he laughs, but it does not feel like a joke. Ai is certain she barely limped out of a trap. Or maybe it caught her and she has not yet realized it.
"But really, who do you want to cure so badly that you'd risk your life for this?" he inquires.
"Can I not love humanity that much?"
"Did I miss the part where you were Jesus? You are not the type of person to offer their life for strangers."
He states this like it is an irrefutable truth of Ai Haibara, and he is not wrong. Ai is not Jesus. She would not die for humanity. Most of the time, people were horribly selfish stumbling through life blind to the suffering they cause in an endless cycle of hurting themselves and others. And she is no different because there is only one person she really wants to save.
"I have a friend," she begins, "he helped me through the early stages of the apocalypse; and we were supposed to get to safety in Washington DC, but he didn't make it," she admits. Her eyes sting with unshed tears. She already feels too vulnerable in front of this man, and she hates herself for pretending he was the kind of person she can say these kinds of things to.
Gin's face softens. It is not feather-soft, but rather it is more like the granite edges have smoothed into marble.
She centers herself through her emotional turbulence and asks again, "So will you do it? And what's your price?"
"How can I say no to love? I'll take you but I expect bullets, at least 2000 for my gun. But don't blame me if you don't like the answers you find."
The bullets and the romanticism are an excuse. She does not know why he truly said yes, but he is lying to her, and what's worse, he's not even trying to hide the fact that he is hiding something.
The softness in his face is gone, having vanished like a mirage. In its place, there's a barely suppressed knowing smirk. It's too eager and too bloodthirsty to be smug, rather it's the kind of face she imagines him making right before he drives a knife into a hated enemy. There's no doubt in her mind — this man was connected to both Miyano Shiho and the outbreak of the APTX 4869 zombie virus. How this puzzle fits together will keep her up into the dark hours of the night.
She holds out her hand for him to shake.
"May I have the pleasure of knowing your actual name?"
He takes her hand and shakes it.
"I can give you a thousand names, but none of them would mean anything. Even my birth name has lost all meaning. Gin might as well be my real name," he explains, "What should I call you?"
"Sherry," she says without thinking. She wonders why the name slipped out of her mouth so naturally.
Gin's lips curl into a smile, "A drink for a drink, eh? How fitting!"
As they shake hands, it hits Ai just what she's done— she is seeking help from a man with unknown motivations and a false name; a man who has given every impression he knew her and hates her.
They are not partners. They are not friends. They aren't even allies. This is what they are — a fly caught in a spider's trap.
So here it is, everything is done. I probably add anymore to this. Unless Momo asks me, then I might consider writing more than this one shot. Or if I get enough reviews, I am extremely weak to pressure you know.
(Also if I write this out, this might be GinSherry)