A/N: For AngelofDeath10, whose writing content, volume, and speed has inspired me for a decade! They provided the prompt for this fic: renaissance & supernatural elements.
Other warnings: This fic begins (but does not stay) in 2020. So uh, expect, you know, that.
First came the virus. Then the shutdown. Then Kaoru's layoff, and eviction, and transfer of life-filled duffel bags to Enishi's condo. Then the search for academic jobs that had suddenly evaporated. The weekly ritual of donning a mask to venture into the communal laundry room, the hour of washing her long dark hair afterward to remove possible pathogens, the afternoon phone calls to Megumi out on Enishi's little covered patio. And always, always there was the hope that all this would all be over soon.
But August brought worse news, and more cases. More breathless accounts of hospitalizations, more regional shutdowns. Record-breaking heat, blackouts, dry winds, wildfires. Suffering and death.
September delivered the karmic cherry on Kaoru's Dystopia Sundae: day after day of suffocating smoke that compelled her and every other West Coaster to huddle indoors, with no end in sight.
"I can't take it anymore," Kaoru yelled over the buzz of the box fan to which she had duct-taped a MERV 13 filter so she could pretend that the indoors was still safer than the outdoors. She rose from her nest of pillows on the couch and stuck her nearly dead phone into the zipper pocket on her cheap leggings. "I have to get out of here."
Enishi glared at her over the top of his tablet, his too-small steampunk spectacle lenses lit up from the reflection of the screen. "Everything is closed. Where will you go?"
"I don't care. Anywhere but here." She grabbed Enishi's Toyota keys from the entryway rack. "I'll just drive up the hill a little bit and be back in half an hour."
Heaving a melodramatic sigh, Enishi set the tablet aside and gracefully unfolded himself from the lounge chair. He ran his fingers through his prematurely silver hair, floofing it up in a million directions, then said, "Fine, I'll come," as if Kaoru had invited him.
Kaoru had envisioned a solo outing, but she couldn't complain. She hadn't exactly asked to borrow his car. And since she had shared nearly a decade of unpleasant life experiences with him, not to mention a whole summer of agony the same nine-hundred square foot living space, both she and Enishi had long ago dispensed with formalities like "small talk" and "asking permission to share possessions" and "closing the bathroom door." Okay, that last one was only Enishi, and fortunately it was only when he was going pee. She hoped.
Together, they exited the condo quickly. Kaoru coughed as she gulped air that tasted like a mouthful of campfire. She hoped she was inhaling ash from the nearby grass fire, and not from the one in the hills further east, where homes were burning and where some people had died. She wondered, once again, about the equivalent number of cigarettes for every breath, wondered if the local Air Quality Management District was telling the truth when they insisted that this air was merely "Unhealthy," or if it was actually "Hazardous" like the Purple Air app reported.
"Hurry up. Get in," Kaoru urged as she reached the car and stuck the key fob in the ignition; then adjusted the seat to fit her much shorter height. "So much for avoiding driving on a 'Spare the Air' day," she added, feeling more thrilled than guilty.
Enishi scoffed as he mashed the "recirculate" button with his knuckle and cranked up the A/C. "If they want to 'spare the air,' they better get control of the oil companies spewing carbon into the atmosphere. They need to stop making excuses for the energy companies. The Benicia refineries. The goddamn ports and the waivers allowing the tankers to idle those fucking diesel generators -"
"I get it." Kaoru found it best to cut off Enishi before he got too wound up in his ruminations. "It's the big players who need to make sweeping changes. One Prius on the road for an hour isn't going to stop the planet's slide into inevitable atmospheric disaster."
"You're learning," Enishi said. Finally, he didn't say aloud, but the way he elongated his words made it obvious that he still wasn't especially impressed with Kaoru's understanding of the need to catalyze the Green Revolution.
Admittedly, Kaoru did not usually pay much attention to Enishi's rants, but she had absorbed a decent amount of knowledge after months of sleeping on the futon in his home-office-slash-spare-bedroom where he operated a lean non-profit that was either a wildly successful, disruptive policy force to be reckoned with and which played an instrumental role in organizing grassroots support to pass numerous local ordinances and statewide climate crisis regulations, or an online personality cult led by a delusional eco-terrorist, depending on whether the judgment came from an alternative print weekly or AM radio.
Kaoru pulled out of the parking lot and drove down the smog-shrouded, empty street toward the onramp. She lapsed into silence and concentrated on taking the correct turns; Enishi seemed similarly inclined to stay quiet.
As Kaoru checked her blind spot to merge onto the freeway, she glimpsed an eyeful of Enishi's taut bicep. Her emergency roomie had been in good shape for as long as she had known him, but it was one thing to be aware of the fact that Enishi could run six-minute miles, and another to see him do shirtless crunches on the living room floor. Mostly she had tried to ignore his workout routine, just as he had given her space each afternoon to run through her yoga postures, but about a month ago she'd stared at him too blatantly while he finished a set of push-ups, and when he was done he'd wiped the sweat from his face with the back of his arm and had given her a snarky little grin, and she had smiled back and thought that something was going to happen. But then a big donor had called Enishi's cell, and later that night the first of the wildfires had broken out, and he'd been sucked into his work day and night, and since then he had hardly spoken to her about anything except telling her to replace the wet towels in front of the door to keep the smoke from coming inside. In any case, she had grown more careful about ogling Enishi when he could catch her.
A flash of light cleaved the sky in two, followed moments later by a rumble of thunder. "More lightning," Enishi muttered. "Great. Next up, more fucking fires."
Kaoru peered out at the grey-black horizon. "This is like the night they -" she broke off. She hadn't brought up the disappearance since the court declared Tomoe and Kenshin legally dead back in January; she wasn't sure if Enishi would ever want to talk about it again.
"That night was all mist and hail. No smoke for a thousand miles." Enishi said flatly. "God. Tomoe and her experiments. Who knows what she would have tried to do on a night like this?" He coughed to cover the wavering in his voice. "And Kenshin would have kept enabling her crazier and crazier ideas until - well, you know, until what happened, happened."
"Sorry. Nevermind," Kaoru said. There was no point to argue about it, not anymore. She punched the gas and, as usual, the hybrid vehicle responded anemically. At the overpass, the smoke grew even thicker, with visibility limited to no more than three streetlights ahead except whenever lightning periodically brightened the view.
Beside her, Enishi shifted, and the fabric of his workout pants crinkled loudly. "Not that I would have wanted to see Tomoe's body, but it would be easier to accept her death if the investigators had found their car. Instead, I'm just - " he swallowed loudly. "Chasing after her. Trying to figure out what she was looking for in all that climate data."
"Yeah. Like if you learned what she was doing, maybe you could get a part of her back. I did the same thing. Except, you know. For him." Kaoru had never admitted it, but Enishi must have determined the real reason she had abruptly switched her doctoral thesis topic from the early twentieth century to the Italian Renaissance. It had been a real bitch to learn a whole different language in the last two years of the academic program, but she'd done it to pick up where Kenshin had left off. "The stupid thing is, if I'd stuck with my original plan to study the aftermath of the first World War, I'd be rich now. Everyone wants to talk to historians who can tell them about the 1918 flu."
"Couldn't you teach them about the bubonic plague or something?" Enishi asked, distracted by the lightning that crackled again, then dissipated in the haze.
"I wish," Kaoru grunted as she began to drive slower. "Nobody wants to hear about the history of bloodborne bacterial infections right now. Only aerosolized viruses."
He chuckled mirthlessly. "Haven't you heard? The plague is making a comeback."
"You're such an optimist," she laughed, then reached over and patted his shoulder, a habit she had developed when they had cracked morbid jokes and held back sobs as they sifted through the strange lab equipment and dusty, creepy old books in Kenshin's and Tomoe's basement.
But instead of rolling his eyes and giving her a sad smile like he usually did, Enishi caught her hand in his.
Kaoru glanced at Enishi's face, then down at their entwined fingers.
The sky lit up again, followed by a tremendous clap of thunder. Then everything went dark.
Kaoru came back into consciousness with her throat burning. With her eyes still closed, she tried to swallow, then licked her lips. Yep, everything still tasted like campfire.
There was a muffled feminine voice coming from somewhere outside of the car, if she was still in the car. "Is that -"
"No. It's -" a man's voice. "Yes. It worked."
Kaoru finally cracked open her watering eyes and hacked up a mouthful of phlegm. Enishi still sat in the passenger seat beside her, with his red eyes wide and his mouth open, but he seemed to be in shock or something, because he didn't respond when she croaked his name. She turned her head to see what he was looking at and saw that the Prius windshield had completely blown out, and a layer of ash now blanketed the dashboard. Beyond the hood of the car, the smoke-filled freeway Kaoru expected to see had disappeared and had been replaced by a pair of arched windows with bubbled glass filtering in orange sunlight.
In front of that was a pair of two familiar, beloved figures: Tomoe and Kenshin.
[to be continued]