Camping. It was a wonderful idea on paper, a couple of friends going out and roughing it in the woods for a few nights, cooking their meals over a hot fire and bathing in nature's finest clean water. Kaito had dreamed up the whole arrangement for the trip months before the weather was nice enough to make it happen, during the winter months where the only nights he was spending outside were ones where he was stargazing without any idea when he'd be seeing the planets in alignment or meteors shooting across the sky. The moment it started getting nice enough, he pitched the idea to all of his friends, hoping that he'd have a bunch of takers and they'd be able to have a big friend bonding moment underneath the starriest of skies.
Unfortunately for him, just about everyone showed zero interest in going. There were only two people who were completely sold on going—Gonta, who wanted to sleep out in nature to experience the bugs, and Shuichi, who wanted to go just to make sure Kaito didn't do anything reckless while out in the wilderness—and after giving it a lot of thought, Kaito didn't want to give up on his dream trip even with the small group of attendees. That already small group dropped in size by one after the use of tents was reiterated a couple of weeks before the trip itself and Gonta decided he'd just go out on his own time, meaning that it was only going to be Kaito and Shuichi versus the vast wilds of the local forest.
Not too big of a challenge for a man who'd been spending months thinking about the fun he'd be having, and the best friend who wanted to keep him safe. Since it was only the two of them, it became a one-tent ordeal, with separate sleeping bags to allow them to maintain their own temperatures however they pleased, and after much deliberation about still going or not they set out in Kaito's car to the spot he'd reserved for a long weekend getaway to enjoy what nature had to offer.
They didn't find their way home in the same manner, however, and it would forever be known that their trip had been ill-fated from the start. On the road to the campsite, the car had experienced a flat tire that they'd needed to fix, and rather than turn back to get a replacement, Kaito was adamant that his car could make it there and back on the spare that had been collecting dust in his trunk. "I don't know, maybe we should take this as an omen or something," Shuichi had warned, speaking words that had never been truer but fell on completely deaf ears.
"Omen, sch-omen, we're not turning back because of a little flat tire. No good explorer would give up after a single thing going wrong!" Puffing his chest out in pride as he set the flat tire down where the spare had once sat, Kaito looked at Shuichi with a very boastful expression, one that was typically followed with a proclamation of who he was. But Shuichi, knowing that was coming, headed back to his seat in the car so that Kaito's whole display fell flat, something that bruised his ego and had him scampering back to the driver's seat to get back on their way.
What had started as a rather simple trip suddenly became a lot less smooth, as driving on the spare had the car off-balance and was making a somewhat winding road into a challenge to drive on, but Kaito remained insistent that going on the excursion was the right thing to do. Hours after they'd intended on getting there, with a car that was going to need serious alignment repairs after the damage the drive had caused, they pulled up into the dirt parking lot at the base of the forest they were camping in. "You didn't mention there was going to be hiking on this trip." Sounding utterly defeated at what was going on, Shuichi was throwing his personal backpack over his shoulders as he grabbed everything he could hold and waited for Kaito to do the same. "We're not going to be able to make this one trip."
"Always the complainer, that's why you're the sidekick around here!" Laughing, Kaito worked his hardest to prove Shuichi wrong, but there was just too much left that needed to be carried and he admitted defeat after dropping his entire load twice. Scrambling to save face, he quickly said, "It's not that far of a hike, I'll come back down and get the rest while you start setting up base camp. Nothing you can't handle, right?"
Shuichi shook his head and waited for Kaito to begin leading the way to their campsite, a trek that had one of them completely winded at its conclusion. "I…think maybe I'll need a bit of a break before going back down there," Kaito wheezed as they found their plot, which was marked with a sign labeled with his last name to show that it was theirs, quite a way up the trail from where they'd parked. "Unless you want to do the honors instead, prove your worth and all that."
"I think we can wait until you're ready to go, we've at least got the tent to set up while we're already here." Shuichi's voice gave away that he was already annoyed with the turn of events that had taken place, how the trip itself had been mis-advertised to him and how he was beginning to see how out of his element Kaito was. "It'll start getting dark in a couple of hours, so as long as we're back by then, we should be fine."
They most certainly were not back by dark, as it was already sunset when Kaito felt like he had the strength to get back down to the car, and the journey down, while not as hard as the one going up, still had him needing to take nearly an hour's break when they arrived at the vehicle. Growing more fed up by the minute, Shuichi made it a point to walk as fast as he could to show his friend how he felt things should be done when they started back toward camp, and all Kaito could do to keep up was nearly run, coughing and hacking as he went due to the strain on his lungs.
Back at camp, they were able to throw the firepit Kaito had insisted they bring along out near the tent and get a raging fire burning within it, which in turn allowed for them to make a dinner of roasted vegetables and meat over the flames. Eating by the light of the moon and the fire wasn't what they'd planned, but it was the experience they got to have, even if it came with the consequence of them having to stay up far too long waiting for the embers to die down so they could safely go to sleep. At least in the time they were waiting, Kaito was able to point out some dim constellations that he was excited to get to show his friend, and Shuichi was able to share that sort of moment with Kaito.
The last thing they needed to do before bed, once the fire was out, was make sure that they weren't going to be leaving the tent again until morning. In their previous rest time, they'd scouted out where the bathrooms were, thankful that the campgrounds actually had buildings for that rather than causing them to have to rough it. They'd walked down to them completely safely, even finding some other campers around the building taking care of their own business before calling it a night. It was on the walk back to camp that everything fell apart, all starting with the sound of branches nearby snapping.
"Was that you?" Shuichi asked, sounding spooked by the sound. "I didn't step on anything, as far as I know."
"No, must've been a bird or something around here. You know nature, it's unpredictable and all that." Chuckling, Kaito wanted to say something about how Shuichi was clearly starting to overreact to the slightest of sounds, but then they both heard the scream. In response to what sounded like a woman shrieking in the distance, Shuichi just about jumped into Kaito's arms, while Kaito looked around for the source. "We just saw a bunch of dudes back there, don't know where that noise is coming from, but it's probably nothing."
"N-nothing? Someone could be getting mauled out there and we're just walking by, listening to their final moments!" His breathing beginning to speed up, Shuichi grabbed Kaito's arm and clung to it for dear life. "I spend too much of my time solving murders to be an accidental witness to one!"
"It'll be fine, stop worrying so much," Kaito assured him, shaking him off. "In the morning, we can go look and you'll see that there wasn't any murder at all happening around here."
It was a fine gesture, except morning wasn't going to bring them any sort of exploration time, and rather than fighting to find clues to a murder they'd both be fighting for their lives far away from the campsite. No one had warned Kaito about securing food safely and tightly, and nowhere near where the camping was happening, and so when a hungry bear family was drawn to the campsite thanks to the smell of the remnants of dinner left scattered all around, the men were both asleep and unaware of what had come to visit them.
In the dark, they were just meaty meals prime for the taking, and after the bears managed to break the tent open—waking Shuichi up in the process—they did what any normal scavenger would do and decided to try taking their find back to their den. The sound that brought Kaito back to the waking world was the sound of Shuichi absolutely screaming in terror at the bear looming over them both, before being swiped at by a large paw that meant business and causing further panic and screaming. Never once did Kaito scream as well, even when he felt claws against his skin in all of the commotion there in the tent, but Shuichi's absolute terror was enough to bring campers from everywhere within earshot to come investigate what was going on.
By the time anyone willing to help showed up, the bears had been scared off and Kaito had grabbed his bloodied friend, trying to run him back down to the bathrooms to get a better look at what had happened in the florescent lighting. But his horrible stamina and inability to run for too long came back to haunt him, and he collapsed mid-stride, sending Shuichi tumbling to the ground and causing further damage while Kaito himself curled up on the ground, his chest feeling like it was on fire and like he couldn't breathe.
The next thing he remembered was being in a hospital room, no one around to explain to him what had happened for quite some time. He could hear the screams of panic and terror in his head, creeping in every time he closed his eyes, and as he had no idea what had happened to his friend he could only imagine that he'd heard his dying moments in those screams, and that was going to be the lasting memory he had of his friend. When he finally got answers he was looking for, he found out several things, first and foremost that Shuichi wasn't dead but he wasn't doing well recovering from his attack, and secondly that everyone found it miraculous that they'd both been able to live through what had happened to them.
As the doctor in charge of Kaito's recovery said, it wasn't every day that two guys got airlifted after a major bear attack in the middle of the woods and neither of them died, even if Kaito's memory of the event had him thinking that there was no way that was actually the case. Even when he could see Shuichi again, he struggled to accept that the screams he'd heard and was currently haunted by weren't the screams of death, and overcoming that obstacle (in addition to all of the medical ones they both had to deal with) was going to become a huge problem in their close friendship going forward.
A/N: prompt requests are still open for this over on my Tumblr account! 3