Nature
Challenge: for the writing_game prompt 'nature', 200 word limit. Haruhiko and Lan centric.
"You know, I don't think I can remember what a real tree looks like," Haruhiko says casually to Lan one day over breakfast. It has been only four years since the world ended, reducing everything above ground to dust and demons, frayed cement and empty shells. "I mean, I could draw one if I had to. It's a fucking tree, not a Picasso. But it's the little things, right? Like, leaves. I know they're leaf shaped, but can you remember what they actually really looked like, how they felt?"
Lan doesn't know what to say. He has always been happy with empty, structured boxes, believing at his core that it's how you use those boxes (what you put in them) that matters. But Haruhiko's powers are elemental, with Haruhiko the conductor through which they vibrate and explode.
"They've managed to grow some saplings artificially in the lab," Lan eventually replies. It's not the same – the saplings aren't the same, can't be the same in this contaminated new world – but Haruhiko just grins around a mouthful of gruel before changing the topic to the most recent attack on the base.
And trees go back to not existing. It's much easier, that way.