Iris–faith, hope, wisdom and valor

HEY GUYS! I'm back!!! I hope you're ready for even more sarcasm, inappropriate jokes, and survival skills. I have OCs in this one, but they're super likeable. I based them off people I know as a base and worked from there personality and look- wise. I hope you love this story just as much or even more than it's predecessor! Enjoy chapter one of Are We Alive?

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Trees. Lots and lots of trees.

Soft green grass.

Flowers swaying in the gentle breeze, bees buzzing around to pollinate the flowers. Sun shining brightly. A perfect blue sky with small, fluffy white clouds floating peacefully along.

Rin decided he loved this place.

It was serene. He could lay here forever. He wished he could just sink into the Earth and become part of the beauty of this Springtime.

A shadow covered him and he opened his eyes. "Ryuji. Did you need something?" He murmured. Said teen smiled. "We got a shower working. The water cycles through a purification tank of some sort. And the old owners left all their stuff behind. Thought I'd tell you before they used up all the shampoo." He answered.

Rin grinned. His hair was brown with filth and disgustingly greasy. He could probably be rocking dreds by now with how nasty it was. His skin had a protective layer of dirt on it as well, along with some dried blood for extra safety. His clothes were near shredded and probably smelled disgusting. They were nose-blind to Mary smells at this point though–
Sachi's diapers made sure of that. The only surviving article of both Rin's police uniform and military uniforms were the heavy duty combat boots.

Meanwhile, Kinzou's cowboy boots and hat were still in pretty good condition. Maybe he was just good at preserving things. Rin couldn't even preserve his own clothes and the past year had proven he couldn't preserve certain relationships very well either.

"Rin?" His boyfriend's voice prompted, breaking him out of the bitter thoughts swirling in his mind. He smiled at the boy and got up.

If Yukio wanted to go back to being a selfish brat, then that was his problem. Rin was the designated Leader(not by choice), so Yukio could listen to him or leave.

§~•~§~•~§

The girls were all chilling in the living room of the house when Rin walked in. It was a pretty small house. One story, two bedrooms, one bathroom, a small kitchen/dining room, a small living room with a nasty fishtank that could've given the filthy tank from Nemo a run for it's money, and a whole ton of free space filled with grass and a decently steep hill farther back for a backyard. There was a swing hung from a sturdy tree branch with strong, thick ropes. Old bloodstains stained a corner of the wooden seat. In the driveway, a pink and silver scooter lay on it's side on the gravel next to a truck that had been crashed into the power line pole by the road.

The front yard faced the road and had two huge pine trees in front. It was a nice little home and he wondered what had happened to the family that used to live there. In the pictures, there was a tall, buff man, a short, thick woman, and a young girl. Sometimes there were two girls in the pictures, sometimes there was only one, sometimes the girl were in pictures together by themselves.

The two girls looked like they could've been sisters, possibly twins. One was tall and slim, with pale skin, ice-blue eyes, lots of freckles, and curly chocolate-brown hair. Her smile was always wide and her eyes squinted in happiness at the camera in almost every picture.

The second young girl had darker blue eyes, pale skin, few freckles, and wavy dark brown hair. Her smile was almost as wide as the first girl's. In a few of the pictures, which showed the family at amusement parks with brightly colored roller coasters in the background, the girls held hands. There were baby pictures of one, but not the other. At one point, the girls both got glasses between the years the photos were taken.

While Rin waited for Paku to finish showering, he made up a story about the family to amuse himself. He'd done this the few times he'd stayed in abandoned family homes back in Japan too. He'd make up the life stories and the personalities of the people in the pictures.

In a couple of the more recent photos, the girls looked to be around thirteen or fourteen. The more freckled one was just barely taller than the second now. She was wearing a black sleeveless shirt with a Micky Mouse silhouette filled in by the American flag, grey skinny jeans with a chain, and black combat boots that had spikes on the heels of them. Her hair was cut shorter, like a boy's. Her red-framed glasses were nowhere to be seen, but that smirk made it look like she might've stomped them to pieces before the shoot.

The second girl wore a bright tie-dye Band-t-Shirt with the words Panic! at the Disco in a messy font across the front, short pastel pink shorts, and pastel yellow converse. Her glasses were still on her face. She was thicker than the slim girl next to her and not even an inch shorter.

Rin snickered. It looked like Tall Girl had gone the Dark Punk route while Short Girl was more Pop Pastel. What a pair they made in that picture. Tall Girl was in a Superman pose with her fists on her hips as she stood tall with the same wide grin as the older pictures. She wore a school spirit shirt, black jeans, and converse. Her hair was dyed bright blue and still cut short.

Short Girl stood in a chill pose, leaning on the pole between them while throwing up a peace sign with the same grin from her childhood self as well. She wore all pastels again, and the contrast was still amusing. The girls looked to be in their later teen's in that one.

It was nice to look at. It was happy. He wondered how old the girls were now. If they were alive. The father's corpse had been struggling in the driver's seat of the crashed truck before they dispatched him.

The mother was nowhere to be seen. Rin wondered if the girls had even been home when everything went down. He wondered if either had significant others. If they'd done any sports. He decided that the shorter one would be a soccer player. The tall one would be basketball player. Or maybe the tall one did Track and Field. Maybe they were both in Drama and screamed at people from the stage.

"I'm out!" Paku's soft voice called. "It took a while for it to get warm, so I took mine mostly cold! Enjoy while it lasts, whoever gets the shower next!" She giggled as Renzou and Kinzou started fighting for it.

Rin slipped right past them and gave a victorious laugh as he shut the door.

"Damn." He heard Renzou sigh, defeated. Kinzou was laughing at his younger brother. "What are you laughing for, you didn't win either!" Renzou shrieked indugnantly. "Yeah, but at least you didn't get it!" Rin chuckled at their antics as he stripped his nasty clothes off. He looked at them on the floor and cringed. He'd been living in those? The clothes by themselves were health violations!

He didn't even bother to feel the temperature of the water and just stepped in. He moaned in delight as the water poured over his tense muscles. He didn't even remember what exactly relaxing felt like at this point. He was always on guard, no matter how capable his group was.

There was only women's shampoo and conditioner left to use, most likely because there had been three girls and one man in the house before the Apocalypse and Konekomeru, Bon, and Shura already smelled suspiciously like men's shampoo. Rin decided on the pair of bottles that had honey displayed on the label. It really did smell good, too.

He let the filth wash out of his hair before lathering it in shampoo. The water wasn't by any means hot, but it was warm enough for him not to shiver during his shower. Rin was lucky he couldn't grow facial hair–he was sure he'd look like a caveman by now. And a beard looked good on someone like Ryuji, but definitely not Rin.

He finished washing up and saw someone(probably Torako) had left a couple stacks of folded clothes for them to go through and pick what they wanted to wear. All of the Father's stuff was too big on Rin's lean frame, so he looked through the girls' clothes instead. Her clothes fit him a lot better than the Man's.

He came out of the bathroom in a grey tank top with an open back, black jeans(most likely from Tall Girl), and his military boots. Shiemi took a shower next and Rin went to find the kids. They were with Izumo in the backyard.

The red-eyed girl was sporting Tall Girl's clothes as well–a grey croptop, black jeans, and her spiked combat boots. She had a black newsboy hat on her head too. She looked pretty in the dark colors against the bright spring atmosphere around her. Actually, she looked gothic with her red eyes and dark purple hair. All she needed was dark makeup and black nail polish.

The girl pushed Tsukumo on the old swing and held Sachi's hand as she balanced unsteadily on the large and bumpy tree roots. The baby looked up and grinned wide. She had nearly all her teeth and she'd grown a little taller. She had less babyfat, probably from walking around the Wisconsin when she finally learned how. Half the time she'd get lost and someone had to go find her. They simply followed her singing, which echoed around the halls loudly. Sachi loved to sing and Rin used that to teach her to sing so they could find her when she was lost in the ship. Rin wasn't really a singer before the Apocalypse, but he taught the girl all the songs he knew since she insisted after hearing Shiemi sing to her sometimes to get her to sleep.

"Daddy!" She'd started to calling Rin Daddy and called Ryuji Papa. It was a lot less confusing for who she wanted to call, at least. She stumbled off the root and over to him. He picked her up and her little arms went around his neck. "Did you take a shower with Izumo and Tsuku?" He asked. She nodded furiously. "Yeah! I got new dress from Gramma! Issit pretty?" She leaned back to show him the bright green dress. It looked to be made from a t-shirt. It had been cut and re-sewn into a smaller shirt that was like a dress on the baby. She had some shoes they'd scavenged from a store on their way to wherever this place was. He wondered what state they were in. It didn't look like the pictures of New York he'd seen, so that wasn't it. The beaches they'd seen when they docked didn't look like Florida either.

He decided he liked this state. It was peaceful. There was never just silence. Even in the beginning of Spring, it rained often and if it didn't, there were always animals around to make noise. They'd encountered a Zombie Cat and had almost lost Shima before Rin sliced it in half. His blade just barely cut Shima's face as well, but he said the scar going diagonally across the bridge of his nose made him look cool, so he didn't mind.

"Daddy, your hair smells good! Like Izu's!" Sachi told him. "Used the Honey one, huh?" Said purple-haired girl guessed with a smirk. Rin blushed. "All the Mens was gone and it never smells that great anyways...." He grumbled.

"Your hair looks nice." The girl commented, pushing her little sister on the swing to go a little higher. "Thank you. It feels a lot better too. I was about ready to chop it all off!" Rin huffed. "I've never seen you with short hair. Just really long hair, and then regular long hair." She noted. "You look cute with the length yours is now." Rin told her honestly. Her cheeks burned. "I had to cut it before since it was long like yours. I've never had short hair before." She said. "Believe it or not, my hair was always short before all this." Rin told her.

"No way!" She turned back to him in surprise. "Yep. Never went past my ears. When the End of the World happened, I was too busy surviving to really pay it any attention. As long as I put it up to keep it out of the way, I didn't care." Rin admitted.

"The bottom was black when I met you. Why?" Izumo wondered. Sachi played with Rin's now shoulder length hair as he explained. "When I was little, the other kids used to make fun of it. My dad decided to dye it so they would leave me alone. They didn't, the kids just found other ways to hurt me. But I kept dying it even after he refused to do it anymore."

"Why? If it didn't matter to them, then what was the point?" Izumo asked, frowning. She'd had purple hair and everyone had left her alone about it. They'd only stayed away from her because she was going to be a shrine maiden serving a so-called demon.

"I hated it. My....my real father was not a good person. He was a brutal Russian man. Dad called him a war dog. He came back different after his first tour. My mother still stayed with him because she felt bad even though she was in love with Dad. She died shortly after giving birth. We came too early and she wasn't contracting right. But Dad told me that I looked kinda like him. So I just....always hated it." Rin answered.

"That's stupid!" Izumo cried. Rin looked incredulously at her, insulted. "I look just like my mother, who spent more time with men than her own kids! Our dad left when we were babies! She once blew up on us because a guy told her he refused to marry her all because she had kids! She couldn't stand us!" Izumo shrieked. "I didn't let that hold me down or hurt me! I just did my best to live normally! You can't let stuff like that get to you!" She'd grabbed Rin's arms and glared at him.

Her gaze softened. "I know you didn't have a great childhood either. But people like us have nothing to start us on our way to a decent life but ourselves." She sighed.

"And this? This whole thing?" She gestured to the sky and the trees and the house. "This helps people like us. We do better in this world than the one before. We can make it in this world and do something worthwhile with ourselves. This is good." She finished.

Tsukumo and Sachi were watching with interest as the two stared at each other. Then Tsukumo giggled. "Nee-chan blew up again!" Izumo's face went red in embarrassment and she backed away from the taller teen.

"Why don't you go into the girls' room and look for toys, hm?" Rin suggested to the two girls. They nodded and ran inside. Rin smiled after them. He turned back to Izumo. "Do you think there are survivors here too?" She wondered quietly.

Rin sat on the swing and swung slowly. "I don't know. I wanna hope someone in America survived, but I don't know if it's good for us or not." He listened to the bees buzzing in the flower patch next to him. He picked some from a different patch and started weaving them together. Torako had taught him how to weave and he'd developed a habit of messing with anything that might be in his hands when he was thinking.

"I get it. I'm hoping there are good people left here, but that's usually not the case. If we're going off of movies and TV shows, that is." Izumo shrugged. She gave him one of her rare smiles and he grinned back.

"Let's hope this isn't like the movies then." He said.

They went back inside to scavenge the kitchen for dinner.