This zombie-AU fic includes: Body Horror; Mild Gore
The edge of Awsten’s fingernail is hanging loosely. It catches on every branch he shuffles past, unavoidable and painful. Most of his body is like that, now. Falling apart at every joint, flesh sifting off of his bones and sloughing to the ground. His blood doesn’t spill anymore, there’s no point. His heart doesn’t push it, his organs don’t need it.
He shuffles through the forest slowly, trying not to trip over the numerous branches that stick out from the ground. His body is entirely covered in yellow-green bruises and where he has gotten more banged up it’s blotched purple and black, the same as it has been for weeks now. At least, it’s like that on the parts of him that still have skin, which is an ever decreasing percentage of his body.
Over his joints, where his muscles and fat were already thin to begin with, there is almost nothing there. Bare, pink-white bone is visible on his elbow, only the very last of him still sticking to it. If he had eaten anything in the last three weeks he would have thrown up when he discovered that. Luckily for him, there’s not much eating he can do like this.
He hears the crunching on the ground before his mind registers the figure in front of him, the clearing he has finally, finally reached. Otto stands in the center of it, walking towards Awsten as well. Their meeting place is barren and cold, like most of the world is now.
Otto is in the same condition he is, falling apart at the seams to reveal the inner workings of a person's body. They look like an anatomy project, something taken apart to be leered at. Awsten wonders if either of them even count as a person anymore.
Awsten tries to say hi but his vocal cords have long since come apart into nothing but strings of muscle inside of his throat. They are nothing but loose spaghetti to gurgle every time his lungs forget they aren’t supposed to move anymore and try to out of habit. Otto manages a low whine in the back of his throat but it fizzles into nothing in moments.
Instead, Awsten pushes himself forward, stumbling over twisted ankles and toes that are mostly bone. Soon all that will be left of him will be bone. He hopes he loses consciousness before that happens, but he isn’t sure he’ll be so lucky. Most people have already lost it by the time they’re as decomposed as he is. He can only pray he stops feeling the pain working its way through his body before it drives him mad on its own. Most of his nerves have stopped fully working by now, so it’s not agonizing, but phantoms of the burning sharp fire in all of his limbs still ghost along his body.
His body falls into Otto’s and they tumble to the ground together, a tangle of broken corpses. They made a truce to find each other when it all came crashing down and they got infected. They made a truce to rot together on the forest floor until they became two skeletons forever entwined.