All Who Wander [Chapter 3 - SPRING]

[Chapter 2]

Katsuki didn’t wait around to hear the words, he could already see it in their faces. Their last set of experiments had been another failure; if they’d managed to grow anything at all, it was weak and small, nowhere near enough to feed the people of the town. If they were lucky, it might feed one of the reindeer who lived among them. There had been a lot of talk about those, too, but Katsuki wasn’t willing to give up on what had once been a beloved town creature. Especially when they still relied on them to cart things through the snow and provide the town with milk – that milk was keeping them afloat, some weeks. And alive in the coldest months; a pot of hot milk over a fire was a sure way to get some warmth and energy into the townspeople to keep them going.

So no, he wasn’t willing to eat all the reindeer, no matter what anyone else said – once in a while, sure, when one was on it’s last legs anyway, but not as a go-to method of stocking up. He would stand by that principle until they hit absolute rock bottom.

With his jacket zipped up tight and his scarf wrapped multiple times around his neck to keep the wind out, Katsuki began the hike up to the summit. He was one of only a few people who dared to go all the way to the top on a regular basis, the others too afraid of the bears and other wildlife you could come across on the trail. Katsuki wasn’t super keen on it either, with the weather and the animals and the sheer distance and subsequent exhaustion it caused, but there was one thing up there that he couldn’t find anywhere else on the mountain they called home.

A lake.

A frozen lake, sure, but he’d become an expert at cutting through the ice by the time he was five years old, let alone eighteen. He was still the record-holder for the youngest person in the town to catch a fish from that lake, to bring home his spoils with a big grin and let the town gather in the square to cheer for him and teach him how to cook it. That part had been less exciting, but his father had always been there to do it for him until he got a little older, until he became less squeamish about the idea.

One day he’d make his father proud again.

The day of his eighteenth birthday, Katsuki had been officially instated as the new leader of the town, taking over from his ageing father who could no longer handle the cold like he once had. Now Masaru got to sit at home in front of a fire, fueled by the logs Katsuki diligently harvested from all over the mountain. Despite his best efforts, he still saw the forest dwindling every time they went out for firewood. There was enough there to last them years, unlike the food, but still he could see that problem coming their way, even if it was still a ways out.

The fish, too, had become sparse. As other food sources had dwindled, they’d had to rely more and more on the fish, who in turn were lacking in food to repopulate – it was a vicious cycle that Katsuki honestly had no idea how to end.

That was the crux of the matter, really. What it all came down to. Katsuki had no clue how to fix things.

Masaru had taught him all he could about keeping things running, about biding their time, but he had still been relying on one thing: hope. Hope that the next season would be better, hope that David Shield's experiments would prove fruitful, then that Melissa's would be, when she started to join in. Hope that someone would come along with a magical potato tree in a bucket that just gave them eternal food for the rest of their lives. Not that he'd ever actually tasted a potato, it was just one of those dumb words he'd heard growing up, in some old story or other about the old times, about things getting better one day, about hope.

Hope did not put food on the table, that was for damn sure. Katsuki was a man of action, not a man of sitting around and praying something good might come their way. He needed to do something, to fix things, and he just... had no idea how.

A number of the townspeople had already left, had moved on looking for greener pastures in the less snowy and mountainous areas of the world, and each had promised that if they found a safe, reliable, and abundant source of food, they’d be back to pass on the message.

The fact that no one had returned yet didn’t exactly fill Katsuki with that hope his dad loved so much.

So instead, he fished. He sat in the cold snow, with an old stick in his hand, and waited for the dumb little bastards to be enticed by whatever scrap of food he could spare that day as bait.

And they survived.

Month after month, they scraped by.

Month after month, they each ate a little less.

Katsuki needed to fix things, god damn it.

He couldn’t let them all down, not again.


[Chapter 4]