welcome 2 my twisted mind....

Excuse any bad proportions, most of these are from a few years ago!

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I really like this doodle of them!

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First concepts for Leo I'm pretty sure?

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I realized while gathering drawings for this that I draw Leo way more than literally any other OC, LOL...

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Genuinely one of the best drawings I've ever done, and it's on shitty lined paper in a random notebook...

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Just because Erik can regenerate doesn't mean him getting injured isn't terrifying.

Their playlist!!
I imagine this is composed of random CD's they've found while wandering around, and most of them don't actually relate to the story all that much, it's just what I'd imagine them listening to. Some of it fits anyway!

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Brief warning for (unsuccessful) suicide!
Also this one's stupidly long LOL, like, 2k words long... For a better reading experience, copy/paste it into a bigger document instead of reading it in this tiny little box.

I'm not exactly sure of the nature of "the incident" that starts this story... All I know is that something like an earthquake happens, and when Erik finally wakes up, every single person in his city is gone.
I'm not sure how bloody and gross I want this to be, so it ranges from "solar flare that magically poofs all humans except a very select few" to "all humans (except a very small amount) get crushed into terrifying red piles of mush".
Excuse the terrible writing, I haven't actually written much in the past decade...

Erik wakes up completely unscathed, but judging by the change in seasons from late fall to... late spring?, he's been knocked out for more than half a year at this point. Confused by it all, he goes outside, hoping to find someone. However, no matter how far he looks, and how hard he calls out for someone, anyone to respond, he's met with complete silence. He tries using a computer in his school's library, but finds out the power's out. It probably hasn't been back in a very long time, judging by the unrecognizable rotted mush in the defrosted cafeteria freezers.

He spends a long time that day just... wandering. His first thought was that there'd been a zombie apocalypse or something, but not a single window was broken, no trash littered the streets, and no undead were sluggishly limping around.
He browsed stores (not confident enough to steal anything just yet, still convinced it might just be a very elaborate prank), took peeks into unlocked apartments, and eventually found himself back at home. He ate some canned food he managed to heat up on the stove (finally grateful for having an outdated gas stove), brushed his teeth (hoping his family's well was still safe to drink from), and went to bed. His one sign of vulnerability showing in how, instead of sleeping in his own room, he brought his blanket and pillow into his parents' room instead.

He spent a month completely alone before the reality of it all finally set in, and the shock wore off. He'd been borrowing canned food from his neighbors, leaving notes explaining the reason just in case somebody came back. He obviously knew that the chance of anybody returning was next to none at this point, but it was something that kept him from completely spiraling.
His hope and will to live had only held on for so long, however. A month after waking up alone, he decided it's probably best not to draw out his suffering.

The first three attempts at taking his own life failing miserably could be chalked up to bad luck. By the fourth, however, he'd started taking more drastic means. When he ended up with an obviously broken neck, but showed no signs of dying other than a limp body and indescribable pain, he realized something was terribly, terribly wrong.
He'd laid on the floor for several weeks, feeling his spine slowly align itself back together, feeling terribly hungry without actually withering away, when it really sunk in. He could not die, whether he wanted to or not. Tragic ending ruined. Well, shit.

Once his head was back on his shoulders, he could finally get a good stretch in, and start preparing to head out. He'd been holed up in his house for a majority of the time, hopeful that his family would return at any moment. That thought had completely left him when he'd been laying on the floor, bored out of his mind. So, with his dad's old hiking bag filled with food, water, and basic necessities, he finally closed the door behind him for the last time. His first stop was the local shops, specifically the clothing store. He had some well-earned stealing to do.

. . .

Erik had managed pretty well on his own. When you don't really have to care for your health more than to avoid unnecessary pain and the annoyance of a limp, life after the world had ended was pretty sweet.
He'd spent his time going through record shops to find CD's to put in his little battery powered boombox, figuring out what combinations of preserved food tasted best, and even picked up photography using an instant film camera he'd found.
Obviously his backpack wasn't sufficient enough for all the random junk he'd gathered, so he now had a utility wagon as his most trusted companion. Life was good.
The only real issue Erik had encountered so far was the complete lack of... well, people? He hadn't been a total social butterfly before all of this, but he definitely wasn't used to solitude in this degree. He'd begrudgingly adopted himself a stuffed animal, since that's what a survival book had recommended, but the only real talking he did to it was complaining about random things that never really mattered. At night under the stars, he found himself hoping someone would just pop out of nowhere to keep him company for a while. He also knew that would never happen. He had to get used to the loneliness.

While going through a grocery store to hopefully find more crackers that weren't stale, soft rustling, then a loud thud could be heard. At first, Erik thought an animal had gotten into the store (which, to be fair, was common these days), but upon closer investigation with a rock solid baguette in hand, he found something much more terrifying. A person.

Erik was pretty reasonably dumbfounded. He'd gone three months now without seeing a single trace of people, and here he is, looming over someone who's really getting deep in the fridge to try and crawl into the back of the store (the back of these types fridges are open, they weren't seriously trying to dig through the wall...).
Anyway, so here he was, in a mix of terror and euphoria, debating on what to do. Stale baguette in a vice grip in his hands. So, he waits. The person in the fridge rummages around, but remains eerily quiet. No cursing, no grunting, just silence. Erik finds this a bit strange, but just assumes he's gone crazy and this is just a hallucination, until the stranger finally hits something in defeat, and retreats back out in the open. To say they jumped would be an understatement.

It took roughly 2 seconds for the weirdo in the fridge to go from crouched down next to Erik, to being halfway across the small store, clutching their chest, and looking like they just saw a ghost. I mean, they might as well have.
Moments passed, (likely less than a minute) while they just stood there, staring at each other in fear. That was until Erik started laughing. It was an uneasy laugh, more like a dog's sneeze to indicate it's playing, than genuine laughter. The effect it had was good enough, since the other boy seemed to finally let go of the breath he was holding. Erik had finally gotten a decent look at the person he was faced with. He seemed to be a boy around his age, with likely the world's most unkempt bird's nest of wavy ginger hair. The feature that stuck with him the most, however, was the piercing gaze locked on him.
Regaining his confidence a little (although to be fair, still unsettled by the blatant staring), Erik greeted the boy. To, uh, no response. All that happened was the other boy breaking their eye contact, now semi-frantically looking around for something. Erik, obviously confused, just looked at the boy growing more frustrated by not finding whatever he was looking for, even seeing him briefly mouth a curse or two. The boy regained his cool, and did a brief gesture for writing on a notepad. Ah. He's deaf or something.

"Hello! I'm Leo :)" was soon written in pink glitter pen on a post-it note. They'd tried several other pens, but only the gaudiest glitter gel pens seemed to still have life in them. They'd have to find some proper pencils some other time.
The conversation kept going for a while, now sitting on the floor between the cereal and soup aisle. Erik asking Leo about where he'd come from and how he'd survived, and Leo scribbling (in a somewhat legible chicken scratch) his own questions for Erik. Leo explained that he'd injured his throat pretty severely when "the rapture" (as he called it) had happened. The earthquake had managed to dislodge some piece of sharp junk in the building he was in, and that messed him up pretty bad. He said he felt lucky he had some half-decent medical knowledge from caring for animals, and that he definitely wouldn't have survived otherwise. It had, however, managed to damage the nerves enough that his vocal cords were pretty useless. He wasn't completely mute, but barely being able to whisper made him prefer text-based communication. It made enough sense to Erik, so he stopped prying. He decided to keep his inhuman healing abilities a secret for now, realizing that it probably wasn't a great idea to explain that to someone who just told him about being irreversibly disabled.
It wasn't until the sun had gotten dangerously close to plunging them in complete darkness that they realized they'd have to part ways sooner or later, although both of them seemed hesistant to say the least. Leo had been wandering just like Erik, and they pretty quickly decided to stick together for a while. They weren't desperately trying to cling to the dopamine kick of having someone real to talk to, of course, it was just better for survival. Surely. Definitely.

They spent a while living in Leo's temporary little home he'd set up nearby. It was a decent townhouse with a fireplace on the first floor, where Leo had set up his little sleeping spot on the couch. It still wasn't quite cold enough to warrant using the fireplace, but he explained that it just... made him feel safer. Erik didn't really understand, but he'd been favoring the backseats of random cars lately, so he didn't really think he could argue. He chose to sleep in the master bedroom, feeling lucky at clearly getting the better choice.
Their days were spent doing whatever, really. They went out to loot nearby stores when they felt like it, and other days they sat in the yard, soaking up the late summer's sun while talking about their lives. It was fun, for once. Like they were just enjoying another summer vacation like they had in the past, and not like they very likely were the last two people on Earth.
Erik, being the son of a hairdresser (and also very adamant about keeping up his own looks) finally had enough of staring at Leo's rat's nest. It had to go, whether he liked it or not. On a chair in the yard, with a bedsheet draped over bare shoulders, Leo's hair went from shoulder-length and tangled beyond recognition, to a more managable ear-length. Erik had even grabbed some fancy floral-scented conditioner on their last grocery run, just to make sure it never went back to that horrible, horrible state.
The first thing Leo did after brushing all the stray bits of hair off himself, was to immediately ruffle his hair back into a (considerably softer) chaotic pile of fluff.

. . .

Leo hadn't been unconscious like how a certain someone had spent his first half year after the incident. He'd been keeping proper track of the days, and as long as he hadn't missed some, he could inform Erik that they met in the last week of August, and that it was now approaching mid-September. Erik already had a decent hunch at what month it was, but he appreciated knowing for sure. It was something to restore a bit of normalcy to an otherwise very strange situation.
With the change of seasons slowly approaching, and colder nights being upon them, they realized they couldn't stay in this part of town much longer. They had decent amounts of food stocked up, but they had a pretty obvious lack of firewood, and the local shops were slowly but surely running out of bottled water.
So, after a few hours of packing up, they would head south towards the city. It would be a whole day's effort of walking along the highway, but now with company, the trek didn't seem all that bad for once.

Packing was relatively easy, all things considered. They'd gathered up a pretty significant amount of useless junk that got left behind. Otherwise, all of their heavier stuff fit nicely in the utility wagon, and the rest was stuffed in bags they either carried normally (or precariously piled on top of the overfilled wagon). They'd considered stealing one of the nearby cars despite neither of them really knowing how to drive, but upon attempting to start one, they realized the battery was dead. In every. Single. Car.
They'd found a few bicycles here and there, but without a proper way to attach the wagon, those were equally useless. Walking it is.

They took turns pulling the wagon, while the other boy got stereo duty. They both had their own favorites, Leo's was a sappy love-centric bedroom pop album, and Erik's was a more depressing sounding alternative one. They both criticized eachother's choices, but it was just for the fun of it. Their styles honestly weren't different enough for it to really matter anyway. After the first few hours they'd fallen into a comfortable silence, while the music kept playing. Leo had grown tired of trying to write while walking, and though Erik had gotten better at lip reading, it was hard to walk while facing eachother.
The silence was something they'd gotten pretty used to during the time they lived together. Leo never really thought his lack of a voice would be a problem up until then, considering he hadn't met another person before Erik. So when he'd tried to use his wheezy, whispery voice for a while, he was met with the unpleasant surprise of the pain it caused. It wasn't anything unbearable, but with the amount of exertion needed, he found himself out of breath and with a sore throat pretty fast. After he noticed the pain Leo was in, Erik convinced him to stop.
This was one of the other things that had convinced them both to travel to the city. They were looking for a book on sign language, something they couldn't find in the small town they were in before. The one to actually suggest it was Erik. He always felt bad for Leo for not being able to communicate on an equal level with him, something he didn't know he valued until now. Other than lip reading, this was likely the only way they could have a smooth conversation, so why not try it?

Hour 5 into their travels, they realized they might as well be lazy and take an extended break. They'd taken quick stops before (a bathroom break or two), but considering hauling that damn wagon was more strenuous than they'd thought, a decent two-hour break was the bare minimum at this point.
Erik, having been the one pulling the wagon the last stretch, sat back while Leo set up their stove and began heating up some stew. They settled pretty awkwardly in the middle of the road, realizing the fields nearby were way too overgrown. Erik had pulled out some lawn chairs he'd insisted on bringing along, and had wrapped himself up in a blanket. The breeze had gotten pretty chilly the past few days, and it was definitely noticable out on the highway where nothing blocked it. Both of them regretted not leaving earlier, but at least they didn't have to deal with the scorching sun.
Most of their break was spent eating and talking about nothing in particular.

In a way, both of them were still kind of lost on how to act around each other. They'd both been isolated long enough that any sort of unwritten rules they'd sworn by in the past, had been long forgotten. Rules like how close you're allowed to act to a (near complete) stranger, or which topics are taboo to talk about, were completely lost on them. It only took a week for them to consider each other best friends, and they frequently found themselves talking about their deepest thoughts, things they never really felt brave enough to talk about with their old friends.
It was cathartic, something they both never knew they'd longed for until they suddenly had it. Surely it was just the effect of being the only people left to talk to, but they didn't care. The fact that they got along at all might as well have made them soulmates.

TO BE CONTINUED!!! I GOT BORED!!