You know it's an apocalypse when nobody calls it one.

At least that's what Claude thinks as he walks into the abandoned Lear Mall with Lysithea and takes his mask off to marvel at the vacancy.

"They just...left everything here? Seems like an awful waste of resources to not take them along."

"Well, they've still got control of all the factories, so I bet they can get whatever they need even from inside those things."

She sighs and nods, and he gives a bitter snorting laughter as well.

Outside the fortified glass windows, they can see those tall, ugly structures rising into the distant and dusty morning sky.

Sanctuary Towers.

Built with the joint effort of megacorps and governments, they were advertised as a respite for humanity in the face of nature's growing wrath, but it's painfully obvious that the whole thing is closer to a cage and a jail for everyone who isn't rich, powerful, and/or psychopathic enough to come out on top.

Most people scrambled to buy their entrances anyway, and he doesn't blame them. After all, it's not the average person who put them in this kind of predicament by--

He cuts his internal monologue short and squeezes her hand, alongside a smile out of his own face.

"...Come on, we promised to make today a fun day, didn't we? We've got the whole mall to ourselves, it's like having a childhood fantasy come true!"

She nods and tugs him towards a store with a cute pink sign.

"Let's see if they've got any sweets left in there."

---

It almost feels like the mall dates they used to go on ten years ago, at the tender ages of fifteen and seventeen, when everything was alright and the biggest concerns in their lives were annoying classmates and forgetting to do homework.

They didn't call it dates back then, because neither of them realized their feelings for the other, and looking back as an adult, everything wasn't alright, but he chooses to let the nostalgia filter wash over it anyway. No point ruining the few positive things he has left in this cynical world.

"I should have known most of the unprocessed food would already be spoiled," she mutters, mixing cocoa protein powder and water from a grocery store with a hand mixer from a kitchenware store in a pitcher.

"At least they still had dried fruit," he says, arranging wine glasses and dishes on the food court table, because hey, sometimes you want to play fancy, even in an apocalypse.

Their meal consists of opaque protein shakes in mass-produced goblets and freeze-dried berries in imitations of fine chinas, and the visual is fucking ridiculous, so they laugh and mock-grandly clank their glasses with a toast like they used to back in the GDSAC-- standing for Golden Deer Student Action Collective, then later Golden Deer Survival Alternates Collective-- shouting, "For our future!"

(The joke is that they don't have one anymore.)

When they get up and leave for the theater, neither robots nor underpaid workers come to clean up the table.

---

Most of the movie lineup is commercial, formulaic, focus-group tested sludges, and they get less than twenty minutes in before heading to the projection room to turn it off and switch to the next one.

"We're never going to see a full film at this rate," she complains.

"Hey, least we don't have to suffer through all the unnecessary commercials and trailers. Even though it was kinda fun to see which movies with mildly interesting trailers would turn out to be bad."

"Truly awful movies are actually interesting on their own merit. But the problem with most of this," she gestures to the screen, "is that it's not bad, it's just...painfully mediocre and unremarkable."

He lifts the armrest between them to pull her in closer.

"Well, that was the problem with a lot of things in life, not just movies."

She leans in and nods agreement.

Eventually they find that one of those weird cult classic B-movies amongst the line up, and settle on watching that.

Claude finds the idea of snakes decimating a whole plane hilarious, but Lysithea, apparently, doesn't, and hides her face behind his arm whenever a snake slithered around on-screen.

"I-it's not that I'm normally scared of snakes, but they present it to be legitimately creepy-crawly and gross, so I'm just reacting to that," she frantically explains.

He laughs and ruffles her hair.

"Looks like the ghosts have a new competition in town!"

"I told you, I'm not scared of ghosts, either!"

---

They visit the bookstore next.

Growing up, kids were always told about how reading is important and books will nourish your intellect and whatnot, but he now thinks that's only half-true, because books (and writings in general) are subject to Sturgeon's Law like anything else, so a lot of it is...not necessarily shit, but simply nothing to write home about.

The fronts of the store is decorated with self-improvement books that tell you the same obvious things over and over again, how-tos on breaking into some hot new industry to make a ton of money (even though the market must already be oversaturated if someone's written a book about it), or some grand sensationalist rabble from so-called "leading minds of the world" that tell you what to think about the past, present, and future.

Well, perhaps the last judgement is too harsh, because growing up, the words of those leading minds did inspire him and his dreams.

The dreams that now lay dead and fucking broken like most of his friends, while the intellectuals who preached speaking truth to power all shut up and bought high-tier Sanctuary Passes into the Towers with their Fódlan Times Bestseller book tour money.

"Claude? Do you want to go to the comics section or not?"

Snapping out of his bitter thoughts, he blinks and takes her hand.

"Sure, sure."

He follows her to the back of the store, then sits down against the shelves next to her with a graphic novel while she sorts and builds a pile of sparkly shoujo mangas to read.

Back then, she tried to keep her love of romantic stories and sweets a secret, because she "didn't want to give the impression that she was some child, or one of those idiots who got distracted by romance when they had more important things to do."

She's more open about having those tastes now, because being honest about what you like is the least you can do to relieve stress in an unsure and insecure situation.

On that note, he wonders if he would ever have told her that he loved her, had their circumstances been more stable, had his plans not fallen apart, had he the need to keep acting as a leader instead of just Claude--

That train of thought is (thankfully) cut off, because Lysithea pokes him and shows him a manga cover, saying, "The heroine of this series looks kind of like Hilda."

"She does! But is her personality like Hilda?"

"...I don't think I've ever seen a character who was quite like her."

They both agree there.

The two of them read in silence, with hums and buzzes of remnant machinery as background noise, and Claude opens his mouth after he's finished reading a shoujo manga he took from her pile.

"Say, Lys."

"What is it?"

"If I was a character in one of these things, what position, or uh, archetype would I be?"

"Depends on the story, but...most of the guys don't have facial hair, so first you'll need to shave those stubbles."

"Okay, let's pretend sexy guys with facial hair are popular in shoujo mangas for a moment."

She rolls her eyes.

"You'd probably be the charming, flirty type who becomes an important supporting character but doesn't get the girl in the end."

"Ouch."

A pair of hands grabs his face and pulls him down for a rather long kiss.

"But in real life," she says, after parting for a moment, "you get me."

"And I'm damn glad for that," he responds, before continuing it some more with a grin on his lips the whole time.

---

The high-class shops that sold genuine, expensive precious metal and gemstone jewelry are closed down (of course), but the cheaper accessory shops are left open and abandoned like everything else.

He asks her to pick the ring, and she immediately chooses the one with a lily-shaped decoration on it, like he expected. It seems to be made with only women's hands in mind, however, so he has to put it on his pinky instead of ring finger, even with the largest size.

"Shame your ear piercing's closed, I think the matching earring would look good on you," she giggles, pointing at the floral studs that are clearly not his style.

"Something good did come out of pawning off grandpa's earring for food after all," he jokes, while clasping the matching necklace around her neck.

They look at hair accessories section next, and he gets an idea when he spots a hair comb with a veil attached to it.

"How about we change into something nice for rest of the afternoon? You go find a nice white dress, I'll go find something something that looks like a suit."

She raises an eyebrow as he slides off her hair tie, undoing the tight, practical ponytail into the familiar loose style she used to wear before...all this.

"I don't know if an abandoned mall is the most appropriate place to hold an impromptu wedding."

"Hey, it's as appropriate as it's ever going to get now. Besides, abandoned malls are kind of romantic in that vaporwave aesthetic way, right?"

"You and I have very different ideas of 'romantic,'" she sighs, but follows him to the nearby clothing store anyway.

---

He picks a black button-up shirt, green tie, beige pants, and brown loafers.

It's not all that formal, but she once told him (while drunk) that he looks "sexier" in semi-formal style, specifically with a black button-up shirt, and he's never forgotten it since.

Lysithea takes significantly more time to pick an outfit, darting back and forth between aisles and even stores, comparing different styles and combinations.

"Maybe I should've asked Hilda and Lorenz for fashion advice more often..."

"They're all white dresses, though. How different can it be?"

"Oh, be quiet, Claude, it's not like you understand this stuff."

"Sorry, what I meant was, you'd look adorable in anything, so don't worry too much! Or something."

He does genuinely think that, and she probably knows, too, but that doesn't stop her from huffing indignantly at him and continuing to fuss over the dresses.

At one point, he spots her going into the lingerie store, and can't help amusedly wondering what she's picking out in there, as she always got flustered walking by those shops, even in recent years.

He wanders off to the electronic store to drag out some speakers, along with a laptop that still charges and has some music on it, and just as he comes back pushing a shopping cart with their backpacks inside, she appears in a simple flared dress with quarter sleeves and a square neckline, plus white stockings and blue flats.

"Well, you have something blue, and I guess everything you're wearing counts as both something borrowed and something new-- but where's the something old?"

She digs into the backpack and finds their GDSAC enamel badges, the very one all eight of the founding Golden Deer members (plus Ms. Eisner) made in their club room with pin machines ten years ago.

"Appropriate," is all he says before fastening it onto one side of her dress, and afterwards she does the same to his tie.

There's beginnings of sunset shining through the smog outside, and the way it illuminates the flyaways of her hair makes its look like there's a halo behind her.

And he's not religious, or the one for waxing poetic with grand metaphors, but as far as he's concerned right now, she really is an angel.

"...Hey."

"Yes?"

"What are you thinking about?"

"How I'm the luckiest man on the planet."

She smiles, maybe with a hint of sadness, and hugs him tight.

"You know we're not really getting married, right."

"Doesn't matter."

He hugs back just as tightly, before scooping her up, setting her down in the shopping cart, and racing down the mall's main hall with a big hollering "Yeah!!!" alongside the yells of, "For goodness's sake, Claude, be careful!!!"

---

For rest of the evening, they blast music from the speakers he brought out and alternate between eating leftover dried fruit, dancing, and simply sitting beside each other while enjoying the tunes.

"This person's got a big nostalgia and retrofuturism thing going on in their library," he notes. "Music by the decade, school dance playlist, electro swing playlist, synthwave playlist..."

"Can school dance music really count as a nostalgia thing when it never changes?"

"Yeah, Cha Cha Slide and Cupid Shuffle definitely popped into existence along with the first modern school dance, and-- oh, sweet, they've got Cascada on here!"

He dramatically lipsyncs to the catchy Eurodance songs while she groans from secondhand embarassment, and when that part's done, they switch to the electro swing playlist then attempt to remember what they little they learned about swing dancing during an event in college.

"Alright, thanks for coming everyone, I'm DJ Riegan, this is the final playlist of the night," he fake-announces in his public speech voice, after the last jazzy tune ends.

"Whoo," Lysithea cheers, a little flatly.

"We're in an abandoned mall today, so it's pretty appropriate to play some synthwave stuff, right? Right! Now please give it up for that 80s aesthetic cyberpunk vision of the future, because the real dystopian future we live in is lame as hell!"

With that, he jumps up, lifts her off her feet with arms around her waist, and spins around to the cheerful synth intro ringing out from the speakers.

They're both laughing when he stops and sets her down to sway to the beat, and although he vaguely registers that the lyrics to the song aren't as cheerful as the melody, the warm buzz from dizziness and affection makes it impossible for him to care about anything other than smothering the love of his life with kisses and hugs.

So all the failures and losses and betrayals that drove him here, all the regrets that tore at him from inside--

(the shitty, lonely childhood,

the disillusionment of learning that the people he once admired and worked with became sellouts,

the despair of watching his attempt at making a safe haven outside the Towers be brutally destroyed by forces that far outpowered and outnumbered them,

the misery and humiliation of being on the run as sole survivors,)

--all returns to nothing and comes tumbling down, tumbling down, tumbling down, sings the vocalist, as he carries his bride into the furniture store with a bounce in his step.

---

"Making love" used to be an expression he found to be unbearably corny, but that's exactly what they do in the soft, unbought mattresses, saying "I love you" and each other's names like the next day isn't coming.

Because if the pills they gulp down afterwards works, it won't.

And it doesn't.

---

.

.

.

---



CASE FILE: GOLDEN DEER SURVIVAL ALTERNATES COLLECTIVE, KEY MEMBERS

~~~

Confirmed

Edmund, Marianne - Confirmed dead, was hit by an agent following her co-sponsorship of the Right to Alternative Shelters Bill.

Gloucester, Lorenz - Confirmed dead, committed suicide under custody of his family. Suicide note has been successfully obscured from the public with the cooperation of his father.

Goneril, Hilda - Confirmed dead, body found in aftermath of final GDSAC shelter raid.

Kirsten, Raphael - Confirmed dead, officially recorded as industrial accident.

[UPDATE] Ordelia, Lysithea - Confirmed dead, body found in Lear Mall 13 months after final GDSAC shelter raid.

Pinelli, Leonie - Confirmed dead, body found in aftermath of police suppression during Sauin anti-Sanctuary riots.

[UPDATE] Riegan, Claude - Confirmed dead, body found in Lear Mall 13 months after final GDSAC shelter raid.

Victor, Ignatz - Confirmed dead, was hit by an agent following the "False Sanctuary" protest art exhibition.

~~~

Unconfirmed

Eisner, Byleth - Missing, has not been spotted after final GDSAC shelter raid. Multiple squadrons are currently in pursuit of her wherebouts. Misleading information about the subject that may cause unrest amongst the population is currently in the process of being deleted from the Sanctuary Tower internet.

~~~

Results

Profits from Sanctuary Passes have increased significantly since the official dissolution of GDSAC, the largest external agitator. Consumers are driven to choose our Towers, in the absence of significant alternatives.

~~~

Notes

As always, we thank the efforts of everyone who secures the future of Sanctuary Inc.