Work Text:
Los Angeles is noisy, even in the middle of the night. Lights veer past your uncovered windows from passing cars, paint temporary streaks on your living room ceiling that you watch with your eyes. Indistinct chatter meets your ears, drifts in through panes of glass and drywall, you hear mechanical noises and city life and it’s three o’clock in the morning. You’ve lived here long enough to know that it doesn’t stop.
It’s the end of the world. You’re just counting the days, now.
Your living room, spacious and dirty and smelling of wine, weed, and tobacco smoke, is illuminated by the blue light of your computer screen, sat open on the floor by the coffee table. The light shifts, changes colors occasionally with the movements of the person on the other end of the video call. You wander back in with a fresh bottle of wine, set yourself in front of it, leaning back against your couch. You don’t have any clean wine glasses, soda in the fucking pipes makes it a little difficult to do dishes, so you use a mug. Gonna pour yourself a mug of wine like a sensible person. Rose rolls her eyes at you like she hasn’t been watching you do this for two hours already.
“I know this is pretty trashy, but I think if I drank it out of the bottle, that’d be grounds to call me an alcoholic,” you say, popping the cork out of the bottle and emptying some of it into your mug.
“Funny, I thought we were already doing that,” she replies, voice crackling over your shitty internet connection.
“We were,” you respond, sipping wine out of your mug like the epitome of class that you are, “sometimes I just like to pretend that I’m not irreparably damaged and also that it actually fucking matters at all how I am.”
“Dark.” You think she sounds amused, but it’s always hard to tell over the internet. You watch her take a sip of her drink, something you’re half sure is some kind of red wine, out of a predictably elaborate, purple-ish flute.
“I know, practically fucking gothic. You must be rubbing off on me,” you joke, loll your head back against the couch cushions. You’re drunk already, of course, you’re not sure if you’ve really been sober lately at all. There’s no real point. Outside your window, you hear the pop pop pop of gun fire, and try to tune it out. You wonder, vaguely, if it’s a clown police thing, or just some asshole trying to make everyone even more miserable.
“Better late than never, I suppose,” she replies. You watch her on the screen, try to memorize the details of her face. It’s been a while since you’ve seen her in person. She looks so much more tired than she did the last time she was here, even more than the last time you talked with her over video link.
It’s silent, for a while. You drink, space out, watch her do basically the same out in New York. It’s way later there than it is here, but you know she doesn’t sleep much.
She breaks the silence, eventually.
“Are you going to be okay?” she asks, and you know the question sounds as absurd to her as it does to her.
“No,” you laugh, “but neither are you, and it’s not like it fucking matters. We’re in shitsville town square waiting to get nuked, right, it doesn’t fucking matter. You know what we’re planning, we’re dead in- in six months, maybe, if we’re lucky. What difference does it make now, right, if I drink myself stupid. What does it fucking matter if my liver shuts down, I’m dead already.”
“...I suppose you’re right,” she says, and you watch her lean back in her chair. “That’s about how I feel about it too. You just looked particularly distraught. I was concerned you might be planning something.”
“When am I not,” you reply dryly. You drain the rest of your mug and pour yourself another cup.
“True enough,” she sighs, swirls her drink around in her hand. You wonder when the last time she slept was.
“Fuck, I mean… Are you okay? Is anyone? Does that even fucking mean anything anymore? There’s soda in the fucking pipes, Rose. I haven’t had a glass of fucking water in three months. I don’t even fucking like water, but I’m serious, I’d kill a motherfucker for some right now,” you huff, arms waving around as you talk. You end up spilling more than you’d like of your mug on yourself in the process.
“I’m not,” she mutters into her glass, and you think that’s the first time she's ever admitted it. Again, you sit in silence for a long, long time. You finish another mug and are halfway through your third before anyone speaks again.
“I kind of want to watch Con Air again,” you tell her, your brain feeling fuzzy, the world spinning a little. “I still got that fucking rabbit, you know.”
“I know,” she replies, “it’s in your ‘museum’, as I recall.”
“It sure fucking is,” you state with pride, “got it’s own fucking display and everything. Dirty fucking plush rabbit, paid- god, like three million for that thing.”
“So, pennies, for you.”
“Yeah, pretty much. Still- fucking thing spoke to me, I swear to God, like- I watched the movie- I watched the movie on a whim right, I was just fucking around one day and I went oh, I should watch Con Air, couldn’t fucking tell you why, it’s like Nic Cage’s greasy-ass face came to me in a dream or something- and I saw that fucking rabbit, and I was like- I was like, I need that shitty bunny, I have to have it- so I got it.”
“Yes, you’ve told me this story before.” She definitely sounds amused now.
“I just felt like it was super fucking important, and then I had the thing in my hands and I was like- I was like, why the fuck did I buy this, holy shit, this is completely useless and Con Air is a shitty, awful, horrible movie, but I kept it and I put it on display for t-”
“For the irony, I know,” she finishes for you, laughs quietly. “I still think you were sincere, but that’s only my borderline-professional opinion, feel free to disregard it.”
“Your opinion means shit. Just because you took two years of undergrad psych doesn’t mean you get to psychoanalyze me, you absolute fucking witch.” You’re joking, of course, and she knows this as well.
“That may be, but you’re a very interesting subject.”
“Am not.”
“I’m not ‘are-too’ing you, Dave.”
“God, fine, fuckin’ buzzkill.”
She laughs, a soft and warm and familiar thing, and you let yourself relax a little.
“I probably am pretty interesting though, I mean- I mean, remember- Rose, Rose do you remember that time I- like, I drove into a fucking lake once, do you remember that, I don’t.”
“I do,” she replies, voice flat, though you can tell by her face that she’s as amused as you are. “You called me at four in the morning from a police station in Idaho to bail you out. I haven’t the slightest idea how you managed to remember my phone number, you were so high.”
“They found- what, coke in my car? Acid?”
“Among other things. You then proceeded to turn around and make it a SBaHJ joke.”
“I am an actual fucking genius, Rose,” you tell her.
“If you say so,” she replies.
You fall back into silence, for a beat. You watch the shadows and the shifting, muted colors, and try not to think about armageddon.
“I had another dream about the kids,” she tells you eventually, quieter now, almost sober sounding. She’s been having these dreams for years, and you’ve come to understand them as visions, rather than innocent dreams. Maybe you’re both just delusional, perhaps this is some ridiculous folie a deux thing, because how on God’s sticky, forsaken Earth, could two kids survive alone a couple hundred years after the motherfucking apocalypse, but you don’t care anymore.
“What about this time?” you ask. She stares at the liquid in her glass like it has answers for her.
“Nothing specific, I just… saw them, I suppose. Older this time though, than I’d seen them before. Maybe they make it longer than we think they’re going to.” You notice that she sounds sad, and you suppose you feel that too.
“I hope so,” you tell her. You think you need a stronger drink.
“Did you finish your preparations?” she asks, frowning at you now.
“Yeah, Rose, months ago. I did everything I could, there’s nothing else we can do for them.”
“It’s just upsetting,” is all she really has to say to that.
“I know,” you agree.
Silence falls, again. You watch Rose slowly fall asleep at her computer, and the slow changing of the clock in the corner of your screen.
Here you are, at the end of the world. Gunshots rattle off outside again, and you fall asleep on the floor of your apartment, by the light of your computer.