Chapter Text
Each morning when she wakes up, she climbs to the top of a barren and sun-kissed plateau that burns the bottoms of her feet and she plays her trumpet. At night, or what is her night when the sun fails to set, she does the same and climbs to the top of the highest point she can access without leaving her handmade border of barbed wire and scrapped wood from the fallout she made, and plays that rusted trumpet a bit better every time.
She has only a vague idea of why she’s compelled into this morning and nighttime routine. She is the God of this wasteland. The trumpet wakes Olathe up, puts Olathe gently to sleep. The trumpet keeps the beast quiet, the trumpet makes her son smile.
But none of that is really true. No matter how many days go by with her playing her song for nobody, she still feels like this world’s prize. An object, a weapon utilized by this doomed humanity.
She climbs down from her hill. She doesn’t much feel up to playing it today.
The boy is slung to her side, cradled in stolen clothes she tied into a wrap to hold him in when she has to use her hands. Months and days, she hasn’t been keeping count of, but he’s almost too heavy for the sling. However long it’s been, he’s getting older and he still doesn’t have a name. She thinks often about how she was named, try as she might to forget the past. No playful little nicknames or lazy sentiments to be had from her, so those memories aren’t helpful. She’s thinking he might just have to live his life, however long he’ll have one, as “the boy”.
He coos a little at her in confusion when he doesn’t hear the trumpet play its daily song, reaching up with clumsy little hands to try and reach for it.
“Not today.” she mutters, setting the thing down by the kindling where their fire was last night, still smoking. At first, she had been hesitant to keep a fire lit in case the smoke drew anyone close to her. Over time, she realized that what was left if Olathe had bigger problems than investigating smoke signals. Rando, Dusty, had taught her how to start fires. Brad never found a reason to, since she was never supposed to have the need to start a fire at all. Of all the worst-case-scenarios he’d prepared her for, escape had not been one of them.
In her lies a dormant need to be better to the baby and give him a life better than the life she knew. It was easier said than done since life for her had, and would always be, a struggle. She’d grown to accept it as her lot in life. It seemed impossible to show this baby, presumably the first human life since she herself had been born, a world that was not the world they lived in. Because a world better than Olathe was either far away or nonexistent. There is nothing left around them for miles. Nothing but what had been left behind. That sustains them for now, but it won’t forever.
For now, her days go as follows:
Scavenge what’s left. Houses, makeshift dirt huts, and relics from a past that she was not part of. It all exists in a state of before her. Before her, after her. Before her birth, before she took Olathe for herself. She wonders when things are going to stop becoming the past and start becoming the present.
Next, use what’s left to make things easier. She doesn’t know how to build or cook something that wouldn’t kill her and the kid if they so much as smelled it, so rations are a girl’s best friend. The majority of this rough-hewn society was uprooted before she got there. She guesses it became less about finding her and more about surviving her. The thought makes her feel bitter and ugly inside. She’s stopped believing that things could ever go back to the stifling comfort of her life with Brad, but she sometimes thinks back to those green fields and clear streams Dusty had told her he grew up in. What it would be like to be born in those green, flower-strangled fields with nothing to worry about but playing in the dirt. She’d passed that age. Passed that way of life. So she uses the things she finds on her scavenges to build a crumbling society of her own within the desolate wasteland that she lives in now, the one she was born into.
Then she checks on the monster. It has stopped being known as ‘Brad’ to her. That’s a lie. The deformed animal that spends its days stretched out under the beating sun will always somehow be him, but it hurts less to just call it the monster. It doesn’t seem to need to eat, but it likes to, so she brings animal carcasses that she doesn’t know how to safely cook yet and lets it feast. Not many things have changed when she remembers Brad when he would drink and sink somehow even lower and the Brad she sees now isn’t very different from that memory. For the most part, it stays quiet and out of her way. She hasn’t let the baby go near it yet, and she’s not sure if she ever will.
Today is not a scavenging day. And it’s not a watch-the-monster day, either.
She doesn’t feel like doing much of anything at all.
Sometimes it’s paralyzing. The weight of it all. That she must go on living in a world that she killed because she was taught to see herself as both a hero and a victim. A hero who would save the world, but a victim that the world would always attempt to use. The conflicting of those messages are staggering.
She’s brought back to reality when the baby starts fussing at her for something. It’s always something. She pulls him out of the sling around her shoulders and lays him down. He’s getting big but he’s still so tiny. Tiny hands and tiny feet and tiny eyes looking at her to know what to do. She’s started keeping a little mental journal of all the small changes she notices. Yesterday, she noticed he can hold his head up without her now. Today she notices his wispy black hair starting to grow thicker. Something in her feels proud. A little swelling in her chest that maybe makes some of this worth it. Right now, she and her baby know each other more than anyone else out here.
Maybe that counts for something.
He’s stopped fussing by the time he’s settled on the ground next to her. Maybe all he wanted was to be taken out of the carrier and placed on the ground to look up at the clouds passing over them. Buddy manages a smile. She used to love the clouds, too. She’d asked Brad and her uncles what they were, and half of them had different answers because half of them didn’t actually know what they were. Things could only be so simple for now. Just like a child would only be this simple right now. She’d obviously never met anyone younger than post-apocalyptic Olathe, but she remembers what it was like to be simple.
“You just wanted to see the sky?” She asks him in her best gentle voice. It’s raspy and strained, but the baby always seems to like it when she speaks. She touches the silky hairs on his delicate head, so soft in a world of nothing but rough edges. She wonders if he will grow to hate her. Those wide eyes staring up at the clouds in wonder turning into a venomous gaze towards the person that failed to make his life everything it should’ve been. It’s a hard concept to swallow.
“Promise you won’t hate me for this.”
The baby coos and wiggles around like a little worm in the dirt. As good a promise as any.
She grabs one of his tiny hands. He wraps his fingers around hers as best he can. That’s all they can do — the best they can. For a peaceful, long while, it’s just her and the boy holding onto each other as the morning sun beats down behind the occasional set of clouds. It’s as much as she can handle right now, and it’s nice.
All good things do eventually come to an end.
This one ends when she sees a stranger over the barbed-wire fence.