Work Text:
Five settled into the corner of the empty room, pressing her back against the wall and crossing her legs in front of her, resting a tall glass bottle against one knee. Screwing her eyes shut against the harsh taste of cheap wine, Five gulped half the contents of the glass she clutched in one hand. She took a half dozen swallows before running out of air and placing the drink down carefully in the space made by her legs. For a brief second, she fixated on the cheap plastic cup.
Why did I bother? Five wondered vaguely. It wasn’t a wine glass. She could have just drunk out of the bottle itself, considering she’d run off alone anyway.
Pouring it into a plastic glass doesn’t make it any classier.
But of course, then she’d feel guilty about hogging the bottle to herself by drinking from it directly as if she could have given the rest to someone if she hadn’t dirtied it. Sure, she’d traded her guard friend her next two Runner’s Rights for it. But they probably would’ve shared it with the other guards, so Five was really cheating several people out of a bit of comfort on an upcoming cold night.
Well. You’re here now, I guess.
Five sighed, shutting her eyes and exhaling hard as if that would soothe the growing lightheadedness or burning in front of her eyes. Much to her frustration, she had not managed to make it to the isolated library that also served as Abel’s archives without letting a few tears fall. She could feel the tightness across her cheeks from the drying salt and scrubbed angrily at it. Five took another drink, emptying the glass of the bloody liquid, and set it down with a clack against the warped wood floorboards.
God, the crickets outside were so damn loud.
Five put her head against the brick wall behind her with a harder clunk than intended. Wincing, she rubbed at the back of her scalp for a second, checking she hadn’t scraped it badly. No injury, but the brief flash of pain brought her back to herself a little bit.
What am I doing? Five wondered, staring at the middle distance in front of her. Not only is blowing off steam like this unhelpful, but it’s also not fixing the problem.
She missed home. She missed garbage American fast food; absurdly processed meats piled on spongy bread with mostly-artificial semi-liquid cheese, served with fries in unfinishable portions. Packaged candy bars with no nuance, vegetables swimming in cream, sweetly smooth peanut butter. The absolute worst examples of the hundreds of good cultural dishes she’d sampled in the many places she’d visited, and that was what stuck? Five felt an amused sort of indignance at herself.
But of course, that was all just a symbol, wasn’t it? The superficial cravings on the surface of everything else she missed. With the right ingredients and knowledge, food could probably be replicated here on this side of the pond. She’d even tried something similar once or twice, wheedling the kitchen into serving childhood recipes her friends at Abel mentioned.
But there was so much more Five missed that she couldn’t even try to duplicate here.
The bustle of a big city not on constant watch for the undead. The familiar row of narrow red-brick buildings she had walked every day.
Being able to greet passers-by on the street, knowing they had the same accent as you and wouldn’t look twice when you spoke.
The way her house smelled. Her mom upstairs reading a book and her dad downstairs watching hockey—
Five grabbed the wine bottle and raised it as if the low burn of cheap alcohol would do anything to distract her. But her head already felt lighter, her teeth softer in her jaw than they should be, and she had to run tomorrow afternoon. So Five stopped when the wine wetted her lips before setting the drink down with a light clink. She ran one hand through her hair a few times, tugging at the tangles, feeling her fingertips graze across her scalp.
Five had just about started to get bored with sitting in misery—no surprise, that; how long had it been since she’d just sat somewhere on her own for more than ten minutes since Z-day?—when she heard the sound of deliberate footsteps on concrete stairs. Five swiped at the tears currently sitting on her cheeks and turned to face the doorway across the room from her with what she hoped was an innocently bored expression.
Sara Smith emerged from the space, looking around the room that made up the tiny building’s second floor. Her gaze registered Five but then continued to scan the rest of the cluttered space, unfazed. Finally, turning to make direct eye contact with Five, Sara pressed her hand to her right ear where her headset was hidden under loose waves of light hair.
“Look, Sam, I don’t know where Runner Five is,” she said in her usual measured tone. “But if she hasn’t got her headset nearby, she probably just needs a night off, don’t you think? Maybe you should ask one of the other runners to take on your urgent run to the games store—I’m sure Runner Twenty-Two would jump at the opportunity.”
Five held Sara’s gaze. They both knew there was no hiding what was going on here. And although Five’s gut lurched with guilt at unwittingly dodging Sam’s call, it wasn’t enough to make her get up from her position in the corner of the room. Besides, it would be irresponsible to even try to go for a run in her state with nearly half a bottle of wine gone.
Wow. Two glasses in, and I’m feeling it. Guess it’s been a while.
Sara listened to her headset for a few long moments. She was too far away for Five to hear anything, so Five could only guess at the chatter on the line before Sara finally started to move across the room.
She sat down next to Five, leaning against the wall with her feet on the floor and one arm laid casually across a drawn-up knee. Sara held the silence for a long moment before turning her head the slightest degree to look sideways at Five.
“You gonna drink that whole thing?” she asked with an arched brow as if she was an old friend joining Five at a bar on a night out. And in what was left of the world, she might as well be. “Didn’t think a tiny thing like yourself would have it in you.”
Five shook her head and passed the bottle to Sara. The older woman took one long drink before setting the bottle on the ground away from them.
Five focused on keeping her breathing steady and staring straight ahead. She’d have liked to pretend her occasional violent sniffles were the only things that gave her away. Still, she knew Sara was far too perceptive for that. It was honestly spooky how well the older runner was able to read her.
Sara waited out the silence long enough that Five began to fidget, curiosity and guilt and irritation at the interruption battling for the first chance to break the stillness.
“You’re a lot farther from home than you ever planned for, aren’t you?” Sara asked suddenly.
Five was so caught off guard by the question that she answered honestly, immediately.
“Yeah.” Another long pause. “It was just supposed to be a vacation.”
“And instead, you wound up with an apocalypse.” Sara’s voice was almost infuriatingly matter-of-fact.
“Yeah,” Five replied lamely, cheeks burning with embarrassment, struggling to contextualize her next thought. “But, I mean…everyone else did too.”
“Sure,” Sara answered, nodding sagely. “But your apocalypse is a bit different than other peoples’, isn’t it?”
Five considered this for a long time. “Isn’t everyone’s different?”
“Of course. And everyone’s got their own way of dealing with it, haven’t they?”
Five ran a hand through her hair again, twisting the ends of one section around her fingers as if trying to give it a curl.
“I should be out running,” Five said flatly. “That’d be the best way to deal with it. To do something useful, instead of moping in a corner.”
Sara shrugged and seemed to debate something for a long moment.
“Have you ever heard of deadheading, Five?” Sara asked.
That was out of left field enough that Five turned to stare quizzically at the other runner.
Sara chuckled. “My Breandan used to do it all the time to keep the roses up. You cut off the blooms that have gotten too big so the rest of the bush can put its resources to new growth.” Sara ran her fingers up the wine bottle’s neck and into the air as if tracing a flower in a vase.
“…So I should let go of my old life so that my new life at Abel can begin?” Five asked with scathing cynicism. She was too upset to be interested in trite motivational phrases.
Sara let out a single laugh, and it sounded bittersweet. “That’s probably what my husband would have told you, sure. But I’d say…sometimes you have to let yourself really feel it when something is violently ripped away from you.” She brought her palm down to rest on the top of the wine bottle, and the slightly metallic sweet scent disappeared from the air for a moment. “After all, it still takes a while for the next rosebud to show up.”
For the first time in a while, Five looked Sara full in the face. Sara met her gaze steadily, her features much more sympathetic than her words would suggest. Eventually, Five let out a long, trembling breath and pressed her back against the wall again.
“I never would have pegged you for a poet, Runner Eight,” she said wryly. “If you knew how much I’ve actually just been thinking about awful fast food, you’d be ashamed of me.”
Sara smirked. “How very American of you.”
The two blonde women stayed there on the second floor of the otherwise empty building for a long while. Five told Sara all about her favorite restaurants back home, which quickly turned into stories of chaotic nights in hole-in-the-wall taquerias with friends. She talked longingly about the bakery where she knew all the employees and was only charged for half the bizarre gourmet donuts she taste-tested. Sara told Five about the tacky décor in Luke’s favorite pizza shop back in Northern Ireland. How his younger brother Dylan had gotten into the pancake batter one Shrove Tuesday and ruined it so badly, they’d had to go out for breakfast. Both runners knew they weren’t really talking about the heart of the matter, but neither cared.
Sara didn’t need to mention what had happened to her boys. Five remembered; her first conversation with Sara hung vividly in her memory. There was no way to compare having to put down your husband and sons to the endless rise-fall, hope-despair of endless unknowing, never finding out what happened to your loved ones. There just wasn’t a comparison, nor a need to find one.
What about Maxine, or even that new Australian runner, Runner Six? They were out there in the night, too, maybe feeling just as lonely. More people far from home, trying to learn how to live in this place, in a world gone wrong.
Well. You’re here now, I guess.
Or what about Sam? Searching for bao ingredients with him a few missions ago was what had gotten Five thinking about the food she missed in the first place. He was mourning an entire culture as well—one he’d never get to learn more about. Five’s gaze wandered, and she wondered what her night would have been like if she’d gone to talk to him instead of running off to be sad in some empty building. She had two roommates who’d be wondering where she was, for goodness’ sake.
“How’d you find me, anyway?” she asked, voice a little rough.
Sara studied Five for a moment, evaluating. “If you didn’t want to be found, I knew you’d be smarter than to go to one of your usual spots. So I started with places you might know from other people that might be quiet this time of evening.”
Five nodded. Of course Sara knew where Five’s roommates hung out. Was there anything that went on in Abel that this woman didn’t know?
The bottle of wine sat on the floor, forgotten, and Five began to feel fatigue settle on her like a weighted blanket, the dried salt on her cheeks growing uncomfortable. By the time Sara half-turned away to listen to her headset, the pair had drifted into silence.
“They’re all in for the night,” Sara said at last, pulling her headset down to hang around her neck. Sure enough, the small patch of sky Five could see out the window from her position on the floor was a deeper blue pinpricked with the earliest stars.
Five sighed and uncrossed her legs, grimacing as the blood rushed back to knees folded inwards too long. Sara rose smoothly from the floor after her, picking up the sloshing remains of their drinks as she did. The two runners headed down the archive’s stairs, steps slow and unhurried. They didn’t exchange another word the whole walk back to the runners’ dorms.
Runners Five and Eight each had their own things to miss, their own tragedies to mourn. And although they were different stories, each had come to the same narrative beat here, in a tiny township very far away from home.