Work Text:
The noise that escapes Maria's lips when she finally falls would be embarrassing if there were anyone around to hear it. This is the way the world ends, she thinks dizzily, not with a bang but a whimper.
It feels right, at least, that she should die alone and unmourned on the chilly sidewalk in an ugly little suburb. This was her fault. She was a loose end, and now she's been tied off by a sliding glass door. It'll all be over soon.
"Ma'am?"
A voice? Her imagination, has to be.
"Can you hear me?"
The voice is attached to arms that are shaking Maria's shoulders, it seems.
"Are you alive? Ma'am?"
"Not f'r long," Maria slurs.
"We'll see about that," says the voice with arms, but it's much too dark and soft for Maria to see anything at all.
Maria wakes up. That's unexpected. She takes stock of herself without opening her eyes: exhausted, still, but not as delirious; pain in her arm, possibly a little less; thirsty; lying on something a great deal more comfortable than concrete.
"Are you awake?" It's the voice with arms — probably, Maria concedes now, an entire human being. When she opens her eyes, struggling to sit up with the aid of her better arm, there's a young woman seated cross-legged in a chair next to her. A very young woman.
"How old are you?" Maria asks, then winces. Not exactly diplomatic.
Rolling her eyes theatrically, the girl says, "Older than I look. How does your arm feel?"
"Better." Maria glances at it, then, startled, looks closer; the wound has been stitched, careful sutures like a regiment of ants running the length of her forearm, the whole of it glossy with antibiotic ointment. "Did you do this?"
"Nah, it was the pixies. I leave them a bowl of milk, and they do minor medical procedures — yeah, obviously I did."
Definitely a teenager, then. "And you brought me in here," Maria says. "Is this some sort of dormitory?"
"EMS headquarters, and yeah, I did a blanket drag. It wasn't hard, you're pretty light." She shrugs with one shoulder. "Least I could do, I guess."
Before Maria can stop herself, she blurts out, "Who are you, Kindergarten Dr. Kildare?"
Fortunately, the girl just snorts. "Close enough. You can call me Angie."
"Maria." Neither are their real names, Maria is willing to bet, but they'll do.
"And I don't want to talk about Before," Angie continues. "I hated them all, and now they're dead, and I'm glad, the end. You can talk about what you want, though."
"If you hated everyone, why did you bother rescuing me?" There's a glass of water next to the bed; Maria grabs it and drinks greedily.
"Sorry about the taste, it's distilled and probably older than I am," Angie says, nodding to the water. "Wet, though. And I hated everyone I knew, not everyone, like, everyone. Also, this is what I'm good at."
Maria can't argue with that. She finishes the water, which does have an oddly flat taste, but makes her throat feel less like it's lined with dead leaves. Then, for some reason, she offers, "I've been on my own this whole time. In the airport, for most of it."
"Me too. Here." Angie looks up at the ceiling, all popcorn tiles and fluorescent fixtures. "I've been having weird dreams for months now."
"Oh yeah?" Maria forces herself to sound casual, even though her heart is in her throat. "What kind of dreams?"
"Two kinds," Angie says, resettling herself into a casual position with both legs over the arm of her chair, still staring up at the ceiling. "It's weird — my dreams didn't used to have, like, continuity, you know? But first the old lady was in a cornfield somewhere, which made me nervous, because you never know what's in a cornfield."
Maria pauses. "...corn?" she ventures.
"Ugh." Angie flaps one of her hands irritably. "Behind that. But she and her friends are somewhere else now, with mountains instead. And the other guy... I think he's in the desert."
"Las Vegas," Maria says distantly.
Angie flips around to sit properly and plants her hands on her knees, squinting at Maria. "So you do know," she says. "I thought you might. Why aren't you there?"
She's withstood interrogation by professionals a dozen times, but something about this cranky girl with her grown-out highlights and baggy uniform sweater, who dragged her in from the cold, hits Maria like sodium pentothal. "Because I don't want to be."
"Huh. Good." Angie scrunches up her nose. "Then why aren't you in the mountains?"
"Because I don't deserve to be." Maria digs in her bag, set carefully by the bed, and pulls out the last of her stash of beef jerky. "Here. Why aren't you in the mountains? You're that afraid of cornfields?"
Angie takes a piece of jerky and crams it in her mouth. "I can't drive," she says, chewing.
"It's not hard," Maria says, "and it's not like it matters that you're too young for a license anymore."
Angie rolls her eyes so hard Maria's almost afraid they'll fall out of her head. "I didn't say I don't know how," she says. "I said I can't."
Maria chews her own jerky and raises her eyebrows inquiringly.
Angie sighs. "See my glasses?" she asks.
"...no," Maria says. She's certainly not wearing them, either on her face or pushed up into her hair, and they're not in evidence anywhere else in the room.
"Yeah," Angie says pointedly. "Me fucking neither."
"Oh, shit." Maria blows out a breath. "You're too young for the Twilight Zone, right?"
Angie laughs. "The one with the guy who can't read all the books at the end of the world? Yeah, exactly, except I'm nearsighted as hell, so in his place, I'd be happy as a clam. Anything further away than, say... you? I'm shit out of luck."
"Damn." Maria's own vision is 20/15, last she checked. The idea of not being able to see much further than the end of her arm is frankly terrifying.
"But now you're here," Angie says, "and I bet you can drive." She raises one eyebrow, a talent Maria's always wished she had. "But you don't deserve to go west, right?"
Maria shakes her head. "If I tell you who I was, you'll kick me out of your little headquarters. I'll be lucky if you don't — I don't know — bludgeon me with some of your equipment, too."
"Pretty sure I won't do either of those," Angie says, examining her fingernails. "For one thing, I bet you move faster than I do."
"True." Maria leans back against the wall. "But you know the building, and what you're looking for. It'd take me a little while to find something to use as a weapon, and you'd have the advantage."
Angie smiles lopsidedly. "You're trying to distract me from wondering what you think is so bad I'd want you dead over it," she says.
"Is it that obvious?" Maria hugs her knees to her chest.
"Never underestimate the powers of observation of a bitch with no friends," Angie says cheerfully. "Anyway, seriously, I'm pretty hard to shock."
"You're a child."
"No," Angie says. "I'm not." Maria looks up at her and flinches; her foggy blue eyes have gone hard and cold as chips of ice. "I wasn't Before, and I'm sure not now."
Oddly, it's comforting. "I worked for the government," Maria says. "I was... out of the country when all this started."
"Yeah?" Angie looks interested. "I've been to Canada, but that's it."
"They'd sent me to Bucharest — that's in Romania."
"Oh, like the Dorothy Parker poem!" Maria blinks, and Angie declaims, "Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, / A medley of extemporanea; / And love is a thing that can never go wrong; / And I am Marie of Roumania."
That startles a laugh out of Maria. "Yeah, I guess," she says. "Well, they sent me a package."
"Hmm." Angie tilts her head. "From the way you say that, I suspect it was not a surprise birthday present."
"It was Captain Trips," Maria says heavily.
Angie nods. "Sucks," she says. "Did you know?"
"Officially, I was under the impression that I was releasing radioactive particles to be charted by satellites," Maria tells her. "Unofficially, I..." She sighs. "I thought maybe it was something else. But no, even in my worst suspicions, I didn't think it was that."
"Would you have done it, if you did know?" Angie asks.
Maria shrugs. "I hope I wouldn't have. I don't know. I was a different person, and it was a different world."
"There you go," Angie says, smugly, like she's solved something. "All you can do is the best you can."
"What, and that makes up for it?" Maria twists her hands together.
Angie looks at her blankly. "Of course not."
"Then..."
"You can make shit better, or you can make shit worse," Angie says. "I think those are the only options."
"And you think driving us to Colorado would be making shit better?" Maria says.
"What, you think they couldn't use two women of our talents?" Angie smirks. "Also, maybe they've got an optician."
"You never know." Maria gives her a rusty smile. "Ever been on a road trip with a spy?"
"There's a first time for everything!"