Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Pratt didn’t know how to reconcile the reality of Montana before the bombs with the reality of it after.

The first thing he noticed was the trees. It was the sparseness of them, really. It felt like every other tree had been removed from the landscape — not even removed, really, because that implied something left behind, some sort of sign that the trees had ever been there in the first place. Instead, it was as if they had been vaporized out of existence. And in the end, wasn’t that exactly what had happened? Superheated air, like hell itself, blasting through the scenery and taking what it wanted to feed itself?

He could still see the mushroom clouds when he closed his eyes. Even after ten years. He didn’t wake up screaming anymore — now, he just lay there, staring at the wall next to his bunk in the Wolf’s Den, letting the tears run down his face soundlessly, staining his pillow until he had exhausted himself enough to be able to fall back asleep, back into the nightmares.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a pleasant dream.

So there was that. Big Sky Country, indeed. With half the trees gone, he was left standing there on the top stair out of the bunker, eyes turned to the sky that had previously overwhelmed, and now just plain boggled the mind.

The second thing he noticed was the abundance of flowers all around them. The Montana wilderness had always been a place you couldn’t walk five feet without tripping over some plant or another, but nothing like this. As his eyes swept the landscape, he couldn’t find a single plot of land that wasn’t covered with the hot pink of a mutated strain of — well, some sort of flower. He wasn’t sure exactly which. Catholic school had never focused much on nature unless it was to reiterate that God had created it. Which was all well and good, until it came to dealing with real-world problems.

“Verbenas,” said Wheaty as he climbed up behind Pratt and sidestepped to get out of the bunker. “Fuckin’ insane. Nuclear apocalypse — ten times the efficiency of Miracle-Gro.”

They’d been more or less locked in a vault for ten years, so it wasn’t surprising that Wheaty retained the vernacular of his youth, despite nearing thirty. Really, he looked rather the same as he had when he had discovered Pratt was alive and desperately pulled him from the burning truck. Not entirely the same, of course; he looked thirty , it was obvious from the way he held himself — the unsurety of his youth, the clumsiness of limbs too long for him to understand the space they occupied gone, now — and the lines in his face, not wrinkles, of course, but something hardened, something born of the stress they’d both had to live under the crushing weight of for ten years. But at the same time, there were those bright eyes, even with a little bit of the light taken out of them, and that childish eagerness, the openness and passion with which Wheaty threw himself into everything he cared about.

Pratt had tried to avoid looking in a mirror. He didn’t want to see what the bombs had taken from him.

And he didn’t want to see what losing Rook had done to him, either.

It was strange, because he simultaneously felt twenty-six and thirty-six. There was a stasis that came with living in an underground bunker for all those years, never seeing the outside world, never seeing so much as the sun rising and setting. Yet at the same time he was hyper-aware of just how much time they’d lost. The ten years between the bombs dropping and now felt like they’d stretched out forever and also like they had gone by in an instant. It was the sort of time dilation that only happened after the event was already finished. The way highschool had been a lifetime while he was in it and then, a mere year after graduating, had flashed by so quickly that the time he’d spent in it hardly felt extant, a collection of a few memorable moments and nothing more.

The way Jacob’s training had felt like it would never end, and then it had, and he was at once through it and still living in it. Forever, living in it.

One two three, one two three, one two three one two three onetwothree. And then he’s got you.

“Pratt,” Wheaty said, not unkindly. “You coming or what?”

He was only a few steps outside of the bunker, but Pratt had stayed cemented to the top step. Taking another seemed criminal.

“It’s weird, right?” Wheaty, hands on his hips, took in the sprawling landscape before them. With this much space, it seemed like both everything and nothing was possible. Like they were kings of Hope County, and like their kingdom was in ruins. “Like … I guess … I dunno. Guess I thought we’d take one step outside and fall into quicksand or somethin’. Or, like, sometimes I’d have these dreams? About leaving the bunker and we’d open the door and there’d just be, like, this huge black void. Nothing left. Not even reality. You know?”

Pratt knew. He’d had the same dreams. Among others. Ones that involved cages and wolves and gunning down friends and family and watching Rook starve for seven days straight. Watching as he fed them — I’m so sorry, I wish it wasn’t what it was, but, like, even so, I wish I could give you more, because look at you, I’m so sorry, Rook, Christ, I’m so sorry — and they leapt forward like an animal and shoveled the meat into their mouth with their hands. Music boxes. Cages. Wolves. Gunning down friends and family. Watching Rook starve. Music boxes. Cages. Wolves. Only you, only you, only you.

The sun on his face was cold. He realized he wasn’t actually sure what the date was. He realized he didn’t really care.

It was silent. Everywhere, everything was silent. Why would he need to know the date?

He could go back down the stairs, he thought. Close up the door and never leave again. The Wolf’s Den, becoming a grave. It felt fitting. People were already typically buried underground. Did the shape and size of the coffin matter? Was anyone else even still alive to care?

Wheaty’s hand was extended towards him. The cold sun in the sky seemed to warm in Wheaty’s bright eyes.

“C’mon, man,” he said. “Let’s get it over with. Like ripping off a Band-Aid, yeah?”

With a jaw clenched so hard that it hurt, Pratt took Wheaty’s hand and took his first step into the new world.

There were glaring, obvious spaces where things had been once. Cenotaphs. Nothing, not even ruins, there to mark that they had ever existed. Fields in clearings so enormous that no one, not even a visitor, could trick themselves into thinking that any of this was natural. And verbenas as far as the eye could see. Pratt kept accidentally tripping on them, but it was mostly due to the fact that he hadn’t walked on a surface that wasn’t flat concrete for ten years now.

“It’s probably not safe out here,” he said, and immediately regretted it. He’d given that terrified thing inside of him a voice. He wasn’t supposed to. Jacob said if you acknowledged it, you gave it power. And if you gave the fear inside of you power, you weren’t being strong. He amended, “I mean, because of the radioactivity. Did we bring a Geiger counter?”

It seemed like a ridiculous question to ask after a nuclear apocalypse. But the truth was that the Wolf’s Den had run out of food, and neither of the boys were experts in nuclear holocausts, and really all there was to do in the end was to hedge their bets and embark on an adventure that could end in any number of ways rather than stay in the Wolf’s Den and wait for the one that was inevitable.

Wheaty wrinkled his nose. “Yeah,” he answered, “but, like, does it really matter? I mean … as long as we stay away from where they dropped, we’re probably okay, right?”

It was logic he couldn’t really argue with. He knew where they’d dropped — would never be able to forget it, ever — and it wasn’t like there was anywhere in Hope County that had entirely escaped the bombs. Still, Wheaty pulled the Geiger counter from the pack slung over his shoulders and fiddled with the knob until a uniform clicking came from the device. Shrugging a shoulder, Wheaty said, “It’s gonna be like that everywhere, man. That’s how Geiger counters work.”

Neither of the boys were experts in nuclear holocausts, but it seemed Wheaty knew just a little bit more about them than Pratt.

They kept walking. There was no destination in mind. Neither of them knew if any of the destinations that they would have suggested were still around or if they had been blasted right the fuck off of God’s green earth. Behind them, the Whitetail mountains were mostly ash. Every leaf was stripped off of every tree. It was impossible to see past a certain point — the surroundings devolved into a thick green smog that was so heavy it felt like it might be palpable if they had gone to try and touch it.

Ten years. Ten years, and the effects were still apparent.

It felt unreal. Everything that was happening felt unreal, but this especially so. It was unreal in that there was no frame of reference for it. It was a fairytale, an illusion, a dream. Something that felt real that would end in Pratt jolting awake, sweaty and tangled in his sheets, taking in the world around him one detail at a time, the sun outside his window, the trees still standing tall, cars driving by on the road. He expected any minute to wake up. It was worst-case scenario. It was an irreversible event that changed the world forever. It couldn’t possibly be real.

No wonder that terrified thing inside of him begged him to go running back to the bunker and never leave again.

He reached back and touched his fingers to the cold surface of his shotgun.

Wheaty decided south, eventually. “Cold as hell,” he said, pulling on a jacket from his pack, and shivering the whole while, “and probably gonna get even worse the farther north we go. And I don’t really feel like trying to make it to the East Coast. California, maybe. If we had a car. But …”

He didn’t need to finish. The roads were completely silent. 

It was also anyone’s guess if California still existed.

The East Coast, though. That sparked something in the numbness Pratt was feeling. It was easier to shut off all of his emotions and focus on the end goal, like he’d been taught. There were only two things that could cut through that careful veneer he slipped into place.

One was obvious — Jacob, his leader. No, his trainer. No. Mentor, he thought. No matter how much he said he hated the man, the truth was that he was still, to this day, desperate for Jacob’s approval.

The other was also obvious — Rook. East Coast Rook. Lakewood Rook. Rook, so perpendicular to everything he’d been expecting when Whitehorse had briefed them on the new probationary deputy. He’d been expecting loud, brash, rude. Already sort of a jackass, he’d amped it up to eleven to keep from feeling emasculated by them. In his mind, tempered by years of rural Montana private school, East Coast was synonymous with New York City, synonymous with busy subways and quick breakfasts and the complete lack of any sort of hospitality at all.

He’d have liked to go to the East Coast, though, if it had produced someone like Rook.

Wheaty and Pratt took in everything they passed like they were infants. The farther south they went, the more signs of civilization, or the ruins of it, at least, were beginning to populate the landscape. Wide-eyed and curious, they drank it all in and attempted to match things to what they could remember. The foundations of cabins that had been blown apart, leaving only the half-rotted wood behind; the empty space where a lookout tower had used to reside; the Whitetail Visitor Center, which was only recognizable because of the multiple levels of ground the center had been built on, now smoothed over like glass; the Hawkeye Tunnel, a landslide of rocks blocking any progress in or out. A strip of black, charred fabric was pinned between two of the rocks. Pratt could see the stark white bottom of the Eden’s Gate symbol.

Impossible, that it had survived, even just as a scrap. Impossible.

On the second day, they made it to the Stone Ridge Chalet — or, like so many other places, what was left of it. Pratt gave it a wide berth. He refused to look, even at the remains. Something sick inside him twisted until he thought he really might be physically sick.

Things were different once they descended down out of the mountains. The Whitetail Mountains had always been inhospitable to people who didn’t know the forest like the back of their hand, but Holland Valley was different. From the crest of the last mountain they could see colorful structures beginning to decorate the wide-open clearings that had become a common occurrence. Two-story buildings — houses, maybe? They were too far away to tell for sure, but they were definitely man-made.

The sick thing inside of Pratt twisted again. He didn’t like thinking about being around other people. For so long, the mere concept of ‘other people’ had been a threat, and then had come the ten years alone with Wheaty and … well, Pratt didn’t trust himself to be able to interact with people the way he had before the Collapse. No, before that — the Veterans’ Center. Because as soon as he’d started training, he’d only ever been able to see other human beings as something to be outdone. Tossed away when they no longer served their purpose.

He reached back and touched his shotgun again. The curve of it felt cool and comfortable in the palm of his hand. He silently mapped out the route he would take, if danger presented itself. A clearing was difficult to hide in, but he could dart underneath the stairs of that house, get the drop on whoever it was that lived there. Could have the shotgun unstrapped from his back and in his hands in point-seven seconds. Could shoot and reload in the blink of an eye. The element of surprise was a cheap win, but when it came down to you or the other person, you had to use anything in your arsenal.

“Pratt.”

Wheaty was next to him, leaning forward, carefully inspecting his eyes. Pratt had never seen it, but Wheaty had claimed that Pratt’s eyes seemed to change color when he was in that place he could never really seem to get out of entirely or for more than a few hours at a time, if that. If it was true, he was sure that his irises were fiery orange right now. Like buckshot. Like the lights in the Center. Like a warning.

“You with me?” Wheaty continued, knowing he wasn’t.

It took a few moments for Pratt to erase the mental attack route from overlaying itself on his sight. Slowly, the world came back into focus, and it was just a clearing, just a building, just human beings that had never done anything wrong living inside of it.

There’s nothing to protect anymore, he told himself. The only things you wanted to protect died in the fire. It’s just you, now.

And he wasn’t really sure anymore whether he wanted to live or die.

There was a certain coldness to the way that Hope County looked after ten years and a nuclear holocaust.

Wheaty sat in the chair by the window, gazing outside. It was the trees, probably. The whole world felt so much more open. He didn’t like it. Montana was trees, Hope County was trees, the Whitetail mountains were trees. He’d first learned to track, hiding behind those trees, keeping his progress by the specific type and height and markings. He’d escaped to the trees when he was too frustrated to talk to anyone and just wanted to be surrounded by the whispering of nature. He’d done his homework at the bases of those trees, trying to grasp the concept of a quotient in the shade of something older than the idea of a quotient itself.

He hated this, how open it was. He felt exposed. He felt like someone in that big sky the state was named for was watching him. He felt like he’d suddenly been transported to another town, another state, with no warning and no time to emotionally prepare.

He didn’t know how to think of this place as Montana. Maybe it wasn’t. It was entirely possible that he was still dreaming. Usually, when he dreamed, it was that he exited the Wolf’s Den to a black void, like he’d told Pratt. But maybe those were just dreams, and this was a nightmare.

He realized, as he sat there, that he had been rubbing his thumb against the fabric of the chair he was sitting in. Hard. He pulled it away and the pain rose, suddenly. It was just a little pain, a bit of a throbbing from the pressure and the burn, but it hadn’t let itself be felt until he had paid attention to it.

Through the doorway to the dining room came a blond man. He was probably about Wheaty’s age, but it was difficult to convince himself that he was about to turn thirty. The Wolf’s Den had been like a stasis pod. He’d known the years had gone by, but there had been nothing to show for it aside from having to shave every morning. The man seemed to have a perpetual smile on his face. His eyes were bright in a way that Wheaty couldn’t quite understand. This man held some sort of electric joy within him like a tiny generator, but Wheaty couldn’t guess what powered it.

Moving in silently behind him was a broad-shouldered dark-haired man, blessedly overweight. The scarcity of food after the bombs fell had probably brought the world back to the point of beauty standards being derived from one’s ability to find said food. This man wasn’t like the other — he was instead quiet and a little bit foreboding, but only in the sense that he was that way around anyone he didn’t know well. Wheaty got the impression that he’d soften right up around people he was comfortable with.

The blond’s name was Patrick. The brunet’s name was Devon. Patrick and Devon were the people that had built the house that Pratt and Wheaty had seen from the boundary between the Whitetails and Holland Valley — the house that Wheaty was currently sitting inside of.

They were also the first human beings Pratt and Wheaty had seen in ten years.

“You wouldn’t be the first people that came by after poking their heads out of the bunkers like groundhogs,” Patrick said with that ever-present smile, placing a mug of hot coffee into Wheaty’s hands. It was immediately obvious he was northwestern. His vowels sounded like they should be capitalized and bolded. Patrick lowered himself into the loveseat at a right angle to Wheaty’s chair, followed shortly by Devon, who, just as quietly as he did everything else, slipped his right hand into Patrick’s left. “I think ten years is probably everyone’s limit.”

Wheaty blew gently on the mug in his hands. The hot ceramic against the burn on his thumb felt good. It felt controlled. As long as he was the one causing the pain, it didn’t hurt so much. “But it’s just houses right now? Like this one? Or is there, I dunno, some sort of restoration effort going on? Fall’s End — what’s that like?”

“Gone,” said Devon, deep-toned and contemplative. “Mostly.”

It didn’t feel right, to Wheaty. He and the other Whitetails had kept to themselves, but he knew that the rest of Hope County counted on each other — that it was the sort of place you could go over to your neighbor’s and ask to borrow a cup of sugar; the sort of place everyone knew everyone else in sermons on Sunday mornings; the sort of place that you couldn’t disappear from because you’d be noticed missing within the hour. And with how much weight Hope County placed on their neighborhood apple farms and churches and visitors’ centers he couldn’t imagine that everyone was suddenly satisfied with living their own lives, apart from each other, minding their own businesses.

Then again, he couldn’t have imagined the world would be destroyed by nuclear hellfire. And that one had been prophesied for years.

Devon quirked an eyebrow suddenly, and leaned over to Patrick to say something into his ear. Patrick’s mouth made a round little O, and he said, “Oh, right, babe!” He looked back to Wheaty. “Dev reminded me — there’s been some talk about getting community together. Just whisperings about it, for a long time, but apparently if you go farther down south it’s really starting to come along.” He looked sheepish and apologetic. “We don’t have that much information about it. We don’t really have any interest in going anywhere but here. But if you want to find more people, that’d be your best bet, I think.”

“Six people in the past few days,” Devon said, “comin’ this way asking how to get there. More every week.”

Patrick nodded affirmation. “We don’t know much about it, and no one who goes there has ever come back to tell us if it’s really there or not, but it’s some kind of lead at least, right?”

“Right.” It really was the most minimal of leads, but considering the number of leads Wheaty had had fifteen seconds ago had been zero, he was willing to take it. He took a long, slow drink of his coffee. It didn’t taste like it could have come from anywhere east of Spokane. He could almost hear the gulls over Puget Sound, despite never having been there.

The three of them sat in silence for a few moments. Patrick’s personality, however, wouldn’t let him do so for longer than that. His eyes drifted out the window and fixed on a point just past the outside deck. “You sure your friend doesn’t want to come in? I mean, you guys said you haven’t seen any other people for ten years. And, like, I don’t like to brag—” Devon snorted, “—but drinking Seattle coffee is kind of an experience.”

Wheaty followed Patrick’s eyes out the window. Pratt was standing there, looking off at the mountains rising all around them, so stock-still he could have been dead. He was the world’s best guard dog. His shotgun was clenched in his hands, and the only evidence that he wasn’t some kind of apparition was the way the evening wind was rustling and rearranging his hair and skirting along the collar of his shirt. There was something to be said about the way he had turned out because of Jacob’s tutelage — something equally wonderful and terrible.

Wheaty sighed. “He hates enclosed spaces.” It was the kindest excuse he could give them. There was nothing to gain by telling them that if something so much as spooked Pratt he would slip effortlessly back into those trials, where Devon and Patrick were nothing but other soldiers that he had to gun down in record time to make Jacob Seed proud.

It was very difficult to explain just how much sway a ghost still held over Pratt, ten years later.

The three of them talked for a while more, and then Wheaty thanked them for their hospitality and stepped out into the chill of the evening air, which wasn’t much different from the chill that seemed ever-pervasive in this new Hope County except for the time of day it existed in. He cleared his throat softly, moving into Pratt’s field of vision without moving too quickly.

“You don’t have to be careful. I heard you coming,” Pratt said listlessly. His eyes didn’t move from where they’d been trained all this time. The squareness of his shoulders relaxed, but only by an infinitesimal amount.

Wheaty handed him a styrofoam cup of Patrick’s coffee. Pratt eyed it warily, and then, with obvious hesitancy, accepted it. He slid the shotgun into one hand and brought the coffee to his face, letting the steam warm it.

“I won’t say you should have come in,” said Wheaty, taking his place at Pratt’s side, looking out over the ruins of his beautiful Montana, “but they were really nice, man. And they told me there’s some sort of community thing going on farther south. They don’t know many details, but … it’s as good a place as any to start, right?”

“A community,” Pratt echoed, nonplussed.

Right. Pratt and people were not a good mix. But all the same, they couldn’t just wander around fending for themselves. “I don’t know. It’s something. If you wanna stay outside while I scope the place out — if it really exists — then that’s totally fine with me. But I can’t, like, leave you out here. Like, permanently.”

“I’m not good with people,” Pratt said, taking a sip of the coffee.

This, at least, was something that had been true since far before Pratt and the other deputies came to Hope County. Wheaty had heard more than once how much of a jackass Pratt could be. But there was a difference between not being good with people because you were a jackass and not being good with people because you were a trained killer.

There had been that soft spot in between, though. Wheaty had seen it. Where the jackass from before had been softened into something with actual depth, and emotions, and where he had been changed to the point where, if it had continued, he might have been able to learn how to genuinely care about other people without being pushed to. That Pratt had been someone he had liked, even if they still hadn’t really gotten along very well. That Pratt had been terrified and traumatized, but he’d had support, and he’d been loved fiercely by someone who had seen the good in him and dragged it, kicking and screaming, to the light.

Pratt may have thought now that that soft Pratt, that in-between Pratt, was a weak piece of shit, but Rook had been incontestably in love with him. And he, them.

Wheaty’s heart ached. The last image he had ever had of Rook had been of them in the front seat of that truck. He hadn’t had the time. He hadn’t had the space. And they’d looked so dead already. Pratt had been the only one to have moved, even if it had been barely perceptible. And, before that, his memory of them was tainted with the vitriol he’d treated them with after they’d killed Eli, even though he’d known that Jacob Seed did this to people, even though he’d known that Eli being killed had always been a possibility. It hadn’t felt like it in his mind. Eli had felt invulnerable.

Rook had felt invulnerable, too.

Wheaty toed the dirt. It didn’t quite move in the way he expected it to. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

He didn’t have any arguments. He was desperately holding on to the dream that for once things might work in their favor. Stubbornly, he wanted to believe that everything would work itself out. Life was a series of twisting turns in which at least one path had to lead to a net win of an outcome.

Except that maybe this time, it didn’t.

Chapter Text

It took a few hours for Pratt to be even marginally alright with approaching Prosperity, and then another few to see the prospect of coming inside as anything other than the devil’s temptation straight from the desert.

He sat there for a long time with his back against the wood of the wall that surrounded it, his knees drawn up to his chest, his arms out in front of him, and his face buried in his arms. If he allowed himself to take in stimulation from too many of his senses, he thought he might lose himself. So instead he sat here, feeling the coolness of the wall against his back and listening to the idle sound of human activity inside the walls.

Jacob hadn’t brought out anything supernatural in them, but he’d honed their senses enough that he might as well have. Pratt could estimate how many people were inside the compound with a margin of error of maybe two people. He could tell where the closest body to him was. He knew without even trying how he would take them out if he so decided. He knew how to make it so quick as to be inevitable.

He’d given his shotgun to Wheaty, who had protested but ultimately taken it. What Wheaty didn’t realize — or at least didn’t realize the scope of — was just how deadly Pratt could be with his bare hands. How he knew all the points that could incapacitate a person. How he could use his hands as weapons just as effective as a shotgun. How he craved it, even now, the feeling of a pulse going weak beneath his fingers, sputtering out, then stopping, and his excited glance towards Jacob, expecting praise for a job well done, which of course never came.

It wasn’t that he craved the killing. It was that he craved the praise. And the praise only ever came with the killing.

Sitting here trying to gather up the strength to go inside felt like being ill and trying to decide whether he was well enough to go to work. He would think for a moment that he could handle it, and his body would tense up in preparation to move, but just as suddenly he would feel the sickness roll through him and he would relax again, or at least relax relatively speaking, because he was pretty sure he hadn’t been able to actually relax for the past ten years.

Wheaty could trust him all he wanted, but the truth of it was that Pratt would have been better off if he had died in that truck while the world burned around him.

At least then, he thought, he’d still have people in this world that he loved.

He wasn’t foolish enough to think that his parents had survived, or his older sister, who he hadn’t spoken to for years anyway after she’d up and moved to Cincinnati to chase some dream of being an actor or a singer or a real estate agent. Pratt didn’t know which. He loved his family, but he was notoriously awful at paying attention to things that didn’t directly involve or benefit him. Anyway, he was sure that dream had been cut short, because if Hope County, Montana — a place no one had ever heard of unless they lived in a place bordering it — had been blown nearly off the map, surely a place like Cincinatti wouldn’t have made it.

And while he had never especially gotten along with the rest of the squad, aside from an uneasy joking-around friendship with Hudson, they had been the last people he had seen that weren’t Eden’s Gate before it all went to hell. It was impossible not to form a bond with your last link to freedom. And it was impossible not to form a bond with the people you knew were going through all the same bullshit as you were.

Well. Not the same bullshit, really. Rook was the only one that knew exactly what he had gone through.

His heart ached, then, long and slow and painful, like it was in the world’s slowest-moving hydraulic press. He swore and clutched his hand to it. It was a useless gesture. He could no more stop this heartache with his hands than he could with a couple of Tylenol.

Inside the gate, he could faintly hear Wheaty’s voice. He was talking to Kim Rye, and thank god she’d survived, at least, because if anyone deserved it, it was her, warm and fierce and stubborn in the best way. Wheaty was telling her about him. About the way that being around people was no longer a luxury Pratt could afford any time he wanted. About the way that he could hear and sense things so well it was like he’d been raised by— no, not wolves, never fucking wolves, but something. Foxes, maybe. Some creature in a codependent relationship with the earth beneath their feet. About the way that Pratt couldn’t in good faith be called entirely “human” any longer.

Pratt didn’t argue, not even in his mind. He sat there staring out at the glow of the verbanas, eyes tracking every little thing that dared to move in his presence, and wondered idly the exact moment that he’d lost the humanity that Kim Rye was arguing so adamantly that he still had.

“No, no, you’re not really getting it,” Wheaty was saying, not unkindly. He was speaking in a hushed tone, but he had to have known that Pratt could hear him. The hush was to keep the community from finding out just what kind of a creature they had sitting right outside their gates. Exasperated, Wheaty continued, “It’s not a bad thing, Miz Rye. It’s just that, like, he’s different now. In a way you can’t ignore even if you tried. So … it’s gonna take him some gettin’ used to this place, if he decides to stay at all.”

It was clear that Wheaty was planning on staying. Pratt thought that was probably a good idea. He’d be protected here. Make new friends. Be able to contribute to something. Heal.

The same could not be said of Pratt. He was suffering no delusions about his inability to heal.

The gate was opening quietly, now, and Pratt’s heart lurched into triple-time. His fight-or-flight was massively backwards after the trials; he was incredibly calm when surrounded by adversaries, forming plans in seconds to take them down. It relaxed him, really. Killing was something he knew how to do. Something he was unsettingly good at. It was the mundane things, now, that made him take pause. His pulse was so loud in his ears that he nearly couldn’t hear the footsteps of Wheaty and Kim Rye as they made their way toward him.

He couldn’t ignore their silhouettes next to him, against the night sky, but it didn’t mean he didn’t try anyway.

“Just … be careful,” Wheaty told Kim helplessly.

Kim scoffed. “For God’s sakes, Wheaty, he’s not an animal.”

Pratt thought that on one level, that was probably true. On another, it couldn’t be further from.

Kim knelt beside Pratt. He allowed himself to look at her, and he could hear the soft intake of her breath. The way his eyes must have looked only adjacent to human. Enough to bring to mind the things they had built these walls to get away from.

She herself was a pretty thing, he wouldn’t argue. There was a constant fight in her. She was the perfect person to lead a place like this; she wouldn’t give it up for anything. It was the sort of tough that people were supposed to be. The sort of strong that didn’t include the constant pain and suffering that Jacob had thought was the only method. She had cut her hair since he had last seen her, short, an undercut on one side, the rest falling in an asymmetrical cut across her face. People who got those sort of haircuts tended to look tougher as a result, but Kim had always been that way.

Still, there was a gentleness to her. She rested her hand on one of the arms crossed on top of his drawn-up knees, and she said, “Oh, sweetheart. You must have gone through so much. I’m so sorry.”

Pratt felt like this would probably end up being the rest of his life, if he allowed himself to interact with other people past this. People forever walking on eggshells around him, scared to say anything to either set him off or remind him of everything he had lost. And it was unreal, because he was the one who should be sorry. He was the one who had let everything happen, who hadn’t been strong enough to save anyone, even after Jacob’s endless trials. What had they been for if what he became after them hadn’t even been able to protect the ones he loved? Maybe that was why he was leaning into it now — he had to make them mean something, because so far, he hadn’t been strong enough to do damn near anything.

He hadn’t said anything back to her, but Kim had a mother’s intuition. She knew what Pratt couldn’t say. He was stupid, really, to think he could hide anything from her just by keeping quiet. Especially this.

“It wasn’t your fault, you hear me? None of this was your fault.” She said it with such authority that even though he disagreed, he couldn’t say so. “I know what you’re thinking,” she continued, undeterred, “and nothing that happened was your fault. Earl and Joey would be so proud of you. So happy you’re alive. And Rook …”

And there it was. The slow, heavy heartache once again. He would’ve clutched his hand to his heart again, but he knew it wouldn’t help. He was sure Kim saw the flash of pain in his eyes.

Sure enough, her already-distressed expression fell even further. “Rook loved you so much, Pratt. You know that, right? They would want you to keep yourself in this big, crazy world. Hell, they’re probably up there right now wondering when you’re going to pull off a stunt anything near as crazy as the ones theyalways were.” She shook her head. Her expression was wistful. Some flicker of fondness crossed her eyes. Of course it did. Rook was everything good in the world, even after all they’d gone through. It was impossible to talk about Rook and not feel happiness somewhere within you.

“I know,” Pratt said. Even he could hear the way his voice was low with disuse. It had to be jarring. Before any of this, it had been difficult to get him to shut up.

Kim gave him a sad smile. His insides twisted. She pitied him. He didn’t need her pity. Pity was an emotion he had long since outgrown. Weak people were pitied. People who weren’t strong enough to prove themselves. And he hated that that seemed to be the only way he could think of things now: whether they were something that a strong or a weak person would do. There was a part of him that knew, really, that the world didn’t work like that. That it was conditioning. Ten years away from Jacob and the Veterans’ Center had taught him that. But at the same time it felt like to get rid of it entirely would require surgery. A scalpel to cut it out. His first thoughts (what Jacob would want, what Jacob would think, if Jacob would approve, always Jacob) versus his rational thoughts (anything except for Jacob). Probably his first thoughts would always be wondering if Jacob would say yes to whatever he was about to do. But at least now it was less of a monumental effort to push past them and remember that there had been a world before Jacob.

It helped, that it was Kim here. He hadn’t known her before Jacob, but he’d known her after, at least a little bit, and that was almost as good. Rook had introduced them, their fingers intertwined with his, and it was enough of a positive association that he didn’t hate her the way that he hated people he didn’t know.

Probably, he would still have remained near-silent, but Wheaty was there, too, and Wheaty was the closest thing Pratt had had to a friend in the past ten years. He was the only person Pratt really cared about disappointing.

“Wheaty’s right,” he continued oddly gruffly. Not at all the way he felt inside. The scared thing of his heart beat against the inside of his chest tentatively, like it was afraid of upsetting this strange Pratt that had been molded by someone who had no business changing any part of him. But it made you strong, that Jacob-voice inside of him said, and the other part, the part that he’d grown up with and the part that Rook had fallen in love with and the part that he had nightmares about succumbing to, said, The things you had to lose along the way to become like this weren’t worth losing for it. “I shouldn’t come through those gates,” he continued, ignoring the silent war within him. “I’m not the same person that you used to know, before all this.”

Even while he said it, he knew Kim would argue it. The fire in her eyes was nearly tangible. “None of us are the same people we were before all of this.”

“You don’t know the trials.”

He could hear the growl in his voice, the desperation for her to understand that she could never understand. Damn her for being so good. Damn her for seeing someone hurting and wanting to help—

She smacked him.

For a moment, no one breathed. The smack had been hard enough to make him face sideways, and he stayed that way now, in shock. For so long he’d been sure that his reaction to something like that would be to eviscerate whoever had done it. He’d been convinced that there was only a killer left in this skin.

He could tell, from the way Wheaty had stopped breathing, that, no matter how much he argued otherwise, he had been, too.

Kim fell forward, then, and gathered Pratt into a hug. Stunned, Pratt allowed her, and then, slowly, brought his own arms up to encircle her as she shook gently in his embrace.

“Were you in the underground, too? ‘cause me and Mommy and Daddy were in the underground for a long time. I wasn’t scared, though, ‘cause I got born underground.”

“Carmina, honey,” said Kim, exasperated in the way that one can only be when having to explain something to a young child many times before. “You weren’t born underground. Remember I told you how Daddy and I had to get to the clinic to have you? Remember I told you all about how Rook drove the truck and—” She blanched. “Actually, I really am not a fan of that story. I’d rather not revisit it.”

Carmina Rye was adorable, bright-eyed, and ten years old, which was an age Pratt didn’t know how to deal with. She had so many questions and he wasn’t sure how to answer a single one of them in the sweet spot that was neither talking down to her nor telling her more information than she needed to know. He looked helplessly at Wheaty, as if a twentysomething would be any more capable of bridging that gap.

“Yeah, I … was in the underground,” Pratt said slowly. It was clear Kim wasn’t going to save him from this; nor were any of the several people that they passed on their way up to the second floor of the main building, where Pratt and Wheaty would be staying for the foreseeable future. How long that future would end up being was anyone’s guess. He allowed himself to continue: “You were strong for being so brave. I got scared sometimes.”

With upsetting clarity, a memory flashed through his mind of Wheaty in the doorway, arms crossed, worrying at his bottom lip. It was a sight Pratt had seen many times before. He had rolled over and dragged his hand down his face, waiting a second to speak.

“I was screaming again,” he guessed. It wasn’t a question. He already knew.

Wheaty had nodded.

“Sorry,” Pratt had told him. Wheaty had obviously wanted to say something more, but he’d said it so many times by now that there was no use in it, and no victory, besides. Both of them had trauma responses; both of those trauma responses were messy and upsetting and irritating for all parties involved. “I’m gonna get up. Keep myself awake for a little bit. Go ahead, get some sleep.”

In the present, Carmina said, “Really? But you got guns an’ stuff. Well, they got locked up, but you got ‘em down in the underground. Hey— why’d they get locked up, anyway? Don’t you need ‘em for any bad guys?”

The answer was, of course, The things I’m afraid of can’t be hurt with guns. But how did you explain that to a ten-year-old?

Wheaty did take the lead, this time, just as Kim was opening her mouth, likely to shut the whole conversation down. She had to know how painful it was revisiting this. “Miz Carmina,” said Wheaty, crouching down beside her. “You know how sometimes you get real bad nightmares? The kind that feel really real, and you wake up thinkin’ you’re still in that nightmare?”

Carmina nodded enthusiastically. “Once I had a nightmare that Daddy was driving his plane and then the wheels fell off and so did the wings and we were gonna crash into the ground.”

“Right. Well, Mr. Pratt here has nightmares like that all the time. And sometimes, it takes a really long time for him to realize he was just dreaming. Long enough for him to get his gun and try to hurt the things that scared him, even though they’re not real. That make sense?”

Carmina was blinking up at Pratt — non-judgmentally, of course, and actually with a fair amount of sympathy, but it made him feel scrutinized all the same.

“Ohhhh,” she said, Wheaty’s logic apparently making perfect sense to her. Thank God for small miracles. And thank God Wheaty hadn’t called him Deputy Pratt. He hadn’t deserved that title for ten years, and maybe longer. “Got it. But everyone else got guns. So we can blow up the bad guys.” She lifted an invisible shotgun, closed one eye, and aimed at a spot at the end of the hall. “Boom! Mommy and Daddy won’t let me use a gun yet, but I held one, and when they let me use one I’m gonna blow off the bad guys’ heads.”

“Leeeet’s get you to bed, Carmina.” Kim shuffled her daughter off down the hall and smiled apologetically over her shoulder. “Those two rooms past the column are yours. Make yourselves at home!”

“There’s gonna be blood and guts everywhere,” Carmina was saying, even as she was hurried along by her mother, “and I’m gonna bring the bodies in, and maybe we can make a real good steak out of ‘em. Can you make a human steak?”

“CARMINA RYE.”

Wheaty had his fist pressed in front of his mouth to silence his laughter. Once the two of them were out of sight, he said, “Well, no one can say she’s not Kim and Nick’s daughter.”

The rooms they had been gifted were sparse in decor, unsurprisingly. Everything aboveground had been blown off the map. The simple bed that graced each room had been crafted by hand, probably from the numerous trees that grew around Prosperity. The mattresses looked to have been repurposed from the beds people had slept in down in the various vaults dotting Hope County. Other than that, there was only a dresser, handcrafted as well, across the room, and a shelf against the wall in case someone needed a spot to be able to grab their essentials quickly. In each of the rooms, there was a west-facing window looking out over the different resource stations within Prosperity.

All in all, a veritable paradise, for anyone that wasn’t Staci Pratt.

He was glad that Wheaty was getting situated in Prosperity, that he was invited to dinner and went, even though Pratt didn’t, that Pratt could hear the spirited conversation from outside the window, the laughter that broke out every few minutes, the breeze that came gently through the screen, a picturesque summer night if it hadn’t been for the empty skyline. If you were coming up out of an underground bunker you’d been in for the past ten years this would have been the culmination of things you would want to experience. It would have reminded you that the world goes on, that even though so much had been lost, not everything had been, and that you could build another home where the first one had gone up in flames.

If you hadn’t been forever, irreversibly changed since before the bombs.

Pratt lay there in the empty room, staring across it at the opposite wall, losing himself in the grain of the wood, which was lrss painful than looking around the room and seeing the ghosts of the people he had loved there. Hudson would have been by the door, loading a shotgun, rag in her teeth, laser-focused and ready for anything, itching to leave the building and get out into the field. Whitehorse would have pretended to be pissed off at something trivial in order to keep them motivated, but really you’d be able to tell by the glint in his eyes that he was looking forward to de-stressing that night at the bar and not quite remembering how he’d gotten home, but of course in Fall’s End it wouldn’t have mattered, because there was only the one road anyhow, and if you didn’t make it home there were plenty of hay bales or backs of pickup trucks or sacks of grain that you could pass out against. And Rook…

He pressed the heel of his hand to the eye not buried in the pillow and sent away the thought of them.

Of course they haunted him. The last thing he’d seen before he’d been rescued was them, burning. And it was something he’d revisited against his will many times since, both in nightmares and in waking.

For the next two weeks, he passed through life like molasses. He was merely existing, because one couldn’t call what he was doing “living”, not truly. He woke up, lay there for most of the day, and then went back to sleep when the sun fell below the horizon and night settled on Hope County once again. He wouldn’t have even eaten, but Wheaty continuously brought him a plate of whatever they were having for dinner that night while Kim attempted to hide down the hall and failed miserably — not because she was bad at keeping quiet, but because the person she was trying to fool was Pratt, and he had been irrevocably changed by Jacob to the point he might as well have been tracking her by her heat signature. Still, he let her think she was getting away with it. It was the kind thing to do, and he owed her much more than that.

At the end of two weeks, the nightmares were coming every single time he fell asleep. While they mercifully didn’t culminate in him waking up screaming anymore, he was sick and fucking tired of them.

Wheaty closed the door behind him when Pratt entrusted this to him. He set the plate on the floor and tried not to notice the way that Pratt fluidly moved from the bed to the floor in a way that resembled an animal far more than a human. He tried to ignore the way Pratt usually didn’t use silverware, not if it was a solid food. “Do you think, uh … and this is gonna sound weird, but, like, do you think laying Rook to rest would help?” When Pratt just stared at him, Wheaty said, “Sorry, sorry … I know it’s, like, pretty macabre and all. I don’t know, man, I’m just trying to help you.”

“No, you’re right.” God, he hated it, though. “We could try, I guess. Not like anything else has helped.”

So the two of them made plans for the day after to take a trip to the island in the middle of Silver Lake. Wheaty reassured everyone that they’d be returning, that this was just to put Pratt’s mind at ease, that maybe afterwards he’d feel comfortable coming out and joining everyone — but if he didn’t, Kim was quick to reassure him, it was fine, she wasn’t here to force him to move on when he wasn’t ready, and Pratt had to stop himself from saying, like, he wasn’t sure if he would ever be ready, but he sure was hoping this would do something, and then the two of them were setting back out the way they’d came, except that this time they kept the rising sun close by.

“You know you didn’t have to come with me,” Pratt said when the silence stretched too thin between them, like a thing about to snap.

Wheaty rolled his eyes. Even if Pratt hadn’t been matching steps with him, he would have been able to tell. “Shut up, man.”

He didn’t have to explain why he was coming along. By now, the two of them were as inseparable as Patrick and Devon, although without the romantic aspect of it. (Wheaty being seven years younger had nothing to do with it. Pratt’s heart belonged to one person and one person only. One person who was certainly nothing but scorch marks in the dirt.) Though Pratt had been tempted to lose Wheaty along the way and strike out on his own — because as much as he was grateful for somewhere to call home at the end of a long day, once he started actually going out and doing things during those days, he couldn’t help but feel trapped; if not by Kim, then by the concept of a building itself — he couldn’t convince himself that doing such a thing wouldn’t be cruel beyond forgiveness. At least Wheaty had found a home. Pratt was willing to rein his discomfort and restlessness in and leash it if it meant this person who had put up with all of his trauma response could have a chance at a normal life.

“I feel bad,” said Wheaty, because he, too, knew he didn’t have to explain himself, that there was no separating the two of them, not easily, anyway. “The last time Rook and I saw each other, I flipped out on them for killing Eli. I mean, there was the funeral, but…” Wheaty sniffed, and it could have been the chill in the air or it could have been the regret refusing to stay buried. “…I don’t know. After living with you for so long, and seeing what all that did to you … I guess I just…” He sighed. “…I wish I could, like, say something. Like, I understand now, or something like that. I mean, I don’t understand, not really, like, it didn’t happen to me, obviously, but … Eli would have wanted us to become friends.” His eyes were trained on the ground. “We never did get to be friends.”

And it sucked, because Rook would have wanted to be friends, too. They were the kind of person that might have taken a little getting used to, but once you did, you could so easily fall into a natural rhythm with them. Someone whose puzzle fit every single piece, even if it took a little bit of jostling to get it to connect completely.

But there were a lot of if s in this world. And a lot of maybe s. An endless world of possibilities cut short with the flash of a nuclear bomb.

They found the crash site easily. Not because the truck was there, or because any of the corpses were there, because of course they weren’t. But because Pratt would never be able to forget this place as long as he lived. Every detail of this landscape was burned into his mind forever.  Not even dreams warped the accuracy. He would know it in five years. He would know it in twenty. If he lived to be a thousand years old he would still be able to find the exact spot where he had lay dying among the bodies of the people he’d loved as if they carried his heart inside their hearts. Coworkers that had become friends that had become family, even if it was just because of what they’d all been through.

Wheaty nervously shifted from one foot to the other. “You want me to, uh, go somewhere or something?”

Pratt didn’t respond. He was on his knees in the dirt, staring at the exact spot the truck had come to a screeching halt. The fire had claimed it, and he assumed scavengers had claimed the rest.

“Okay,” said Wheaty. “I’m gonna go walk around a little. Shout if you need anything. Think we’re the only ones here, though.” Hands on his hips, he studied the surrounding area. Other than the dead radio tower a ways off, the only sign anyone had been here in the past twenty years was the presence of the two of them. ‘Okay,” he said again when Pratt didn’t answer, “I’ll be back. Take your time.”

There was the sound of retreating footsteps as Wheaty began to wander the area.

“I’m so sorry,” Pratt found himself whispering to the dirt once he was sure Wheaty was far enough away. He gripped the dirt and saplings in the spot where they’d all died — because you couldn’t look at the way Pratt was now and say that more than half of him hadn’t died here — and moved his fingers inward, digging up the topmost layer. Like if he could uncover a trace of them they would spring back to life, good as new, making fun of him for being so concerned about them. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered again, and he wasn’t even crying. He couldn’t. He didn’t know how to express the grief within him. It choked out every other emotion he’d tried to feel, until the only one that could even hope to break through was fear, and Jacob had told him that he either had to banish that fear or make it work for him.

He should have driven, he thought. He hadn’t trusted himself, because of what the trials had done to him. Hadn’t trusted himself to take the lead in anything. Hadn’t trusted himself to be autonomous. He’d never been able to, not really. When he’d piloted the helicopter he’d ended up crashing it, even with Hudson co-piloting. When he’d gone through the trials he’d consistently placed poorly, but Jacob had kept him around as an example, and as the bait on the end of the string for Rook, of course. He’d only ever been something that was only of use when it was to get something else, something better. He’d handed Jacob the music box, the very thing that sent Rook through hell, because he was nothing more than a tool for someone more powerful to wield.

But he should have fucking driven the truck anyway.

He’d let Rook do it because they were the kind of person that took charge, and, god, they were so badass, the most badass person he’d ever known, and he couldn’t believe they saw anything in someone like him, and so with stars in his eyes even then he’d let them drive because if anyone could drive a truck through a fucking nuclear war and come out unscathed on the other side it was them.

But not this time.

And, god, the bruises. The mottled purple and black and red all mixing together on Hudson’s face. Her limp body next to him, how he’d felt the stillness of her, even in his delirium. And Whitehorse’s head through the windshield. The quiet of it, while fire crackled all around them. He’d never known the sheriff to go so quiet in the face of adversity. He’d never known him to be in this sort of situation and not getting a plan together, thinking on his feet, figuring out how the hell we’re gonna get out of this one.

And Rook. In the front seat, burning.

He hadn’t even been able to see their face one last time.

He thought about just staying here, just letting nature overtake him. Part of him wanted to see it as poetic. The other part knew he would just be doing it so he didn’t have to live with the pain of this new world, where everything he’d ever known had been killed forever.

Wheaty called, tentatively, from across the clearing, “Hey, man … whenever you’re done, you really gotta come see this.”

They’d been so close to the bunker.

Pratt marveled as he and Wheaty descended down into it. Wheaty hadn’t known, didn’t really frequent Silver Lake, and probably didn’t want to get caught in a bunker that might be full-up or closed off or not have enough resources for more than one person — whatever the reason he’d taken Pratt to the Wolf’s Den instead, it didn’t matter. The fact of it was that someone had been here for the last ten years. And not someone the two of them wanted to meet if the rudimentary Eden’s Gate crosses on the walls of the bunker were any clue to who the inhabitants had been. And normally neither of them would have willingly gone down into a place with those horrible crosses on the walls, but the doors had been open and the air was still as death inside, so the least they could do was take a look and see if they could swipe anything now that the residents had left for greener pastures.

The light inside the bunker was as pink as the fields of verbanas outside, even though the candles lining the bunker, eternally on fire (and Pratt had stopped trying to understand how things regarding Eden’s Gate made any logical sense, because they often didn’t), were topped with orange flame. He hovered his fingers over the wall as the two of them carefully made their way deeper. Tally marks were etched into the walls — someone counting the days? They were a little bit frantic, a little bit jagged, like the person who had done them was beginning to lose their mind. There were so many of them. Years’ worth of them. The ones in the middle were desperate squiggles — and then, at some point, they straightened out again, clean and methodical.

He caught sight of a slip of paper on one of the shelves. He wouldn’t have looked closer, except…

He swallowed.

“That’s Rook’s handwriting.”

Wheaty, who was a few steps ahead of Pratt, froze where he was and turned around slowly, eyes wide and shining in the candlelight. He said, “Real shit?”

“Yeah.” Heart heavy, Pratt fished the paper out of its hiding place and read every word as slowly as he possibly could, savoring this gift, this new thing of Rook’s. But as he took in the contents he wished he had done it all at once and gotten it over with.

I can’t think, I’m getting hungry
we need to go topside soon but I’m terrified
I think I did the right thing
I want to do the right thing now
he says he forgives me but I can’t
I don’t know if I did the right thing
I don’t understand and all he gives me is the Word

He silently passed it to Wheaty.

“Jesus Christ,” Wheaty said once he’d finished. 

When he passed it back to Pratt, the other man had no idea what to do with it. He was holding it so tightly he was afraid he would tear it in two. It was already so flimsy, just a weathered piece of notebook paper, now that it had been exposed to the elements for who knew how long. In the end, he carefully folded it and slipped it into the pocket of his jeans, where he let his fingers linger against it for a moment. God, at least now he had something concrete.

Searching his eyes, Wheaty said, “Rook was down here, then. With Joseph.”

That much was abundantly clear. Pratt couldn’t stop turning the thought over in his mind.

Wheaty swallowed, hard. “And the bunker’s open.”

It was obvious what he was getting at. But the thought of it was far too much reward for far too much risk. That he’d left Rook there, burning, when they weren’t even dead. His own ability to do anything for them aside, he should have begged Wheaty to make sure that they were okay. Somehow. He should have at least said their name. Surely he could have managed that much.

So it was easier to block it out. To insist that they had died somewhere along the way, that this was a false hope. He wouldn’t have his heart broken again if that was the case. He wouldn’t crest the highest wave just to fall into the deepest valley.

Wheaty must have seen this in his eyes. He had long ago become an expert in reading Pratt.

He said, “Okay. Let’s keep going. Just in case.”

They moved slowly, now, giving every room they passed twice the attention they might have before. It had been lived in, but only very recently. Days, possibly. You could feel it in the air, how it had only just now been stirred up, how before that it had sat silent and still as a tomb. Dust motes danced in what rays of sunlight the two of them could see from the top of the stairs.

In the refrigerator in the kitchen, they discovered row after row of some kind of hybrid fruit neither of them had ever seen before. It looked mostly like an apple, but when Wheaty picked one up and turned it over in his fingers he said it felt more like a peach. And, when he brought it to his face, he claimed that it smelled more like a strawberry. They cut it open and stared at it in wonder when the inside came into view, pure white with black seeds like a dragon fruit, except that the seeds were in the shape of the Eden’s Gate cross.

“What the fuuuuck,” said Wheaty, which was pretty much the endorsement Pratt would have given it if he could have forced himself to speak.

Only one more room now, though. It was the pinkest room of them all, so bright the light spilled out into the hallway. Candles rimmed this room like someone had deliberately gathered them from other parts of the bunker, terrified to be left in the dark. Pratt found his Beretta in its holster at his side and closed his fingers around the handle. Probably overkill, if someone was here, but he couldn’t imagine anyone who would want to stay in this place besides a Peggie, and he was so goddamn motherfucking sick of those people.

He slid into the doorway and brought the Beretta up in one motion, just the way he’d been taught.

And immediately dropped it.

It went clattering across the floor. Wheaty yelped behind him as he skittered away, out of its path. “Yo, what’s the big idea? You could have— No way, dude. Holy fucking shit.”

He was now standing as still and as slack-jawed as Pratt.

Because inside that last room in the bunker, which was empty save for endless tally marks scrawled across the wall, and scores and scores of those candles, so many that darkness could never have had a home here even if it had tried, and a bed with handcuffs attached to it that imprisoned no one, not anymore, but must have used to imprison a person, was the very person they had used to imprison. At first, you wouldn’t be mistaken for thinking the form on the bed was a corpse. It was lying on its side, legs stretched out, arms placed haphazardly, one atop the other. The dark hair rested every which way, including bits and pieces that must have been tickling its eyes and nose — but it made no move to brush them away. It was the breathing that did it, really, that clued them in — it was only doing it what amounted to a few times a minute, but it was doing it. This thing was alive.

And Pratt was laughing, now, because he could either do that or he could break entirely. Or maybe the laughing meant he was breaking entirely. He stood there, and he laughed, and he laughed, and he laughed, and he was crying, and he was frantically wiping the tears off his face, and he said, “God, what a fucked-up, beautiful dream to have, right?”

Wheaty’s hand was on his arm.

He stopped mid-laugh.

He looked back at Wheaty, who was watching him carefully.

And then he looked back at the room. And Rook was no longer in the bed. They were standing in the doorway.

Wheaty flinched back. He hadn’t even seen them move.

Rook didn’t tower over him, not by more than a few inches, but there was something about them that made it feel like they did, anyway. They searched him with eyes that had had the irises and pupils completely removed. Now, the only thing marking the whites of their eyes was a black Eden’s Gate symbol. It was impossible — but Eden’s Gate was impossible. The fact that Rook was standing here before him was impossible. The fact that they were alive was wildly, ridiculously impossible.

But Rook had always been good at circumventing the impossible.

With tears springing to his eyes, the old Pratt — because that’s all it had taken, to shunt him back to those days when he still had something to live for, the days where he had prayed fervently for Rook’s deliverance as he sat there in that horrible chair underground, the days where he had been intimately aware that he was nothing, that he would always be nothing, that the only reason he was worth anything was that it meant Jacob could get closer to Rook — curled his fingers around Rook’s biceps and drew them down in wonder until he was grasping their wrists. Not for the first time he was struck by how pale he seemed against their warm Mizrahi brown. He gave another disbelieving laugh, and he said, “Oh my God. It’s you — I mean, I thought you were — I can’t believe you — I. It’s you.”

It was all he could manage to say because, like, holy shit. It was them.

As if to cement this, Wheaty said, “Holy shit, dude. I can’t believe you’re alive. I—”

Rook tugged Pratt forward, tight to their chest. He accepted, euphoric, and looped his arms around them. The reality of their body, here, in his arms — Jesus Christ. He was giddy with it. He tightened his grip on them just to make sure it was really happening. Just to convince himself of the realness of them.

In his periphery, he could see a trickle of blood running along the cement floor.

Huh. Weird.

And then Rook was pulling their right hand out of its awkward position against Pratt’s chest.

Or, rather, inside his chest…?

Where it had been clutching Pratt’s heart.

They pulled it out, as easily as if he’d been made of cardboard.

It was still frantically pumping despite not being attached to any veins or arteries, like a last, desperate hope.

Wheaty couldn’t even scream.

Pratt, eyes wide as he realized, very slowly, what was happening, didn’t so much release his hold on Rook as crumpled against them. His body was at their feet; his arms had sloped downwards to half-heartedly form a broken circle around their ankles. They did loom over him now, and though he couldn’t form a coherent thought, he said, listlessly, to the wall, “I … missed you.”

And then everything was still as Staci Pratt died.

Chapter Text

Pratt’s eyes fluttered open, only to have to squint them against the harshness of the bright yellow sun shining almost directly overhead.

Everything ached. He didn’t feel well-rested in the slightest. He shut his eyes and, presumably, fell asleep again, because the next time he opened his eyes the sun had moved a quarter of the way across the sky, even though he felt like he’d slept maybe three minutes in total. He thought maybe he could stagger through the world for an hour or two before succumbing to exhaustion once more.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, pushing himself up, surprised to hear the gravel in his voice.

There was a sound of rushing water coming from his right — not anything like the still and silent waters of the lake that had surrounded Dutch’s island. Cascading over a cliff a short way away was a waterfall, reflecting the sun overhead brightly. Arching above him were trees — trees. For a moment he wondered if the bombs had just been a terrible dream. He’d thought all along that the nuclear hellfire that had ended the world had been too permanent to be real. He’d kept expecting himself to wake up from the nightmare that was Hope County after the bombs. And here he was now, doing it.

But his desperate wish was dashed moments after. Ironically, it was dashed by another fervent hope he’d had that had come to be true.

Rook was standing over him. He hadn’t even seen them move. Just like before.

Even that would have been grounds to believe that he was dreaming — or had been dreaming — or was about to dream — because he wasn’t sure anymore what was real and what wasn’t, so insubstantial was everything he’d thought had been concrete. But as he blinked up at them he could see the Eden’s Gate symbol replacing their pupils, floating in their otherwise white eyes, studying him, tracking every minute movement he made as if he was nothing but prey.

“Oh my god,” he said, because what else did you say? And then, regardless of whatever situation had brought them to him: “Rook.”

They dropped to their knees, one on each side of his legs, bent low like a wolf might, sniffing at him. He was forced to lower himself a little bit, propping himself up with only his elbows, as they sniffed at his chest, and then at the groove between his shoulder and his neck, and then, finally, just shy of his throat. He swallowed.

“Rook,” he asked, trying to bring them back, “are … are you real?”

They stiffened.

He remembered asking them the same thing when they’d come down to save him from that awful room in Jacob’s armory. He remembered how he’d been sitting there for days on end, starving, dehydrated, alone in the dark except when Jacob would come to taunt him, and sometimes the taunting was best done by leaving him alone, because sometimes the worst torture was what your own mind came up with. He remembered how he’d barely been able to open his eyes when the door had been shoved open, and then they were there, their silhouette against the backlight, and a flower had bloomed and burst inside the dead garden of his chest.

And he’d asked, then: Rook … are you real?

Rook must have remembered that, at least — because they circled their arms around him, awkwardly, the way someone not at all used to doing such a thing would, trying to figure out how to position their fingers during the whole ordeal. Pratt, unable to keep from reciprocating such an affectionate gesture, lowered himself back onto the ground and did the same, one hand sinking into the waves of black hair that fell over one shoulder. They were cheek-to-cheek; he could hear them opening their mouth, trying to figure out something to say, and then closing it again when they failed to come up with anything.

Finally, they whispered, simply, “Staci.”

Pratt had always hated his first name. He kept it a secret from everyone he knew as long as he could, but official documentation in the academy and during his time on Whitehorse’s team had destroyed those efforts. Still, just before they’d been on their way to Hope County, in the days leading up to that fateful trip, he’d trusted Rook with it, asked them not to tell the locals — not like they were planning to, of course, but you could never be sure when something was going to slip out — and they’d assured him they would keep it safe. And they had. They’d kept it so safe that he didn’t mind hearing it out of their mouth, because his name in their voice was never cruel, never derogatory. His name in their voice had always felt so full of affection.

That was how he felt now, even with Rook like this. They said it soft and warm, and it pooled in his heart like thick honey.

His eyes were wet. He pressed them into Rook’s hair, but after a moment the relief crashing through him at being able to hold them again was too great. He said through his tears, “I’m never letting you go again. I’m never letting you out of my sight, Rook.”

Rook pressed their lips against the side of his face in a long cheek kiss. “‘kay, Staci. I think that’s good. I like that.”

Their words were disjointed, the way someone who was not at all used to speaking, let alone speaking English, would speak. As Rook had always had a great grasp on the English language, this was unusual. They’d been quiet, but never to the point of forgetting how to form words or sentences. He wondered if it had been a side effect of Jacob’s conditioning. He himself had become little more than a killing machine until he’d seen Rook again and every single sunlit memory he’d ever had had burst through his consciousness unbidden. He wondered if something similar had happened to them.

“How are you alive?” he asked, because that was the pressing question. He’d seen them. He’d seen them burning.

The answer didn’t come from him. It came from off to the side, accompanying approaching footsteps. Into his field of vision walked—

“Wheaty?!”

Wheaty, with dark scruff down his chin and across his jaw and world-weariness in his eyes, gave a tired smile as he knelt beside his friend. “Yeah, man,” he said, and his voice, just like the rest of him, was full-grown now, rich and smooth. “We got a lot of shit to catch you up on.”

Pratt’s hand was clutched to his heart.

Or, rather, the void in his chest that had once housed his heart. Now, his fingers were curled over a massive white scar in the shape of the Eden’s Gate symbol, splotched across his upper chest.

“Are you gonna be okay?” Wheaty asked once he’d finished telling Pratt the news. He was relaxing in the middle of a nest of blankets — the only furniture Rook allowed in the makeshift shelter they were staying in. There were tarps up top, sloping towards the sky, keeping them from getting rained on, but otherwise the shelter was vacant save for a few plants off to the side and some cookware that had seen better days.

“Seven … years…” Pratt repeated, as if that would make it easier to believe.

Rook was staring at him, concerned, but he couldn’t make himself meet their eyes. Once again his world had been entirely upended, and he had no choice but to go along with what he was being told, even though it had been so out of the realm of possibility before now. He thought he might be having a panic attack. Could you get those without having a heart?

Rook made a whimpering sound, more animal than human. A lot of things about them were now more animal than human.

“And,” he said, “and you’ve been living up here this whole time?”

Up here was very far north. He couldn’t imagine how Wheaty and Rook had gotten him up here. Had Rook carried him? Across the county, and then all the way up this mountain?

“Well, yeah. I couldn’t exactly get away. Rook was, ah…” Wheaty rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. It was a very young-looking expression to be on the face of a thirty-five-year-old. “…let’s just say it took a while for Rook to, uhm, remember who we were. And, like, during that time … I may have tried to escape from here once or twice. Or, uh, a lot of times. And … Rook may have gone absolutely apeshit trying to keep me here, and, uh…”

He trailed off, clearly unwilling to get more explicit.

“Rook,” Pratt said, in a tone approaching what one would use to chastise a household pet, “what did you do?”

Rook bit their lip and kicked gently at a rock. Instead of harmlessly skipping over the ground, Rook’s gentle kick sent the rock flying through the air, landing what sounded like more than two hundred feet away. While Pratt stared at them in shock, Rook didn’t seem to think anything was out of the ordinary and kept their eyes cast downwards.

“It’s okay,” said Wheaty, trying to help them onwards. “I’m better now. And, like, it isn’t the first time Rook’s done something they didn’t mean to— ah, shit, Rook, sorry. Not trying to rip open old wounds.”

“‘m sad,” Rook mumbled. Pratt wondered if they had even remembered how to speak language before he and Wheaty had showed up.

Wheaty nodded. “Good, Rook. How come?”

“‘cause I’m scared Staci will be mad at me.”

“He won’t be mad at you. He wasn’t mad at you when you did it before.”

His voice hitched a little, there.

Rook shook their head. “No, that’s different. What I did to Eli was fun.”

Pratt was horrified. “Rook! What the hell?!”

He chanced a glance at Wheaty, whose jaw was tight and whose mouth was pressed into a thin line. Fuck. If he couldn’t get Rook under control, he and Wheaty weren’t going to be able to stay friends for very long, with or without the ten years they’d spent in the bunker. Even that sort of friendship had its limits.

But Wheaty just said, voice carefully neutral, “Rook is … like this now. It takes some getting used to.”

“No,” said Pratt, “I don’t care. That was fucked-up.” He looked back over at Rook, who had flinched back, their shoulders drawn up as if they were retreating into themselves. They were as panicked as it was possible for a person only barely holding onto humanity to look. “Rook,” he said, “you’re going to apologize to Wheaty, and you’re going to do it right the fuck now.”

“Ah—” Rook shrieked, “—sorry!”

Before Wheaty had a chance to accept it, Pratt said, admonishing, “Rook. I know you. That wasn’t an apology.”

They had brought their hands up to cover their face. From behind them, they shook their head and said, “Nuh-uh.”

“You’re not sorry for what you did to Eli, are you?”

“No.”

“You just don’t want me mad at you.”

Rook nodded vigorously. “Don’t want Staci mad at me.”

“Listen, Pratt,” said Wheaty. “It’s really okay. I promise. Rook apologized to me seventeen years ago, after it first happened. They left me a note before they went to rescue you from Jacob’s bunker. And … I forgave them. ‘cause it’s what Eli would have wanted. And, uh, I apologized to them, now, like, in the time we spent together, for losing it on them when I saw what they’d done to him. It’s never going to be okay, but … it’s okay.” He gave them a genuine smile, tinged with exhaustion as it was. “Rook’s my friend. Even like this.” Before Pratt had a chance to interject, Wheaty said, “Rook, you should tell your fiancé what you are sad about.”

Rook shook their head again, more fervently than before, their black hair whipping around and settling haphazardly across their hands and face. “No, it’s bad.”

“You said you were gonna try and tell him, right?”

“Yeah … but it’s hard…”

“Remember I told you it was gonna be? But that you had to do it, anyway, ‘cause that’s what people who are strong do?”

Well, that was a blow to the chest. At least Wheaty was using Jacob’s insistence on strength for good, he guessed. It still sucked to see how it was the only thing that got through to them — because they brought their hands down from their face, steeled themselves, took a deep breath, and nodded.

“Hurt Wheaty,” they said, despairing.

Pratt stared at them.

“Bad,” they amended self-destructively.

“I was really hoping it would fly under the radar,” Wheaty said. “But when Rook found out you were my friend, they were so adamant about telling you.”

“How?” Pratt managed to ask.

Rook’s hands cupped invisible twin limbs and then made a quick motion, as if snapping them.

“My legs,” explained Wheaty. “When I tried to escape. I thought I was really clever, you know, from growing up here. But your fiancé is, like, the apex predator of this world now. I might as well have been crashing around with a neon sign strapped to my back.”

The story, in full, went like this:

After they’d torn out Pratt’s heart seven years ago, Wheaty had lost his mind with terror. He’d been screaming Pratt’s name, then Rook’s, then whatever else came to mind, because he’d just seen the only friend he’d had for the past ten years die right in front of him, and he was convinced that he was going to be next. There’d been no question that Pratt was dead, and not even “maybe we can bring him back” dead but rather “it’s time to notify next of kin” dead, “is he an organ donor” dead, “get the grave ready and call a priest” dead. He’d been hysterical — screaming that Pratt was someone they loved, how could they do this, and what the fuck, Rook, Jesus fucking Christ, get a fucking grip!

“Are you just going to kill everyone you care about?!” he’d demanded of them. “First Eli, now Pratt, who the fuck else, huh?!”

Rook had been little more than a feral animal at this point, and had definitely planned on killing Wheaty after, because raw meat was usually as good as That, and when they ate it they didn’t have to do the scary thing with the big animal that exhausted them, but they were so surprised by the nerve of this fragile little creature berating them even while tears streamed down his face that they just stood there and watched. And then they’d looked down at the other human they’d killed, the one that had, for some reason, said kind words to them instead of squealing and crying and whatever else it was humans did before they died.

Fists tight by his sides, torn in between hatred and despair, Wheaty had snapped, “If there’s something you can fucking do now that you’re like this, then you better fucking do it, or you’re going to regret it for the rest of your fucking life.”

By then, Rook had been mostly in a daze. They’d shaken off the dead human and gone to the refrigerator, where That was stored in abundance, and brought one of them back to where Wheaty was hunched over Pratt, crying beside the bloody hole in his chest.

They had remembered feeling … guilty. They didn’t like feeling that way. They remembered having felt it at some point in the past, far enough away that they didn’t remember the specifics anymore, only that it was something they’d wanted to get rid of so badly they would have done anything. It had felt like this. They’d hated it.

Maybe if they made the dead human alive again, it would stop happening.

They sliced off a piece of the fruit with nails that functioned as knives — it wasn’t the sharpness of them, because they weren’t any sharper than human nails, but the speed. Anything moving at that speed would cleave something in two. They buried the majority of the fruit, the whole that they’d sliced from, into the cavity of Pratt’s chest, and then they’d forced his lips open and slipped the other piece between them. It remained there, because dead people couldn’t swallow, and Rook sat back, watching their handiwork, one bloody thumb pressed to their bottom lip.

It had taken quite a while. They’d thought maybe it wouldn’t work after all. But then a light began to radiate from the cavity, and they watched as veins and arteries stitched themselves back together and connected to the fruit, and they watched as muscle and fat and tissue began to regrow, and then, a very long time later, as the skin grafted its way over his insides once more. From there, the Eden’s Gate symbol had pulsed white on his chest, and they watched him, still asleep, chew and swallow the piece of That that they’d given him.

“Oh, thank fuck,” Wheaty had said, sick with relief.

After that, they’d spent a little longer in the bunker, and then Rook had journeyed with Wheaty up into the mountains at the northernmost spot of Hope County. Wheaty had wanted to go back to Prosperity. Rook wouldn’t have it. It had been dubious they’d understood him in the first place — for all he knew, they only saw him pointing to the opposite direction they wanted to go and refused. And he’d had no say in the matter, of course. He’d just seen them rip the heart out of someone they’d been engaged to be married to. Surely he measured far less on their scale of importance. He’d sighed heavily, packed what he could, and followed along behind them.

His first escape attempt after they’d moved into the mountain shelter had not gone well. Wheaty spared Pratt the details, but it had ended in Rook breaking both of his legs, standing over him, eyes glinting, spine curved, arms dangling, as if they had only been walking on two legs out of courtesy. Wheaty had lay there in the grass, whimpering, figuring this was it, this was where his relatively good luck until now ran out, because Rook was definitely going to have him for dinner.

Instead, they’d simply lifted him up into their arms and brought him back to the shelter, where they’d set his bones; he’d passed out from the pain, so all he knew was that he had woken up and they’d been healed. Not perfectly — he walked with a limp now — but in a way that should not have been possible in the few short hours he’d been out.

“I think it’s the fruit,” Wheaty told him, in the present. “It’s all they’ve been eating for seventeen years. That, and raw meat.” At Pratt’s alarmed expression, he said, “Yeah. For the first few weeks they didn’t understand the concept of vegetarianism. Kept trying to feed me the shit they’d hunted. They got it after a while, but I almost starved a few times. The fruit’s the real wild shit, though. Apparently, it, uh … what was it you said, Rook? It’s like a dream where you’re chased by something?”

“Big bear,” Rook said miserably.

“Yeah. And it, uh, represents your sin or some shit like that?” He scratched at his jaw, knowing his explanation was inadequate but not knowing how to put it any better. “If you defeat it, I guess it’s like cleansing your soul or something. And then you can do all the stuff Rook does.”

“‘s hard,” said Rook. “I’m the strongest one. ‘cause you’re not supposed to eat more than one.”

They looked at Pratt meaningfully.

“Anyway,” said Wheaty, “back then, they couldn’t talk. So it was tough to get any of this information out of them. I had to reteach them. And, god…” He laughed. “…that was a nightmare. Getting them to sit still long enough to listen to me? But once they got used to it, it was nice. I think that’s a big reason we became friends again. I could see how frustrated they got not being able to speak. Oh — but their first language is Ojibwe, ‘cause, I’m sorry, Pratt, but I have no patience for English when it comes to teaching someone else to speak it, especially when they don’t speak at all. Plus, it was, like, really nice to have someone learning it because they actually gave a shit, not just because it was ‘exotic’ or whatever. So your fiancé's first language is Ojibwe now. Second is English. They’re gonna have to relearn Hebrew. I don’t know a damn thing about Hebrew. Sorry if talking dirty to you in Hebrew was a thing they did before.”

He looked half-sheepish, but mostly joking. Pratt was a little upset because, like, it had been a thing they’d done. And it had been sexy as hell. Ah, well.

“Oh, and uh…” Wheaty bit his lip, clearly debating whether or not to say this next part. “With Rook eating all that fruit, uhm … it did something more to them than just giving them powers. It … how do I put this … basically, uh, they’re gonna live forever.”

Despite the hesitation, Wheaty said it so casually Pratt thought he must have misheard him.

“And,” he continued, as if he hadn’t delivered the most earth-shattering news possible. “It’s not just Rook. The way they healed you … you’re gonna live forever, too.”

Rook had been the most badass person Pratt had known even before they’d changed into this creature. They’d traipsed off into the wilds of Montana alone, rescued the locals, gunned down Eden’s Gate, infiltrated three bunkers and saved their squadmates, killed the Seed siblings — Joseph aside — and learned how to craft explosives and homeopathics on the fly with only minimal room for error. They’d grappled up mountains, explored caves, killed feral animals — the list of things they’d done would have made the world’s top wilderness experts look like kids camping out in their backyards. It was part of the reason he’d fallen in love with them. When someone was that incredible, you couldn’t help but be caught up in their wake along with them.

But even that paled in comparison to how they were now.

Pratt had offhandedly mentioned that after seven years he thought he could probably use a bath. Wheaty, who had spent enough time with Rook to know where this was going, winced.

“Good luck, dude,” he said.

“Wh—”

Rook, a smile curving up the side of their mouth, disappeared and reappeared next to him as if by teleportation. They scooped him up in a bridal carry as if he weighed no more than a feather and shot out over the side of the waterfall. There was a terrifying moment in which both were suspended in midair — terrifying mostly because Pratt could see how far below them the actual river was, and because that second seemed to stretch into infinity — and then both of them dropped like stones.

The next few seconds were a maelstrom he couldn’t sort out. There was only wind, and then wet, and then underwater, and then crisp air again, and he was gasping in lungfuls of it, still cradled in Rook’s arms, his own arms hooked around their neck as tight as he could.

“Holy shit, Rook,” he managed to sputter after a few seconds.

Rook grinned at him from under a curtain of wet black hair.

So this was their lives now. Rook still doing all the same insane things as before, except now there were no longer any consequences. It was a good thing Rook had removed his heart, because he would have died of a heart attack by now if they hadn’t.

Once he’d calmed down, they let him go, and he did his best to wash himself without any soap. Rook was staring intently at something in the water; he left them to it as he thought about where they were supposed to go after this. Back to Prosperity? Was it even still around? If Kim was, she would have kept it running, he knew that for certain … but any number of things could have happened since Pratt had died. Was there even a world left outside of Hope County? He remembered telling Rook, before all of this, that he’d take them away after all of this Eden’s Gate business was done, because the both of them had more than earned a vacation, but that had been seventeen years ago. If they left now, what would they find? Miles and miles of scorched wasteland? At least Hope County was still green-and-breathing. If he took the risk and left, it wasn’t a sure bet they’d find anything still standing.

He wondered how much Rook remembered. If they remembered his promise to them to get them out of Hope County. Did they … fuck, did they even remember they were engaged? The question came to him for the first time and he felt the twist in his stomach like a dagger.

Don’t think about it, he told himself. Just worry about the here and now. Rook’s alive. That should be all that matters.

And they certainly were alive, weren’t they? He watched them as they went death-still — and then shoved their face into the water so quickly he felt it should have left a sonic boom. When they came out, they had a live, squirming, wriggling fish in their—

“Oh, gross, Rook, spit that out.”

—they were enjoying themselves, emphatically so. Like they must have wanted to before but couldn’t because of all the Eden’s Gate bullshit, the responsibility heaped on their shoulders. Now that Eden’s Gate was gone … they were happy. Finally. The way they should be. The way they deserved.

He sputtered again as water splashed into his face. Rook had surfaced near him, smooth as silver in the water, and had gently sprayed him with water in an attempt to get him to play with them. But when they saw the expression on his face, they tilted their head the way he’d seen foxes do when listening for something, and they blinked their big Eden’s Gate eyes at him.

“It’s nothing,” he told them, and forced a smile on. He was sure it wasn’t fooling them in the least. “Let’s go get Wheaty. And then… And then we’re gonna go home.”

Chapter Text

then

They rubbed their wrist against the handcuff, hard, enough to break the skin and send fresh trickles of blood down their arm. It was far from the first time they had done so, and they had the scars to prove it. At first, it had been an attempt to get away; now, it was an attempt to feel something.

The blood shot down their arm and settled into their deputy jacket, which was the only thing Joseph would let them wear. It was horrible — maddening, really — but they deserved to feel like this, after everything they'd done, after everyone they'd failed to save. They'd waged war against the Seeds, and for what? They'd been right all along. Everyone could have been safe, if only they'd kept their pride in check, admitted they didn't know everything, reigned in their wrath, stopped themselves from acting on impulse. Good job, they told themselves. Faith said you'd be the one to decide what happened, and you sure as fuck did decide what happened, didn't you? Idiot. If you'd just fucking behaved... or even just not put the fucking handcuffs on Joseph in the first place... then all of your friends and everyone in the county would still fucking be alive. And you wouldn't have killed them. And you wouldn't be the only one left alive when you're the least deserving.

If they hadn't gone and screwed everything up forever. If they hadn't kept going, if they'd just fucking stopped all the bullshit, if they'd just fucking... left. They could have found a way. It would have been difficult, to know that they'd left Hope County behind, but it would have been better than this, for everyone involved except they themselves. Christ, anything would have been better than this. They could have made a difficult journey through the Whitetail mountains, could have found their way to Missoula, could have come in with the National Guard. They would have heard the world was going to hell, if they'd done that, on the radio or by word of mouth, and the National Guard would definitely have accompanied them back to Hope County if they heard that the Seeds had bunkers. No one was going to pass up something like that, staring nuclear war in the face.

They squeezed their eyes shut. It never got better, and it never went away. That visual of the truck, the last thing they'd seen before they'd been taken by Joseph. The bombs, the fire, the truck coming to a stop and everyone fucking dead, Hudson, she'd been through so much and come out the other side stronger, and Whitehorse, they'd all let him down, even after he'd believed in them wholeheartedly, even after they'd gotten him kidnapped because they weren't strong enough to resist the Bliss, and Pratt, oh, Christ, Pratt, they were supposed to spend the rest of their lives together, he had said the second this mission ended he was gong to take them far away from this shit county, as far as possible, and learn how to sing them down the aisle to Eishet Chayil, smash the glass under the chuppah with the tallit wrapped tight around both of them. It had been so beautiful, and it had all crashed down into nothing as the fire raged around them and the world came to an end.

And it was their fault.

For all you've done to everyone you care about, I have every right to take that ring off your finger, Joseph had said as he sat in a chair opposite and leered at them through those terrible yellow sunglasses. It had been days, weeks ago, they weren't sure, time meant nothing down here and they half-expected time to no longer exist as a concept, because the worst had happened, the bombs had fallen, and surely there was no world left outside.

He had held their left hand in both of his, running his thumbs over the black band there. But I won't, he had told them. I won't, and do you know why? Because I'm gracious. Because I'm merciful. You deserve for me to take every bit of happiness from you and have you know even a fraction of the pain I am going through every day as a result of the things you refused to stop yourself from doing. But even now, I still see potential in you. So I'll leave it there, and you can look at it every day and remember what you did to the love of your life because you could not stop yourself from giving in to sin.

He'd made it very clear what he thought about them. That there was no one he wanted to have in this bunker less than them. That every day he woke up and remembered he shared this space with them was nothing short of a nightmare.

But even so, he fed them, and he let them sleep, and he saw something in them that he could nurture.

It was like that for a long time. One day blurred into the next until life felt like little more than an extended dream sequence in which nothing happened besides Joseph coming in to berate them, and then read to them from his Word, and then assure them that he was working on being able to forgive them for what they'd done.

And Jesus Christ, did Rook crave forgiveness.

Not from him, of course, not at first, anyway. But it was the only forgiveness they were going to get. He was the only one who could grant them salvation now. The only person who could pardon them for their crimes. And they wanted that so badly that it hurt every second of the day that he withheld it from them.

Their imprisonment became a desperate wait for his forgiveness, to the point that it consumed their every waking thought. To the point that they began to actually pay attention during his rambling sermons instead of tuning him out, because if they did, maybe he would see that they were trying to change, and maybe he would forgive them faster. Maybe if they changed, they would become something different than the terrible, awful person who had gotten all of their friends and a hell of a lot of innocents brutally murdered.

And over the years, Rook did change. They started earnestly looking forward to his sermons, wanting them, genuinely, and seeing meaning in them. Because if what Joseph said was true, and the world really was supposed to be cleansed in holy fire and made new, then maybe what they had done was okay, maybe it was supposed to happen, maybe instead of cutting peoples' lives short they had instead sent them home to a much lovelier place than this fucked-up world, and maybe they didn't have to flagellate themselves every second of the day, wishing that they'd chosen any other path than the one they had.

And once Rook believed that unflinchingly, once they believed the world was destined to be cleansed and that they could help Joseph as an instrument of his judgment in order to begin repaying him for what they'd done — that was when Joseph told them it was time to go.

now

"Man," said Wheaty, "it's gonna be a bitch and a half hiking all the way back to Prosperity. I guess I was just hoping we'd all stay up here forever so you wouldn't have to find out how bad it was, even though that sounds awful. Sorry, Rook, I know you like it up here, with the blankets and everything."

"They have blankets at Prosperity," Pratt said, watching Wheaty as he worked to lace up his shoes. The Wheaty he'd known had been full of youthful energy, even if he'd had no place to put it in the bunker. Watching him struggle to do something as simple as tying his shoes and knowing his fiancé had been the one to make it that way made his immortal heart ache.

Wheaty caught him staring and gave him a displeased look, hands on his hips. "See, this is why I didn't want to say anything. Who do you think helped patch me up afterwards? I mean, I know you're scared Rook is, like, completely different now and, like, you're worried you guys will never be able to date or get married or anything like that, but that's not true. They're just Rook. A little different, but... you guys are gonna have a normal life. I promise." He heaved a sigh. "Rook's my friend. I told you that. Not, like, I'm trying to convince myself they're my friend so I don't start crying about Eli again. My actual friend. Just like you are. So treat them like a real person, the way you did before the Collapse. Stop walking on eggshells around them. They can handle it."

Rook was quiet, standing beside Pratt, their hands folded behind their back. Like usual, they didn't show their feelings on the subject, choosing instead to remain silent and pensive, but Pratt reached over and slid his hands down their arms, bringing them back around their front and continuing on until he was holding their hands, rubbing his thumbs overtop of them the way he had used to before all of this. He could see a light in their eyes, like doing so had dredged up the memory. Would Rook come back, the way they had used to be, if he kept doing things like this? If he reminded them about their life before?

He hoped so. He loved them so much, and he knew this change had not been their choice.

On their journey back to Prosperity, Pratt's heart was racing, and not just because of the prospect of seeing people again that he hadn't seen for seven years. There was some sort of compound close by the lake, and though Joseph's compound hadn't looked quite the same, he had heard Jacob's plan for how to live after the Collapse and this was an approximation of it. He'd said they were going to live off the land, and from what he could see of it, it appeared the compound was following those rules, at least from the outside. They gave it a wide berth as they passed, and a low growl rumbled in Rook's throat, like they were trying to keep it from coming any closer. Their Eden's Gate eyes were narrowed, and they tightened their grip on Wheaty's legs — he was riding on their back, with his arms looped around their neck; Pratt wondered if they could see all the way into the compound or if the things their imagination was supplying were terrifying enough.

His heartbeat — or was it a phantom heartbeat? He wasn't quite sure how this new body worked — calmed down as the compound faded into the distance behind them, and when it was nothing but a speck on the horizon, he felt he could finally exhale. There were no shortage of strange things they came across as they kept walking: cars spraypainted and shoved halfway into the ground so that they slanted up and down like Cadillac Ranch; monster fish that snapped at their ankles as they walked beside the river; buildings that they had visited time and time again either derelict and crumbling or completely gone. But none of them held the sort of terror that seeing the continuation of the Project at Eden's Gate did.

For the first time, he realized Prosperity might not even still be there. A lot of things could change in seven years. Maybe Kim had packed up and moved south, or maybe whoever had spraypainted these cars had forced her and hers out of their community and taken over. He hoped that wasn't the case, if only for Rook's sake. Could a person survive that many traumatic blows to their mind? They were barely holding on as it was.

He pushed the thought out of his mind. Prosperity would be there. It had to be.

They stopped a few moments later, the sun lazily drifting towards the horizon. The air was beginning to cool, and massive cumulus clouds gathered close enough together that they were never more than a minute or two in direct sunlight.

"Gonna go, uh... have some alone time," Wheaty said as he hobbled off into the thickest copse of trees he could find (which wasn't very thick). He must have guessed Pratt was going to ask him to stay close due to his injury, because he called back: "If anything dangerous so much as breathes in my direction, Rook will be there to beat its ass. Right, Rook?"

Rook nodded emphatically.

And so the two of them were left alone, sitting in grass that was flourishing despite everything that had happened. Rook's fingers grasped at it absently as they gazed at the mountains in the distance, which were blackened even all this time later with the scorch marks from the bombs. Their Eden's Gate eyes flicked around constantly, as if they couldn't take everything in all at once, like a cat that had been let outside and was experiencing a thousand new sights and smells a minute. Pratt knew the feeling. It had been the same one he'd had when he and Wheaty had climbed out of the bunker that first day seven years ago. So much to absorb. Even though he'd spent months here before the Collapse, the bombs had made everything seem completely new.

Rook turned to him and tilted their head quizzically.

They had always had an uncanny knack for knowing when he wanted to say something but didn't know how to say it. Patient and quiet, they would wait for him as he put it into words. Even as awkward as he was with conversation, real conversation, the kind you put your emotions into, they were never judgmental about it. Their attention had never been something he had had to fear.

So he took a moment to figure out what he wanted to say. And then he said it.

"Rook... I just can't believe you're here with me. I really can't. I can't stop looking at you. I feel like any minute I'm gonna wake up and it'll all have been a dream." He moved over so that their shoulders were touching — softly, at first, to make sure they were comfortable with it, because the rules for what Rook was comfortable with had changed entirely, and he had to ask permission all over again for things he'd known they were alright with before, and then, when they didn't resist, he put his weight into it, as if he was about to fall asleep on their shoulder. "Give me your left hand."

They did, lifting it from the grass beside them and letting the blades they'd been tearing up flutter to the ground. Pratt took hold of it gently with his right hand. The outside of their skin felt like fragile glass, even though he knew that within them rested the world's most lethal organic killing machine. Diamond-hard power rested within their bones and muscles, but here in the Montana forest with the sun overhead and the breeze lifting strands of their midnight-black hair ever so softly, and Pratt's chest so full of love for them that he thought it might burst and really, really kill him this time, they reminded him of spun sugar, of ultra-thin filaments woven together in a gorgeous tapestry.

He rubbed his thumb gently over the black zirconium on their ring finger. He was genuinely surprised to see it was still there, after everything. "Do you know what this is?"

Rook shook their head.

"You know it's important, though."

They nodded.

"Didn't ask Wheaty?"

They shook their head again. If they retained vague memories of what it was, then it made sense they hadn't asked him. It wasn't like them being engaged was a secret — but there was a certain element of privacy to a person's romantic relationships that they had probably retained even though they couldn't remember they were in a relationship in the first place. Or maybe they'd figured Wheaty wouldn't know regardless.

He lay his own left hand overtop of theirs, aligning their rings. "I got these from one of the people you helped save, Rook. Near the end, when we'd gotten rid of the siblings and everything was almost back to normal again. I got them for us because I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you."

Rook just blinked.

"I still want to spend the rest of my life with you, Rook. You know that, right?"

Rook nodded slowly in a sort-of jerking motion. He could tell this meant they were processing the information. Their new movements were becoming familiar to him now. Relief flooded through him; Wheaty had been right. He just had to learn this new language of Rook's — but he was sure that they lived somewhere inside. It was just going to take some time to get used to how they communicated now, was all.

He brought his left hand up to their face and cupped their cheek, running his thumb carefully just below their eye. "I know there are a lot of things you don't remember, Rook. I just wanted to tell you it's okay, if you don't remember being with me, and if it scares you to be close to me... it's okay. I'll wait for you to be okay with it." He gave a soft laugh of disbelief. "I mean, we're gonna live forever now, right?" He was still working on coming to terms with that. "So if we're gonna live forever, I have a really long time to wait for you to be okay with it. So... I guess I just wanted to say... take your time, okay, Rook?"

"I really, really wanted you to live forever!"

This outburst took Pratt entirely by surprise, even with Rook's new mannerisms. He could only sit there and listen to Rook as they followed this surge of emotion.

"It's not just because it was the only way... first, uhm, when Wheaty told me... to go get the fruit, so I did... and anyway, at first it was just because he said so, and I didn't know why, but I liked him, and... I just... and..."

They made a noise of frustration and tugged a little at their hair before taking a big gulp of air and continuing.

"And so, uhm, eventually... started remembering some things... like the building, with the guns, not that part so well, it was scary and I tried to forget, but then the room... and you were there, you said, 'Rook, are you real?' You said that. And... and you said, you said, 'He said I was weak. He said I deserved it. Maybe he was right. Maybe I deserved it. MAYBE I DID!'"

Pratt's blood was icing over inside his veins. Of course he remembered that. How could he not have? Even seventeen years after the fact he could remember the tone of every word he'd spoken to Rook when they'd come to rescue him. He could remember how every time Jacob had tortured him it had felt like the sharp and raw slice of a kitchen knife, but by the time Rook had showed up the world had become a glazed sepia until they'd set him free. They'd been the only reason he'd been able to leave. The only reason he'd been able to remember how a gun worked and mowed down the Project at Eden's Gate. Every time he'd looked at them, fighting alongside him to get him to safety, he'd felt the slice of that kitchen knife again, flooding him with adrenaline, telling him to keep going because there was no other alternative. That Rook was the answer.

"You said that," Rook was saying now, and their right hand was clutching desperately at the bandages wrapped tightly around their bare chest, the ones they had consistently worn ever since the day Pratt had met them, concealing their breasts or lack thereof from everyone who thought they could discern their "true" gender from their biology. Their eyes squeezed shut, and they looked like they might be about to cry. "You were... it hurt... and on the TV, you were screaming... and it hurt so much... I remember that."

"Rook..."

They held him to them in one quick motion, so blindingly fast Pratt's senses were momentarily thrown off from the sudden change of scenery — one moment sitting beside Rook, watching them, with the forest as their backdrop, and the next, they'd drawn him halfway onto their lap, one of Rook's hands in his hair, the other arm circling around him tightly, and he was staring out at the forest over Rook's shoulder through their dark hair, his mind struggling to put together the events of the past second in an attempt to understand how he'd gotten here from there.

"I did that to you," Rook whispered torturously.

"Wh-What?! Rook, no, I—"

"I couldn't save you."

They had saved him, and that was the problem. Their idea of saving people looked so different from everyone else's that they couldn't see what was right in front of them. Pratt didn't know what the end goal looked like in their mind — maybe being able to spirit everyone away from the bombs? To a place they'd never be hurt again? That was ridiculous. No such place existed. But certainly Rook was desperate to bring them all there anyway.

"You did, Rook." He brought his arms around them and held them close and tight, feeling their shoulder blades tense under the palms of his hands. "You did save me. I'm right here, with you. Remember what I said to you? When we were escaping? I told you you were my guardian angel, Rook. Because you saved my life."

Rook shook their head. "When I remembered... I wanted you to live forever... I was happy you were gonna... 'cause I don't want you to die..."

They remained together like that for a very long time. Pratt let his eyes flutter closed and focused only on Rook's breathing, this physical thing that told him they were alive. He didn't kiss them, even though he wanted to more than anything in the world, even though it would have been something he would have done for them before the Collapse, because it had always served as a silent affirmation that they were taking on this world together. Things were different now. He was going to have to learn Rook all over again.

But he would learn Rook a thousand times over if it meant he could be with them forever.

Chapter Text

Wheaty insisted on walking on his own into Prosperity.

"It's one thing to be carried here from Rook's place," he told them about half a mile from the compound, which they could see through the trees, rising up into the air like the most beautiful post-apocalyptic hodgepodge of wood and leaves and stone and what looked like the beginnings of an actual radio tower, which had lit Wheaty's entire face up when he saw it. "I obviously can't make that on my own, y'know? So it's okay Rook carried me, 'cause otherwise I'd still be stuck at the freaking Moccasin. But, like, even though everyone's gonna be losing their minds that we're here and that Rook's alive, they're gonna notice my limp. And I don't want them knowing Rook caused it. Okay? Are we all on agreement on that?"

He looked at both of their faces in turn, uncharacteristically serious. Pratt wasn't sure if the events of the past seven years had sharpened the Wheaty he'd known into this new half-adult, able-to-be-serious-as-all-hell Wheaty or if he would have ended up like this regardless at thirty-five. He was sure the old Wheaty, the fun-loving, carefree Wheaty, was still there, a few layers down, but as he thought about it he realized he might have been idealizing his friend a little bit. To expect someone to stay the comic relief their entire life even after what had happened to him was cruel.

"Yeah," Pratt said. "Yeah, whatever you tell them, I'll go with it."

"Good. Then I'm just gonna tell them I fucked up and took a really bad fall halfway down the mountain. Rook found me and nursed me back to health. That sound good, Rook?"

Rook bit their lip with an incisor that was a bit more pointed than a human's had any right being. They were tugging at the frayed hem of their jacket uncomfortably and couldn't meet Pratt and Wheaty's eyes.

"You don't wanna lie, huh?" Wheaty heaved a sigh; Pratt tried not to be jealous of the way that Wheaty so easily read their gestures. He was certain Wheaty understood this new nonverbal language of Rook's far better than he did, even if he was still phenomenal at it, at least in comparison to other people. "You're worried 'cause you don't wanna pretend you didn't do the things you did."

Rook nodded quickly. "Don't wanna lie."

Wheaty placed a hand on their shoulder and gave it a comforting squeeze. "Don't worry, Rook. We're gonna tell 'em. Just not right now. Everyone's gonna be really, really happy to see you, and I just... I don't want them to be thinking about how much you went through 'til they can handle it, yeah? Eventually we'll tell them. Just... not right now. I don't want anything to spoil this. Okay?"

It took a long few seconds, but Rook finally nosed at Wheaty's hand and said, "...'kay."

"Alright. We're all in agreement, then. Oh, and Pratt — that means you gotta pretend you didn't get your heart ripped out by your fiancé."

Fuck, he'd forgotten all about that. Before all of this, he hadn't even been aware of his heartbeat except for when he purposefully felt for it, so it was easy to forget he no longer had an organ that produced one. "That's easy to hide," he said. "No one's gonna be looking under my clothes any time soon."

Wheaty snorted. "'cept Rook, if you play your cards right."

Pratt's ears burned.

Wheaty was beside himself with laughter. "Dude, you can't even freaking meet my eyes! That's hysterical. I wonder if all Catholics get that pink in the face over shit like that or if it's just you. C'mon, let's go, I wanna get there before it fades so everyone can make fun of you."

Pratt purposefully hadn't tried to remind Rook of any of their old friends. He hadn't been sure if Prosperity was still standing, and it would have crushed them to remember the people they cared about and then find out that they had been killed in the meantime, another group of people Rook was too late to save, so there hadn't really been a point. Even now that they were here, he wasn't sure who would still be in the compound. Kim probably would, but what about Nick and Carmina? (Did Rook even remember Carmina?)

Still, it was kind of unnerving, to see Rook so indifferent as they neared Prosperity. He almost wished he had said something just so that he could see the anticipation in their eyes, the slight tremble under their skin as they looked forward to once again seeing the people that they had grown to love. Anything would be better than this Rook with the half-lidded eyes, only reacting when they heard an animal trampling through the underbrush.

Once they approached the gate, the butterflies that had been gathering in his stomach, at least, all started beating their wings simultaneously. "Are we ready?" he asked the two people that had, if he was going to be honest, been his only two companions for the past seven years.

Wheaty nodded, his face set. "Born ready," he said.

Mimicking his expression, and his inflection, perfectly, Rook echoed, "Born ready."

Pratt took a deep breath and knocked on the door.

There was a sound beyond the gate as if whoever was guarding it was there only because no one could think of anything else for them to do — as soon as Pratt knocked, he heard a gasp, and then running footsteps in the opposite direction. Just like before, he could pick out every set of footsteps inside Prosperity and a likelihood of who they belonged to; he could hear the soft whirring of some sort of machinery halfway across the compound; he could hear murmured conversation on the steps leading to the main room of Prosperity; he could hear the static from the radio tower as someone tried to tune something or other to a different frequency. Obscene, really, that Jacob had been able to pull this potential out of he and Rook and whoever else he trained. This wasn't normal power of observation. This was something supernatural. But then again, there had never been anything entirely natural about what the Seeds could do.

For a moment he was worried that no one would answer after all, that there were only a few people here, none of whom he knew, all squatters, because most of the voices were unfamiliar — but after a minute, much calmer, slower footsteps approached the gate, and the wooden slat slid open.

"Who is th— 'oly shit."

Roger Cadoret was from Quebec, so of course the 'shit' sounded more like 'sheet'. Pratt wondered, past the spike of adrenaline in his chest at seeing someone he had known from before, if Cadoret's accent had somehow become more Quebecois in their absence.

"Deputy Pratt," Cadoret sputtered, his eyes wide through the slat. "And... And our friend Wheaty, and... who is this...?"

"A friend, I promise," said Wheaty. "Someone everyone in there is going to want to see. Can we come in?"

"Of course, of course..." Still in a daze, Cadoret opened the gate just enough to admit the three of them. Pratt couldn't help but notice that Cadoret was showing his age — there was some gray in his hair, and his face was weathered from the seven years of stress and survival that had passed since they had last seen each other. "Mon dieu, you don't look a day older than when we first met, my friend. How is it you are still looking as if you are only thirty-five years old when I know for a fact you should be forty-three?"

Pratt sighed. "It's a long story." Which was simplifying it to the extreme, but whatever.

"As is frequently the case with you, it seems," said Cadoret. He shifted his gaze to Wheaty, who looked restless inside these walls, as he always had. He'd never liked being cooped up, whether it was among friends or not. "But yet Wheaty shows his age. Not to offend, of course."

"Nah, it's okay," said Wheaty, flashing a grin that one couldn't help but notice had a little bit of strain in it. "I'm an old man now. You can say it."

Cadoret laughed heartily. "Ah, good to hear your sense of humor has not changed, at least. I did not know either of you for very long, but to me you appear the same as the day you left — personality-wise, of course." He leveled his gaze at Pratt, who figured he was going to get looks like this constantly in the next few days from people who could not make it make sense that he still looked thirty-five — or even younger, really. He'd always had good genetics, and the shoulder-length haircut he'd had since he was in college didn't hurt matters. "What have you been doing this past number of years?"

"That's... a long story, too," said Pratt, scratching at the back of his neck and trying to come up with the best way to explain himself without sounding like he was listing off the plot to some shit like Tuck Everlasting.

Fortunately, he was saved from having to do so as someone approached — a middle-aged woman with a sniper rifle in his hands. He had never met her, but he had the impression that whether he was standing right next to her or nearly a mile away she would be able to hit him with that rifle regardless. Though he was fairly certain he had accelerated healing now, like Rook (he was pretty sure? they'd never gone over the specifics, but it seemed like a fair bet), he didn't want to draw her ire, so he stood there, tense, streamlined, the way Jacob had taught him, ready to leap into action if needed but otherwise remaining quiet and low to the ground, a wolf in the forest pressing its ears back against its head but waiting for the other person to make the first move.

"Roger, you know you're supposed to check with Kim first before letting anyone in, what with all the Highwaymen bullshit. I swear, if I have to tell you one more time—"

She continued approaching as she talked, and Pratt could see that her eyes were the milky bluish-white of someone with advanced cataracts.

He almost laughed with relief. He'd been tense for nothing. The woman was blind as a bat. She probably carried the gun around to remind her of her glory days—

The barrel of the sniper rifle slammed into the tender flesh beneath his chin, and he suddenly found himself looking down at her past the bridge of his nose as she stared straight at him.

"And don't think I can't hear your foolishness," she snapped. "Never met you, so you better make the hell sure you work to get on my good side, 'cause you do not want a sniper — and a damn good one — as your enemy."

Pratt was about to sincerely apologize; it was rare someone was able to take him by surprise, and he felt Jacob's disappointment in the back of his head, chiding him for it. He had just opened his mouth when he heard a sharp intake of air that wasn't from him.

It was from Rook, beside him.

He swore silently. The woman was obviously dangerous, and now Rook was going to leap into action to protect him, which was, if he was being honest, the last thing he needed right now. Against all odds he really did want to get on this woman's good side — she was right, it was incredibly stupid to be on the bad side of a sniper, that was just common sense — and now Rook was about to attack her and destroy any hope of that happening.

Except Rook wasn't leaping into action. Their hands were tented over the middle of their face, and tears had built in their eyes, hanging onto their bottom lashes, and then falling into the dirt, one after the other.

"What's wrong with your friend?" the sniper asked, quirking an eyebrow. "I ain't gonna kill ya."

Rook whispered, "Grace."

And the sniper lady's blind eyes opened wide.

"No..." breathed Grace, as stupefied as it was possible for a person to look. "No, you're bullshitting me. There's no way I could be hearing that voice. Ain't no way. Not after seventeen years. Not after it was confirmed that you... We confirmed that you..." But she couldn't finish. Her words had been a desperate denial, because she wanted it to be true, and wanted it so badly it was painful, but she couldn't let it, the same way Pratt had convinced himself there was no possible way that Rook could be alive, because if they were, that meant... that meant...

"Deputy," Grace cried, and every ounce of fight went right out of her.

Rook drew their arms around Grace and held her tight, tight enough that they seemed to forget their abilities, because Grace made a surprised sound, but at least it wasn't enough to really hurt her, because she dropped her sniper rifle to the ground and folded her arms around the back-from-the-dead Hope County junior deputy she hadn't seen in seventeen years and likely hadn't expected to see ever again.

"You're alive," Grace said, because how else did you even deal with something like this? You had to keep convincing yourself that, holy shit, this was real? "You're... You're alive. Rook. Jesus Christ. I don't understand — you were dead — you were dead — they told me... everyone... like, I don't understand. It wasn't... It wasn't up for debate. We were all sure... It wasn't even like you were missing, you were dead..."

"Join the club," said Wheaty, sotto voce.

People were starting to notice the newcomers, or at least notice that Grace, who must have been the battle-hardened sniper she had been to Pratt by default, was quietly weeping into Rook's shoulder, clutching them like her last lifeline. Pratt eyed them all warily, daring them to get close, though of course none of them would — not with his wolf-eyes glaring at them.

"C'mon, Deputy," Grace managed after a few minutes. She pulled away and swiped at her eyes, but her smile was the light of heaven itself. "Let's go say hi to all your friends."

Kim was still here at Prosperity, which was a huge relief to someone who hadn't been here except for ten years prior and found most of the faces in the compound new and confusing. Grace was explaining to them that although Kim was tough as nails, she also had a tendency to let her heart make the decisions. Not the big ones — those were still products of hard logic and deciding what was best for the community. But she was maybe not so much the battle-hardened warlord that some people might have wished her to be.

"It's a good thing we're here to defend that big heart," Grace was saying as they strode towards the weapons area of Prosperity, eyes following them as they went and then trying desperately to pretend they hadn't been when Pratt flashed his own at them. "Not that I'm angry at her for it. It's good she's like that. She's a good person. Wish I could believe in humanity like that. But I can't. Seen too much."

Rook gave a little whimper. "Grace... I know something that might... uhm, your eyes, it might help... maybe you could see again..."

"Deputy, you know I love you. But ain't nothin' gonna fix these eyes."

"This could," Rook said immediately.

"Even so," said Grace. "Even if you got some kinda miracle cure, somehow... and that wouldn't be altogether too crazy to assume, 'cause I don't know where you've been all these years, but you're back from the dead, so there's gotta be some forces in this world I don't know about — I don't want my eyes fixed. I've spent the past seventeen years gettin' used to experiencing the world this way. Don't really feel right, goin' back to the way things used to be. And if I did — feelin' like it might be a bit overstimulating, you know? That life is gone. My eyes are like this 'cause when the bombs went off I made sure as many people as I could find were okay. I don't regret that. I don't want to take away somethin' that reminds me every day how much I love the people of this county. You understand, Deputy?"

Pratt could see that Rook didn't. Likely they were still self-flagellating about not being able to save as many people as they could, even though it would have been madness to expect them to. But they nodded miserably.

Grace introduced them to the weapons workbench which was where she said she spent most of her time. She didn't go out in the field anymore, "But I can still make life absolutely miserable for Prosperity's enemies." She showed them her latest invention. "I call it the Saw Launcher," she said, sounding upsettingly excited about it. It was a sort of modified crossbow that shot circular saws instead of arrows. She handed it to Rook, who took it and stared at it in wonder. "Here. It's a welcome-back present from me. I'll make another one. Already gave one to that security captain that's been hangin' around."

Wheaty tugged it gently out of Rook's hands and gave it back to Grace. "Thanks, Miz Armstrong, but I really don't think Rook should be, uh, in possession of something that launches buzzsaws."

Grace was baffled. "I know Rook's handy with a rifle — seen it myself, when they helped me defend the mausoleum from those Peggies — but you can't tell me this wouldn't help."

"It really wouldn't," said Wheaty.

"Rook is..." Pratt searched for the right word. "...different now."

"Well, of course. Post-traumatic stress disorder takes a lot out of a person."

"More different than that," Wheaty said. "The sort of different we'd have to sit you down and tell you about in private."

Pratt was about to suggest that they find Kim and go into the building adjacent to break the news, but before he could speak — people were developing a bad habit of doing things before he could speak — the door to the aforementioned building opened and an older man with graying hair walked out. A bandana was wrapped tightly around his forehead, sporting an American flag pattern. Actually, maybe it was an American flag. The craftsmanship didn't look the best. Pratt had the sense he should know him, at least by proxy, but he couldn't for the life of him place him.

Rook was not a victim of this problem, however.

The newcomer had gotten as far as, "Hey, Gracey, I was wonderin' if—" before he was tackled to the ground by a blur, a smear of color, really, because Rook was moving at speeds so fast the human eye could not process them.

They came back into view sitting on the new person, straddling them, his face in their hands, planting chaste kisses all over it.

This was, of course, kind of frustrating to Pratt, who had been, like, engaged to them and still hadn't gotten this treatment, but as he watched he could see the recognition blazing in Rook's eyes. They'd been little more than an animal when he and Wheaty had come across them, and now they had spent some time with other humans and had consequently come somewhat back into themselves, so he supposed he couldn't really get angry at them. Still...

Wheaty reached over and clapped his shoulder. "They still love you, man. I promise."

Childishly, Pratt wanted to ask, How do you know? Did they say something during those seven years? but shut himself up before he could say something he regretted.

"What the—" The man beneath Rook was saying, and then his eyes were bugging out of his head. "No way, man, no way. This ain't real. I totes got hit by Grace's new saw launcher and died and now the Monkey King is sendin' me visions of what coulda been. Singin' me off sweetly. Like, hey, wouldn't it be the fuckin' greatest if instead of a saw to your face it was the deputy." He was crying in the way of someone who felt big emotions and cried easily and wasn't in any way ashamed of it. "Man, I knew it was right to follow the Monkey King. This is the best send-off ever."

Grace rolled her eyes. "Hurk, in what world do I ever miss and hit someone on accident?"

"None, Miz Grace."

"Mhm. And in what world exactly do I miss a target less than ten feet away from me?"

"None, Miz Grace."

"Mhm."

"Sorry, Miz Grace. It's just that if I ain't dyin', then that means..."

"Hurk," Rook said, grinning ear to ear, sounding entirely like their old self again, if only for a moment. "It's me. It's really me."

Hurk didn't need to convince himself, unlike most people. He instantly believed them, wrapping his arms around them in a great big bear hug that would have killed lesser men, and did approximately nothing to Rook, who could have destroyed a cement wall with a single kick and come away uninjured. "Deputy," he choked out. "Holy fuck, Deputy. You got nine lives or somethin'? I mean I guess I shouldn't be surprised on account of ya goin' in and whoopin' John and Jacob and Faith's asses, but like... I still am, 'cause they said you were absolutely a hundo percent dead, and the people who said that ain't the kind to lie and, and they went out and checked and everything—"

"Yes," said Cadoret, standing on the outskirts of this interaction, having seen the speed at which Rook moved. His eyes were now laced with suspicion. His arms remained folded across his chest, at least, not even twitching towards the pistol on his waist, but it was obvious he wasn't going to let them go anywhere without answers. "It seems the deputy has quite the story to tell us."

Chapter Text

then

When Pratt woke up, Rook was standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame, watching him quietly with their hands wrapped around a mug of something steaming.

"How... How long have you been standing there?" he asked, voice gravelly with sleep.

"You were screaming," Rook said softly. Though they tried to hide it, he could see how harrowed they looked, like the past six months had taken six years of life from them instead. There was a hollowness to their eyes, like they were always on the verge of disassociation. "Can I come in?"

"Jesus..." Pratt sat up in bed and shoved his hands through his hair. His index finger caught on a tangle, and he flinched a bit at the pain — but it felt good, now, to experience such a thing. No, maybe not good... but familiar. Yeah. Familiar. Pain was something he was used to. He knew how to deal with it. He didn't know how to deal with the reality of not having to look over his shoulder every second, of being able to get a good night's sleep, or at least relatively, since there was always some bullshit going on out in the woods. He said, "Yeah, of course you can come in. Why would you ask that? If it's you, you don't ever need to ask that."

Rook shrugged one shoulder as they walked into the room, the soft light of the bedroom highlighting the dark circles under their eyes and the bruises along their neck in the shape of fingers, turning what had once been a healthy brown into a patchwork of purple and green. They lowered themselves to sit on the edge of the bed and passed the mug to Pratt. "Things are different now. I didn't want to assume anything."

Pratt felt the guilt sink into his fingers, the soles of his feet, the cavity behind his chest. Even after all of that, their focus was still on him. He knew that if he told them he felt guilty, they'd do anything they could to rectify it, and the last thing he wanted to do was to make them take care of him again, but keeping it inside hurt, too. It bounced around and around inside of his head without any outlet.

He brought the mug to his lips and took a sip. A strange mix of coffee and hot chocolate that Rook had told him they'd been making since they were a child, when they would ask their parents if they could drink coffee and their parents would split the difference by mixing hot chocolate into it so they weren't up half the night caffeinated to hell and back.

"I want it to be like this every day," he said quietly against the rim of the mug. "I want to wake up every single day to your weird hot-chocolate-and-coffee mix, and I want to sit at the table with you right there with me, and I want to hold your hand while we... I don't know, whatever old married couples do. Read the newspaper, or whatever."

"Scroll our news feeds?" Rook suggested, giving him a wry smile.

"Yeah. Christ, I miss the Internet."

"You're trying to avoid thinking about the nightmare you had," Rook said plainly, in that blunt way they had adopted from their Mizrahi roots.

Pratt took a shaky breath. "Thanks, Doctor Rook."

"I think it'd be good if you talked about it with me."

"Jesus Christ, Rook. You went through it, too. You know what happened. Why would you want me to remind you of all the shit we went through?"

Rook frowned and motioned for Pratt to move over. There wasn't much room on the twin beds in the Wolf's Den, since most of the free space went to resources and supplies, but both of them were skinny as hell after their time at St. Francis, and it was easy for them to find space in each other's bodies, locking together like puzzle pieces. Rook ended up with their head against Pratt's shoulder, their arms around him, their legs tangled in his. Pratt appreciated it, since they were taller than him and it felt good to look down at them for once. When they next spoke, it was into his chest. "'cause I'm never gonna forget what happened anyway."

"I still don't want to talk about it." He set the mug on the nightstand beside him and ran a finger idly through Rook's thick black hair. "I already think about it every single second of every single day. I guess it's a relief I found you, right? Who else would be able to deal with a fucking mess like me?"

Rook kissed his collarbone, his throat, his jaw, and then just under his left eye. He breathed in the scent of them, the clean linen, the earthy tone somewhere underneath, the faint note of some amalgam of nature, plants and trees and rain. They were here, he thought to himself. They were here, and physical. They were in his arms. After all of what they had gone through, he was holding onto them now. He pressed his fingers against them as if to remind himself of the fact. A painless pinch me, I have to be dreaming. But he wasn't waking up. Somehow, this was real life.

"Rook," he said. "How the hell do we get over what happened to us?"

"We don't," Rook said quietly. "We just keep going. We talk about it when we can to keep ourselves from going insane and the rest of the time we just try to pretend it happened to someone else." After a long pause, they went on: "It's not difficult. I don't 'deal' with you. When you wake up screaming, the reason it bothers me isn't because it's inconvenient for me. It's because I wish I could have been in time to save you from going through all of that." They kissed the outside corner of his left eye, and he felt soft under their touch. Much softer than he had ever thought he'd have the ability to feel. "When I saw your name... at the Grandview Hotel, on that chalkboard..."

They couldn't finish. They made a distressed sound and nuzzled into his shoulder. He understood. If he had seen their name, his heart would have stopped right then and there. He wasn't sure he would even have had the strength to go on. The fact that Rook had was testament to their resolve.

"We could leave," he said suddenly. It was such an obvious solution that he knew even as he said it that there was no way it could work or else they would have done it already. "Both of us know how to fly a helicopter. And with John, uhm... otherwise occupied... we could probably find out how to sneak away and keep those fucking lunatics from shooting us out of the air. Besides," he said, too caught up in the fantasy to think straight, "they love you. Eden's Gate. I don't know why — I mean, I do, because I love you, but, well, you know what I mean — but they do, and they wouldn't risk killing you. They want you so badly, Rook. If we figured it out, we could get over the mountains, contact someone once we get radio and internet service back. And then once everything is over we—"

"You know I can't do that," said Rook before he could tip over the edge and into that abyss of hope. "I can't leave everyone like this."

"We'd be getting help," Pratt protested miserably.

"It'll take too much time. People are being killed here every single day. And there's no way every single person in Eden's Gate would follow orders to keep me alive. Besides — they have planes now. Ones that go faster than helicopters. They could ambush us... they could find a way to extract me and then kill you... and I made promises to everyone," they said, their voice quiet, the way he was so very used to, having to coax words out of them for ages before they had finally opened up to him, or at least about topics like this, where he knew thoughts were bouncing around the inside of their head relentlessly, too, and they had to get them out somehow. "Everyone says I'm the only one who can stop the Collapse. I don't really think that's true, but... I'm scared to test it. What if they're right?"

They were blinking up at him now, and he could see the weight of the entire world resting on them. God, he was so selfish. Thinking only about his own comfort when the only way Rook would feel any better was if they made sure to save as many people as they could. He hadn't even been thinking of their mental state. He hadn't even been considering how every foot he put between them and the people of Hope County would be slowly destroying them. He felt pathetic and useless for even considering such a plan. "You're right." He couldn't even bring his voice above a whisper, he was so disappointed. "Of course."

"I wish I could," they told him, except it felt like a fucking consolation, now. "You have no idea how much I wish I could."

He didn't answer.

"Staci." His name, the one he trusted only Rook with using in anything other than a situation where a person had no other choice. "Can I kiss you?"

Miserably, he nodded.

Rook hesitated just a second before pressing their lips first to both corners of his mouth, one at a time, and then to his lips. "Baruch atah hashem, elokeinu, melekh ha'olam," they whispered against his skin, "shehecheyanu, v'kiy'manu, v'higiyanu lazman hazeh."

"You know it's not your first time kissing me, right?" he asked.

"I know. But every time feels like the first time." They dipped their head and kissed his throat. "Feels like it here." He couldn't help but make a satisfied sound. They moved down to the hollow just above his chest. "Feels like it here." And kissed it. And then they moved down to the area just above his waist, dangerously close to... "Feels like it here." And kissed it.

"Rook," Pratt breathed sharply. "Jesus Christ."

"You want me to stop?" they asked genuinely. The things they had wanted to do to each other before any of this couldn't be assumed now. Every action that hadn't been made explicitly permissible needed to be cleared first.

He shook his head. "No, I just... is everyone gone?"

He and Rook usually slept during the day, when everyone else was typically out of the Wolf's Den, in case one or the other woke up from a particularly bad nightmare and started attacking. It was, according to the clock, about three in the afternoon — still early enough for the Whitetails to be out securing their region of Hope County and keeping it from falling back into Eden's Gate hands. Wheaty was probably still here, since Tammy — and Eli, before... — refused to send him out into the fray, especially after seeing what had happened to the people who had been taken to St. Francis, so he was most likely doing inventory, but if they were quiet... really quiet... unbelievably quiet...

Rook flashed a smile at him. "You think it's hot," they said, sliding their hands up beneath his shirt and dancing up his sides. "Doing this where we might get caught."

Pratt bit his bottom lip. He couldn't say that doing something usually forbidden for his own pleasure didn't turn him on like a motherfucker. And with Rook teasing him like this, the endless parade of Jacob, Jacob, Jacob became Rook, Rook, Rook. Their hands, deftly removing his shirt, pressing their thumbs into the dips of his sides. Their eyes, bright with excitement, looking up at him, making sure — is this okay? Is it okay that I do this? Is it okay that I touch you here? Is it okay for me to keep going?

At least it was something to quiet every other voice inside of him except theirs.

When he woke up a few hours later, Rook was no longer in his arms. The warmth of their body had gone, and when he saw the letter they had left in their place, the disappointment that flooded through him made him feel more cold and alone than ever.

Staci,

I'm sorry. Before I say anything else, I want you to know that there's nothing more in this world I wanted than to stay here with you. Forever. It's like a dream I had no idea I wanted until it came true. You have no idea how hard it was to see you lying there asleep beside me and tell myself that I had to go anyway.

But I was contacted, the other day, with a lead on Faith. She's got the marshal and Whitehorse and — Staci, you know I can't leave them there any longer than necessary. And yeah, I know they're your friends, too, but I DON'T want you coming along. Not because I don't want you to travel with me. You know I'd never say no to waking up every morning to your face. But because you NEED to rest. You need to recover.

What about you? Pratt wanted to argue, because no matter how much Rook cared about other people and their wellbeing, they never seemed to extend the same courtesy to themselves. There was no way they were alright; there was no way they were okay to go after Faith. But of course because this was Rook, he had to stay here and recover while Rook went out and got bitten by venomous snakes and shot in the head and struck by lightning and just got back up and kept going, because their mental state meant nothing as long as they were okay to fight.

Staci, please... I need you to stay there so that I know you're safe. I know you don't want to. I know you're going to be angry, reading this. I know. But i need you to be somewhere I can protect you. I know you want it to be the other way around, and I promise some days after this it can be. But not with this Eden's Gate bullshit. Anything else, yeah. But not this.

Staci... I don't know what I would do if I lost you.

I'll come back. I promise. I'm going to rescue the marshal and Whitehorse and I'm going to come back to you. I promise, I promise, I promise. Please, just... wait for me there, okay? Don't do anything stupid. Please. I need you to be there when I come back. It's the one thing in the world I'm counting on.

And then...

Here, he could see they had paused for a while, trying to figure out how they wanted to phrase the next part. Their script had faded out, and then the next part was much sturdier, as if they had decided what they wanted to say and forged right on.

And then maybe we can talk about what you said earlier. Waking up every day beside each other, and eating breakfast together while we hold hands and scroll our Twitter feeds or whatever. Maybe we can talk about having a life together, when we get out of here, and we can head east and I can introduce you to my parents... and, uhm, my shadchan. And we can tell her that she can stop setting me up with people when I come home because I'm already found my bashert. If you want. If that's okay with you.

It felt like all of the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. Pratt had to read the paragraph several times for it to sink in, and even then, he had to revisit the conversation he and Rook had had about the meanings of those two words before he could really be positive they were asking him what they were asking him. He nearly thought he had remembered it wrong, because Rook couldn't be saying he was their soulmate. Not him. They couldn't be saying they wanted to marry him... right?

So, that being said, I promise I'll come back to you, Staci. Sooner rather than later. I already miss you so much and I haven't even left yet.

I love you. I love you so much, Staci Pratt. Please let me protect you. Okay?

Love,
your Rook <3

P.S. You're really cute :)

Wheaty came up from inventory a few minutes later to see Pratt sitting there pink-faced, reading and re-reading Rook's letter. Being Wheaty, he launched right into friendly teasing, and the endless repetition of Jacob, Jacob, Jacob disappeared for a moment, just the way Rook must have known it would. They knew him better than anyone else, after all.

That day came back to him, as he lay there in the backseat of the truck, flames licking up the sides. Whitehorse had been thrown through the windshield, cracks spiderwebbing out from the point of impact. How fucking fitting, he thought as he fought, and lost, against that forever sleep, the sleep he would never wake from, that the two of them had promised the rest of their lives to each other, and the rest of their lives had been no more than a few short weeks. How fucking predictable, that he wasn't allowed to be happy, that Rook taking their life essence on credit would come back to beat the shit out of them in the worst way.

They were there, in the front seat. He wanted to reach out and grab their hand. At least be there for them in the end, even though they were very much so already dead. But his body didn't respond. He lay there among the broken glass, watching the smoke fill the car and feeling his lungs heavy. They were fighting so hard to keep him alive. He wanted to ask why the fuck anyone wanted to keep someone like him alive.

now

Pratt sat on a couch in the living room of the main building in Prosperity, holding a steaming cup of what he had dubbed 'hot chocoffee'. Or maybe it was Rook who had started calling it that. It was difficult, after all these years, to remember.

Rook was next to him, of course, looking sort of uncomfortable, which was understandable, because they'd all been summoned into this room after what had happened with Hurk, and while Rook knew they had friends here, they had enough self-awareness to know that they were dangerous now, and that when you're really dangerous, even people who call themselves your friends are careful around you, and sometimes so careful that they have to keep other people from being hurt by you, even if what you were doing to hurt them was just an accident, or even if the accident didn't actually happen yet. He could see the way they were studying the room, picking out escape routes, probably cataloguing weapons they could use to defend themselves if needed, though of course they were the most dangerous weapon possibly in the whole wide world, short of nuclear missiles. He could see how nervous it made them to be inside now.

''s okay, Dep," Hurk was telling them from a large chair to their left. "You got more friends comin' than you know what to do with. Might help ya a little, seein' the people you love. Oh, shiitake mushrooms, that reminds me, Dep, I had a motherfuckin' baby! Like, a little human an' everything. His name's Blade, he's the cutest lil' guy in the whole wide world, and I had 'im with this smokin' hot babe named Gina— hey, Dep, you okay?"

Rook's hands were folded in their lap. Their eyes were focused on the grayish-blue space outside the window, and their eyes were wide, though it was a little tougher to tell now what with the irises gone and their pupils in the thick stroke shapes of the Eden's Gate cross.

"The birds..." they murmured.

Not a single bird had flown by the window since they had sat down. Pratt said, "The birds? What do you mean, Rook?"

"The birds..." they said again, and then, "fuck," and then didn't respond for a very long time after that. All they did was shake their head slightly, as if trying to knock something loose.

"Sorry," said Pratt to Hurk and Grace, "Rook's not really... themselves."

"Yes, they are," Wheaty said sharply from Rook's other side, leaning forward to shoot a displeased look at Pratt, who immediately withered under his accusatory expression. "I keep telling you, man. This is Rook. I know you're having a tough time coming to terms with them, you know, not remembering much from before, but they are not. A different. Person. And you need to get that through your head, yeah? 'cause there's not gonna be any magic moment where they snap back into themselves. It's going to be like this forever. And if you're gonna..." He trailed off, realizing it might not be the best decision to talk about Pratt's and Rook's immortality in present company. "...then you'd better get used to the idea," he finished.

Wheaty was right, of course. Pratt felt the shame of it twist inside of him. It wasn't fair, to demand that Rook be the person they were before the bombs. It wasn't even fair to try and force them to remember. What if prying that door open meant all the trauma came back? Sure, they knew about some of it, if what they'd said on the journey home was any implication, but what if they never remembered any more of it? What if the only things that came back to them were images of him in pain, and not themselves? If he could spare them from knowing that they had been through all of that, then shouldn't he? And it wasn't like he was babysitting a different person that had taken up residence inside Rook. This was them, whether he liked it or not, and passing them off as a presence that was only going to be here temporarily until he brought back the 'real' Rook was cruel.

He was saved from any further introspection by the arrival of the person they'd been waiting for. She came around the back of the couch and stood in front of them, her hands tented over her face, her eyes wide and disbelieving.

"You're alive," she said, as if there had been no chance at all they would be.

"And old," said Wheaty, flashing a grin. "Or, at least one of us is."

Cadoret, standing by the door, arms crossed, eyes probably still as narrowed as they had been when he had shown them in, snorted derisively.

"And... Deputy," she went on, sinking to her knees in front of Rook and taking their hands in hers. Kim Rye had always been a paragon of strength, but Pratt watched as she had to fight back tears, looking at them, studying them, hardly daring to believe they were right here in front of her. "Is that really you?"

Pratt was sure that Wheaty was holding himself back. He could practically hear the, Yeah, but Pratt doesn't seem to think so, and had to restrain himself from shooting an irritated look at Wheaty, who probably would have no idea what was going on.

Rook, however, was staring at Kim with this intense expression on their face, like, I should know you from somewhere, I think, but I don't, and I'm sorry.

It hurt, to watch Rook sitting there unable to pull the memory from where it was buried deep, and not be able to step in and help them. Not being able to step in and help them hurt in general, and now he was watching the consequences of it in real time.

"That's okay, honey," Kim told them, patting their knee gently and sniffing back her tears. "You must have been through so much. You take your time saying anything, alright? Isn't like you talked much before this, anyway. And when you're ready, then we can talk." She gave them an honest, heartfelt smile, with all the love she could muster poured into it, and then stood up, hands on her hips. She barely looked any older than the last time they'd seen her, seven years ago, but that was hardly surprising. Kim wasn't the sort of person to show her age, not until she got through a few decades, even with all she'd been through. But a shadow passed across her face as she updated Pratt and Wheaty on what had happened since they'd left. "There was a siege on Prosperity," she told them. "We lost a few good people... the Highwaymen were mostly looking for prisoners, though. They took Nick with them, this last time they came by. I'm not sure where. Up the hill, practically close enough to throw a stone at, but they're so trigger-happy it's been tough to get anywhere near."

Sensing their confusion, Grace said, "The Highwaymen're a group of no-good losers who think wearin' old BMX gear and spray-paintin' everything neon makes 'em badass. Been terrorizing innocent folks since not long after the Collapse." She told them about their reach across the country, about the twins that led the local chapter, Mickey and Lou, and how they'd killed the old boss, who had been their father. Everything she said about them was worse than the last thing she'd said. "I wouldn't get too close to 'em. Or, rather... that's what I would have suggested, except..."

She fixed her blind eyes meaningfully on Rook.

Cadoret must not have let Kim in on much of the reason behind the meeting, because she looked at each of them, clueless. "What? What's going on?"

Pratt heaved a sigh and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, palms pressed together, hands tented in front of his mouth. "There's something you should know about Rook."

Kim cocked her head. "Should've spoken up sooner. Not like I'm going to be angry at anything the Deputy did, short of, I don't know, hurting my family, I guess."

"Angry ain't what he's worried about," Wheaty said under his breath.

"So," said Pratt carefully, "you know how Rook was really badass before the Collapse? You know, how they were always running out into danger and getting into all sorts of trouble and somehow escaping any of the—"

"For fuck's sake," said Wheaty, "Rook's got superpowers."

Everyone in the room stared at him.

"The fuck was that for?" Pratt demanded.

"Well, if I let you say it, we'd be here all day. You were fixin' to tell them Rook's entire goddamn life story."

"I was getting to it."

"Sure, you were."

"Superpowers," Kim repeated.

"Yeah. Rook?" Wheaty inclined his head toward the second floor balcony that lined the inside of the main building. (Pratt was trying to ignore how obviously it was the skeleton of John's ranch. You could see his influence in it, no matter how much it had worked over by Prosperity.) "Can you get up to the second floor as fast as you can for me? It's okay to use your abilities."

The speed with which Rook moved was more teleportation than speed. One moment, Rook was sitting on the couch in between Pratt and Wheaty, hands in their lap, feet flat on the floor; the next, they were gone, so quickly that a gust of displaced air blew through the building, rustling everyone's hair, causing the fire in the fireplace to flicker violently, and scattering the papers that had been sitting on the table in front. Rook was standing on the second floor balcony, leaning against the railing, apathetic, not even breathing hard, as if they had merely taken a single step, though they must have jumped from the floor, straight up, the same way a cat might.

Kim reached for a seat behind her, unable to look away from Rook, one hand on her chest. Pratt leapt up and guided her to where he had been sitting.

"I just— it's just— oh, wow," she managed.

"If that ain't the coolest shit I ever saw in my fuckin' life," said Hurk, who was halfway out of his chair, eyes huge, like he'd just seen his favorite team score the Big Goal, "and I've seen a lot of shit. Dep, and I say this in the best way possible, 'cause you're my friend and all, what the ever-loving holy mother of sweet baby Jesus?"

"Appropriate thing to say to a Jewish person," Wheaty said, smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Something about Rook having these powers must have amused him to no end. Understandable. Being able to show that sort of thing off must have been satisfying as hell. Pratt figured he'd feel the same, once he came around to accepting that this was who Rook was now.

Kim clutched onto things like a bear, so Pratt was silently relieved when she let go of his arm after a minute or two, during which time Rook descended the stairs at a regular human speed. They lowered themselves to the floor by Pratt, blinking up at Kim, who was just now perceptive and open-minded enough to notice the shape of their pupils. "My god," she said quietly. "At least I can associate this symbol with something good now. But you don't have any irises. How the hell do you see?"

Rook shrugged. "I just do."

Kim looked at Pratt helplessly. "How did this happen?"

There was a certain vindication in being the one that people turned to to ask questions about his fiancé. If nothing else, he was happy to still be considered the expert on Rook by someone, because so far, that title had mostly fallen to Wheaty. "You comfortable? 'cause it's sort of a long story."

She took it well, though. "I guess it's not really stranger than brain-dead Bliss-fueled Peggies, or a man-bunned radical Christian predicting total atomic annihilation," she said, which, fair.

Cadoret was much more amicable now that he knew the entire story. "You must understand," he told Pratt by way of apology. "There have been threats the likes of which we have had no precedent for, in these years since you have been gone. At any turn, we are faced with new challenges. It would not be out of the realm of possibility to assume that people we once knew as our friends have become our enemies. You understand this?"

Pratt nodded, and shook Cadoret's offered hand. "Yeah. More than you know."

"Now everything would be perfect if we could just get Nick back," said Kim, chewing at a thumbnail. Pratt shouldn't have been surprised she bounced back from her fright early — and accepted Rook's new abilities — so easily. He felt sort of inadequate for not being able to do the same.

Though, like, he had been dead for seven years. So, you know.

"We could get Nick back," he said. Kim had told them they could stay at Prosperity for as long as they needed, even the rest of their lives if it ended up coming to that, and he was floundering now for a way to pay her back. She'd opened her home to them seven years ago too, after all, and now she was doing the same despite their running off last time. If he'd owed her for seven years ago, he owed her doubly so now. He saw the indecision in her eyes, the desire to tell him no, you don't need to do that, warring with the desperate need to have her husband back safe with her. "It's no problem," he assured her, but he was certain he wasn't convincing her. He glanced over at Wheaty with a help me out here look in his eyes.

"It's really no problem, Missus Rye." And even though he was in his thirties, you couldn't turn down a charmer like Wheaty. Though he was an adult he still retained something eternally youthful and boyish about him, the sort of thing you couldn't grizzle out of him no matter what happened to him. "Rook can, like, kill an elk with their bare hands now. No trouble for them to retrieve someone for you. And you said the Highwaymen were hoarding ethanol, right? Bet Rook could pick some up on the way back."

Pratt wanted to cut in, like, hey, who gave you the right to offer my fiancé up on commission? But he knew that it really would be no trouble at all for them. And as he saw Rook nodding fervently he realized that they needed it, too — that being able to do this for Kim would go a long way to doing away with the guilt that must have been churning inside them for the past seventeen years. They had always blamed themselves for anything going wrong. This was their chance to rectify it. Whether or not any of it was actually their fault was irrelevant, as long as they were given the opportunity to make up for it.

Maybe you should be the one marrying them, Pratt wanted to snap, and then stuffed it down way deep inside where it couldn't resurface in the heat of the moment.

As they walked side-by-side together, Pratt desperately wanted to say something that would pave over the vitriol he'd felt earlier towards someone he considered his closest friend. He wanted to tell them, Your hair looks like starlight, because it did, under the stars, the moonlight striping across it and making it look like its own galaxy, but such a thing felt trivial and silly and not nearly enough to absolve him. Instead, he said, "Hey, Rook?"

They didn't look at him, instead choosing to focus on placing one foot exactly in front of the other, heel-to-toe, like a child playing a game. "Mhm?"

"Is it, uhm... is it scary at all? Being how you are now?"

They cocked their head, though they still didn't look at him. He was reminded of a fox, or a similar wild animal.

"Like... like before, you were still kind of like this. Throwing caution to the wind at all. But, uhm... if I had the powers you had, besides the living forever thing, it would feel really strange, right? As opposed to, uh, you know... before? When you were..." He swallowed. "...human?"

"Don't really remember being..." They hesitated, too. Theirs felt a little pointed, or maybe that was his own imagination. "...human."

They must have felt bad about their answer, though, because they went on to say, "Are you mad at me?"

"What? No, of course not, Rook. Why would I be mad at you?"

Of course, he was saying this so frenetically because he understood exactly why they would think that, and he didn't want Wheaty's judgmental voice in his head to get any louder.

Rook's eyes dropped down to the verbanas like paint spatters along the ground. They said, "'cause Wheaty keeps getting mad at you about me."

Right. Because of course Rook was there for those conversations. Pratt realized he was thinking of them sort of like a beloved pet, who was still a pet nonetheless, sitting at your feet and looking up at you as you spoke, with no comprehension of what you were saying. He was alarmed that he was thinking of his fiancé like that, even if it was mostly subconscious and went away when he actively paid attention to their existence. He rubbed at the back of his neck, and he said, feeling very stupid and not at all worthy of any answers Rook could give him, even for the most basic questions, "Rook... do you remember anything else about me? Anything at all?"

The only sound was from the descendants of cicadas and whatever other critters had survived the bombs.

And then he was being yanked into the corner of a nearby bush.

"Shhh," Rook said preemptively.

Not like he could do anything else. Rook had used that insane speed of theirs, the stuff that was so fast it might as well have left afterimages in Rook's wake, and Pratt, whose only ability from Eden's Gift was his immortality, was left with his head spinning. When the world finally stopped rotating, he peered through the thick foliage to try and glimpse what it was Rook had spotted that had spooked them so much.

"Oh, that's just Carmina." Pratt hadn't known her for long, and he'd only known her when she was a child, but there was something decidedly Kim about her, in both her looks and the way she held herself. If you knew Kim, you knew Carmina; if you'd met Kim, but not Carmina, or vice versa, you'd know right away that one was related to the other. "It's okay, Rook, we know her. That's Kim's daughter."

"Carmina," Rook gasped.

"Wait — you remember her? The last time you saw her was when you drove Nick and Kim to the clinic. You haven't seen Carmina since she was a baby."

"Carmina's my..." Rook narrowed their eyes and tilted their head, as if they could find the word hidden somewhere in the bush.

"Goddaughter."

Excited to have the term for it, they nodded, and then just as quickly froze up. "There's someone else."

Next to where Carmina was standing on the dirt path not fifty feet from them was a person with white hair tied up in a half-ponytail. Halfway down it transitioned to a lavender color. Hair dye? It had to be, but Pratt was surprised they had found any in this post-apocalyptic hellscape. They wore the official-looking uniform of a security captain— oh, right. Kim had mentioned a security captain Carmina was pal-ing around with. She'd given them the short version of what had to be a longer story, about Carmina looking for Thomas Rush, who had helped settlements all over the country get legs under them and start not just surviving, but thriving. He was supposed to have arrived in Hope County on a train, but the Highwaymen had thrown it off-course and nearly killed the security captain — and presumably Rush — along with it. Luckily, the security captain was sort of like Rook in that they kept staring death in the face and just simply saying, like, No. The security captain didn't look anything like Rook, though — where Rook was tall and dark and lithe, the security captain was short, pale, and, while skinny as well, not in the way that you could sense the liquid silver rippling underneath the skin. They were simply skinny because they hadn't had enough to eat for years.

Pratt was about to suggest they stand up and introduce themselves when Rook took his arm and yanked him down so that he got a faceful of dirt.

"Stay here," they whispered beside his ear. "Let me protect you."

They kissed his cheek. And then they were gone.

The displaced air from their departure rustled the grass, and when Pratt managed to wipe the dirt off of his face and get to his feet, he was greeted with a sight that sent his heart down into the abyss below.

Carmina and the security captain were stock-still, eyes wide, Carmina's fingers twitching. wanting to reach for her handgun, but unable to do so, because there were three of what Pratt assumed were Highwaymen standing just in front of the two of them. The security captain had one arm out in front of her, to protect her, but neither of them were especially threatening. Rook was in the middle, in between the Highwaymen and Carmina and the security captain, knees bent, a million volts of electricity raring to go, sparking under their skin, needing only the command, whether it come from someone else or from themselves.

Which would have been reassuring, but one of the Highwaymen had a shotgun pointed directly at their face. Another had a machine gun leveled at them that could easily fill them with holes in less than a second. And the third had a rocket launcher propped up onto his shoulder, which would be certain death for anyone on the receiving end, even an immortal god-thing.

A thousand horrible futures ran through Pratt's mind in a nanosecond. In every single one of them, he saw Rook dead, and just when he had finally found them again. He was about to call their name, to beg them to escape, even if it meant he was the one the Highwaymen turned their weapons to, except that Rook had already begun moving with lightning speed, too fast for the Highwaymens' eyes to track or even to pull the triggers on their weapons. In less than ten seconds, they had disarmed and killed all three of them, which Pratt didn't even realize for a few seconds more, because first they were standing there, and then they didn't have weapons anymore, and then they were missing this or that limb, and there was a crack there, and a snap here, and one's head was all wrong, and another was clutching his heart, horrified when he realized he was actually clutching the space where his heart used to be, and the last one sinking to her knees definitely missing something vital from her body except that Pratt didn't know what it was because Rook's hand-claws had reached in with such precision and yanked it out as if they were doing nothing more serious than retrieving something from a cupboard. The blood was settling like a red mist on the dirt around them.

"Holy shit," he heard Carmina say.

There were sounds from inside the blood-cloud, and Pratt's unbeating heart sank even lower.

Rook came into view. They had killed all three Highwaymen, alright. Pratt could tell because he watched his fiancé kneeling over the dead bodies, ripping them apart with bloody hands, and shoving the raw meat and organs into their mouth with the ferocity of someone who had been starved for weeks on end.