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Maybe the worst part about it is that, after it all, Rand gets to hold his little sister’s hand again. Maybe the worst part is that his friends, the only fuckers in Galloway other than Rat ( Richie , he keeps reminding himself, the guy died in the worst way possible and it’s in some, convoluted way Rand’s fault so he deserves to be remembered with his name ) or his mother to give two shits about Rand’s existence, are dead and he doesn’t even remember it. Maybe the worst part is Rand gets to walk out of the bayou at all.
Rand doesn’t know what he’s thinking. Or doing.
Rachel is clinging onto him like a lifeline, and it’s not like Rand isn’t doing the same but the tight grip on his hand is a weight Rand doesn’t know how to bear. Because this is his little sister , this is Rachel alive-but-maybe-not, and she’s been dead for years and he spent so long knowing he’s a fuck up for letting her go – and here she is. Here she is. Rand can’t pretend he even wants to let go for a second, that terror at the edge of the numbness that if he lets go she’ll disappear again, but every nerve in his body is strained and begging for something to make sense . For something to just fit back into normal so Rand can pretend that the burn is from chasing Rachel or Barc to get them inside, or running away from home in the middle of the night to do who-the-fuck knows what. So he can pretend, just a second, that his entire being isn’t exhausted from hours of running away from bug-monster things.
Distantly, as Rand lets Rachel swing their hands while they walk through the meat-covered streets of Galloway, Rand thinks he wants to throw up. Or pass out again. He’s not even sure all the blood is Kian’s. Hell, it could be Rolan’s, but he’s sort of sure the guy (a bug , an honest-to-God bug thing that developed an alcohol tolerance out of spite, and if it weren’t so disturbing it would be hilarious) doesn’t bleed red. So. Maybe Rand wants to pass out from blood loss, is the point.
Except he’s not even sure of that. Honestly, he’s not sure any of this is real. He could be dead and this is Hell for all he knows. Fuck if he doesn’t sort of deserve it.
(Rachel squeezes his hand. Rand squeezes back, if only just to hear her giggle.)
It’s as they walk back home that Rand really thinks . Idly watches as people leave buildings, people Rand knows the faces and sometimes names of, and pick their way through the ruins of Galloway. Rachel doesn’t stop but she slows sometimes, watching with Rand as Galloway and its survivors wander around and clear up the mess with distant eyes. Distant eyes that aren’t hollow , not quite like how Rand feels. Unseeing, as if they're being stopped from processing what they’re touching and cleaning up.
Rand, stupidly, feels jealous.
The survivors of Galloway, probably a quarter of who they had which was never a lot to begin with, pull together to eradicate what’s left of the Hive. They don’t see, not the way that Rachel does (attached to the Queen, of course she wouldn’t be fazed) or how Rand does. They survived but they didn’t… survive .
For a moment, Rand wonders if they’ll even remember Kian or Rolan, and feels sick.
Nobody will know how it feels to know, like a basic fact, that their best friend exploded. Nobody will live like Rand does knowing without the full memory that Kian exploded into chunks and blood, and that he’d died in a mess of viscera and goop on a tree before that.
Nobody will know that Rolan Deep died years ago, drowned in the bayou, and replaced by a sleeper agent bug-alien- thing and died again ensuring the Queen – his Queen, isn’t that a fucking riot? – died with him. Nobody will know that Rand remembers it so vaguely but with a perfect factual quality.
Because that’s just a normal thing. Yeah, he saw his friends die but he doesn’t remember it, but he knows it happened because it happened right in front of him. Isn’t that crazy? Timothy Rand, the guy who went into the bayou with two bug aliens, coming back with his dead little sister and none of the sanity he went in with. Crazy. Insane. Maybe this really is hell.
Maybe it would only be hell if he was alone.
Part of him doesn’t even want to consider he’s alive. That this is real. That he’s in the middle of the streets of Galloway, Louisiana and actually watching people pick up the ruins of their stupid town that got almost consumed by Hive-bug-aliens. That those bugs have been alive and around for years and nobody knew.
It is real. He knows it and he knows it in a way that makes him sick and horrified and numb. But he doesn’t think about it. He doesn’t even consider it for a second. It’s safer that way, Rand idly thinks. Think of it all just like fact and entirely fictional.
God.
God .
As they pass by, the few living give simple nods. Indulgent and wry smiles, like Rand is part of the community and deserves the acknowledgement and smile. Rachel always smiles back and waves with her free hand and it almost makes them brighten before they focus back on cleaning up flesh-goop from streets. None of them ask questions about why Rachel Rand is alive, just act as if she’s always been there at his side despite her being the same age as the day she disappeared and Rand so many years older.
Maybe that’s the benefit of not understanding. Maybe the problem is Rand understood too much.
Maybe it’s all just bullshit.
Would Rachel complain if Rand just took a car, if there’s any left in this fucked up town, and got them the fuck out? Would she complain or ask him where they’re going? Would she shakily ask to go home or would she stay quiet until they reached somewhere far away and restarted their lives? Or would she decline and wander back home and explain it all to their mother and get laughed at and indulgently smiled at (even if it’s a little horrified) and be the only one to know that Timothy Rand ran away from Galloway.
If it’s even Galloway anymore.
If his parents are even alive.
If any of this is real.
(Rand thinks he already knows the answer to all of them.)
All he can do is stare blankly, but not the kind of blank as everyone else, as Rachel lets go of his hand with an excited shout and charges forward to the waiting embrace of their – their , God it’s their again – mother. To the tearstained, alive body of his– their mother, who somehow survived all this shit and is just as blank-eyed as everyone else and needing no explanation to why her daughter is the same age when she disappeared and alive.
All he can do is stand stupidly on the sidewalk and watch, disconnected, as his parents get their daughter back after the most horrifying 24 hours of Rand’s life that they’ll never know about. Stand and watch as his mother ignores the gore and viscera everywhere in favour of hugging her long-lost daughter and doesn’t even comment when Rand hangs back and shoves his hands in his pockets.
All he can do is exist and breathe and wonder, idly, that if he goes to sleep now he’ll wake up to Kian and Rolan shouting over him as they head into Arizona.
Rand doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing here.
The only one who comes up into the attic now is Rachel. His ma doesn’t try to, never exactly did but she hasn’t tried again since Rand almost hit her over the head with a book repeatedly, and Rachel always loudly announces her presence before she barges in just as loudly. His pop did, once, and Rand only knows about it because Rachel said he was unresponsive the entire time he was up there, but he’s never come up again so Rand considers it a win.
Rachel never comments on the books, will poke through them repeatedly like she’ll find them interesting at all, but it always inevitably ends up with her flopping as close to him as possible. Rand doesn’t dare think she does it to comfort him when he knows well she just gets bored, and there’s never been particularly anything to do in Galloway but now there’s less than nothing.
He’s gone out only a few times. Nobody has said a word about the bugs. Sometimes, just to prod at it a little, Rand will ask if they remember the apocalypse and all he gets are confused, dazed looks of horror before it smooths over. He’s becoming more and more convinced the only thing stopping Rand from joining their daze is that he understood it, looked too hard between the lines at the very start and knew too much in the end to forget.
The town looks no less fucked up than it did at the end.
Rand doesn’t know why he’s still here.
Rachel, maybe. Or maybe because there’s nowhere to go. Rand’s about as good at leaving Galloway as the people who were born and died in it. He’s lived how long and never even moved out of his parents’ place? What’s he even thinking, that he could make it out of Galloway and know what to do with himself? Leave Rachel alone in their rotting town?
He’s beginning to think he’s looking for reasons to stay.
He doesn’t think it’s hard.
He knows he’s making excuses.
Kian left, so did Rolan. They both made it outside this hellhole, but that was before it became more of a hellhole and they died in it. Maybe Rand is kidding himself and he’ll follow in their footsteps – leave Galloway and come back just as a visit and die. Maybe he’ll get Rachel killed for real that time, just like he got his friends killed.
(It wasn’t him, but it was. Maybe Rolan would be alive if he’d thrown it better, maybe Kian would be alive if they just never split up, maybe they would’ve been fine if they’d just left before the birds and they’d be out in Arizona during the apocalypse. Maybe if Rand just said something a little different, saw something else coming, none of this would’ve happened. It’s just like Rachel all over again, but this time Rand knows his friends are dead like a fact and he doesn’t even really know if his sister’s alive despite her standing in front of him every day.)
Rachel doesn’t complain that Rand hardly ever goes outside. Barc survived, which keeps her occupied, but she gives him these looks . Ones that make her look too old for her age, which who fucking knows maybe she is older for her age after being attached to an alien for years, and like she knows something he doesn’t and she understands. Sad looks that leave Rand feeling like shit every single time because he should be her brother, right? He should be taking her outside and playing with her instead of thinking of why he’s still here.
He can never quite muster the energy for it. Rachel never talks like she blames him, when Rand knows she does sometimes.
On the very, very few times Rand leaves to look at the ruins of his hometown Rachel will follow him until she takes his hand and comes with him. They watch as people rebuild and find no bodies except for the flesh-web-things that are left behind of whatever Hive those things were making. They watch as people never quite see what they’re touching and doing, and sometimes Rand finds himself talking to them.
(“We’ll come back from this,” someone said, Rand doesn’t know who anymore. “We’ll be running like normal again soon,” said someone else but Rand doesn’t believe that one specifically.)
“It keeps making you sad,” Rachel says one day as they walk back with all the gusto of a kid who is going to say what they’re thinking, consequences be damned.
Sad isn’t the word Rand would use. But he shrugs anyway with an indulgent, “Just wanna know what’s happening.”
Rachel is never content with the answer, but she takes it all the same.
No matter how much flesh he watches everyone in the town remove, it never feels like it goes away. Even as time passes and Rand watches it all disappear bit by bit, it never looks that way. The scraps left in doorways still look like webs over the doorway, rooftops still splattered with stretching meat even though it’s just chunks now. Even as people come in, returning or not, and they look on in horror that isn’t comprehending and eyes slide past it all in some kind of preservation attempt Rand doesn’t feel like any of it is fixed .
Once, only once, his ma asked him to help her with a piece of the flesh because he was the nearest. Rand only got to briefly touch it before everything ( blood, Kian, bugs bugs bugs flesh dying mimicking becoming stealing Rolan Hive Queen) crashed back in and Rand instead threw up and hid for another week. Rand never did find a way to explain why it happened. All he got was a patient smile. It made Rand feel horrible.
Maybe the worst part is that Rand can’t explain it because the words don’t find their way despite how he knows every single word and every single fact about what happened. Maybe the worst part is how his parents talk to him now with eyes that say they don’t understand and their minds are filling in gaps Rand can’t begin to guess – maybe they think his behaviour is because of the weed, or maybe they think it’s progress to him finally growing independent. Maybe the worst part of it all is that Rachel is at his side, smiling and excited as ever, and Rand sometimes can’t even look at her without thinking of the thing that had been attached to her and feel bile rising up his throat.
Maybe it makes him a bad person, that he doesn’t try to explain to his only friend left why he sometimes can’t even look at her or talk to her. Maybe it makes him a bad person that he refuses to talk to anyone because they don’t understand . Maybe it makes him a bad person that he refuses to explain why he lashes out at people because they don’t know how he fought for his life. Maybe it makes him a bad person how he never tells them that sometimes he still hears the buzzing and sometimes it still feels like Not-Kian’s blood and muscle is all over him, or how he can swear he still hears their clicking and the screams of people as they’re consumed and turned.
Maybe it makes him the scum of the fucking earth. Rand already accepted that a while ago.
Once, people never really looked at him, or if they did then it was with familiarity that either was disgust or indifference. Rand got used to it, didn’t care for it really.
Now, people look at him with some kind of distrust like they need to scatter in case he’s the next one he blows up at over the smallest sound that’s just too similar .
Rand really, really doesn’t know why he’s still here. Sometimes, he thinks everyone in the remnants of Galloway wonders that too.
Galloway’s not home. Rand has maybe known this for years, maybe since the day that Kian left after Rolan. It’s too long ago to tell when he realised it. But it’s internalised now in a way Rand can’t explain. Just that he looks at the semi-functional town, months and nearly a year after the worst few days ( hours ) of Rand’s life, and he knows that this place hasn’t been a home for a long, long time. Not in a way that’s meaningful.
It’s funny. He had this knowledge for years, and it’s only now that Rand can admit it. He can only say it to himself in the middle of the night standing in the middle of the street now that Galloway has been basically destroyed. Beaten beyond recognition, which is such a strange concept because Galloway is just one of those places that looks like it’s been destroyed so many times that being rebuilt on top of itself makes it seem like some immortal backwater town. But Rand has been here since he was born and he’s seen it change in subtle ways before, but it’s different now. Different in a way Rand doesn’t have words to describe.
Or he does. The words, this isn’t Galloway .
It sounds a lot like how he did that first day. Those first few weeks where none of it was real. But Rand knows it for sure, knows this like he knows his best friends died stopping the apocalypse, Galloway isn’t this place. This place, this town, is built on top of Galloway but it’s not Galloway .
Rachel doesn’t feel the same. Rand knew it from the first second he said it to her under his breath in a passing sentence and she looked at him, for the first time, like he was crazy. Or, she looked at him in confusion but in that way where it’s accusatory. But Rachel was attached to the thing that turned this place inside out for years, so Rand doesn’t blame her. She knows, but she doesn’t… know .
(Rand is silently grateful that she doesn’t live with it all. That she doesn’t have it burned into her mind how many people died, integrated into the Hive. She didn’t watch the town die person by person, building by building. But he envies her too, because he did. He watched it happen and came out of the other side, hands never clean of blood he didn’t spill but splattered on him all the same.
As it is, just like the rest of the town, Rand can’t blame her for not having understood it. Rand, just like Rolan and Kian, understood by accident, exposure, and to survive. Even then, though, trying to recall the details of those days – that day – picks away at the dregs of sanity Rand hopes he still has left.)
Sometimes, Rand catches himself looking at the cars that are beginning to filter back into the cleared streets, and wondering. If he just asked for a ride from someone on the way out, would he make it? Would he make it through his sentence, or would he say nevermind or find out the consequence of being the survivor is he is mystically bound to this hellhole? Would he be able to bear leaving Rachel alone, or when he asks would the desperation Rand can feel at the edges overwhelm the guilt?
He has no money but the bits and pieces he’s always had lying around, but he could make do. Just anywhere but Galloway. Anywhere but this mimicry of his birth town. Maybe Rand would one day return to this place and see Rachel, or maybe he’ll come back just like Rolan did for his parents’ funeral – and maybe, just like Rolan, he’ll die. Or maybe he’ll come back just for Rachel, sort of like Kian, and he’ll die that way.
Rand finds himself thinking of Kian and Rolan a lot nowadays. He wonders if they’d support him or not. He hopes they would. But it clings like some leech how Rand never really got to know Rolan, despite how the bug was a perfect replica and nothing had changed between the two of them at all, and how Kian died first and alone singing a plea for revival.
Sometimes, he’ll just stand at the edge of Galloway, there on the road where they almost died trying to escape what they didn’t know existed yet. Wave his hand around and wait for contact with a membrane and a heartbeat, sigh in relief when it never appears even though he knows it disappeared with all of the bug things.
Rand chooses not to think about how, if they’d defeated the Queen, Rolan and Kian probably would’ve died anyway. Kian kept alive through a space magic and Rolan, himself, a bug. He chooses not to think how he was always going to be the only survivor no matter how well he threw or no matter how fast they did it. Rand maybe would’ve had them long enough for goodbyes before he’d wake up on the edge of the bayou with Rachel and a town that’s Not-Galloway.
(Ha. Not-Galloway. Like how Kian was Not-Kian for a time. Ha ha. A false, bugged-out version of the original. Maybe that’s unfair to Rolan, but it’s not like they had time to think about that. Maybe Rachel’s Not-Rachel now, after being connected to that thing. Rand feels like a piece of shit for thinking about it.)
Rand thinks a lot about leaving, just like they left him. Then he goes back to his attic, curls up, and falls apart with what little of him he has.
For weeks, he tries to leave. He never does, but he’s come close. Rachel always looks at him like she knows. Rand slowly begins to think she’s beginning to silently beg him to stop hesitating. Maybe he’s also, definitely imagining it. But she’s spending more time with him, so maybe he’s not.
Rand’s just not sure of a lot.
It takes him a year and a half after the death of his friends, Galloway, and everything Rand’s ever known for him to convince someone to drive him out of the city. He doesn’t say goodbye to Rachel.
Maybe they both know he’ll be back eventually, like everyone in that cursed town is, and he’ll die when he does. Maybe they both know they’ll both die by the time Rand comes back, or that she’ll join him outside and they’ll come back for their parents’ funeral and die.
Maybe Rand is just a little too convinced Galloway will kill him, like it killed everyone. Rand doesn’t think he’s unreasonable.
Maybe, years later, if he makes it that long in whatever state he ends up in, Rand won't feel like his mind is splitting apart at the seams and he'll be able to come back.
Maybe, just maybe, Rachel will forgive him for leaving and they could be something even vaguely normal. Maybe she'll even tell their parents he left and they'll be proud of him before they die.
Silently and privately, in the back of a car of some guy driving to who-knows-where, Rand hopes Rachel can grow up a little normal but still a little weird. That way they can both play pretend again when he comes back.