Chapter Text
Etho is running.
(Why is he running?)
He is running in a forest. Branches reach out for him, leaves smacking his hair and tangling with the strands. His entire body is working against him, exhaustion clinging to his legs. There is a sharp pain in his torso, the only pain he can feel. He knows there is more.
(He can’t remember.)
He trips.
He gets back up.
Stumbling over his own feet, he doesn’t dare look behind him. His heart is pounding, threatening to escape up through his throat. He feels nauseous.
He can’t stop.
(The pain is blurring his mind.)
He heaves uneven and shaky breaths, pushing through the trees. The trees—the trees feel like they are closing in, like they are caging him. They stretch, lurch forwards, creaking, gnarled fingers trying to grab him.
It’s not real, it can’t be real. He’s seeing things. Trees do not move. Trees do not have fingernails that scrape your skin, trees do not reach in and grasp your ankles, pull you back into their embrace with twisted smiles, unblinking eyes.
He is terrified. Somehow, the fear tears through the dull ache that had wrapped around his heart. He doesn’t feel the ache now. He is terrified.
(He’s not thinking straight.)
There is blood on his face. There is blood on his hands. There is blood on his clothes, soaking in, spreading through the threads like an infection. It drips. He tastes it. There is blood on his tongue.
He smells smoke. He smells smoke, and blood, and dirt, and—
It’s raining.
Is it raining?
(He can’t tell the difference between the rain and the blood.)
Etho stumbles, gasping for air. The mask on his face does not aid him; with each suck of a breath, he feels it, hot against his own skin. He feels like he’s suffocating.
His balance is thrown. He falls on his knees, palms flat on the ground. His wrists ache in protest.
It hurts. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. His palms sting, thin cuts caked with dirt. He brushes them off on his pants. He takes a breath, the fabric of his mask against his lips.
He looks behind him.
There is nobody there.
(Why does he think there should be someone there?)
His eyes dart around, looking past every tree, squinting. He doesn’t trust his own eyes. There is still nobody there.
He pushes himself to his feet despite the ache in his knees. His heels are sore. He can barely feel it past the adrenaline.
He still smells smoke.
Why is there smoke?
It curls in his lungs, scratching the sides of his throat and dries his tongue.
He sees the fire.
He doesn’t know how he missed it before. It’s there, in the distance—not far away, but far enough to give him a chance. He starts running again. He is going to die if he doesn’t get out of the forest. He is going to die. He is going to die. He is going to die.
He is terrified. He doesn’t want to die. So he keeps running.
* * *
It was storming.
That was the first out of place thing that happened that night. It didn’t rain much, not anymore. They were in a perpetual drought, a constant nagging in the back of your mind that asked when your luck would run out and the water would run dry.
It was out of place, but not exactly unbelievable. It was still a natural cycle with or without an apocalypse, and the world apparently wasn’t planning on completely dying any time soon.
Truthfully, Joel loved the rain. He would complain about getting wet—and he did hate getting wet—but it was worth it when he considered the broader upsides to the storms.
The sound of it was peaceful. Like a melody, a warm comfort by the fire, wrapped in blankets and kissed goodnight. It pitter-pattered against the roof of his car, paired with the rumble of the tires on the dirt road. Drowning out his thoughts, a pleasant break from daily annoyances.
It reminded him of late nights spent drifting off while being driven home in the rain. Seatbelt a familiar though uncomfortable pressure against his chest, something he would undoubtedly complain about, though unable to fix. A finger tapping his shoulder, soft, fond murmurs, arms sliding around him and lifting him out of the car.
The scent, too. The fragrance of the rain after the storm, weekend mornings where Jimmy would drag him outside to play, jumping in the puddles though they were told not to, ruining their clothes with stains of mud and dirt.
Bad boys, they had called themselves. Joel had been told the name was stupid time and time again, though he was not inclined to care. Silly childhood memories, not easy to let go.
The only downside was that it made it quite hard to see in the dark of night, headlights glimmering on pools of rainwater, droplets glistening before they slam into the windshield. Distracting. In this case, he was fortunate that they were in an apocalypse—there were no other cars on the road to run into with the hindrance to his vision.
The rain was not only a comforting thing, but a healing thing. It soaked into the ground, catching on dried leaves and bark, droplets of dew forming on blades of grass. It allowed for growth past the cracked earth and dead bushes.
It was a sign of moving past the grief and despair. A hope to see the world green again—though Joel thinks he might not live long enough to be a part of it. A slow process, it was.
The disease had done many things. An outbreak of a virus that spread too fast to procure a vaccine, quarantining civilians while the government panicked. They didn’t know what was happening, back then, and really, Joel still wasn’t quite sure.
The rain was an allowance to heal from all of that.
Really, Joel thinks he could stay here for the rest of his life, sitting in a car in a storm. He could close his eyes, lay his head back, relax into the back of the seat, and listen to the chorus of the rain. He could pretend that nothing, no one, else existed, that it was him and the planet and that it was all he needed.
He could pretend.
Not tonight, though.
The other out of place happening that night was Jimmy leaning forward, squinting his eyes with a hand placed against the console.
“Hey, do you see that?” Jimmy practically had to shout to be heard over the pounding of rain. Joel mimicked his actions in an attempt to see whatever Jimmy was talking about, but he didn’t catch a glimpse.
“No, I can barely see five feet in front of me, Jim.”
“There, it looks like”—Jimmy leaned further, his free hand grasping at his seatbelt that would otherwise be attempting to crush his ribcage, pulling it an inch away from his chest for wiggle room. Joel spots a patch of white, stark against the road—“It looks like a person. What—wait, what are they doing? Oh—oh my god, Joel, stop the car!”
Joel curses under his breath, slamming his foot on the brakes. They screech, an awful, drawn-out sound that rang in his ears with threats of a headache. The car slows to a stop a good couple feet away from what looked like a person’s body, crumpled to the ground. Joel grimaces.
They sit there in stunned silence for a couple moments, Joel attempting to calm his rabbit-quick heartbeat. Jimmy finally springs into action, fumbling to undo his seatbelt, hands searching his pockets for his walkie-talkie.
“Go—go see if they’re alive. I’m gonna see if I can get anyone from work to answer,”
Joel splutters. “What—?! Have you lost your mind? I’m not checking if they’re alive, Jimmy, what if they’re infected?”
“They can’t be infected if they’re inside the city, Joel, just go see.” His voice only slightly wavers, firm and authoritative, a hand shoving Joel’s side while the other grabs at his radio, scrambling for the on button.
Joel racks his brain for a response, but is only met with panic. So instead, he just clumsily undoes his seatbelt, unlocks the doors and swings the door on the driver’s side open, jumping out of the car and onto the wet ground.
He didn’t know what he was doing.
This was a stupid idea, this was a horrible idea. By no means should he be doing this. The ways that it could go wrong were racing in his head, screaming at him to get back in the car and drive away. Whoever it was, they could be infected. Nobody came out this late at night, nobody should be here this late at night. Especially not collapsed on the road.
Being a good person was not a viable way to survive anymore. This wasn’t an environment where kindness thrived, this was everyone for themselves. Nobody was to be trusted.
Trying to save a stranger on the road was, by all accounts, a bad idea.
But Jimmy, sweet Jimmy, still held hope for a better world, still wanted to be a place of reprieve from the hell that had become of the Earth. And Joel, Joel wanted nothing but for Jimmy to stay Jimmy.
They didn’t have much anymore, but they had each other, and Joel didn’t think he could stomach seeing a Jimmy that didn’t carry that light with him.
So he approached the crumpled body anyway, boots walking over wet ground that clung to the bottom of his shoes, dirtying the already worn material. The rain soaked into his clothes and hair, splattering over his face and dripping down his skin.
He crouches next to the stranger, a hand placed on their shoulder, turning them so they lay on their back. He heard a pained hiss, an arm shooting out and clutching at their stomach.
Joel looks down at their clothes where they grasped at the fabric with white knuckles. A green—he thinks it’s green—coat, blood creating a dark splotch on the material. The fabric covering their body is ripped in places, mud and dirt and blood and rain mixing to create a mess of stains. Their skin—any that is bare—is covered in scrapes and bruises.
“Hey—are you, um—are you… good?”
He stumbled over his words, panic creeping up his throat. He was not medically trained, at all. The city didn’t have any doctors, either; it was incredibly rare to find one, since they had been dealing firsthand with the virus—and therefore had been easily victim to it. It was a stupid question to ask someone who looked—he wasn’t completely sure, it was dark, illuminated only by the faded headlights of his car—like they were currently bleeding out, unconscious on the road.
There was no answer, but Joel thought the shallow, hoarse and pained breathing he could hear was as good as one. He reached a hand out, hesitating some moments before wrapping it around the stranger’s wrist and peeling it away from their torso to take a look, as gently as he could. Their fingers grasped tightly onto his own, digging into his skin with cold hands slick with a dark liquid. His heart squeezed. It felt like being strangled.
He brought his free hand up to the zipper on the jacket, sliding it downwards until he found what he had been worried about.
There was a large gash, likely a knife wound, reaching across their abdomen and stomach, ripped through a black undershirt. It wasn’t deep, from what he could tell from his limited medical knowledge, and they didn’t seem to be actively bleeding anymore, but there was still blood covering their clothes, and Joel thinks he might vomit, looking at it.
He was never good with blood.
Swallowing down nausea, he squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, rocking back and forth on his heels and taking a deep breath.
Okay.
Okay, this is fine. He can do this.
He can do this.
(What can he do, exactly?)
Worrying his lip between his teeth, he opens his eyes again and zips the jacket back up, guiding their joined hands to rest over the stranger’s stomach.
Was he supposed to apply pressure to the wound? No—the bleeding had stopped, right? That’s what it was for? Oh, he was not prepared to do this tonight. Even if he knew what he was doing, the panic settling in his throat made it impossible to think clearly.
At the very least, they didn’t seem to be infected. Not with the virus, at least; the wound could still probably get infected easily, with something else, if it wasn’t cleaned and bandaged properly. Which, it most likely would not be.
He sucks in a breath.
Should he take their jacket off? Maybe—
His eyes drifted upwards to where their head was laying against the dirt, white hair—white hair, messy with knots, twigs and dirt tangled up in the rain-soaked strands. Bangs that clung to their forehead, smattered with blood that clung to skin. A thin gash on their temple.
His breath hitched as he looked over their face, something nagging in his brain.
He knew that mask. That stupid mask, the white hair, the shapes of features that he had memorized in the back of his mind. He knew this man, he was sure, it was so hard to forget. In late nights where he would be working until 2 AM on some architecture assignment for college and get dragged into bed by arms that he was certainly strong enough to peel away from, but didn’t. In early mornings where he didn’t want to get out of bed, blankets ripped off his back and a cup of tea set on the small bedside table that was almost definitely made wrong—but Joel would love it anyway, Joel would love it anyway because it was made by him.
(Though he would never tell him that. He would still complain.)
There was a light, faded scar—that was new—thin and stretching down from the man’s forehead and over his eyelid, slipping under the dark mask, pulling on the skin.
He bit down hard on his lip, furrowing his brows.
The hand squeezing his own suddenly felt all too much to bear.
“Joel?”
Jumping, he abruptly drops the man’s hand, whipping his head around to see Jimmy staring down at him, a hand stretched out like he was about to lay it on Joel’s shoulder.
He takes a deep breath. Just Jimmy.
“He’s alive, breathing,” Joel says, standing up and brushing dirt off his knees. “It’s—there’s blood.”
Jimmy frowns, looking past Joel’s shoulder to where the man lay on the ground, drenched in rainwater.
“Okay,” he mutters, “okay, ah—nobody’s on the line right now, so—um—”
Jimmy swallows, Joel can see his throat bob. “Go back to the car. I’ll get them in the backseat.”
He freezes.
“What?!”
“Joel, we need to help them,” Jimmy says firmly, narrowing his eyes. “Go back to the car.”
“He’s bleeding out, Jimmy, what do you expect to do about this? We don’t know how to deal with injuries, there aren’t any doctors—we can’t.”
“We have to try.”
“I—”
“Joel, please. Go back to the car.”
Joel opens his mouth to keep arguing, but he looks up at Jimmy’s pleading face and finds the words die in his throat.
He bites back a sigh, giving a curt nod to his best friend before pushing past Jimmy and trudging back to his truck.
His truck.
Why is he letting Jimmy do this?
He opens the driver seat’s side, hoisting himself up and onto the seat, slamming the door closed as he leans backwards, head roughly hitting the back of the car seat. He brings his hands up to his forehead, dragging them down his face with a groan. There is blood on his fingers from holding the man’s hand, smearing down his nose bridge. He doesn’t find it in himself to care all that much, aside from the sickening twist in his stomach.
Dropping his hands, he looks to the car window, out and over the horizon. They call it a city. They call it a city, but the truth is it used to be a city—a small one at that—and now, there isn’t really much left of it.
Barren ground. Dead trees. Dirt. Sand. Rocks.
Rubble. Crumbled buildings, rusted metal and collapsed rooves.
It looks like the world has already ended.
Distantly, he remembers that, really, it has.
So many people have died. Parents, children, sweet old ladies offering to knit a sweater and middle-aged men just trying to make a living. Teenagers that hadn’t gotten to experience a happy life yet, young adults studying late for college.
Husbands, wives.
His wife.
It’s a miracle he’s survived this long, really.
It wasn’t the type of apocalypse you’d always see on TV—the gross, gory zombie ones. In those, he thinks, the survivors would always be brave, smart, quick-thinking and resourceful. They would survive because they were built for it. Joel was nothing like them.
Joel was built for sketching out buildings, for sleeping in on the weekends, for late movie nights watching shitty romcoms with his friends because he thought it was funny.
He thinks he might rather this have been a zombie apocalypse. He thinks that maybe, this is worse, staying alive as a human, watching the world around you burn. He thinks he might rather be a zombie.
He wouldn’t have to carry around the grief, then, right? He wouldn’t have to think about dead wives or strangers left on the road, not about childhood best friends or college roommates. He wouldn’t have to think.
Though, thinking about it, he knows that there was no way he would trade this for a zombie apocalypse. Not if he’d still be right where he was. It would hurt more, if she—if she was still there, somewhere, just—a rotting, decomposing body with tarnished clothes and bones poking out her shoulders, staggering around, hungry—hungry, starving.
He looks at the window.
Rain droplets slide down the glass. He remembers, as a kid, trying to guess which one would reach the bottom first. Poking his finger to the glass, trailing the drop from the dry side of the window. It would be cold, and he would only keep it there a second before taking it back, pressing it to his lips and trying to warm it back up with his breath.
Past the rain, he sees the earth, ruined buildings and a high wall blocking out the outside world. A stray couple lights among the dark city, not quite as bright as they used to be, though still shining, acting as a brief respite from the rest of the world. Tiny little beacons of hope, reminiscent of stars, thought not nearly as many lights as there were stars in the sky.
He looks up to the sky. It is dark, night having fallen hours ago. Or, he thinks it was hours ago. There wasn’t any way to tell time anymore, aside from the point of the sun or moon. And Joel could guess whether it was early, or afternoon, or late—but he had no experience relating specific times to where the sun was. He didn’t just have a sundial laying around, either, unfortunately.
It’s covered with dark clouds, an occasional lightning strike in the very distant horizon. There were barely any visible stars, and he wasn’t sure where the moon was, presumably hidden by the rainclouds.
It was hard to see. Even more so accounting for the barrage of rain hounding down against the ground.
He shouldn’t let Jimmy bring that man into his car.
He really, really shouldn’t, but he finds that he also really, really cares whether the man lives. That there is a small part of him that clings to a speck of hope like a lifeline, and he finds it hard to dispute. Like denying a sweet child just as sweet candies.
When he hears the backseat car door open, he turns, watching as Jimmy awkwardly hunches over to place the unconscious man in a comfortable position, then struggles to buckle the seatbelt. It is an odd sight.
A very odd sight, seeing his old college roommate in the backseat of his car at the end of the world, unconscious and bloodied.
Jimmy opens the passenger side door and slips into the seat, securely closing the door as he does so. He fumbles for his own seatbelt, and Joel mimics the action before placing his hands on the wheel, tightening then loosening his grip, flexing his fingers.
He starts the car.
“I can’t believe you’d just leave him there,” Jimmy mutters, and Joel feels shame flush his face. He bites the inside of his cheek, contemplating.
“It’s not our job.”
In his peripheral vision, he could see Jimmy staring at the side of his face, burning a hole in his cheekbone.
“Isn’t it?” Jimmy replies.
“We patrol the walls. And it’s after work hours, either way.”
“So you’d just let a man die,” he says, bluntly. It’s not a question. Joel inwardly cringes.
“It’s dangerous.”
“It’s dangerous? Is that it? When have you ever cared about that, Joel—everything is dangerous now.” Jimmy snaps, “but that doesn’t mean we have to be.”
Joel bites back frustration.
“You don’t get it, Jimmy.”
“No, I don’t, Joel. So tell me why.”
“I told you.”
“Elaborate, then.”
“Just drop it, Jimmy,”
“I’m not—”
“Please.”
Jimmy shuts his mouth, clenches his jaw and scowls. Joel sighs, slumping slightly. He takes a turn on the dirt road.
“We’re gonna talk about this later, then,” Jimmy warns.
Joel resists the immature urge to roll his eyes, instead just muttering resigned agreement, keeping his gaze ahead.
* * *
It’s not a long drive to his apartment, five to ten minutes, Joel’d guess. Though it feels as if it’s much longer. Stuck inside his thoughts with the rain falling down, punching the roof of his car noisily, the rumble of the engine, and the rolling of the tires against the dirt.
When they arrive at the building, Jimmy has him help carry the man inside, up a stairwell and into the door that led to the room Joel had “claimed”.
After, he helps by standing around and getting Jimmy anything he needs, letting the other do all the medical work.
It wasn’t like Jimmy knew what he was doing—neither of them did—but he was at least less likely to pass out looking at the wounds, which was just as important in Joel’s book.
He fetches the med kit in his bathroom that he’d taken from the LIFE office building a while back, a glass of water, blankets and pillows. There isn’t much he can do—not much either of them could do, considering they had no prior medical experience, nor the proper tools and resources to execute procedures had they the knowledge.
Joel does his best not to worry, standing a couple feet away from the couch where Jimmy was working, staring at the wall. He didn’t want to look, afraid of what he might see.
He didn’t think it was a horrible wound. It had looked large, but he didn’t think it was that deep. The man wasn’t dead yet, anyhow, so however bad it was, it wasn’t enough to kill him.
Yet.
After a while, Jimmy steps back, sets the roll of bandages he’d taken back down and turns to Joel.
“That’s all I can do,” he says, “I’m gonna head back home. Radio me if you need me?”
Joel felt ill, thinking of Jimmy leaving. He protests weakly, but Jimmy is firm, saying that they’ll be fine—he thinks, reckons, hopes—and so he gives in, letting the man out the door.
And then, there is silence.
It’s quiet after Jimmy leaves. It somehow feels much emptier, more so than it had even before Jimmy had entered in the first place. He was a bright presence, and without him, the room was far darker, it seemed.
There is nothing but the incessant clicking of the broken clock hung on the wall and the buzz of the overhead light’s lightbulb, a dim thing, having faded from years of not being changed. He’d probably have to ask if the LIFE organization had any to spare, soon. Though, Joel was lucky to have electricity at all.
On second thought, maybe not lucky. Was he fortunate, to have electricity, or was he unfortunate to be in a situation where that could be considered lucky? Was he willing to allow himself that small victory, in a landfill full of misfortunes? Could he look past all of that, for one simple thing that was already dying? Was it enough?
The clock ticks.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Each second, another click. If he listens hard enough, he can pretend there is a tune to the broken clock, some twisted and distorted imitation of a lullaby.
The thing had never worked, not in the whole time Joel had been living here. He didn’t know if it was a result of the apocalypse, or if it had been broken since before the end of the world, but he supposed it didn’t matter.
It was still a useless, broken clock, either way.
One that he couldn’t be bothered to throw away.
(He couldn’t be bothered to do much, lately.)
He looks over to the couch where his old college roommate, unconscious, lay. His jacket and undershirt had been removed somewhere along the line, torso wrapped in bandages.
There are bruises—purple, green, brown; colors blooming beneath skin—scattered along his arms and chest, small cuts that Jimmy had cleaned but not thought big enough a deal to bandage. Joel furrows his brows, frowning at the sight.
Something in his heart twists, a form of grief, for the man. Someone who he hadn’t talked to, hadn’t seen—had blocked out of his mind, neglected to think about for what he assumes has been over a decade, and yet it didn’t seem long enough to remove the instinctual sadness that came with seeing him hurting.
He could simply blame it on sympathy, but he knew better. He had carved out that emotion from his heart, stabbed into his chest with a knife and ripped the gory thing out. Slowly, painfully, he abstracted the soft parts of himself, refusing to let them hurt him again.
(At least, he tried to. And no matter how hard he tried, it never seemed to truly work.)
Over a decade later, and he still cares? It still aches to see him injured, like it had, before, to see him ill?
It baffles him, how that affection he carried has stretched the time apart from one another. Distantly, he thinks that it won’t be reciprocated.
There is an instinct, deep, buried in Joel’s ribcage, to pull himself closer, to stay there until they’re both coughing, until he caught whatever he had.
But he’s not sick.
And Joel doesn’t have the privilege to do that, any longer, either way.
It felt wrong to leave the man in the room alone. It was likely it’d take a couple days—maybe even weeks, Joel had no idea—for him to regain consciousness, but if he woke up in the middle of the night in a stranger’s—not stranger’s—house, Joel can’t imagine it not being an alarming thing. And he didn’t want to take chances with this.
It would still be an alarming thing to wake up in an unfamiliar area either way, but Joel figures he would wake up before the man either attempted escape or murder.
And after he wakes up—
Well, he supposes he’ll cross that bridge when he gets there. He never did like planning things out much.
He walked into his kitchen and brought one of his three chairs—a lot for someone living alone—over to the living room, on the side of the coffee table opposite the couch.
He sits, crossing his arms in an attempt to warm himself with his own body heat.
His eyelids droop, and even in the uncomfortable wooden chair, he finds his way to sleep.