Work Text:
diptych (n.)
(1) a thing made of two parts
(2) two stories that go together
* * *
Combeferre
He has been hungry for so long.
He's not just hungry: His clothes are tattered and filthy. There's snow on the ground and he doesn't have a hat or gloves. His hands and feet are numb. There's a ragged gash along his forearm, and dark bruises showing through the rents in his jeans. There's a dozen things wrong with him, and a thousand things wrong with the world. But mostly, he's hungry.
This part of the city is shopping centers and plazas and car dealerships--big concrete buildings with smashed-in picture windows and huge parking lots filled with abandoned, rusting cars. It's silent and still, except for the occasional creak of a loose sign or car door. The asphalt is cracked and buckled in between the cars, and he stumbles over it as he wanders from one useless store to another.
Some of the stores were grocery stores, and they used to be stocked with food of every kind, shelves and shelves of it, people calmly pushing their little carts down the aisles with no recognition of the overwhelming bounty that surrounded them. Now they're empty, cavernous places. In the panic after the world ended, they were the first stores to be looted. The first mobs swarmed through frantically, piling carts and baskets high with bottled water, fighting over bread and canned goods and cereal. Later on, more cautious scavengers picked over the wreckage for flour, salt, perishable goods that had dried out in the summer heat before they could rot, cheese that was edible under the mold. In the months and years that followed, the handful of remaining survivors scraped residue from bulk-food bins and picked the shards of glass from jars of peanut butter that had fallen and shattered in the first mad rush. Now the stores are shells, mazes of overturned shelving littered with broken glass and a slick of long-rotted produce.
The other stores--the hardware stores, the pharmacies, the salons--are all the same. They've been picked over again and again for anything remotely useful, and all that's left are the things that belong only to the previous world. He shuffles through heaps of magazines, long-dead celebrities smiling up from brightly-colored pages that rustle underfoot like dead leaves. He wanders between shelves full of electronics that were overlooked in the first few days of aimless looting; now they'll sit there forever, rows and rows of iPods and digital cameras and smartphones in perfect black and white boxes. At a salon, the rubbing alcohol for removing nail polish is gone, along with the potted plants and the goldfish from the fishtank and any plastic container big enough to carry water in. But the rows of nail polishes still fill an entire wall, vivid pinks and rich purples and shimmering blues underneath a thick layer of dust and soot.
He can't stay here. There's nothing left.
In the distance, far beyond the stripped shopping plazas and choked wreckage of the road, the ground rises up in hills. The trees are mostly bare-branched now, with the deep green of pines scattered among them--and one or two gaps where blocks of faded blue and rust break the organic hillside. There are houses in the hills. There could be food there. There could be people.
Stumbling with exhaustion, he walks toward them.
* * *
Courfeyrac
One foot in front of the other, he walks.
The road is clogged with cars--cars that ran out of gas, cars that crashed into other cars, cars abandoned by their panicked owners, cars that simply couldn't get through the snarl of other vehicles. He has to weave between them like a maze, and sometimes he reaches a point where there's no way for even a very thin human to squeeze past, and has to retrace his steps. He could climb over the cars, if he wanted to--or if he really had to. (He thinks he could, at least.) But scrambling over things takes a lot more energy than walking slowly around, and he has to save what little energy he has left.
He used to run, he remembers, and the thought makes his lips twitch into something that he suspects is trying to be a smile. He used to run for exercise, burning calories as if they were a poison. He used to run for fun, for god's sake. Somewhere in the back of his mind, an image lingers of a ridiculous pair of hot pink booty shorts.
And then the pandemic hit, and he was running for his life. There were so many shamblers at first, when the infection hit a critical point and exploded through the population. Every time he turned around, he found himself face to face with another knot of them--another reason to run. And he'd been so jumpy then, he'd run for no good reason plenty of times, wasting valuable calories to sprint away from shamblers when a brisk walking pace was more than fast enough to outdistance their slow shuffle.
But the weeks turned into months, and then years--and there are fewer shamblers now, but it's also getting harder and harder to find food. His legs, once soft, then tough with muscle, became wiry and then nearly skeletal. He's not sure he has the energy to run anymore, even if he needed it.
The shamblers usually only last a few months, or at least that's what
Someone (he doesn't remember who, just somebody) once told him, the shamblers usually only last a few months. They run on the stored energy in their flesh, and it's a limited supply. Even though they can access much more of that energy than living people can--burning through fat, muscle tissue, and internal organs alike--they eventually use it up with their ceaseless shuffling. They can get additional energy by eating flesh, of course--but there aren't many living humans left to be eaten, and most of the shamblers left are running on the energy from their own atrophied bodies, repetitively stumbling up and down the same stretches of ground, unaware that they're literally walking themselves to (a second) death. They're practically skeletons, held together by papery, mummy-like skin and sinew, propelled by a last few twitching muscle fibers. Before long, they burn through the last of their reserves and just fall to the ground wherever they are, completely used up.
Courfeyrac wonders if the same thing is happening to him.
A part of him thinks it would be better to just have it over with. Then he wouldn't have to feel so hungry and cold and tired. He wouldn't have to fight so hard to avoid thinking about what happened, about how
No.
But something keeps him moving forward. Putting one foot in front of the other, step by step. He wakes up every morning and looks for something to put in his mouth to keep him waking up the next morning. It's a circular process, where the struggle to find calories burns just as many calories as it gains him, and he's not sure what the point of it is. But that's another of the things he doesn't think about.
* * *
Combeferre
He walks for hours and he still doesn't seem to be getting any closer to the hills. He leaves the shopping center behind to walk a stretch of road between car dealerships, huge parking lots full of never-driven cars with bright, peeling paint. But when the car lots finally come to an end, there's another stretch of plazas, more gutted sporting-goods stores and concrete boxes full of useless electronics. The hills and the houses still sit far in the background, like a mirage.
But then, down in one of the parking lots, he sees someone. A small figure, stick-thin the way everyone is these days, dressed in a dirty green jacket, the hood pulled up.
When was the last time he saw a human being?
There are so few people left, other than the ones underfoot on the clogged roads and in the wreckage of the raided stores. But they're nothing but bones. The whole world is turning to dust and bone; Combeferre is more than halfway there himself.
From the road, he can watch quietly as the scavenger picks his way across the parking lot, moving haltingly, stumbling unevenly through the wreckage. It's strange to see movement other than the slow drift of the clouds and the occasional frantic flutter of a bird. It's strange to see a person.
People are life, but they're also danger. The wound on his arm is proof--the mark from the last time he encountered a person. She was jumpy and desperate; she was cornered; she had a knife.
He looks up at the hills, then down at the scavenger in the parking lot. Everything here is dead--rusty metal and sun-bleached plastic, inorganic and brittle. The route he's taking leads away from here, out of the wreckage of the world, up toward the green on the horizon. Even as he watches the scavenger, his feet keep moving along that course toward the hills. That's where he should go.
But something pulls him toward the stranger.
* * *
Courfeyrac
He searches the stores mindlessly, systematically going from one wall to the other and then on to the next store, operating on algorithm and muscle memory, not on conscious thought. This part of the city has been well picked over, but so has everything else in the world, so he keeps on with it, getting through one plaza a day before locking himself in an empty car to sleep until the next daylight. It's a habit (just like crossing himself before every meal, back when he ate meals, even though he didn't believe in God anymore; just like continuing to try to survive even though he doesn't see the point). So even after a search of the four stores on the west side of the plaza yields nothing--shoe store, jewelry store, gift shop, frozen yogurt joint--he turns toward the east side.
Carefully placing his feet among the rubble--every stumble means a moment of panic, flailing arms, a surge of energy he can't afford to waste--he picks his way through the parking lot until he reaches the big concrete block of a building on the far side.
He walks a few yards inside and waits for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. He hasn't seen a working flashlight in months, and even if he had one, he's not sure he'd keep it with him; it wouldn't be worth the calories it cost to carry the weight. He waits, standing (because sitting down is dangerous and getting back up again takes more energy than just staying on his feet), until the inside of the store becomes visible.
This one is a pet store. Was a pet store. It's trashed in the same way all stores are--things pulled off the shelves, packaging scattered around the floor. But you can tell what it was from the racks of chew toys and toppled scratching posts and the lingering odor--even after all this time, like it's embedded in the very walls of the place--of pet food.
The faint smell is enough to flood his mouth with saliva, to make his stomach pitch with the reminder of how hungry he is. The last thing he ate was three crushed goldfish crackers dug from the cracks of the small carseat in the minivan he slept in last night. He swallows convulsively, hoping he can keep them down. He can't afford not to.
He distracts himself from the nausea by looking around the store, searching for anything his mind can latch onto. There are bodies on the floor, but they aren't much of a distraction. There are bodies everywhere. There were so many humans before their world ended that even now, after the extinction of their species, they are still everywhere. There are five of them--no, six--visible from where he stands now, and that's without turning his head. One draped over the counter by the cash register. One half-buried in the wood shavings spilling from torn bedding packages. Three lying in a tangle halfway down the exotic pets aisle. One just an arm's length away from Courfeyrac. Or rather, part of one. They've all been eaten away to almost nothing by the virus's insatiable consumption, but this one's been visibly gnawed as well, the stomach cavity open to the air, part of the arm a few yards away.
He's stopped noticing them, to be honest. After all, they can't be eaten. Some of them could have died from starvation, but it's far more likely that they were shamblers who used up every shred of flesh on their bodies and dropped. Even if there were still some meat on those bones, it wouldn't be safe to eat.
There are other distractions, though. There's a display of dog costumes by the front counter--it was about to be Halloween, he dimly remembers, when everything happened. Back then, he might have been excited about the costumes, giggling over the images of little daschunds dressed as Robin and the fairy wings for pit bulls. Or he might have thought they were a ridiculous waste of money. It's hard to remember the person he was back then, to untangle his own opinions from those of the other people he knew.
There are signs on the walls and the ends of the aisles still, posters that show scenes that would be impossible today: A dog leaping up to catch a frisbee. A happy perfect family laughing at something their parrakeet said. A woman with short purple hair and a spiked leather jacket gently caressing a soft gray bunny. A couple relaxing on the couch, a tabby cat curled up on the smaller man's lap. The man's head is on his partner's shoulder; their hands rest between them, the fingers entertwined. Courfeyrac can't remember what cat (or any kind of meat) tastes like anymore, but he can recall the warmth of a person sitting close against his side, the brush of fingers over the back of his hand, as vividly as if it were happening right now.
God, he's so lonely.
If he had another person with him, someone to talk to, someone to share a ragged sleeping bag in the back of a minivan at night, someone to take turns watching for shamblers with, someone to discuss where they might next find food or shelter or medical supplies--if only he had someone, this wouldn't be quite so impossible. Almost as much as for food, he is starving for human contact, for a glimpse of a living person, for a moment of gentle touch, for the sound of a voice. Sometimes he talks to himself, danger be damned, but the sound of his own creaking voice in the emptiness just frightens him.
The nights are the worst, locked in a car for hours in the pitch black of a world with no streetlights, all alone, not knowing what he'll wake up to or if he'll even wake up. Sometimes he's too terrified to sleep, despite his bone-deep exhaustion, and he sits curled up in the corner of a backseat, eyes straining into the darkness. On the better nights, he forces himself to lie down and imagines a person lying next to him, pretends the fold of the sleeping bag draped over his shoulders is an arm, tells himself stories in which another person whispers to him in the dark. On the worst nights, he shakes and cries and rakes his fingernails down his arms to try to fend off the feeling that he's about to crawl out of his own skin in panic.
He shouldn't be thinking about this now; he shouldn't think about it ever. Nothing good comes of dwelling on things. They just get bigger. Sometimes he's gripped by the fear that he's the only person left in the whole world--everyone else gone, even the shamblers--and the empty highways and abandoned malls become so terrifying he has to clamp a hand over his mouth to stifle the sobs of terror.
He's level-headed enough right now to not let it go that far. (He's not the only one left; he remembers seeing a shambler just 2 days ago, and he crossed paths with a person a week before that.) Still, thinking about how very alone he is--how much he's lost--has his eyes watering and his heart aching with loneliness.
But at least he's not going to be sick anymore.
Taking a deep, shaky breath, Courfeyrac turns away from the images of people long dead--both the dessicated bones and the colorful posters--and gets to work.
* * *
Combeferre
It's like there are two parts of his mind. There's the part of him that wants to follow the scavenger down into that plaza, to get closer, that part of him that is still drawn to people despite the gash on his arm, despite everything.
But there's another part of him--buried deep, almost unrecognizable, like a vestige of a past life or the experiences of some long-distant ancestor--that's straining to run in the opposite direction. It's like a voice in the back of his head, screaming so frantically he can't make out words, only the gut-wrenching certainty that going anywhere near that scavenger means danger and horror and the end of everything good.
He stands still for a long time up on the road, even after the scavenger has disappeared inside one of the stores, torn between the two sides of him, between his desire to be near someone and the faint voice protesting so violently against it. As if he's used up all his decision-making power, he's frozen by the simple choice: Go on, or stay here. It takes a long time. The sun is starting to go down (the light getting oranger but no warmer) when he finally turns his head and starts across the parking lot toward the store where the scavenger disappeared.
There's a ring of cars in the parking lot, big blocky SUVs and pickup trucks and some solid ancient vans all drawn up in a circle. Inside the ring, the pavement is blackened and buckled from heat underneath the layer of charred bones. The paint on the cars in the ring is scorched and bubbled, and on one side many of the nearby cars are also burned, where the fire--or its fuel--must have jumped the containment ring.
He doesn't spend any time thinking about what might have happened here. There are many things like this, or things completely unlike this on the surface but the same underneath, on this road. Like most of them, this one is very old. Probably no one is alive to remember it, and it's likely no living human will ever pass this way again to notice it or wonder about it.
It takes him a long time to find his way around the obstacle.
* * *
Courfeyrac
The cages are all empty, of course. One of them holds a handful of bones, and Courfeyrac checks just in case there's marrow or an overlooked scrap of desicated meat. But they've all been cracked already; clearly he's not the first desperate refugee to go through this place. The packages of food and treats are long since gone from the shelves; the bird cages and fish tanks have been emptied out. There's nothing here.
He goes over the store from top to bottom anyway, starting with the big cages along the left wall and moving across the store, through the bird section and the big glass rabbit and ferret cages to the smallest cages, tucked into the front right corner. He feels around in every cage in the "exotic pets" section, even though most of them have clearly already been rummaged through, remembering one amazing afternoon when they'd found a whole handful of dead crickets in an empty cage that must have been used to store food for the tarantulas. That was several months ago, but even then they were hungry enough that they didn't hesitate to devour the insects, laughing, almost giddy with delight at their good fortune. They'd had almost twenty apiece, and
No.
He can't think about it. That was a good day, but what happened later on was
It seeps into everything, so even the memories of the good days make him so sick with grief that he has to stop and grab onto a shelf to hold himself up, the corner of the metal digging into his palm.
The past is a yawning gulf, a black hole that will swallow him up if he gets too close. The future holds his death, eventually--but if he thinks about that, he's just crushed by the overwhelming amount of lonely effort and cold and pain in between now and then. The only thing he can afford to think about is this present, right now.
Better yet, don't think at all--just move on to the next cage. Carefully, conscious that every movement is calories you can't afford to spend.
A few of the rat cages still have wood shavings on the bottom, and he sifts through them slowly, automatically, bringing each piece of detitrus close to his eyes to squint at it in the dimness until he can identify it--dropping, bone, bit of wood. The first cage yields nothing but a few wads of fur and tiny foot bones. The second is no better, nor is the third--but the fourth.
The fourth cage.
His legs go weak and he almost sits down right there in the middle of the store, never mind the caloric cost of getting back up again. At the bottom of the fourth cage, underneath a scum-crusted food dish, is a handful of honest-to-god food pellets.
There's at least a quarter cup of food there--more than his starved stomach can handle at one time. He's going to walk out of here carrying food for later. He can't remember the last time that happened.
Carefully, he scoops up the pellets and tips them into the pocket of his jacket. Then, fingers trembling, he counts out five of them and puts them in his mouth. He leans against the shelves, chewing slowly, savoring the knowledge that--just for the moment--he's taking in more calories than he expends. That he's inching ahead.
* * *
Combeferre
The scavenger, chewing slowly as if he's forgotten how, closes his eyes in a tiny moment of ecstacy, and so he doesn't see Combeferre step into the doorway of the store.
He's in bad shape. He's scrawny, with sunken cheeks and filthy clothes. His dark hair is greasy and matted, and he leans against the metal shelves as if he doesn't have the energy to stand on his own.
It's been a long time since Combeferre has been this close to a human. He can see the dark circles under the scavenger's eyes, the scratches on his arms, the streaks tracing through the dirt on his cheeks. He can hear the man's breathing and the faint crunch of whatever he's eating. He can smell his sweat.
Combeferre wants to get closer. But he can't move. He stands, still and silent, on the threshold of the store, while inside his head the two parts of him fight.
It's nearly a stalemate. The stronger side, the side that wants to be near people, is more insistent now that he's almost there. It's pulling him into the store, and it has inertia on its side because after all he did start this process, turning away from the road, following the stranger down into this shopping plaza.
But the other voice, faint though it is, has become frantic at the sight of the scavenger up close. It claws at his brain, unwilling to give up. The desire for other people is almost lost under the sheer terror of the panicked, half-strangled scream of DANGER DANGER DANGER. There's no reason for it, but that deep-buried voice is convinced that if he does this, if he takes one step toward this person, everything will be over.
For a moment, he almost turns away.
But he needs this other person, needs to come close to someone in a way he can't understand. He shakes his head slowly, as if underwater, and pushes the voice down, ignoring the wave of horror that washes over him. He takes a step into the store.
An old food dish, the plastic weakened from months of exposure to sun and rain through the broken windows, cracks under his foot.
* * *
Courfeyrac
There's a crack, and Courfeyrac's eyes are open and his knife out almost before his brain registers the sound.
The late afternoon light is shining in through the shattered windows in the front of the store, and at first all he sees is a tall silhouette in the shape of a person. Then the figure takes a few shuffling steps forward, its feet stirring up the dried flyers and bones that litter the floor, and Courfeyrac can see the face.
Combeferre's skin is sunken around his cheeks and his dull eyes. His clothes are torn and through the rents Courfeyrac can see his ribs under the skin and the long gash down his left arm that will never knit together. He's lost a shoe, and half the foot that was inside it. Blood streaks his clothes and skin, stains the teeth in his half-open mouth.
The bite wound still gapes over his collarbone, a bright flash of bone against the reddish brown of his blood-soaked shirt.
Courfeyrac's fingers turn to water, and the knife slips from his hand. Combeferre doesn't seem to notice the noise. He takes another step forward, moving slowly, slower than he should even given what he is. Courfeyrac can't move at all.
He knew--he knew, when it happened and Combeferre begged him and he said no--he knew he was risking this moment. But he couldn't do it, not to avoid this possibility, not even because Combeferre pleaded. He told himself if it happened, he would walk away, like he has from a hundred other shamblers. Now the moment is here, and he can't move.
Combeferre takes another step forward. He is making a low growling noise that doesn't sound like him--doesn't sound like a human at all. A whimper breaks from Courfeyrac's throat.
Combeferre stops. He shakes his head once, twice, as if trying to dislodge something.
You have to run, Courfeyrac tells himself, and there's a little of Combeferre in the voice too. If you want to live, you have to run now. Get the cash register between you and it and get out the front of the store while it's still trying to go around. This is your only chance.
Courfeyrac's not sure he wants to live, but he still doesn't want to die.
He tries to obey, in spite of his weariness and sadness and his best friend in the world standing there but not there; he tries to run. He manages a few stumbling steps toward the front of the store, ducking past Combeferre's reaching arms. The afternoon sun is still shining in through the windows, and if Courfeyrac can just get out into that blinding light he can get away, because even after everything, he knows he can still outpace a shambler's uneven shuffle.
But he's so tired. His knees buckle before he makes it to the cash register. He tries to scramble up, his feet slipping on flyers and broken glass and a dead woman's hair, and Combeferre's fingers close on his shoulder, gripping harder than a dead man should be able to.
* * *
Combeferre
He's been hungry for so long.
The hunger fills up his head, drowning out everything else. The scavenger's flesh is warm and it's not going to stop the hunger but Combeferre buries his teeth in his arm anyway. It's warm, and he's so hungry.
The part of him that was screaming danger danger danger gives one last convulsive cry, and then goes silent.