Work Text:
A lone dandelion situated about twelve steps away from the gates of Ericson's is fortunate enough to see the sun another day and narrowly avoid getting crushed and crippled by the bottom of Louis' boot. The shoe's scuff marks graze the tips of the bright yellow petals in a close call, and the flower, standing a proud twenty-three centimetres tall, beams up at him almost peacefully. While a barely there breeze proceeds to shake the surrounding plantation that the flower follows along with like a dance, Louis can’t help but briefly ponder on the fact that the world is crawling with monsters, yet it’s still sprouting flowers.
So there’s a slight pang of guilt curling within his chest when he plucks the dandelion from the ground, lightly brushing the stem with his thumb as he stands and giving it a twirl in between his fingers. The weed, though we’ll continue to refer to it as the flower, gives a slight droop of the head at the sudden eviction as it peeks over the edge of Louis’ index through another quick yet soft spin, and that is how its dance concludes in a way.
Almost like a bow, that droop of the head deepens before a cock of the hand flicks it back up straight so the sun can seep deep within its soft fluff of petals that shine at him in return.
“A pretty pain,” Ruby once called them every time they started to be noticed poking up through the gaps of the cracked concrete by the grass and the dirt. And pretty they were, regardless of if they were considered pests.
The placid encounter sends one quick look over his shoulder that gifts him with a flower of his own still standing by the school’s gate. Louis doesn’t hesitate in turning on his heel and striding right back to where he was just a minute ago, unintentionally ignoring Willy’s impatient and antsy urges to hurry up just because he can.
Just before the eleventh step, Clementine presses him with a questioning lift of the lips that he has not seen in a couple of long days; “back already?” he feels she could say, and Louis feels like grinning at her with something along the lines of: “yeah, it was the most short-lived hunting trip I’ve ever been on. We didn’t actually hunt much, as you saw, and I know I could be letting what could be the last meal of our lives run away by standing here, but at least it led me back to you!” Instead, he wordlessly swings Chairles up to sit along his shoulder and, beaming in such a way that could rival the glow of the sun-filled dandelion, presents the flower to his darling, his darling of barely two days.
He catches the slight golden dazzle that rushes round her irises as her eyes flicker from him to the flower, then back to him before the flower once more. Then her lips curl into the brightest smile he has ever known, every light giggle that leaves her floating around in his head with echoes in his ears that he wants to hear ring constantly. Now he feels she could say something similar to that of “idiot” or “dork”, but she doesn’t, and he settles with recalling a previous moment when she did as a substitute, one that feels like weeks ago because it was weeks ago, maybe plays it over in his head one or two times more than necessary.
With a nod in response to his careful “may I,” he sets Chairles down in the dirt, lifts the flower, and gently pokes it through the buttonhole of her jacket’s breast pocket, tucking the stem away into the pocket itself as the dandelion’s head sits snug like a brooch. Then his hands retreat quickly with a bashful half-chuckle.
Rather charmed she felt when he awkwardly noted that it suited her, really brought out her eyes. He was scared with how quickly he came to think she had the most beautiful eyes, but he could not help what he found beautiful in the end. So, captured in this single second, he allows himself to get lost in the forest that is his enraptured mind, bathed in the soft sunlight of her eyes, as the crawling fear of the Delta floats away like a small battleship awaiting an exploding fate that will send dangerous white sparks and threatening red flames across his skin, but only temporary shocks because a danger like that will possibly never overcome the safety of the beaming dandelion yellows that can be spotted within the gold of her eyes.
About a day later, the sky is not quite as warm as it was in that moment in favour of a subtle grey casted through clumps of gloomy clouds, threatening to cry above a small six-year-old boy covered in blood and guts as he uses every ounce of strength he has left in his body to push a full wheelbarrow through the near silent forest, unknowing of the small yellow flower growing from a grass patch in the path that gets flattened under the front wheel.
An unconscious Clementine located about a few hundred steps away from the gates of Ericson’s is fortunate enough to see the sun another day as it just barely peeks through a gap in the sky and brings the thinnest blanket of warmth to her deathly pale skin. Her sleeping mind is unable to properly register the strongly painful throbbing felt within her freshly severed yet cauterised and wrapped up leg, nor that she is also lathered with a walker’s rotting insides, squished in a moving wheelbarrow with her arms rested across her lower chest and upper belly and her unharmed leg dangling over the edge.
Her gifted dandelion is forgotten in her breast pocket, poking out of the buttonhole, petals shrivelled up and curled in on themselves. It is not beaming similar to the grin that makes her heart swell, not a bright yellow, but a devastating brown, similar to the current colour of her eyes.
The light footfalls that each begin with a gravelly skid across the ground cause AJ’s hope to spike as he navigates the endless clusters of intimidatingly towering trees and their taunting branches that hush to observe his work. His puffy red eyes dart down to the wheelbarrow every minute or so in hopes of any microscopic sign of life; a stir, a shift, anything. He does not think he has ever felt so alone in his life.
But he knows she is still breathing; he knows that she is still alive, and she is not going to die because he can hear her in his head. Helping him, guiding him. A dandelion’s persistence, the drive to never give up. A constant chant running on repeat; keep moving forward, keep moving forward. Keep moving. Keep moving forward. Forward. Keep moving forward.
They are close, he can feel it.
A terrified Louis posted right behind the gates of Ericson’s is distraught to see the sun another day without two of the most important people within his life. He paces in short and uneven ambles, has only left his post beside the watchtower because Aasim has urged him take a breath or to check on Violet through the beginnings of her recovery. There is an eyepatch sat at the bottom of a dusty prop box nestled in a corner of the music room somewhere, and that makes him think about the potential flat look, maybe a chuckle, and the definite punch in the arm he will get when he offers it to her.
They are all worried about the whereabouts of the missing two, Louis just does not know why nothing is being done about it. He is fiddling with the head of a dandelion, just where the stem ends. He is debating on going back out there. He is also telling himself that they are okay, that wherever they are, they are okay and safe.
They could be at least a few thousand steps apart. He needs to sit down. He needs to go back out there.
He feels shaken. Mere hours ago he assisted in blowing up a boat, saw an old friend’s insanity lead her to her agonising fate, witnessed a bullet dig into the neck of a little boy he cared for beyond words, shot an arrow through the back of a woman’s skull and watched her bleed out onto the metal floor, and now he is stuck with the torturing thought of the unknown scratching at his head that he might have truly lost both the girl he thinks the world of and her little boy who he thinks of just as highly. He feels shaken. He cannot go through with that thought one more time.
The dandelion stares up at him expectantly. He loosens his hold on it, wanting to let it fall to the ground, before tightening his grip to keep it there, and goes through with settling it withing the pocket of his jacket instead.
A few thousand steps are, unbeknownst to him, actually a few hundred. A few hundred steps apart slowly decrease to a couple hundred, around a hundred, half a hundred. He only pauses when he spots movement through the trees when they are just under half a hundred steps apart.
When Clementine first wakes up, her first conclusion is that she is dead. She wakes up in her bed, in her and AJ’s room, back at the school. The sun shines at her through the bars of her window. Her vision is blurred. Her leg is missing.
Then there is a heavy shift from somewhere in the room, two or three rushed footsteps, and the knockback of a body half her size colliding into her and wrapping her in the tightest embrace she has ever received. A breathless laugh bursts from her chest as she returns the hug, one of clear bafflement yet pure thrill and a rush of exhilaration because she is alive.
She feels the shake of two tensed shoulders, one lightly bumping against her chin as AJ starts to softly sob into her neck, holding onto her with a death grip, like he is never letting her go again. Her now clear vision is only blurred again by her own tears as she soothes him, carefully rocking them both from side to side.
They sit there within each other’s arms for an unknown amount of time, before Clementine faintly hears the turn of a knob and the squeak of the dorm’s door as it is pushed open. The next thing she grasps onto is a shift of the bed as a third body’s weight settles itself upon the mattress, before a third pair of arms slip around her and AJ. Whenever she opens her eyes, half her face remaining nested in AJ’s hair, she is greeted with the brightest smile that she has ever known.
Louis presses a firm kiss to Clementine’s temple, one full of relief and warmth and bloomed love, and rests his forehead gently against hers, beaming in such a way that could rival the glow of the bundle of dandelions dropped in his lap that hold the sun itself.