Chapter Text
And to die is different from what any one supposed
Walt Whitman
Vegas had planned to kill Pete at least seventeen times.
By now, he'd stopped keeping track of which attempts had been genuine and which had been born of frustration.
Pete stood only a couple of steps away while Vegas kept the gun trained squarely on his forehead. Nevertheless, Pete's attention remained fixed somewhere above Vegas's left shoulder.
Vegas waited.
Pete kept staring.
Then, slowly, so slowly it bordered on offensive, he raised one arm.
The fly had already buzzed halfway across the room by the time Pete's fingers reached where it had been. They closed around empty air, but the arm kept moving anyway. Vegas had begun to wonder whether Pete's body was still capable of correcting itself once a movement had begun. Or perhaps the neural signals themselves were too slow to tell the rest of him that the target had already moved.
Thwap.
His palm landed squarely against his own face.
Pete paused for a second, then went right back to watching the fly, as if the outcome had been only mildly disappointing.
Vegas let out a long, tired sigh and lowered the gun.
Pete had never struck Vegas as an especially competent bodyguard while he was alive. Expecting him to become a competent zombie had been far too optimistic.
If there had ever been a point where this entire mess could still have been avoided, it had probably been the day they first met.
And oh, what a memorable meeting it had been.
The hotel that had once served as the Main Family's residence had long since become one of those places nobody entered unless they absolutely had to. Yet months after the outbreak, there was still enough left inside to make the risk worthwhile: ammunition hidden in forgotten armouries, medical supplies, fuel, equipment no one had managed to salvage before the city fell.
Every expedition returned lighter than it had left, but this one had very nearly failed altogether. In retrospect, Vegas had slightly overestimated the number of zombies one person could comfortably deal with before running out of bullets. By the time he finally reached the upper floors, he'd lost the rest of his team somewhere in the building, emptied his last magazine, collected several new injuries, probably a concussion, and developed an increasingly sincere appreciation for the concept of tactical retreat.
His father was going to be absolutely furious.
On the bright side, if Vegas died here, it would no longer be his problem.
Then he spotted the body sprawled across the corridor, dressed in the black uniform of the Main Family's bodyguards, and changed direction without hesitation. Dead bodyguards occasionally came with useful things attached to them. A spare magazine. A knife. Hell, at this point, he'd have settled for a working flashlight.
He crouched beside the body, already reaching for the tactical vest, when he realised the face looked vaguely familiar. One of Khun's bodyguards. And not one of the brighter ones, if Vegas remembered correctly.
Oddly enough, he looked almost peaceful. If not for the ashen skin and the dirt tangled in his hair, he could've been mistaken for someone taking an afternoon nap.
Then, before Vegas could take a closer look, the body opened its eyes.
Vegas stared at it.
The body stared back.
"...Seriously?"
His hand moved instinctively to the pistol at his hip.
Empty.
Right.
That was, unfortunately, the entire reason he'd been digging through dead people in the first place.
The zombie meanwhile made no attempt to attack. It just watched him.
Vegas briefly considered hitting it over the head with something, but another wave of dizziness hit hard enough to remind him that his body was rapidly approaching its limits.
The next thing he remembered was waking up against a wall, every muscle protesting the experience.
The zombie was still there, sitting a few feet away and watching him. Or, more accurately, staring. Watching implied intent, and judging by its expression, it was operating on approximately the same cognitive level as a goddamn toaster. If toasters had a habit of killing people, that is. Damn. That was definitely the concussion talking.
Vegas squeezed his eyes shut.
Counted to three.
Opened them again, more out of hope than expectation.
The zombie remained exactly where it'd been.
Carefully, Vegas shifted one leg, then flexed his fingers around the knife he'd pulled from the dead bodyguard's vest.
Still nothing.
Vegas weighed his options. Starting a fight with a zombie while concussed, exhausted and running on sheer stubbornness felt unnecessarily ambitious, so he decided to see what it would do instead.
Slowly, he pushed himself off the wall.
That finally got the zombie's attention. It rose as well, joints moving with the same sluggish reluctance as the rest of it.
It didn't lunge. Didn't growl. It just stood there, watching.
Vegas took one cautious step backwards.
The zombie took one forwards.
He took another.
So did it.
There was a pause while Vegas considered several possible explanations and frankly speaking none of them were encouraging.
"You're fucking kidding me."
The zombie, regrettably, did not appear to be kidding.
So Vegas walked.
The zombie followed, never close enough to touch him, never far enough to lose sight of him, always keeping the same slow, unhurried distance.
Under normal circumstances, Vegas would've been moving much faster. In his current condition, however, his pace happened to match the zombie's almost perfectly.
As they made their way out of the hotel, Vegas remained painfully aware that they weren't alone. Every shadowed corridor, every broken doorway, every dark window felt occupied. More than once he caught movement in the corner of his eye or heard distant shuffling somewhere deeper inside the building.
The fact that none of it seemed interested in them was no reason to start counting his blessings. By the time they reached the street, however, and nothing had come after them, Vegas had almost stopped expecting an attack.
Behind him, the zombie was still following with unwavering determination, like a duckling that had made an exceptionally poor decision about who its mother was.
And that was how Vegas got himself a pet. Or, as he preferred to think of it, an unexpected research opportunity.
If there was one quality that had kept Vegas alive long before the apocalypse, it was curiosity.
Curiosity was useful. It made him notice patterns other people dismissed, ask questions before everyone else realised there was something worth asking. More often than not, understanding a problem was the difference between surviving it and becoming part of it.
Nobody truly understood the virus yet. They knew how it spread and what happened to people after they died. Well, the part where they got back up in a generally homicidal mood, anyway. Beyond that, there were mostly theories.
This was the first opportunity Vegas had ever had to observe a moving specimen that wasn't actively trying to tear him apart.
It followed him instead.
It reacted to him.
Ignored every opportunity to attack.
That alone made it far too valuable to shoot. Whatever was wrong with this zombie, it might answer questions nobody else had even thought to ask.
So Vegas brought it back with him and started experimenting.
The first few days were, for the most part, deeply disappointing. Like every other infected they'd encountered, the zombie seemed remarkably indifferent to almost everything Vegas threw at it.
Pain produced no visible response. Neither did heat, open flames, loud noises or electricity. It didn't flinch, didn't move away, didn't appear frightened.
It made sounds from time to time — a low hum, the occasional rasp, something that might once have been a sigh, but none of them appeared connected to any obvious stimulus. Vegas spent hours trying to identify a pattern before reluctantly concluding there probably wasn't one.
If the virus had any obvious weaknesses, this particular infected specimen was doing an excellent job of keeping them to himself, because he didn't seem to care about much of anything.
Well, not anything.
Vegas remained the focal point of his attention.
Other people barely seemed to register, but Vegas could cross the room and the zombie's gaze would follow him with unwavering determination. Whenever Vegas left, it tried to follow. The bars of the cage stopped it easily enough, though. Instead of throwing itself against them like a proper zombie, it would simply wait for Vegas to come back. Almost politely.
Fast-moving objects, however, were apparently even more interesting. A fly drifting through the room would, humiliatingly, demote Vegas to second place almost at once.
Oh! And then, of course, there was hunger.
But even in that respect, the dead bodyguard differed from every other zombie Vegas had encountered — hunger didn't make him aggressive, only restless.
Restless, in his case, meant slowly pacing the cage instead of standing motionless in one corner.
Which was still alarming enough.
Vegas eventually reached one simple conclusion: forgetting to feed the idiot was the only genuinely dangerous mistake he could make.
The experiments hadn't produced enough useful information to justify detailed records, but Vegas scribbled down a short list in case someone else ever had to deal with the zombie.
Keep the cage closed.
Check the locks before leaving.
Indifferent to pain, heat and electricity.
Feed immediately if restless.
Keep alive.
One day, Macau came across the list pinned to the side of the cage. He stood there reading it while Vegas remained buried in paperwork at the other end of the room.
"Is this a care manual?"
Vegas didn't even raise his head.
"It's a containment protocol."
Macau kept reading.
"'Feed if restless.'"
"It becomes less predictable when it's hungry."
"'Keep alive.'"
"I still need to make some experiments."
Macau looked from the list to the zombie behind the bars.
"You know..." he said after a moment. "Considering how long he's been living here, calling him it is starting to feel a little rude."
"It's a zombie."
"It's your zombie."
Vegas finally looked up.
"It's a specimen."
Almost immediately, the zombie stirred.
His gaze settled on Macau for barely a heartbeat before drifting away again until it found Vegas.
Macau watched the exchange with growing amusement.
"I think he likes you."
"He follows movement."
Macau frowned and, without taking his eyes off the zombie, sidestepped to the left.
Nothing.
He waved a hand.
Still nothing.
Vegas got up to retrieve another folder from a nearby shelf. Immediately, the zombie's head turned after him.
Macau looked from the zombie to his brother.
"...Right. Movement."
He let the silence hang for a second.
"So... can I give him a name?"
Vegas almost dismissed the suggestion as ridiculous. Then, unexpectedly, paused.
The zombie had already had a name.
This thought should have occurred to him days ago. He'd been too focused on what the virus had done to the infected to wonder what might have survived instead. Names were memories and memories belonged to people. What if the virus had failed to erase something as deeply ingrained as a name?
Well.
That was an experiment worth running.
He frowned, searching through the dusty corner of his memory reserved for the Main Family's personnel.
"I think it started with a P," he muttered more to himself than to Macau.
Macau immediately took it upon himself to be helpful.
"Pol?"
"Different bodyguard."
"Prem?"
"No."
"...Porsche?"
Vegas's expression soured noticeably.
"Pornchai?"
Vegas sighed.
"They didn't have a Pornchai. Is it even a real name?"
Macau frowned, clearly running out of names. He let out an exaggerated groan and scrubbed both hands over his face.
"Come on... how many names starting with P can there possibly be?"
He stared at the ceiling for another second as though expecting inspiration to descend from above.
"Pete," Vegas said.
A low, rasping sound broke the silence.
Both of them froze.
The zombie hadn't moved an inch. He was still standing exactly where he'd been, his gaze fixed on Vegas.
"Pete?" Vegas tried again, just to make sure it wasn't a coincidence.
The sound came again, rough and strained. He resembled someone trying to clear a badly clogged throat, the noise barely forcing its way through, yet there was no mistaking the effort. The zombie was trying to vocalize something.
It was the first time either of them had seen him respond to a specific stimulus.
Neither brother spoke.
Vegas kept his eyes on the zombie.
"...Pete," he repeated, more carefully this time.
The zombie's head lifted a fraction higher. Another rasp escaped him.
It still wasn't language. But for the first time, Vegas caught a glimpse of something beyond instinct. The faintest spark of a mind that hadn't been completely erased.
For reasons Vegas couldn't immediately explain, his first impulse after that experiment was to put a bullet through the zombie's head and be done with it.
The thought was as sudden as it was irrational.
Nothing had happened that made the specimen more dangerous. If anything, it had become considerably more valuable.
Which was precisely what made the impulse so strange.
Perhaps people weren't meant to look too closely at something that existed somewhere between a person and a corpse.
Or perhaps the problem had begun the moment it became Pete.
Vegas knew perfectly well that the thing standing behind the bars was still a zombie. Giving it a name changed absolutely nothing about the virus, the biology, or the risk it posed. But, unfortunately, that made very little difference to the way people tended to think. They saw faces where there were none, assigned personalities to machines and apologised to furniture after walking into it Apparently, once a research specimen had a name, treating it as disposable became noticeably more difficult.
Vegas disliked that conclusion far more than he cared to admit. What bothered him even more was that he had started talking to Pete.
It hadn't happened all at once. At first, he merely found himself thinking out loud whenever he stopped by the cage. Observations. Half-formed ideas. Complaints when another attempt to understand the virus proved thoroughly unhelpful.
Then the topics began drifting.
Vegas would come back from planning patrol routes or arguing over supplies, stop by the cage almost absentmindedly and continue whatever train of thought he'd left unfinished.
One day he spent several minutes ranting about how the end of the world had apparently done very little to rearrange certain power structures. But what the heck! Some people — namely his father and his damned uncle — remained just as convinced they were entitled to tell everyone else what to do.
Pete watched him with the same vacant expression as always.
Vegas didn't think much of it.
Not until he caught himself returning to the cage later that evening for the sole purpose of finishing a story he'd apparently forgotten to complain about.
Pete, it turned out, was an excellent listener.
Vegas would've denied it if anyone had pointed it out, but Pete's portions gradually improved.
Contrary to what decades of horror movies had promised, zombies weren't particularly selective. Brains were appreciated, certainly, but flesh of almost any kind seemed perfectly acceptable.
Pete, however, turned out to be... mildly opinionated.
Fresh meat disappeared without hesitation, of course. But meat that had spent too long in the freezer received what Vegas classified as disapproval — a slightly longer stare than usual before Pete finally bent down to eat it. Whether that hesitation actually meant anything remained debatable. Still, the next time they butchered a chicken, Vegas just happened to save a better piece.
Pete wasn't paying attention when Vegas tossed it toward him. The meat bounced off his chest and dropped to the floor.
Pete watched it for several long seconds. Then bent down, slowly picked it up and started eating.
"Your reflexes are embarrassing."
Unsurprisingly, Pete ignored him completely.
Vegas leaned back against the wall, arms folded, watching Pete chew with almost comical concentration.
"You could at least have the decency to look horrifying while eating, you idiot."
Somewhere along the way, words like that had stopped sounding entirely like insults.
Pretending there was nothing unusual about keeping a zombie in his office could only work for so long.
He was going over patrol schedules one afternoon when the office door opened without so much as a knock. His father had never considered doors an obstacle when they belonged to someone else, and the apocalypse had done remarkably little to challenge that worldview.
The silence stretched just long enough for Vegas to look up.
Gun wasn't looking at him.
"What is this?"
"I've been trying to understand how they work."
A humorless smile tugged at the corner of his father's mouth.
"So this is what you've chosen to occupy yourself with."
Vegas set the papers aside.
"It could be useful."
"Useful?" he let out a short laugh. "People are trying to hold what's left of this family together while you're sitting here feeding zombies."
"It's contained."
"I don't care whether it's contained."
Gun crossed the room with unhurried confidence, stopping beside the desk.
"You've been entrusted with responsibilities." His gaze swept over the office before settling back on Vegas. "And this is how you've decided to spend your time."
"It hasn't interfered with anything."
The slap came so suddenly Vegas didn't even have time to tense.
His head snapped to the side. A sharp sting spread across his cheek.
"When," his father asked, as though nothing unusual had happened, "are you finally going to stop embarrassing me?"
Vegas said nothing.
Gun turned toward the cage.
"Get rid of it."
"It isn't hurting anyone."
That earned him another look.
That particular cold and disappointed look that had always managed to make Vegas feel twelve years old again.
"I said," he repeated, his voice dropping lower instead of louder, "put it down."
Behind the bars, Pete hadn't moved once.
And wasn't it the right thing to do?
The sting in Vegas's cheek lingered long after Gun had left, making it difficult to dismiss the possibility that perhaps he'd allowed himself to become distracted.
His father wasn't wrong about everything. Pete was still a zombie, and whatever faint traces of personality Vegas imagined he had found did nothing to make him less dangerous in principle.
Fine.
Vegas would put an end to it.
Just not in the office.
It was a poor place to shoot anything. The walls were thin, the floor was already difficult enough to keep clean, and the inevitable questions would be more irritating than the mess itself.
The upper floor of the building was empty at that hour and offered considerably more privacy. Since there was no one in that wing for Pete to encounter along the way, Vegas decided that dragging out the restraints he usually used whenever the zombie left the cage would be unnecessary. He just opened the door and started walking.
Pete followed at once, maintaining his usual few steps of distance behind him, his slow, shuffling footsteps echoing through the corridor.
They reached the staircase without incident. Vegas climbed several steps before the absence of movement behind him became noticeable. When he looked back, Pete was standing at the bottom, staring at the first step as though it represented a problem of extraordinary complexity.
Vegas waited.
Pete did not move.
“What are you, a fucking corgi?”
Pete looked up at him, then back at the stairs.
Vegas came down, took him by the arm and guided one foot onto the first step. Pete allowed this with complete indifference, remained there for a second and then carefully returned his foot to the floor.
Apparently, for this stupid zombie death had been less of an obstacle than a staircase.
Then, Vegas decided, the inner courtyard would work just as well.
It was enclosed, mostly unused and far enough from the occupied rooms that a gunshot would attract less attention. He led Pete outside, selected a spot near the far wall and finally drew his gun.
Pete stopped where Vegas positioned him, looking at him with the same vacant attention he always did.
Vegas raised the weapon.
A drop of water struck the back of his hand.
Then another landed on Pete's face.
For a split second, Vegas could've sworn Pete blinked as rain began to fall through the open section of the roof. Within seconds it was running through his hair and down the collar of the uniform he'd been wearing since Vegas found him.
Vegas lowered the gun.
Shooting him in the rain would make dealing with the body unnecessarily unpleasant. More importantly, the ammunition needed to stay dry, and Vegas had no intention of ruining a perfectly good weapon over a task that could be completed at any other time. Right?
Vegas made what he considered the only logical decision.
Back in the office, damp and entirely unaware that his execution had been postponed by the weather, Pete calmly watched as Vegas dragged the cage into his bedroom.
Moving the cage into his private bedroom had seemed like an excellent idea.
It solved several problems at once. His father would be less likely to stumble across Pete by accident, nobody would ask awkward questions, and Vegas no longer had to cross half the compound every time he wanted to check on his... specimen.
It was, by all reasonable standards, a thoroughly practical decision.
There was only one minor detail Vegas had somehow failed to consider.
Pete didn't sleep.
Which meant that while Vegas was trying to, Pete spent the entire night watching him.
The first time Vegas opened his eyes sometime around three in the morning, Pete was exactly where he'd been before — standing behind the bars and looking directly at him.
Vegas stared at Pete.
Pete stared back.
"...Oh, for fuck's sake."
Pete appeared entirely unmoved by the outburst.
Vegas rolled over and pulled the blanket over his head. When he looked again several minutes later, Pete was still watching him.
"Don't you have literally anything else to do?"
And Pete, of course, didn’t.
And there was also another unexpected problem.
Vegas had never imagined that "not decomposing too much" would one day become a quality he appreciated in someone sharing his bedroom. Fortunately, Pete was in remarkably good condition for a zombie. Compared to most of the infected they'd encountered, he'd deteriorated very little. His skin had long since lost any trace of healthy colour, but it remained intact. There was no obvious rot, no pieces of him threatening to fall off whenever he moved, and surprisingly little of the smell usually associated with the infected. Most of it, Vegas eventually concluded, came from Pete's diet rather than Pete himself.
His uniform, however, was another matter.
The black fabric had accumulated months' worth of dirt, dried blood and whatever else the apocalypse had decided to contribute. At this point, it looked substantially worse than the zombie wearing it.
Vegas found himself wondering whether he should wash it. That thought survived approximately three seconds before colliding with the unavoidable realization that washing the uniform would almost certainly involve washing Pete.
And that somehow felt awkward.
Vegas wasn't entirely sure when washing the zombie had become a more uncomfortable prospect than sharing a bedroom with one. This, despite the fact that Pete was by now occasionally allowed out of the cage to wander around the room.
He decided to postpone that particular crisis indefinitely.
For the time being, merely living with Pete turned out to be far less difficult than living with the idea of living with Pete.
As it turned out, getting used to living with Pete wasn't the strangest part.
This new arrangement seemed to somehow accelerate whatever changes had already begun.
At first, Vegas assumed he was simply seeing patterns where there probably weren't any, but after the same thing happened often enough to become impossible to ignore, he decided to test the theory properly.
He left a notebook on the windowsill, walked to the other side of the room and, as casually as he could, said, "Notebook."
Pete's eyes drifted straight to the notebook.
"...Huh."
Vegas tried it again with his keys. Then with a bottle. Then a knife. It didn't always work. Sometimes Pete would simply stare into space, as though his attention had wandered somewhere else entirely. But when it did, it was difficult to mistake for coincidence.
So, fragments of understanding had somehow survived. Individual nouns, at least, seemed to mean something. It wasn't much, but it was still far more than anyone had any right to expect from a zombie.
What fascinated Vegas almost as much as the result was the amount of concentration Pete seemed to devote to it. Whenever he actually managed to identify the object Vegas was looking for, he would become utterly still, as though correctly matching a single word to a single thing required every surviving neuron — or whatever it was he did his thinking with.
For one profoundly concerning second, Vegas caught himself thinking he looked...
...Cute.
Which was ridiculous.
Cute things generally weren't capable of tearing a grown man in half.
Then again, Vegas wasn't entirely convinced Pete knew how to zombie.
"Aren't we just a pair of losers?" Vegas said, idly swirling what little whiskey remained in his glass before setting it aside and balancing the pistol on one finger.
Pete looked up.
"You're an absolutely terrible zombie, you know that?"
Vegas gestured vaguely with the gun.
"No growling. No 'BRAAAAAINS.' No random attempts to eat people. You're too slow to be intimidating..."
He frowned thoughtfully.
"Did you not get the brochure?"
Pete remained perfectly unoffended.
"And me..." Vegas leaned back in his chair. "I'm apparently just as defective."
He let the gun rest across his knee.
"Father spent half my life trying to make me into the perfect heir."
A humorless smile tugged at his lips.
"Look how well that turned out."
His gaze drifted somewhere beyond the room.
"Honestly, if it weren't for Macau..." He rolled the glass slowly between his fingers. "I don't know that I'd still be particularly invested in surviving all this."
The words came out with surprising ease, softened by the whiskey.
"Some days it feels like I'm only still here because somebody has to keep that kid alive."
Vegas stared into his glass for a moment.
"Although, judging by you, even death doesn't seem to come with much peace."
He glanced back at Pete.
"You know..." The corner of his mouth twitched. "I'd probably make a better zombie than you."
He laughed under his breath.
"At least I'd finally be good at something."
"Hrrgh."
Vegas looked up.
It wasn't the familiar rasp, it almost sounded like the beginning of a growl.
Pete remained exactly where he was, watching him with the same unwavering attention as always.
Vegas stared back for a long second.
"...Oh?"
Another pause.
"You think that's bullshit?"
No answer came, which wasn't exactly surprising.
Vegas huffed a laugh.
"What, you think my father's the one who's wrong?"
Pete continued looking at him.
"Yeah."
Vegas leaned back in his chair again, a crooked smile still lingering on his face.
"Maybe he can go fuck himself for a change."
There didn't appear to be any objections to that.
Gun, meanwhile, never brought Pete up again. Pete stayed well out of his sight, and in any case, there were always other matters to occupy him.
Vegas couldn't remember a time when the two families hadn't been at war. He'd spent most of his life fighting that war himself, and before the outbreak there had always been something concrete at stake. Territory. Influence. Power. Every victory came at someone else's expense, every mistake carried a price. None of it had ever seemed worth questioning.
What Vegas hadn't expected was for his father to carry on as though the apocalypse had changed nothing.
But now the priorities began to bother him.
The infected kept multiplying. Ammunition was harder to replace. Every trip beyond the compound carried the risk of never coming back. Survival had become a daily calculation, yet Gun's attention seemed to remain fixed on a war that belonged to a world which no longer existed.
They were all still fighting the Main Family.
The difference was that the people around them no longer stayed because of money, status or fear alone. They stayed because, for now, the family still gave them the best chance of surviving. Vegas wasn't naive enough to believe that would remain true forever if father kept asking them to risk their lives for a war that had stopped mattering to almost everyone else.
If that day ever came, what exactly was he supposed to do?
Stand by his father?
Stand against him?
Or watch the family tear itself apart before the infected ever had the chance?
Each morning's briefing left Vegas asking himself the same questions all over again.
Reports came and went with practiced efficiency. Fuel. Medical supplies. Patrol rotations. Vegas had trained most of the patrol leaders himself over the years, and it showed. They knew what to look for, what details mattered.
"...we'll need another team on the eastern perimeter by tomorrow," one of the patrol leaders said, tracing a line across the map with his finger. "The infected are getting closer."
Gun gave a distracted nod but didn't answer immediately.
"We'll discuss it later," he said instead. "First, tell me everything you have on the Main Family."
No one objected. The patrol leader lowered his hand from the map without a word and began his second report.
Vegas found himself looking around the table instead of at the map.
The faces were as composed as they had always been. No one argued, no one even looked surprised. Yet, this wasn't the first time Vegas had caught himself wondering what lay behind those expressions. Were they still listening because they believed father was leading them in the right direction? Or because, like Vegas himself, they just hadn't decided what else they could do?
Those were dangerous questions.
Worse still, Vegas wasn't sure he could afford to keep postponing the answer.
There were too many things competing for Vegas's attention.
Between briefings, patrol schedules and increasingly difficult conversations with his father, Pete gradually became another part of the room rather than a problem that demanded constant supervision.
Vegas had never consciously decided to let him roam freely. It had simply... happened. For reasons he still couldn't fully explain, Vegas no longer thought of Pete as a threat to himself. Looking back, that feeling had taken root surprisingly early. The first time they'd met, he'd expected Pete to attack him at any moment. Somehow, after that, he never seriously thought about this again.
So sometimes Pete spent his days wandering aimlessly around the bedroom, lingering by the window, staring at walls, occasionally sitting on the floor for no apparent reason before eventually making his way back to the cage.
He had never once stepped outside.
So when Vegas returned that afternoon, it took him a second to understand what felt wrong.
The cage door stood open.
The room was empty.
Pete was gone.
"...Shit."
The realization struck almost at the same moment a startled cry echoed down the corridor.
"Macau."
Every muscle in Vegas's body seized. He was moving before the sound had finished echoing, his gun already in his hand as he rounded the corner.
Pete stood directly in front of Macau, one fist raised while Macau held an arm between them. For one sickening instant, Vegas's mind supplied the rest. Teeth sinking into Macau's wrist. Blood. His brother collapsing before Vegas could cover the few steps between them.
He slammed into Pete from the side, driving him hard against the wall before grabbing the front of his ruined jacket and pressing the muzzle of the pistol beneath his jaw.
"What the fuck did you do?" he yelled.
Pete let out a low, broken sound. His body tensed beneath Vegas's grip, but he didn't resist. His eyes stayed fixed on Vegas, wide and strangely alert.
"Vegas, stop!"
"Are you hurt?"
"What? No."
"Your hand."
Macau held it out without another word. The skin was unbroken. No teeth marks. No blood.
Vegas didn't lower the gun.
"What happened?"
"Nothing. He just startled me."
Pete shifted slightly, and Vegas's grip tightened at once.
"Don't."
Pete froze.
"Would you leave him alone for five seconds?"
"Macau."
"No!" Macau threw his hands into the air. "God, you're impossible."
He gestured toward Pete.
"He wandered out after me and just kept staring, so I thought..." He gave a helpless shrug. "Why not?"
Vegas stared at him.
"Why not what?"
"Teach him rock, paper, scissors."
Macau waited, apparently expecting that to explain everything. It evidently didn't.
"I was dying of boredom, and I figured he wasn't the worst company I'd ever had."
Vegas fixed him with what he considered his most disapproving look.
"Anyway..." Macau continued, completely ignoring it. "At first I kept winning."
"...Obviously."
"Oh, don't judge me."
Vegas rolled his eyes.
"Shut up and let me show you!"
Macau took a step toward Pete.
"Macau."
Pete flinched almost imperceptibly. The moment Vegas spoke, he went completely still.
"See?" Macau said. "Now you've scared him."
He glanced back at Vegas.
"Can I?"
Vegas hesitated.
"...Fine."
The pistol remained in his hand.
Macau gently took Pete's wrist, lifting his hand between them before uncurling his fingers into an open palm.
"Rock... paper... scissors."
He tapped his own fist against Pete's open hand, then switched to scissors.
"I win."
Then he repeated the sequence, slower this time.
Pete didn't move. His hand remained suspended between them, fingers still spread exactly the way Macau had arranged them.
"Come on, Pete."
Still nothing.
Macau looked at him encouragingly.
"You already did it once."
Pete's eyes flicked toward Vegas.
The gun hadn't moved.
Macau sighed.
"Seriously?"
Then he tried again.
"Rock... paper... scissors."
He waited.
Another second passed.
Slowly...
...Pete curled his fingers into a fist.
Macau beamed.
"Yes!"
He turned to Vegas.
"Tell me that wasn't amazing."
Vegas didn't answer immediately. His eyes lingered on Pete before he finally lowered the gun.
"...It's something."
"'Something?' Are you fucking serious?"
"Language, Macau."
Macau opened his mouth to argue, but Vegas had already holstered the gun, caught Pete by the sleeve and started walking.
"You're coming with me."
Pete followed without resistance, glancing back over his shoulder at Macau.
"Yeah, run away," Macau called after them, unable to keep the grin out of his voice. "God forbid you admit I'm right for once."
They had barely reached the end of the corridor when several guards appeared around the corner, drawn by the raised voices.
Perfect timing, Vegas thought grimly. Had there been an actual attack, by now they'd have been identifying a body instead.
One of the guards slowed to a stop beside Macau, looking from Vegas to Pete, then back at him.
"...Everything okay?"
"Oh, it's nothing," Macau replied without missing a beat, jerking his head toward Vegas. "My brother is just having a fight with his emotional support zombie."
A brief silence followed.
"I heard that!" Vegas called over his shoulder.
"I know!" Macau replied, thoroughly pleased with himself.
Macau, though, had been right to make such a fuss over it. This was the most significant change Vegas had seen in Pete so far.
It also left Vegas with considerably more to think about.
Death had always seemed like one of the few things in life that required no interpretation. A heart stopped beating. The brain ceased to function. Whatever made a person who they were simply ended. Pete's body fulfilled every requirement Vegas could think of. No pulse. No breath. No warmth. By any reasonable definition, he was dead.
Except that definition had recently become far less useful. The whole being dead thing had turned out to be much more complicated than Vegas had ever given it credit for.
The changes were subtle enough that Vegas could still dismiss each of them on its own, but taken together they formed an uncomfortable pattern. Whatever occupied Pete's body now wasn't static. It observed, adapted and learned, however slowly or inconsistently.
Vegas kept trying to fit that into a framework that made sense. Perhaps the virus had become more sophisticated. Perhaps it was rewiring the brain, preserving whatever fragments happened to be useful. Memory. Recognition. Habit. None of those things necessarily amounted to a person.
But where, exactly, did that line exist?
If memories survived, but personality didn't, was it still Pete? If habits survived, but will didn't, what was making the decisions? And if something could continue to learn after death, then what, exactly, had died?
Vegas deliberately avoided arriving at the word soul. It wasn't that he rejected the idea outright. He distrusted explanations that couldn't be examined, tested or disproved. Souls were convenient because they explained everything, and explanations that accounted for everything had a tendency to account for nothing.
Yet he couldn't point to a single place where personality was supposed to reside instead. The brain was the obvious answer, but Pete's heart wasn't beating, which meant no blood should have been carrying oxygen to it and no recognizable brain activity should have been possible. But where else?
What bothered Vegas almost as much as the questions themselves was how often he found himself returning to them.
There should have been something repulsive about the whole situation. A walking corpse, decaying flesh animated by a virus. Instead, Vegas found himself watching Pete with a kind of reluctant fascination that grew a little stronger each day.
He wasn't sure whether he was trying to understand Pete or understand death itself. Somehow, the distinction no longer seemed as obvious as it should have.
His thoughts came to an abrupt halt when he looked across the room.
Pete was sitting on the floor beside the bed with his knees drawn up, apparently doing nothing at all. When he noticed Vegas watching him, he lifted his head almost immediately. Their eyes met for only a second before Pete looked away again, as though that brief acknowledgement had somehow been enough.
The gesture was so ordinary that it unnerved Vegas far more than anything dramatic could have.
He caught himself thinking that Pete had looked... self-aware?
Vegas shut the thought down immediately.
No.
That was exactly how people got themselves killed. They started assigning meaning to behaviour they wanted to understand, convincing themselves there was still someone looking back. One day they forgot what they were dealing with, and the mistake only had to happen once.
He crossed to the cage and inspected the lock, testing it more carefully than usual before checking every hinge and weld in turn. Everything was intact.
He threaded a second padlock through the latch anyway.
Only then did he move to the bedroom door, examining the lock and frame with the same meticulous care.
When he finally stepped back, the room was noticeably more secure than it had been that morning.
Pete watched the entire process in silence.
Once, as Vegas straightened, he looked up to find Pete still following him with his eyes.
Vegas looked away first.