Work Text:
As the big bird lands
Life hits me hard again
But holds me
As the speed crashes me
There is no hope for anyone in this world they now know. He’s terrified of his dad (but still, Ron wants his approval so, so terribly), his brother is almost retarded, and his mother is a weak thing that can’t figure out how to hold his dad from losing it on them every now and then. The anger is encompassing, God won’t forgive us (he doesn’t exist, not with the rotten guts and groans all around), and Ron cannot be assed to fix his mindset.
This is what he has learned. But other than that?
When Ron tries to look at Carl, he’s immediately overcome by a discomforting tension that leaves his brows furrowed and lips in a scowl. Almost as if Carl’s mere presence provokes some sort of disgust-fuelled feelings to immediately arise and seep into his voice, into his responses and expressions.
Ron attributes it to Enid taking a liking to Carl the minute he arrived, and to Carl being a clingy fuck that won’t stop close of borderline stalking. Ron has caught Carl watching Pete, watching Enid, and even his own father, Rick. It isn’t just simple watching, out in the open, no. Carl hides— he hides well, and he creeps in silence from behind fences, cars, or amid long grass. Ron only notices him because he, too, has learned how to be deathly quiet and silent at home, even before all this, just because Pete’s moods were to sour horribly quickly at the slightest creak or volume change. Ron thought it melodramatic, but then decided that was not a fit description after Pete took it out on Jessie one night.
Tonight, Ron was sat on the water tower overlooking the poorly kept houses. It was night, stars flickering. He thinks back to an episode he watched on space when he was younger, some scientist talking about the stars, how they’re like ghosts haunting the skies, something about how their light takes years to reach us on Earth, so the stars we see might have already died, making their visible lights ghosts of past selves. In a mundane way, he hopes the stars he can see now are long gone, just like humans on earth— disintegrated and shells of themselves, in the forms of walkers, of ghosts.
He can see himself in a dead star. Though, he thinks his light must’ve flickered off when he saw his first walker on the live news broadcast.
As my breath kisses the window
The big fire is howling
My guts scream out my sorrow
Is it today I'm dying?
Ron stands in numbness. There’s a ringing in his ears, hands clawing near his body, growls reaching his ears, but the ringing overshadows it all.
His mother.
Sam.
Teeth sink into skin, sink and sink and pull, and his brother’s face is all wrangled and wrong, his mother’s sobs no longer sounding among the walker groans. It’s stagnant. He doesn’t move, body numb all over, that even the dull ache in his shoulder subsided to a gentle tingling, his stomach warm. The weight of the gun at his hip seemingly grows heavier, and Ron’s hands wrap around it, pointer on the trigger, eyes on Rick’s neutral face and agape lips. Up, up, up, he shoots, and Rick is still standing, unscathed. He thinks, the bullet fell somewhere, someone, but he doesn’t realize where as someone pulls at his arm, restraining him with one hand, and the other on his mouth. He remembers his father breaking his shoulder with similar restraint, a similar hold. Instead of recoiling, of rejecting it, he helplessly gives into it, falling back into the person behind him as his body gives out.
Tickling his nose, a pungent smell wakes him up. His flannel is yet to be cleaned, covered in walker guts and rotten blood, sticking to his skin like an invisible spider web. There is a painful scratch as he takes desperate breaths, and he cannot tell if it’s an internal scratch from an oncoming cold or a weeping cut on his neck. From the depths of his blacked out mind, he prays it’s a bite, hopes his body is overtaken by the virus, irreversible and unstoppable.
There’s a damp coldness against his side, and it’s strangely quiet— he can’t even pick up the usual hum of hysterical and unintelligible prayers from Joan.
“There, there you are,” somebody mutters gently by his head. It’s not his mother’s voice, and at the thought, he feels a churn in his gut, but he feels too scattered to try and narrow down his mind to a clearer space as to why he feels so.
“Mom,” he mumbles, lips barely unsticking to utter the word. The scratch in his throat worsens.
Somebody shushes him, and for a second, he recoils as his body anticipates his father’s hands. But no, Pete is dead. Carl’s dad, the freak, killed him, treated him like blood sport as some sick lesson to their so-called community. Everything is ruined because of him— Rick, and by association, Carl.
He succumbs to the burning in his limbs, in his heart, and falls back unconscious.
Gone, gone, gone, all gone—
Will God forgive?