Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“The time is now and the end is today. Hold your children now before they fall to their living graves and succumb to the toil of unfathomable devastation.”

Nausea dissipates in his stomach as Wilbur slides the switchblade back into his pocket and surveys the landscape. 

Bare trees shake when a chill cuts through the open air, they sway as brown leaves skitter on the blank concrete. 

He looks down at the sidewalk, blotted with drops of blood like a seep-through gauze. He almost heaves, but instead it comes out a sharp breath. The mutilated corpse is finally still, it does not stir or thrash like it was and seems now to be eerily silent, leaving Wilbur as he was before. 

The only living man left on the roads of destruction. 

The hands at his sides shake with leftover adrenaline. He swallows and looks away from the body. Its face is no longer a face, but something disfigured and round, featureless like all the ones he's ever seen, but not nearly as alive. It could have been a man or a woman, but it’s become impossible to tell. Hair follicles tear from their skulls, their scalps half rotting. 

The cold air stings his eyes. He closes them for a moment and does not react when the wind picks up, numbing the tips of his fingers. When he opens them, he does expect to see a different world appear to him, and like a prophecy foretold, it does not. 

Wilbur tries to warm his hands by rubbing them together, but it does nothing except make them both equally cold. 

He holds them together and puts them up to his mouth and blows, warm air painted into his palms for only a moment before slipping away just as quickly. 

There’s only one more hand warmer left in his backpack and he’d be damned if he used it now. He puts his hands in the pockets of his jacket, worn cotton rubbing against his knuckles. 

Turning around, away from the gorey scene, he walks to the other side of the street, houses lining up and down the road like plastic toy soldiers, saluting to some pretend war. 

His stomach contracts and he lets out a harsh breath. It floats up in the air like the smoke of a cigarette. 

Wilbur leans down and picks up his walking stick he had dropped on the ground in the heat of the moment. 

He continues walking, tugging his knitted red beanie down on his head over his ears. It is tattered and every time he takes it off more threads have torn and loosened, leaving him with a limp material that he gingerly takes on and off, in fear each time that it will be the last time he will ever wear it. If it were any other beanie, he’d have thrown it out on the side of the road and kept walking, but sentimentality is its only remaining feature of use. 

He’d like to pretend it still smells like something nostalgic, something like the person who had often worn it, but the only scent left is that of ash and dirt. 

He walks to the end of the street and turns left onto another road, three lanes wide and spread apart from the houses. He keeps to the sidewalk and doesn’t wander out in the open. Other than the undead he killed (a paradox in itself, but it can be done), there haven't been many more on this side of the town. Most usually migrate to big cities during this time of year for a better chance of survival. They have only rare instances of weakness, but these organisms, like any other, have their ideal climates. 

This winter has been a harsh one. He hadn’t known what desolate world could awaken in this cold before this winter, that January could appear like a poltergeist, unseen and yet impactful in a way no one could count. Or, well, what he thinks is January. There’s no real way to tell, which only worries him when he’s not remembering that there’s no need for calendars anymore.  

The world has lost its vice of time. Sometimes he thinks there could be an old man out there, sitting on a rocking chair at some abandoned radio station, that’s made a clock of some sort, something that doesn’t require energy or copper. He would be the only man who knew the date and the time, and he would sit as king of the world on his empty throne of lies. But then he remembers that if there was an old man with a clock and a rocking chair he would have no one to tell and would most likely die before he got a chance so he kills the man inside his head and continues walking.

It’s nearing the end of the day, and the sun behind the mountain of clouds and grey sky around him peeks forth only once before returning to its daze of inaction. 

His stomach lurches again and his body quakes. He has to find food today. All the other days he could say his borrowed time hadn’t yet expired, but he can’t say the same today. This is not the first time this has happened, but it can always be the last. Very easily he could take one last breath and the rest be suddenly robbed from his chest and that would showcase very nicely life’s capability for mercy. 

Wilbur stops when he reaches the end of the street. He bends over and puts his hands on his knees and struggles for breath. Finding energy to keep moving has been more and more a feat in the last week. He’s not eaten anything more than a package of protein powder in the last 7 days. He’s dizzy when he lifts himself back up.

He looks around at houses around him, close in proximity to the street, places anyone could see and enter without hardship. It’s a gamble. But when you’re already gambling, you might as well go all in.

He scouts for something possibly secluded from view, something someone might not find easily or have time to loot. During the first days, anywhere you could look, you would. It’s possible every house in the five-mile radius has been looted already, and by entering one, he’s only searching for ghosts in cupboards, but there’s no other choice.

He settles on a house with a faded red door, far away from everything else, with an overflowing lawn and dead plants in pots scattered around the front door. It’s as good a try as anything. He prays to luck or a god that will listen before he enters, to not see something he won’t be able to forget and to find something to keep him alive for one more day. 

He shakes the doorknob and it doesn’t give way. He walks around to the back and manages to open the fence to the backyard. Dead grass in plots scattered around. Something like a gravestone he spots from the corner of his eye and does not investigate any further. 

When he opens the back door and finds it unlocked, he steps inside, unconsciously expecting it to be warmer, but it is just as cold but with less of a breeze. It’s draughty and dusty, and when he closes the backdoor behind him, he begins to wheeze and cough sporadically. He’s always had allergies, even before all of this, but without medicine and the only increasing pollution, it’s hard to imagine a life without it. 

And thus begins his routine, almost a drill at this point, of checking upstairs and then downstairs, looking through cupboards and closets for anything of value. Food is his main priority, but his blankets are ratty and almost useless at retaining heat. 

He finds a quilt in the downstairs closet and switches it out with his other blanket, jamming it into his already full backpack. He’s careful to zip it up with caution. He’ll be looting for a new backpack if he breaks the zipper. 

Wilbur hefts it up on his back and keeps searching. No food except for some mouldy carrots at the bottom of the refrigerator. He inspects them and as much as his instinct is to indulge with reckless abandon, they don’t look anywhere near safe. He puts them back in the empty fridge, no longer cold in the way it would be if it were working. 

He checks every drawer, nook and cranny, only finding a half full glass of water on the kitchen table. He needs water. He needs water so badly that he almost faints when he sees it. He picks it up and looks closely. If it were poisoned or was a trap, there could be particles where there shouldn’t be or a difference in colour. There isn’t, and he guzzles it down in a second despite a lingering fear in his brain that he desperately ignores. 

He finishes it and feels the cold liquid travel down in his stomach. When he’s starving like this, he can feel its every trace. 

With chapped lips, he swallows and takes his backpack off of him, rifling through it on the kitchen table. Below everything else, a single three year old chapstick stares back, and he takes it into his hand like a child taking a cookie from a jar. He picks the mould off with his nails and rubs it over his cracked and peeling lips. 

The steps groan below him as he walks up the stairs, looking into the two other rooms. The family photos remain undisturbed in their glassy frames on shelves and walls, beds stripped of their sheets long ago. He usually doesn’t look at the pictures. In fact, sometimes he wishes there were no pictures or belongings, nothing to make him remember what life and people once were. 

One catches his eye. A little girl with dark brown hair, pigtails and bright eyes, a toothy smile with a gap where one must have fallen out. Seven or eight, looking at the camera, the words ‘second grade’ written in marker below her face. There is no knowing where she is now, a zombie or a body laying out on the concrete, in a bunker where she has forgotten what it is to see the sun, or in the ground in a shallow coffin half closed in the hurry to bury her-

He takes the frame and faces it downwards. 

Wilbur opens the closet and finds old clothing, all of them stained and taken off of their hangers. He can tell they weren’t the original clothes in the closet and most of them have been traded in for better clothes, the remains in the closet like imposters. 

He looks in the drawer of the little girl’s room and finds a bible. No one has taken it and he doesn’t plan on taking it either, only studies it like some artefact from a far away planet where hope once lived and people believed in things they could not see and believed there was a golden place called heaven somewhere amidst the smoke and pollution and clouds. 

He pulls away and goes to the bathroom, looking in the cabinets under the sink for any first aid kits. Even alcohol by itself would be good to have, wounds are a weekly affair. 

Nothing. 

He steps towards the bathtub hidden by a shower curtain to scavenge for any sort of soap he can use. His scent, like anything else on the road, although sometimes forgettable, is always present and lingering. He hasn’t taken a shower or anything close to a wash-off in a month or so. Any water he finds is used for drinking, and he hasn’t found any natural water to bathe in since he cut through the forest on his trek from his old town. 

Travelling nomadically is his only option. If you settle down, you’re putting yourself on death row. Camp and you leave as quickly as you can. People are just as dangerous as zombies and have the ability to shoot a gun. ‘Any contact is bad contact’, his father told him once, when things first started and he didn’t know the days he had with his father were few. 

He was 19, almost 20 when things first took off. In hindsight, it’s hard not to see that things were going downhill, that it was only a matter of time before the politicians that had promised world peace were the first to kill their children and eat them when everything fell apart. 

And yet when the first solar storm hit, it seemed to take them all by surprise. 

News coverage and newspaper articles, when things were only speculation, when people could say the government had planned it to make the general public panic, that it was some elaborate hoax. There wasn’t much time between the first arrivals of the zombies and the solar storm, so the information, if any, that Wilbur ever received was short and discursive. 

“And you think this is a punishment from God?” The reporter asked the man. 

“Why wouldn’t it be? We’ve all done a fair bit of sinning. God knows who is worthy to stay alive, and he has found Armageddon a worthy fate, so we must accept his judgement.”

“If you had any advice to viewers at home who are perhaps locked in their houses right now, in a bunker, or even in the streets, what would you tell them?”

“Come out from hiding. God’s going to find you either way. You can’t hide from him. So come out with your hands up and let yourself go.”

“Thank you for your thoughts. Sheryl Tompson reporting from the scene, this is News Tonight. Keep yourselves safe out there, and goodnight.”

Everyone had different ideas. 

Some thought it was punishment, so down went the convents and churches and mosques. It had fulfilled prophecy for some, and for others, completely ruined its foundation. Where is your god you were so adamant would save you? And there was nothing to do but die slowly. 

Holy and deemed holy, leaders deceased. For once, they were human again. 

After that, it was only really pandemonium. Society had been crumbling around them for how long? It shouldn’t have been as ogling as it was, watching people forget themselves, watching them all as they forgot the humanity they had thought called them moral. 

Survive were the words echoing down the streets as they scurried about like ants under a child’s shoe, in the splash zone of destruction, so imminent. 

And somehow, Wilbur survived. He can’t remember how, and sometimes he wished he hadn’t, but since he had, and so many others passed, there was no choice but to stay alive. For the ones that wish they could be here now, even though the concept of living is debatable. 

At first, and Wilbur is not the first nor last to admit it, being alone at the end of the world was terrifying. Any structure he had was taken, and the only one that remained was cursed to the same fate soon enough. But routine thrives anywhere you let it, like a weed in between the cracks of concrete, so Wilbur let himself exist for a little while longer.

If you gave up, threw in the towel, that was death too. Wilbur thinks about it every day, thinks about what there is left to live for and counts it on one hand, looking around for pieces of beauty like fragments from a stained glass mural, stricken to that of a smashed beer bottle on the pavement. 

It’s become a daily thought, how much longer he has, how much longer he can keep going like this. It’s not a life to live, it’s not a life his brother would want Wilbur to live. He doesn’t want to live it either. But he has to. He has a choice, his brother did not. Somewhere he can hear cheering, maybe in that place they called heaven, or from below the dirt he walks on. 

Somewhere someone is telling him to go on. 

Despite his own preaching of caution, he enters another house next door and presses his luck in looting it. 

He finds an old half eaten piece of sliced watermelon in the fridge and an open can of corn. He hovers over it and takes out a few pieces, looking them over. No one would eat half and leave it here if it wasn’t poisoned. 

In the beginning, people were grasping to all the normalcy they possibly could. TV dinners and napkins and a cup of juice on the side. No one expected they would get to the point that they did. No one was eating a can of corn by itself at the beginning. This is newer, and therefore more concerning. 

It seems redundant to leave poison somewhere just to kill someone else on the off chance someone were to come by, but that’s the way it all is. Doing things for no reason as if they need to prove their own wickedness. ‘My mother didn’t survive, so you won’t either.’ A vicious cycle of grief and grasping at straws when there are none. 

Marauders are not the only ones Wilbur needs to worry about. Even those without weapons or food or muscles to fight with, even normal people, cannot be trusted. 

He leaves the corn and watermelon on the counter.

A woman once offered them asylum in her home a few years back. They were young and didn’t stand as a threat, couldn’t hold a gun properly if their lives were at stake, one young boy and another, even younger, showing up to her doorstep with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a quarter loaf of bread they found in an abandoned grocery store. 

She was nice enough, had a son and daughter who were supposedly on their way to stay with her for Wilbur’s entire stay, although they never did arrive, and every day she would say ‘just one more day’ until she herself only had one more day left. 

They took all the food she had once they buried her in the backyard, leaving once again and defending their actions by an excuse that she would want them to take all there was. 

“She would want us to,” Wilbur said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. She was a nice enough person, and she was already sharing.”

“She’s not going to haunt us, is she?”

Wilbur snorted. “You still believe in ghosts?”

“What kind of a question is that? Look out the window and look at the zombies, we never thought those could exist either.”

He finds nothing else in the house and leaves, stomach just as empty as when he walked in. His head pounds against his skull as he closes the fence slowly to make minimal sound. 

Another lesson his father taught him. He was chock-full of those. 

“You’re the older brother, Wil, and you need to know how to survive on your own if the time comes.”

“Am I going to have to?”

“I want to be with you for as long as I can. But nothing is set in stone now, anything can happen. And you need to be prepared for that.”

He tried so hard to be. He tried so terribly hard.

He walks down the sidewalk, careful not to step on too many leaves. 

“Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they’re not there. Assume they’re everywhere because they probably are. You see all these houses, Wil? Almost everyone in these houses has turned, and you need to account for that. Most have migrated to the town square, but all those people- all those zombies are waiting around, just hoping that someone like you will come around and give them a good chance. You can’t give them that chance, alright?”

“I won’t.”

And he did. Just not in the way his father had warned him about. 

He never had to look back to know if his brother was still following him. That was his reassurance, that was how he knew the world could not take away the only thing he had left. And he was proved wrong. He doesn’t have to look back now either because he knows his brother will not be following behind him. 

The longer he walks, the more lightheaded he feels. Taking breaks is more frequent and less reliable. He has lost the energy needed to look for a shelter to stop at and has begun simply sitting down on the sidewalk every 10 minutes of walking. This is where things end. 

God, he never wanted this to be the end. At least he hasn’t turned. It’s a better death, something more moral. Though it’s hard to say what a moral man would be like in a time like this. Maybe a moral man kills and steals and hurts people, but he lives and that is noble enough. 

Wilbur hopes he’s been noble. 

He stops walking and stands still for a moment, observing every foul sensation his body is prodding him with. He can’t tell if it’s his imagination or if he’s slowly sinking to the ground. Nothing makes sense. It’s all fluorescent and wide and upturned. 

He descends onto his knees and breathes. 

And then he lets go and fades away into the trees and the rattle of the branches and the solid gritty ground below him and wonders if this was always fate. 

Chapter Text

“There will be a day where time falls and love dies. And it will all be better this way. No one will be left to mourn it, and only the first ray of sunlight in the day will know its inability to save it.”

And despite fate, he wakes up. It is so reminiscent of first days, how it was all lights and then so quickly, darkness. He awakens with a jolt and sits up, detecting the gritty texture he’s laid against. 

He notices the sky first. He doesn’t have to wonder if he is dead because if he was, the clouds would not look like graves, and the sky itself a graveyard. 

The wind tilts and flows. He shudders, looking down and feeling that for once, his hands aren’t icicles. 

Making a fist, he observes his hand in a startled realisation. He hadn’t died, and where he had passed out definitely wasn’t here . 

And there are gloves on his hands. They weren’t there before. He’d been looking for gloves since the end of summer, he’d gone into every department and clothing store he could find and came up empty every time. And now suddenly he’s awake, gifted gloves by some invisible spirit of goodness?

He turns and observes what he’s been propped up against. A tree, a Live Oak maybe, with a wide base and long drawn out branches reaching out towards some unseeable force. Almost completely bare of leaves and yet still better than being out in the open. 

Wilbur thinks of his things and begins frantically searching around for his backpack and stick. Thankfully, his beanie is still atop his head and his stick has been laid beside him, but his backpack is nowhere to be seen. 

Shit. 

“Fuck!” He shouts, despite his intuition not to, even despite knowing every weed in the field and every zombie in the distance will hear him. He doesn’t know where he is. His backpack is gone. He’s a dead man walking. 

He puts his head in his hands and feels himself sob but no tears escape him. He looks up and stands, having already made the decision to keep surviving. It’s one of those things you can decide in a split moment, whether you wish to live or die. 

He wipes dirt off his cargo pants and adjusts the grey and green sweater over him. His shoelaces are still tied peculiarly and tightly. 

Wilbur’s eyebrows furrow. They didn’t steal his shoelaces. They are, after all, valuable things to have, useful in tying and in some cases, self defence. Anyone who’s survived this long knows that to live as long as possible, creativity is a strength, and utilising everything is a necessity. 

He turns around to face the tree and looks around. 

There, lying to the side of the tree, almost behind it, is his backpack. He drops the stick in his hand and crouches beside it, going through its contents for anything taken. Nothing is out of place. It doesn’t even seem to have been opened. 

Wilbur knows moments like these do not come often in this world, and so he doesn’t think about it any longer or try to analyse why someone would do something like this. The point is that they did, and nothing else matters. 

Yet the thought doesn’t leave his mind. If it were Wilbur, if he had seen someone on the ground, he wouldn’t have done anything at all. He wouldn’t have spared a glance. Now here is this stranger who had saved him and took nothing for himself. Why?

He stands up and throws the backpack over his shoulder, taking a few steps forward. There’s nothing he can see except dried dead grass and a few trees in the distance. He turns around and walks in the other direction, behind the tree where his backpack was laid. The same sight in all directions. 

A sigh. He turns and looks at the tree. For a moment, he is only looking up at the leafless limbs, but as his gaze turns downwards, a flash of colour below it catches his eye. From his stance, it's a peach-like colour, almost orange, and as he walks towards it his expression only becomes more perplexed. 

It’s small, the size of his own palm, and is tied with some sort of knotted rope. He sniffs it, smelling for any sort of gunpowder or chemical. It smells slightly like fruit, which is something he isn’t sure he’s smelling right. He hasn’t had a fresh fruit in years. 

He tears off the rope and puts it in one of his pant pockets, opening the package. It’s wrapped with torn off wrapping paper, and he unpacks it carefully. It’s moderately heavy. 

A can and a small round disc-like pastry. He turns the can around in his hand. 

Chicken Noodle Soup! It reads in faded font. 

He doesn’t let himself react, he closes his eyes and then opens them, the can still in his grasp. He’s not dreaming, and he’s not in heaven. Never in life has he been so thankful for something as small as this. A rusted tin can two years over its expiration date and he’s believing in a god again. To Wilbur, it is not small at all. It may as well be a sign of propriety or a deity in his hand. 

Thank you.  

After venturing out of the field, he checks his map. It seems he’s in an area a few minutes away from the suburban area he was before. Little towns in this area are often separated by fields like this. 

His map has deteriorated rapidly since its first tear a year ago, and it’s been water damaged so heavily by flooding that Wilbur has to squint to read anything on the torn pages. 

The direction that he was carried in (how did anyone lift him all the way here?) was in the direction he would be travelling next. He has plotted out the route on the map with a sharpie and he stands tracing it with his finger, calculating how many days left of walking he must do to get there. 

Before there were places like where he is travelling to, Wilbur assumed he and his brother could stay anywhere they deemed safe enough, in the basement of houses or behind the shrubbery of backyards. That was his flaw. He thought there were places that were fundamentally safe. Now he knows there is no such thing. 

He stops after two hours of walking towards the next town and finds a patch of woods on the other side of the road. He takes his knife out of his holster, as he always does, and places it next to him when he sits down on the ground. 

The pastry is something almost familiar, but it’s been so long that the words stay at the tip of his tongue, forever uncalled. At first, he’s not sure how he should eat it. He takes a bite of the crust, but then tilts it around quizzically in his hand as if there is some etiquette he must adhere to. Eventually, he takes a bite straight on. 

It’s sweet. It’s been long since he’s tasted something sweet. Creamy in the middle and grainy on the edges like a small pie. 

Although he intended only to eat a quarter to half, he finds himself scouring for crumbs on his pants after finishing. He should’ve eaten it slower, taken his time to relish the flavour. It’ll be a long time till he tastes something this appetising again. If ever. 

He packs up his things and tries to imagine what the soup will taste like when he takes his first sip, hot from the fire. He’ll tell himself he’s going to stow away half for the next day even though he already knows he won’t be able to help himself. He needs the protein either way or he won’t be able to keep travelling at this rate. The longer it takes him to get there only gives the cold more time to catch up to him. Winter is a murderous beast and smells one’s desperation a mile away.

The first winters were as normal as any others with only occasional snowstorms, but now, things have gotten worse. Wilbur cannot pretend he doesn’t see it; every day the disasters are worsening. They’ve gotten more frequent, to the point that Wilbur goes to sleep at night unknowing if a tornado will awaken him in the night, forcing him to run with all the belongings he can gather. 

It’s happened before, once with his brother and once alone. He had sprained his wrist after tripping on a branch in the dead of night, running as quick as he could. It was unlike anything he’d ever seen. An amalgamation of natural disaster. The ground quaked and the rain poured relentlessly like the great flood. He had wondered that night they would make it out. They had, and he had done it once again a year later, yet there’s no telling how severe it could become. 

He walks until he sees houses in the distance, far beyond his reach yet still visible enough to give him hope. Every town is a new accomplishment to Wilbur, and every time he hunkers down in the next run down shack of a suburban home, he thanks the unconscious voice in his head that has succeeded in letting him survive for one day more. 

After one more break and a mile more of walking, he finds himself in the middle of it all, the town square; motionless like a crater in the earth where something once was, its only remainder being rock and dust and ash of fires that once raged on, now dormant and quiet like a museum of tragedy.

The air is worse here, as if someone has just broken camp and stamped out a fire. He can smell faraway smoke. Smoke means someone else is around. Smoke means lay low. 

“You know what that means, don’t you?” His father asked. He sat by the fire and looked into it like it was a crystal ball and a future could be foretold within it. 

“It means there are people , Dad. And we need them. We- we need more people. Surviving by ourselves isn’t productive, it’s-”

“The safest way,” His father interrupted. 

“Maybe it is. But if they are good people, it could help us-”

“You’re willing to take that chance?”

“I am. We are low on supplies and I see you, I see that you’re getting worse.”

“And what are we going to do if they aren’t good?”

“We run, we fight, we don’t just lay low until we run out of food and we die!” He said. 

“You need to be quiet. Tommy’s going to hear you.”

“We can’t lay low and wait for death to take us,” He said quietly. 

“Smoke means lay low. You know that. And while I agree, we are running low, I’d rather starve to death than watch both of my children die in front of me.”

Wilbur looked down at his fingers bandaged with plasters.  

“I can’t do it,” His father said. “I can’t. It is my job to keep you safe.”

“So stay alive with us.”

“I’m sorry, Wil.”

“If we found people to travel with us we wouldn’t have to do nearly as much work.”

“We’d need to find more food.”

“And we would, because we’d have more people to help us.”

“I know you think this would be better, but it’s not. You don’t know what those people are like and I’m glad that you don’t. But I do.”

“Then tell me.” He was frustrated. He was angry. His father and his brother were going to die and he was too. His father wouldn’t be the last one standing. Wilbur would. His father was sickly and Tommy was sickly skinny. His father wasn’t the one who would have to deal with being the only one left. 

“They will shoot you in the head and cut it from your body and roast it on a spit and they will make your brother watch . Don’t make me go on, Wilbur. As long as I am living I’m going to protect you from that. Please don’t let this happen to us.”

Wilbur felt the tears in his eyes but didn’t cry. He tightened his hand into a fist and watched his fingers shake. 

Wilbur walks and tries to forget. He never will, and he knows it's a useless endeavour. Whether it is nightmares or memories that barge themselves into the front of his mind at any time of day, they will always be there. But he tries anyway. 

When he’s finally let himself go, when he’s finally left everything and gone into one of his phases of weightlessness, when everything seems to go on without him, that is when the earth starts to shake. 

He blinks and his body startles him. A tremor under his feet. His breaths come sporadically. 

There’s nothing he can do but wait, let the world shake him like a snow globe and hope he doesn’t chuck up the food he’d gone through hell to find. 

Earthquakes are fairly common, but he wouldn’t go as far to say he’s gotten used to them. He holds his arms out to balance himself. He imagines this is what surfing must be like. Or maybe not. He never got to try it despite his brother’s incessant pleading.

“Where would you even go?”

“I dunno. There’s got to be a beach around here somewhere.”

“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Wilbur laughed. “There’s no beaches.”

“Never say never, Willy-boy. Never say never. I’ll find me a damn beach. Won’t I, Dad?”

Their father only laughed. 

He clutches his chest and focuses on breathing. The shaking doesn’t stop. It’s usually stopped by now. 

Combined with his lack of food, it makes him terribly dizzy, and he totters from side to side. It never lasts this long. It’s not supposed to. 

Thunder rolls. He flinches. He looks up and notices clouds that have moved into formation, he hadn’t noticed them. 

Droplets from the sky start slow and get progressively quicker. The world is still shaking. 

He counts to nine and thunder booms above him, shrouding the sky even greyer than before. In a blink the earth below him convulses and he looks into the distance, watching a tree, like all the others, thump to the ground. A streak of light flashes out of the corner of his eye. 

The world still rattles. Oh god. 

The wind picks up, it begins as a normal gust but continues long after it should stop, like a iron slap to Wilbur’s face. He shields himself as well as he can. It’s only getting worse. 

He hurries forward, towards the town, in some sense of refuge he can’t be sure he’ll get. In earthquakes, going inside is always a poor decision, however, in the case of a hurricane, going inside is your only chance of survival. Especially in a fusion storm like this one. 

The rain pelts down tirelessly, and he runs as fast as he can without falling, the sound of his own breaths louder than thunder. At some point he must close his eyes, and when he opens them, chest heaving and standing still, there are houses and streets again. 

He looks around. These houses are old, and he's thinking, no, betting on the fact that they will fall apart the moment the storm reaches its peak. 

Crossing street corners in search of something, anything, he stumbles upon a small grocery store, most words in the sign bludgeoned out by ash and the remnant of old flames. He takes the knife from his pocket and holds it in his hand, opening the door. The door slams behind him by force of wind and he jumps back. 

He turns around and looks around, empty aisles with wrappers and boxes littered about. The lights are out and he stumbles about like a blind man, looking for a back room to wait out the storm. 

Hugging the corners of the store, stick and knife in his hands, he feels for a handle to a door. Even a closet would keep him safer than staying outside. His steps are loud and echo through the building. 

His hand reaches something medal. He lines his stick against the wall and shakes the handle. At first he wonders if it’s locked, and a moment of desperation takes over him. He wrestles against it, using his brute force, hardly such a thing. 

A sound behind the door, something falling off the lock. He pushes down on the handle and this time it gives, which prompts a hitch of breath from his chest. 

He opens it and keeps his protective stance. He doubts there’s anyone alive in this town, maybe a few stray zombies, but not much more. The room that appears is devoid of substance, nothing to tell of its previous purpose. 

He stands in the doorway and listens for sounds. Nothing. He steps into the dark room, squinting. Used for storage or something of the like. A janitor's closet, yet he doesn’t see anything left on the shelves on the walls. He sees only from the light filtering through the windows in the front of the grocery store, which only takes in spare light from the dark clouds.

Whether he should close the door or leave it open is a hard decision to make, seeing that each comes with a potential downside. He leaves it open and someone seeks refuge in the grocery store like him (unlikely, yet still realistically a problem), or he closes it and risks getting stuck by the defective lock. He can barely see what he broke off to get in. 

There aren’t many people left in this world. But the ones left are left for a reason. Wilbur thinks he might be the only exception, even though he too has had to leave his morals behind to survive. More times than he can count. 

He walks out of the room and takes his stick he laid against the wall in his hand and closes the door behind him. The store itself is flimsy, but this room is a structure he can count on. 

It was always his brother that feared small spaces, couldn’t handle the dark. Wilbur would make fun of him at times, those times he now regrets. But it was never Wilbur. And now here he is. 

He slides down to the ground with his back against the door. There’s nothing to do but wait. He takes off his backpack and looks through his things. It’s an odd pastime, but something he seems to be doing more and more often. Obsessive maybe, checking over and over if he still has the lighter and leftover matches. Make sure he still has the tarp, the pieces of paper scribbled with old stories, the map and the flask for water if he finds any, which he as usual, still does.

Although pitiful, Wilbur finds himself thinking of flashlights. There’s no use, all flashlights in the world have been rendered useless by the solar storm. He still thinks of it, the now magical ability to see a room in something other than darkness. Light, true hope, sun. They all fall into the same category of unattainable things. 

After a while, he stands up and looks around in the dark. He pats down the shelves for any chemicals or first aid. As he suspects, nothing. An entire wasteland of it. 

He stands in the corner of the room, directly in front of the empty rows of shelves. He steps to the side and feels something by his feet. He looks down and sees only darkness. When he first looked in the room he was looking straightforward and he saw nothing in the room then. He hadn't been standing by the shelves. 

He hadn’t checked. He had assumed there wouldn’t be anything. 

He stands and waits. No sound or movement. 

He hesitantly prods it with his stick. It’s not solid the way an object is, but softer. More malleable. 

He doesn’t breathe. 

Taking his backpack off, he carefully unzips the first pocket and takes out the lighter. It takes strength he doesn’t have to push down on the fire mechanism, but after a few tries, he succeeds.

When the light appears he finally sees it. 

A human corpse, not yet turned from the fact he can still see the features on its face.  

He steps back and takes another breath that doesn’t come. He sees them everywhere, zombies or humans or animals. He’s seen it all. And yet he’s only once been so close to one, been able to look into its grey lifeless eyes. 

Dried blood sits idle under the body. An unidentifiable piece of metal lodged into their chest. They’ve been tilted on their side, hand out as if to reach for something. 

“Wilbur. Please, Wil.”

Panic flows through his veins and he turns to the doorknob. He turns it yet and it doesn’t open. He turns it again and slams his body into the door; it gives way so quickly he almost falls to the floor. 

He trips over his own feet running yet keeps on, running towards the front entrance. 

It was nothing but a corpse. It can’t hurt Wilbur and yet he reacted like it could. He looks out the muddled windows. The ground is no longer shaking, Wilbur realises. The thunder groans once more and falls silent. The rain has slowed to something only a notch above a drizzle. 

It hadn’t been long at all that Wilbur had been in that room. This must’ve been a shorter one than usual. He frowns. He steps outside and notes the trees surrounding the neighbourhoods nearby, their crowns ashen and darkened from the lightning strikes. It was never this precise before; earthquakes and storms never happened at the same time. 

“Never say never.”

He finds a small house on the edge of the town in a slanted neighbourhood and spends the rest of the evening finding a way into the attic. 

Eventually he finds it in the garage, a limp piece of string tied to something that looks like a bolt. He pulls it down and coughs at the onslaught of dust. If he had another choice, he would take it. Camping in houses is always more of a risk than the forest, but with the mixed-disasters coming more and more frequently, staying in a house is his best option. Staying in the attic is even riskier since houses like these have little foundation to rely on, but they do have basements. In the case of a disaster Wilbur can migrate from the attic to the basement easily. 

That night he makes a fire in the backyard. The smoke carries high up into the air, and although he is always worried someone will see it, no one ever has. People seem to be equally afraid of each other, not like in the beginning, or even in the first few years. Your neighbours and friends have devolved into murderers but they and nevertheless they still fear you, knowing that even as lawless as they are themselves, there are worse evils in the world they Haven’t seen. 

Wilbur cooks the can of soup by tying rope around a low branch and tying the can along with it, heating it from the bottom up. The fire took an hour to build and the hanging branch took even longer. He takes his hands away from the can once he’s finished, careful not to disrupt its unsteady balance, and turns to watch the flames with heavy eyelids. So long are the days of whispering around the fire, laughing and hushing each other when they would be too loud because someone could find them. Like they were playing a game, a game they assumed they would win. 

Sometimes he closes his eyes and imagines he is somewhere else. It’s the enemy of survival, the delusion of anything better. But he can’t help it. He sometimes thinks about the places he had marked on his map when he was young, the map that took over his entire wall, the one he got for his 14th birthday. Scandinavia and South Africa and Ecuador, places he would study for fun. He knew every country flag. And now none of it matters. Colours and names and invisible lines in the dirt. 

He draws a sun, the likes of a second year old's art class drawing, in the dirt with his stick. 

“I’m not going to call it the punting stick.”

“Yes you will.”

“Who says? This is my stick.”

He shrugged. “It’s both of our stick. I gave it to you, I should at least get to name it.”

Wilbur rolled his eyes. 

“You know I’m right.”

He bit his lip and didn’t speak for a moment. Then he sighed. “Alright. Punting stick it is.”

Tommy pumped his fist in the air. “I always win!”

Wilbur unties the can from the rope holding it up and tilts it up to his mouth. It’s bland and warm and tastes like everything he’s ever wanted but never had. 

“Yeah, yeah. But one day you won’t win. I’ll show you. The reckoning is coming, and one day my sticks will be mine,” He teased. 

Being right has never felt so wrong. 

He looks at the man-made sun at his feet and takes another drink from the rusted can. 

Chapter Text

"You once wished for happiness from the same place in your heart that now sits with the desire for carnage and justice that you will never receive. We all have sinned and we all will pay the price.”

It is on the second day of Wilbur’s stay in the town called Donna that he sees the first signs that he is not alone. 

Of course, Wilbur is never truly alone. It would be better if he was; then he could be the only one left. He wouldn’t have to tiptoe around these ghost towns. But alas, zombies lurk around every corner.

The first instance was explainable enough, he had walked to the house next door to find the door wide open. He stepped in cautiously, and although he found himself expecting something like a jumpscare, nothing else surfaced within the house except the dusty shelves that had laid dormant before his arrival. The house seemed untouched. This could be taken as a ransack, years old. If not for the apple core. 

The peculiar thing is that zombies don’t eat apples. In fact, no one seems to eat apples. Where would they come from, from some disparaged tree? Yet there it was, sitting next to the porch, only slightly brown around the edges. Wilbur had picked it up and eaten it in a few bites, seeds and all. He crouched close to the ground and scanned from footprints of which there were none visible. He frowned and went around to the backyard. Nothing but stumps of trees and weeds he almost mistook for flowers.

This morning, he walked to the end of the street and onto the wide and open main road. It made him feel like a fawn in an open meadow, susceptible to any and all violence, to hunters lurking in the bushes. 

He felt the cold dawn air on his face and then a sudden flash of freedom, of danger, or something else so imminent. He walked back empty handed, surprised at his own optimism to find something else to eat.

When he got back onto the street, a quick flash of something from out of the corner startled him into a confrontive stance. He twisted around so quickly he felt faint and rushed to the spot where he had seen the figure. Whatever it was, it was gone. 

He doesn’t believe in phantoms. The rumours began quickly and spread like wildfire after the zombies had been spotted. His brother had believed every word, but even with the so-called sightings, he knew they did this for a reason. To have some control over the world slipping through their fingers, for some sense of jurisdiction over godless land like their invisible lines in the soil. 

Wilbur stood in the middle of the street and laughed. Laughed loudly and recklessly. He didn’t care. He was losing his mind. There was no one there, there was no explanation except that what little of his mind he had left was waning. That applecore had made him think things he hadn’t allowed himself to think in a long time and he was still hungry out of his mind and he was fantasising. 

He walked back into the house and stayed in the attic, deprived. His mind finds new ways to torture him every day; he stayed out of his mind for god knows how long afterwards. When he was suddenly jolted back into himself, it was later in the day. Almost evening. That was when it began raining. 

He sits now in the basement, damp with water trickling in from the side of the house and with residing walls that smell like sewers. He hugs his knees to his chest and waits. He hasn’t left himself to the darkness just yet, he left the door to the basement open so at least a sliver of light could seep through, but his heart still stutters when he feels the thunder rumble through the house. 

He tucks his face into his legs and covers the rest of his face with his arms. The quilt he’s hung around himself can only do so much, he’s almost all bones, and his feet are so cold they’ve been tingling for the last hour. The bottom of his right shoe caved in a couple years ago and since then he’s not been able to fix it. A rubber band or tape of some sort would help, but it would help everyone, therefore anything of the sort is now unavailable. 

Even with the doubled up socks he has it isn’t enough compensation; three layers and the air still cuts right through you. 

“I’m cold, Wilby-”

“Did you just call me… Wilby ?” 

“Yeah, so what? My ass is still freezing off. Literally, fuck this weather.”

“Think about summer. It’ll be soon. I’m sure of it.”

“Soon?”

“Very soon, Toms.”

“Soon like… soon soon?”

“As soon as possible. Be patient.”

“Alright,” He grumbled. 

It was the last summer his brother had seen. He remembers it fondly. At the time, flowers had still bloomed, frogs still leaped,and  they still met people along the roads who sympathised with them and offered them food (of which they always declined, although the thought alone was enough to keep their spirits up.) In some ways, he’s glad his brother never had to survive like this. Maybe they took more risks back then, maybe they weren’t as worried about slipping up and that was why they were living so well. But once they finally did slip up, which was inevitable, there were no second chances. At least not for anyone else but Wilbur. 

He still remembers the first hit. Whether it was bad luck or pure circumstance, a city only 50 miles from the town he was raised in happened to be the first destination for the zombies, the first city to crumble and fall to its knees in desperation. Other cities came next, and slowly, the world depopulated. Airports were the major spreaders, somehow people still found it a good idea to try to escape to other countries. Back then it took a lot longer to spread. Someone could be bitten and stay conscious enough to get on a plane in 24 hours (which slowly decreased to the 1 hour minimum they find themselves at now.)

Supply to other countries stopped and three fourths of America succumbed to the ‘virus’ in precisely a week. 

It was a wonder one of the most gun populated states had not killed the first batch of them at mere sight, but however it had spread, the only thing that mattered was that it had, and they were doomed. At least most of them were. Others failed to survive and from that the future generations learned. They learned the way of deception and survival, even if that meant doing things their forefathers taught were immoral. Ethics were a joke of a prior mankind. 

Wilbur picks his head up and realises the rain has mostly stopped. He stands and climbs up the basement’s stairs, holding the quilt around him like a safeguard. It looks handmade, and he’s thankful to whatever grandmother made this. It’s hardly worn. He likes to imagine he’s honouring her by using it. Or maybe he’s not and she doesn’t exist. He does this a lot. Making up people in his mind. He hasn’t seen a face in at least 6 months, not one without their features eaten by rot. He thinks he might do this to pretend good people still exist.

Through the kitchen a bare window, slightly fogged but clear enough for anyone to peer in through, sits lifelessly. He looks outside and cranes his head to look up. No rain. The wind is still howling; it’s even farther into nighttime. 

The backdoor looks at him sadly with some bit of worry. Like someone concerned for him, the only one in the world. 

He stands at the back door and tentatively opens it. He doubts anyone is travelling at this time, if there’s anyone at all. 

He walks into the backyard and stares at the endless empty space. He used to do this when he was young, in his childhood home, late at night when no one was watching. He had wanted quiet, he wanted to wish away the next door neighbour’s dogs and their yapping and the noisy motorcycles on the road a few streets from his. 

And now here he is, a decade older, fit with new scars and a new mind to bear them, wondering why he can’t have just one good thing, just one sound other than his own ragged breathing. He wishes for all the sound he’s lost. 

He sleeps in a mixed daze of half asleep and half awake, forever on the lookout, forever cold, forever aware. Every hour or two he startles awake and then forces himself to fall back asleep, and so the cycle continues. He wakes up for the 2d time at what must be 11 or 12 at night and wishes he still had his CD player. 

He falls asleep soon after, a memory beginning to play through the gears of his mind in a way modelling a cinema projector. 

“What’s this piece of junk?” He asked. He kicked it lightly with his foot. 

“Don’t kick it! Fuck’s sake, do you have any idea what this is?”

“I did just ask that exact question.”

“It’s a CD walkman. You play music with it.”

“Does it still work?”

“Unless you’ve got new mechanisms and the knowledge to fix it. And new working batteries.”

“So that’s a no.” He sighs. “What does it matter if I kick it, it’s not like it’s doing anyone any favours.”

“I don’t know. You’re right,” He sighed. “It doesn't work. But I still don’t think you should break it.”

“What if there’s useful shit in it?”

“I said leave it.”

“Geeze-us, prickly today are you. What you’re gonna do? Just stare at it?”

“Maybe. Just let me look at it for a while.”

He crouches next to Wilbur and flicks his eyes between the thing and then back to him.  

“Did you have one?”

“Long time ago. Dad had gotten it for me.”

“Oh,” He said, and stared for a little longer at the piece of plastic on the ground. “Well. I guess it’s… a little cool.”

“Just a little?”

“Fine. Maybe it’s pretty cool.”

Wilbur cracks a smile.

He wakes up to a loud crash in the backyard. 

In seconds he’s standing, knife and walking stick in hand. His only available weapons are better than nothing, but everyone knows having a gun is endgame. It’s the most secure thing you can have. Don’t show up to a gunfight with a swiss army knife, his father once said. The chance of whoever is in the backyard having a gun is enough to make Wilbur move slowly, creeping his way to the back door. 

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. Stay quiet.”

His heart hammers in his chest. This is the kind of fear he used to think no one should ever have to fear, the life or death fear that takes you into a mindset you don’t understand until the situation is over, the fear that makes your chest hurt and your head light. 

Wilbur holds the knife to his chest and handles the stick in his other hand lightly, careful not to bump it into any of the walls. He stands to the side of the window and lowers himself down to the floor. He looks out of the window and sees nothing out of the ordinary. Dead grass and withered trees. The moon shines little light through the clouds. His eyes are glazed over with sleep, his nerves buzzing. He doesn’t want to go outside. 

The wind is still howling. He doesn’t want to open the door with his numb fingers and step out onto the hard ground with his sore legs. He wants to go back into the basement and wait until they come in. This is the only time he has control, whether he fights or runs. Lives or dies. To have a choice is a blessing.

It’s all too familiar, all too reminiscent. He almost thinks that if he looks behind him there will be someone there. He looks behind him and only sees the wall. He looks out to the yard. 

“God, please,” He whispers under his breath. 

He turns the knob of the door and walks into the night, an immediate chill running through him. He thought there was no warmth in the house, but the outside is colder than the inside. Everything is cold, and it never ceases. He thinks he’s forgotten what warmth feels like. 

Standing still, he hears slight movements on the side of the house. Nothing he can make out for sure, but definitely something nonetheless. He’d like to say it’s his imagination, but not even his imagination running on such little energy could make him believe the predicament the way he does now. 

He notes the tilting wood fence, holed out in some places, as he walks to the side of the house where the back gate hangs limply on its hinges. He’d tugged it tightly closed the last time he opened it, in case someone were to come around the same way he did. Apparently it didn’t work. 

With his back against the house, he advances in an effort not to let the trespasser see him. He needs to have the upperhand. He needs to see them before they see him. 

The sound of footsteps on the other side makes him uneasy, but he peeks around the corner anyways. 

A figure stands, bent over and clutching their knee under the fogged moonlight, hissing a sound of pain. 

“Fuck,” they say, and he’s taken aback. The voice is real, it’s dangerous either way, but it is real . Wilbur adjusts his grip on the knife. 

He rises from the shadows and steps forward silently. As he takes a few more steps, the figure comes clearer into view. From what he can see, it’s a man, dark haired and many inches shorter than Wilbur. At the very least, he has a height advantage. 

The man straightens up and limps forward slightly, and Wilbur stops his advance. He doesn’t breathe. 

“God, what the hell was I-” He tugs his pant leg up over his knee and leans to presumably take a better look. Wilbur spots the angry gash staining his pant leg dark with blood. He’s hurt himself. For this one moment, he’s in a weakened position. 

Wilbur takes his chance and runs forward, putting his hands on the man’s shoulders and, as roughly as he can, pins him to the fence. The man struggles and thrashes. Wilbur puts his arm across the man’s chest, further pushing him down. He almost stumbles against rocks on the ground next to the gate, but Wilbur pushes him up, steadying him with his arm. He’s forgotten what it felt like to touch skin that wasn’t his own, to feel someone’s rapid heartbeat. 

He pushes the knife against the man’s neck and he stops struggling, going eerily still for a moment. Even in the night he can see the fear in his eyes. 

“Wh-” The man starts to say, but Wilbur pushes the knife deeper, he knows he’s almost breaking skin. 

“What are you doing here?” Wilbur accuses. 

“I-I, I was looting, trying to find somewhere-”

“The truth or I slit your goddamn throat.”

“I promise, I promise,” He begs. “It’s cold, I wanted a house to stay in. This one looked-” His entire body is shaking, “-structurally sound. I promise, I wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t what?”

“I’m not here to hurt you.” The man puts his hands out as if he’s trying to calm a rabid dog. 

“Where are your friends? Are they on this street too?”

“I’m not-” He looks into Wilbur’s eyes and there’s a flash of recognition he doesn’t expect. “Look, man, listen to me, I can explain.”

“Then explain.”

“I’m not travelling with anyone, I swear,” He says, and Wilbur wants to believe him, he really does. But he does not. “I was looking for food.”

“ Bullshit . You look better than I do, so think very fucking carefully because whatever thought you’re having about me being merciful is a lie.” 

The man looks close to tears. “I was travelling with people before, but I left. I’m not with them. I stole some food. But please, listen to me, I was the one who-”

“Listen to me . I don’t owe you anything, alright? I can end you here and now,” He says, digging the knife into the spot above his adam's apple. It bobs when he swallows, and now he’s pleading, pleading for his life, that Wilbur will assume him to be a good person. But there’s no confirming this plea. Any person can be a bad person. 

He’s about to do it, he’s about to slice cleanly and quickly and leave the man bloodied and soaking through his clothes. 

The man is still talking, saying gibberish Wilbur can’t understand. “Please man. Please, I was- I was the one that-”

He lifts the knife slightly to make the final slash. 

“The cake,” The man says, gasping for breath. “The- the soup. Under the tree,” He says. 

Wilbur falters. 

The man’s expression falls. “I put you there,” He croaks. “under the tree.”

Wilbur steps back and takes the knife away from his neck, still holding it defensively in his hand. No one except Wilbur himself and the man that saved him could possibly know something like this. 

“Why?” Wilbur asks. 

“I-I had food. You were dying.”

“But why?” He says, sharper. 

He doesn’t answer, just shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

Wilbur’s eyebrows narrow. He stands, his other hand previously holding his walking stick he dropped in the fervour of the attack in a fist held so tightly he thinks he might make himself bleed. 

“I don’t owe you anything,” Wilbur says, and the man nods quickly in response. “Go,” He says. “Run.”

For a moment the man stands petrified. 

“Go,” He repeats. 

The man runs as fast as he can with the limp in his left leg, somehow climbing back over the fence the same way he came, dropping to the other side with a hiss and running back to wherever he came from. The wind gives no mercy just the same as the night and he knows that even if it wasn’t him, it will be something or someone else. 

He realises suddenly that he wants to either laugh or fall to the concrete ground and sob. He can’t figure out which one would feel best. 

God. A face, not familiar or kind but still a face; a face not yet dead and still a face. The first face in months. A face he had spared. 

He drops his knife and it clatters to the ground. He stares at the broken boards of the fence surrounding him. Prickly brown vines cling to the house on his right side. 

Wilbur goes forward and looks through the slits of the wooden gate that look out upon the street. Hollowed out civilization and the rows of houses, familiar and ungodly just the same as they once were, all those long nights ago. The man is already gone. 

Chapter Text

“A man without power was once nothing. But what is power now but a sickness of the mind that tells you there is still honor to be had? The only honor is mutual destruction that only one can achieve.”

Wilbur is gone from the tumbledown neighbourhoods of Donna by first light, the man he saw last already departed. He didn’t sleep at all the night before, pacing around like a lunatic. He packed what little he had into his backpack and clipped his blanket over him with a clothespin he found in the closet like something of a cloak. He began down the road and looked back thrice to see if anyone would follow, which no one did. 

The breeze has softened and the cold has feigned its pushback against him. His hand, cracked and dry from the dry frigid air, holds the stick as he walks, his left side held close to the forest thickets and his right to the industrial road like some interdimensional traveller, salt to the sea. 

He walks farther and farther until he sees a faint sunlight through the clouds. It watches over him like a guardian angel.

A little house on the side of the road takes him by surprise, and although against his old ideals of safety, he looks through it. He goes about it thoroughly, taking every possible advantage, looking above cupboards and into empty refrigerators. 

When he thinks there’s no more to be found in the house, he passes by a small cabinet above the sink. He opens it and finds small boxes, silver in colour and the texture of metal. He remembers when his father would make homemade peppermint bark and store them in small tin holders like this. He opens the tins and sees a different sight. Cigarettes, cased and old but still usable. 

After stowing them away in his backpack he looks through the house once more but finds nothing and crosses back onto the road. 

While he walks, he hears sounds from the trees, a sound familiar to him but yet still foreign. It buzzes in his ears and he wonders if it’s a figment of his imagination. 

He looks to his side and then upwards, into the webs of branches that appear like they could swallow him whole at any given moment. The sound stops. Like it always does. Like a portal into the past his subconscious can see but he cannot. 

Wilbur, despite his inability to recall most things in the beginning of the downfall, remembers. He remembers when the sound was real and there was a bird in the branches and with his old camera recorder he could run outside and photograph it. He remembers the last time he saw a bird. It was before there was any reason to think they could ever disappear. 

“I wish I had my old camera.”

“What colour d’you reckon it is? From here it looks a bit vermillion.”

“ Vermillion ? Where’d you learn that word?”

“I’m not illiterate, Wil. I know things.”

“Oh, pardon me. I must only assume you learned it from nothing like a true scholar.”

He rolled his eyes. “Hey, don’t take the piss.” He mumbled something. 

“Hmm?”

“From your old book. That one with the bird on it.”

“Jesus, you really have been getting bored then. To read a book, of all things.”

“Or maybe I’ve grown into it. How’s about that?”

“Just fine,” He said, resigned. He releases a breath into a laugh. “Just fine.”

“But yeah. Vermillion, I think.”

“Yeah, I think so too.” He hummed, looking at the bird again. “Vermillion,” He repeated.

He walks the rest of the way, to the middle where one road meets the next, in complete silence. 

Wilbur imagines there’s nothing for miles, no chance of food until he makes it all the way to the next town. The chicken noodle soup can last him another few days but not without side effects. He’s no stranger to hunger, not a stranger to the stomach cramping and dull ache that keeps him up at night. He deals with it either way, there’s no hope for it to suddenly leave him. After all, no one can leave their own limbo. He just hopes goodwill comes quickly, if at all, for the sake of living.

At last his legs are burning and he stops and stands and feels the fragility of the earth and his knees below him. 

He squints into the distance. 

A building, a figure, a something, stands 50 yards away, only slightly visible from his view. He puts his hands on his knees and waits until he can walk in full strides again, and when he finds himself able, he walks on, closer and closer to it.

When he gets close enough to tell what it is, the revelation is surprising. It’s a small truck stop, a place nearly fully overgrown by weeds, unruly and far surpassing the vision of its original makers.

Old tire marks are still branded into the soil. He imagines there used to be food trucks here, places to stop and eat while on the road, but the things that once filled up the plot of land have gone away, leaving it a husk of what it once was. Two buildings, one bigger and one larger, in their collective solitude, reside next to each other, close but not touching. Windows into what must’ve been a gas station reveal dark vines that seep through cracks in the building, engulfing it both inside and out. 

Wilbur walks up to the door of the gas station and prods the door open with the stick in his hand. Inside, he hears nothing. Empty shelves line the sides. The cash register, no doubt empty, sits at the front, no one to manage it. There’s no telling how long it’s been abandoned, left to rot in nature’s fist as a swift force undertakes it. Humans and their construction of such fleeting things. 

He pokes around until he’s satisfied and walks back outside, finding the door of the second smaller building with a rusted metal sign hanging on it, greyed lettering reading ‘bathrooms’, although the second half of the text has been scrawled out for one reason or another that he can’t figure out. 

A reaches for the handle to the door and a gust of wind blows through his hair. He takes his hand off of the door for a moment and then puts it onto the handle. 

“Wil. Wil. What’s wrong with them?” He asked. 

“Shit. Shit! Run Tommy, run!”

He pushes the thought away and opens the door. For a moment, his mind tricks him into thinking there is a zombie in the doorway, but there’s not. 

Because it is not a zombie. It is a person. A person on the ground, half sitting up and half leaned on the door of one of two stalls. The room itself, he first notices, is halfway slanted and dim, alight by something he can only see from out of the corner of his eye like an afterglow. 

He blinks and immediately flinches back, hand gripping the door just as tightly as the stick he was holding only seconds ago, a stick that has since fallen to the grass. 

Wilbur doesn’t realise how hard he’s shaking until he’s grabbing his knife with difficulty, pointing it in front of him, a lousy protection but still nevertheless his only. 

The man’s leg is stretched out, he can see a faint glimpse of blood on his pant leg-

And it’s him. Again. The man he saw yesterday that he nearly killed. A man who showed him mercy. The man that appeared righteous but still proves uncertain.

“Woah, woah,” the man says, dropping a tool he had been holding and putting his hands up. “Put that down.”

The contents of a first aid kit are spilled out across the grimy floors. The stalls and walls have been painted an ancient green, like aged copper. 

Wilbur does not put it down. He walks to the man leaving the door cracked open behind him and jabs his knife in the man's direction. “What are you doing here?”

“Relax. I don’t have anything to hurt you with.”

Wilbur looks over the man, to his pant pockets, half torn and therefore revealing a shape through it. 

“The gun in your pocket says otherwise.”

He looks down at his pocket, as if he’s just noticed its existence. “Oh, that. It’s for show. I don’t have any more rounds.”

“Then you wouldn’t mind showing it to me.”

The man blinks and furrows his eyebrows, a flash and then gone, before taking out the gun. He hasn’t seen one since-

At first, the man seems to want to hand it to him, but even Wilbur in his limited experience with guns can see an opportunity at hand. 

“Slide it,” He says. 

The man slides it across the floor to him and he bends down to get it, not taking his eyes off of the other. 

It’s a black pistol, the type he used to see policemen use, back when they existed. “Where did you get this?”

The man doesn’t respond, just watches him pull back the reload, and as he said, it is empty. 

“It’s empty,” The man repeats. 

“I can see that.”

“Can I have my gun back?” He asks, in the antsy way someone like him might. 

Wilbur narrows his eyes and slides it to the side, away from the man and toward the other stall. It hits the door with a thunk. 

The man looks at him questioningly. 

“Why are you following me?” Wilbur asks. 

“ What ?”

“I said why the hell are you following me?”

“I’m not following you.”

The man looks at him when Wilbur stays silent. “I’m not following you,” He repeats. 

“So we both just happen to be going in the exact same direction at the same time?”

“I don’t know where you’re going and I have no reason to worry about where you’re going.”

He doesn’t respond. Trust in a stranger is blind faith and optimism, but there’s no way the man knows where he’s going. Wilbur, to him, is useless. The man knows he doesn’t have any food and he still saved him. 

“I’m not here to fuck with you,” the stranger says. “I don’t get off on psychological warfare. I’m just here to survive or die trying like everyone else.”

“Is that your motto?” He asks, and when he speaks, a gust of wind pushes the door behind him shut. “Live or die trying.”

“More like a mantra.”

“You’re going somewhere,” He says. The man reaches to his side and takes a grey bottle into his hand. Wilbur eyes it conspicuously. “But you wouldn’t tell me if you were,” He says, completing his sentence without any recognition from the man.

“Hydrogen peroxide,” the man explains, not answering the question but effectively reading Wilbur’s mind. “I was going to clean the wound.”

“Go on then,” He says, not as harsh as he intends.

The man looks at him and looks away, moving slowly, whether for caution of Wilbur’s knife or otherwise, he can’t tell.  

“It’s from the fence,” The man says.

Wilbur’s not sure what the man wants him to say, but whatever it is, he won’t say it. 

The man takes a breath and opens the bottle, sparse in its essence, and begins pouring it over the wound. The man bites his lip and hisses a sound of pain, Wilbur finds himself tensing just the same. 

The man breathes shallowly, putting his head to his own chest and appearing to suppress the urge to wipe off the bactericidal compound. 

Wilbur steps forward when the man sucks in a sharp breath. “Your wound. Do you-”

“No,” the man snaps, and then softens. “Don’t touch me.”

He steps back. “Okay. Alright.”

Slowly the pain must subside because soon enough he is opening his eyes and breathing normally. 

Wilbur watches him take a gauze from the kit and rip a piece off with his teeth, wrapping it around his shin with quick precision he could never expect from himself. He looks experienced, or if anything, used to this. 

“Were you a doctor?” Wilbur asks. 

He screws his face into a strained expression as he begins to tie the knot at his calf. “Like you said,” He says, swallowing hard and releasing a slightly pained sound, “I wouldn't tell you if I was.”

He doesn’t reply for a moment, watching every articulate movement of the man’s hands. 

“My father was a carpenter,” Wilbur says, almost a murmur. 

The man glances at him and continues working on the knot. 

“He’d go out into the woods, in remote places, or places like this, with no one else around.” He realises at this moment that he hasn’t spoken to someone like this in a year, at least. “Survive on whatever he could find. Maybe he’d be proud of me now, since now I’m doing the exact thing he was.” He’s started and he can’t stop. Someone make him stop.

“And what were you?” He says through a laboured huff. 

He looks down. “Nothing useful.”

The man finishes the bandage and pulls himself up higher to sit up. He looks at Wilbur and looks back to the floor. “I was a nurse,” He finally says. “For a second, at least. Provided, that was before everything went to shit.”

A nurse. It makes some sense then, for a nurse to want to save him. 

“Are you going somewhere?” Wilbur asks. 

“You already asked me that.”

“And you didn’t answer.”

“Not answering was my answer.”

“Nowhere?” He asks. 

He shrugs. “You?”

“Obviously you know why I wouldn’t tell you.”

“And so do you.”

A trade, of sorts. 

“Harbour,” He says, testing for recognition, studying the man's face. 

“Harbour,” The man says. 

“You’ve seen it, I imagine.”

“Everyone has. And not everyone is as trusting that they are what they say.”

“What do you think?”

“Well. They know the people coming to them wouldn’t be coming to them if there was another choice. You could only hope they’d do the right thing.”

“How long have you been out here, by yourself?”

“How long have you ?”

“Long enough.”

“Then I have too.”

“You’re going to Harbour,” Wilbur says. 

“You are too,” The man says.

“Yes.” A mutual exchange of information. Reciprocity. 

“You’re out of food.”

“And you seem to be giving it out.”

“Not giving it out. Just having decency,” The man replies. 

“You still believe in traditional decency?”

“Are you asking if I have morals?” 

“Sure, if that applies,” He says. 

“Somehow. Less than I used to but not gone.”

“You seem like a religious man.”

The man waves him off. “No.”

“Do you believe in anything?”

“I believe in kindness.”

“Not a god?”

“Maybe kindness is better than god.” The man looks at Wilbur. “Why are you asking me all this?”

He’s not sure. He hasn’t had genuine interaction in so long that all he wants is to take it for himself, greedily, like he’ll never again receive it. 

“The world is lonely.” That is to say, I am lonely.

The man’s mouth twitches. 

“You don’t believe that?” Wilbur asks. 

He chuckles in a way that makes him wince. “It’s not really a belief more than a fact. I think it’s just unfortunate.”

He’s never heard someone talk this way, like only so much of them has changed since the downfall of it all, as if they kept some of themself locked up to share like a bedtime story of something long past. A relic, a shiny medal in a museum. An outsider to everything else.

“You’re going to Harbour. Why? You have food, you’ve survived this long.”

“As you said. The world is lonely.”

He studies him and finds no trace of a lie.

The man is putting his things back in their places, his leftover gauze into the bright red plastic box and everything else into his backpack. He turns away from Wilbur and takes something from his side. 

“How do you-” Wilbur starts. 

He points at it. It’s lit up, a small caged, almost lantern like, holder. For a candle? “No copper. No mechanism. Old candles I found and a few matches and you’ve got a travelling fire.”

Food, a portable fire, a medkit, a plan. A wreckage of a former Wilbur. He hadn’t known what it was like to lose it all. Although he can never be naive enough to say that the man before him is lucky, from his supplies and attitude, things must’ve fared better for him than for Wilbur. 

He stands up from his leaning position on the side of the room at the same time as the man stands up, hobbling a bit on one leg but regaining his footing rather quickly. 

“Do you have a map?” Wilbur asks. 

“No. Do you?”

“Not much of one.”

“How many miles more?”

“At least 35.”

He looks down on the ground with a hushed resignation. “I thought it was closer,” He deadpans. 

“Well. Some days it goes by quicker.”

“Are you planning on going until you get there?”

“The clock is ticking, as they used to say.” The clock is ticking for him, at least.

“Do you… need food?”

“I always need food. But I won’t accept yours.”

“Why?”

“Poison can camouflage itself to appear kind," He says, as if he's quoting scripture. 

He doesn’t seem satisfied with the answer, but he doesn’t say anything. 

“I hope you make it,” The man says. It takes him by surprise. 

“I could say the same.” But I won’t .

“I guess I’ll see you there, if all goes well.”

One of them will die, he can see it now. 

“See you there, then,” Wilbur says, and looks to his side to see the gun he had slid away from him. He walks to it and kicks it back to where the man is standing, slightly agape and vaguely thankful for a reason he cannot place. 

“Thanks.”

Wilbur opens the door and walks out, backpack heavy and weighing on his shoulders. When the door shuts he walks to the side of the old food truck lot and walks around the corner into the path he had been taking before, halfway between sidewalk and trees. 

He’s slowing down as he reaches the outer parts of the food truck lot when he sees one of them. 

A zombie, and as afraid as he should be, he takes out his knife. He pulls down his sleeves and pulls up the collar of his shirt, careful to hide any skin available to be bitten. He’s approaching it. Slowly. Careful of its steps in relation to his. It’s back is facing him, walking slowly, feet dragging on the ground. 

He keeps going until he sees another one out of the corner of his eye, only feet away. 

Fuck. He can handle one, maybe two. 

He sees a third and a fourth when he turns around. Unlike the others, they face towards him, unafraid. What do they have to be afraid of? Wilbur isn’t the apex predator anymore. 

A fifth on the corner. They’ve seen them. They make groaning sounds, low and horrible, sounds he wishes he would not hear in his dreams. They groan to each other. They turn around collectively like some hivemind. 

Wilbur runs. 

The man is only feet away from the old square bathroom when Wilbur is running back, out of breath and pointing wildly in the direction the zombies are coming from. 

“Fuck,” The man whispers shrilly, immediately understanding. “How many?” 

“Too many,” He says, bending over with his hands on his knees. He can’t breathe properly. He shouldn’t be running like this, he can’t afford to lose more energy. “We can’t possibly fight them all.”

“Are they hunting yet?” He asks. If they were hunting, Wilbur would be dead. 

“No, I don’t think so. They haven’t caught up yet, at least.”

“Okay,” He says, as if he’s thinking something up. “We have time.” The man runs back to the bathroom and swings open the door, gesturing Wilbur inside. He almost denies, but as he turns to look behind him, a figure is coming around the corner. Quickly . 

He runs, stick in hand, as he hears a gurgling noise not too far behind him. 

Wilbur gets into the bathroom and closes the door. A long rectangular handle on the back of the door. He looks down at his stick. 

“How do we barricade it?” The man asks. 

Wilbur doesn’t reply, pushing his stick, only a little more wide than the door handle, under the handle and forcing it upwards to block the space between the door and wall. 

“Will that keep them all out?” 

“I don’t know.”

A sound at the door, a banging. 

“What are they-”

Wilbur shushes him and walks into the greatest slanted stall, getting on top of the toilet in a standing position and then sliding down to lean his back against the wall. The space under the door is minimal, only a few inches of space. 

“Get in,” Wilbur whispers to him and points to the right wall of the stall he’s in. 

“Will they be able to see us if they get in?” He asks. 

“I don’t think so.”

“What do we do if they-” A loud sound at the door. They’re all here. All of them, 5 or more, all trying to get into the same terribly barricaded door. 

“ Get in .”

He doesn’t object and gets in, shutting the stall door and locking it before he cramps himself into the other corner of the small stall, elbow to elbow with Wilbur. 

The air is still. Their silence is deafening, even more so than the half dead creatures banging on the door.

Wilbur thinks he will be frozen in time here. He used to think about being somewhere else when he would get stressed, but now there is nowhere else except here. Time passes and Wilbur’s leg is falling asleep. He tries to adjust himself and almost slips down. His shoes squeak against the dingy white toilet cover. Shit. 

Then silence. And more silence, and more, until Wilbur thinks he might ask the man next to him about the possibility of the zombies giving up their chase. 

And then a loud sound that blows it all out of the water. He hears the cry of the door as it is busted open. Oh god. He hopes his stick hasn’t broken. If he survives and the stick does not, he doesn’t know what he’ll do with himself.

The man turns to him and Wilbur can see the panic in his shrunken pupils. Wilbur’s entire body is trembling. He puts his index finger to his lips wordlessly. The sounds of them, their alien presence, their steps, heavy and trudging like a monster from a children’s book he had read when he was young.

“‘Then the little monster goes… clop clop.’” His father. His smile. 

Wilbur giggled, kicking his feet. “Clop clop,” He impersonated. 

“Mhm,” His father says, turning the page. 

He can hear them getting closer. 

He began to read. “‘Now! Where did my little monster go! I just saw him!’” 

“He’s in the cabinet hiding,” Wilbur whispered. 

His father put his finger to his lips, making Wilbur grin. “Shh.”

“‘I don’t know where he could have gone…’” He pointed to the mother monster as he read. 

He can hear them fiddling with the door, their limp limbs pushing at the door with all their strength. They’re hunting. 

“‘There he is! I found him!’” He read from the book. The cartoonish anthropomorphic monsters smiled on the page.

“How did she not see him?” Wilbur asked. “She’s not a very good looker.”

His father laughed. “I think she’s playing a game with him. She’s just acting like she can’t see him.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s fun,” He said, turning the page again to another picture. “‘Now, don’t scare me like that again, little Mory. You’re going to make your mother very worried, She teased.’”

They stay at the door for a long time, making noises and banging and twisting their fingers under the stall door. Wilbur squeezes himself so far into the corner his arms ache. 

“‘But little Mory didn’t want to worry his mother. I’m sorry Mom, Mory said.’” His father paused and then began reading again. “‘Now don’t run off again, alright? She laughed. I’m making your favourite tonight, and we can’t have Mory in the cabinets while we’re eating our stew, can we?’”

“Would you make my favourite, Dad?” Wilbur asked, because he was a child, and children repeat everything they hear without thinking.

“What’s your favourite?”

“Pizza.”

“Well, I don’t think I trust myself to make pizza, but we could order it if you wanted.”

Wilbur nodded, pulling the covers up over himself and yawning. “Tomorrow?” He asked sleepily. 

His father smiled. “We’ll see what Tom thinks.”

“Alright,” Wilbur said, turning onto his side and closing his eyes as his father closed the book and stood over Wilbur, leaning down to kiss him on the head. 

“Goodnight,” He whispered. 

He’s not exactly sure where he is when the sounds stop, but they do. For insurmountable minutes they sit and stare at the blank door, waiting for something to happen. Nothing does. 

“Are you okay?” The man whispers.

Wilbur nods shakily, blinking. “Fine.”

“You’re pale.”

“I’m fine,” He whispers. “Are they gone?”

“They’re probably not far away, but I guess they gave up.”

Gave up? Of all the times he’s been hunted, giving up has not ever been a viable option for the zombies. They wouldn’t stop even at their downfall. 

Wilbur carefully steps back onto the bathroom tile and waits for sound. Nothing. 

“Should we be going out this quickly?”

“I don’t know. But they aren’t here, and it’s getting dark. They can’t see very well in the dark.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been chased,” He replies easily. 

His eyebrows crease. “Open the door and see.”

Wilbur slowly unlocks the door. He looks out and sees the entry door to the bathroom still open, but no zombies in sight. 

“They just… left?”

“I don't see them ,” Wilbur says, although unbelieving. 

He steps out and takes his stick from the ground. It’s been trampled, surely, but it didn’t break. The lump in his throat loosens as he holds it like a treasure. He turns it over to look at the inscription carved into the side. 

“Should we go?” The man asks from behind him. 

He peers out of the bathroom and sees no zombies in sight. “Unless you plan on hunkering down here for the night.”

“No. It’s too risky.”

“I’m leaving. They could be close, but it’s better than staying here.”

“Is it?”

“I can fight them if I need to.”

“Let’s go in the same direction so it won’t be just one of us by ourselves.” 

“I’ll go on by myself when we reach the main road.” Wilbur steps out of the shrivelled bathroom and into the grass, the man following behind him. 

He starts off cautious and slowly regains confidence in a normal stride, disappearing around the corner and not looking back to see if the man is following him. 

“I heard something,” The man finally says after they’ve been walking for a few minutes, walking quicker to catch up to him. 

“A zombie?”

“Definitely not a person.”

“Where?”

“To the side of us. A second ago.”

“Do birds still migrate?” He ponders aloud.

The man shrugs. “I haven’t seen any recently. I thought maybe squirrels would still be around but… doesn’t seem like it.”

A sound. Bushes or leaves. Wilbur stops. “I heard that.”

“Listen.”

They stand and look around. Nothing is following them. 

And Wilbur thinks that right up until the very moment something lunches out towards him, catching his arm and pulling him down. He immediately takes out his knife, stabbing the zombie once and then again. It’s not enough. Maybe he hit an organ, but not the heart. 

A panicked phrase from the man beside him and Wilbur is being taken to the ground by the creature, it’s thrashing almost equivalent to his own. His instincts are going by themselves, lost in the repetitive motion of stabbing anything he perceives as solid. He’s practically wrestling with it.

He keeps stabbing but the zombie does not falter its appetite. “Kill it!” He yells to the man. 

“Give me your knife!” The man says. 

“What the fuck am I going to fight with?” He says, trying to push the undead off of him.

“Just give it to me! I have a straight shot!”

Wilbur stabs it again. It won’t die, not until he hits the heart. 

He throws the knife to him more limply than he means to. The man rushes towards it as Wilbur fights with hands alone, trying not to get bit. The zombie's face is a warped version of his own, and at first glance, someone might mistake it as a man. 

A sudden sharp pain runs through his arm, he almost lets out a sob. Through the blur of limbs he cannot believe it. He cannot be bitten. This can’t be it. 

The zombie stops thrashing and that’s when he knows the man has hit something, but it doesn’t mean anything if he’s been bitten. He rolls the corpse off of him and lays still, breathing heavily on the grass, adrenaline flow stopping for a moment to allow a clear thought to filter through. 

He feels warm blood seeping through his fingers. 

“It’s dead,” The man says, standing above him and the corpse. He had been leaning, but only now has stood up again. 

“You-”

The man holds up Wilbur’s knife, now obscured with crimson blood. 

“You killed it.”

“Your arm,” The man says, pointing to him. Wilbur turns his head and looks at the wound, a stiff fear that he will look to see a bite mark making him lightheaded. 

“What?” He asks quickly. “What did it do?”

“It didn’t bite, but it fought you pretty hard.” He crouches to the ground and helps pull Wilbur up to his feet. He stumbles. “We need to bandage it or you’ll get an infection.”

Wilbur can’t think to deny, not with his sudden exhaustion. “Jesus, I’m fucking exhausted,” He says aloud. 

“Alright. Just let me do this so you don’t die and then you can go”

Wilbur nods and walks over to a more secluded side of the trail, walking behind a tall bush to try to hide himself from the open and susceptible path of zombies.

“Do you think there are more?”

“I don’t know,” Wilbur says, crouching down to the ground and gesturing to the spot next to him. “They could be waiting for us.”

“You think they’d do something like that? Do they even have the mental capacity for it?”

“I wouldn’t put it past them.” 

The man crouches down next to Wilbur and unloads his backpack quickly. “We need to do this quickly in case there are any other zombies. It would be better to do this in a safer place but your arm is losing blood.”

Wilbur turns his arm and looks at the wound. “It’s not too bad.”

The man looks at him like he’s insane but doesn’t comment, rooting through his backpack and pulling out a piece of gauze. 

“I should probably disinfect first,” The man mutters.

“No,” He says. “Just put the bandage. I can handle it.”

“You have a higher chance of-”

“It’s fine. Just put it on.”

He arches his eyebrows but follows his request. 

Wilbur winces when the gauze makes contact. 

“You should’ve let me disinfect it,” The man mumbles. 

“Why do you care?”

“Why do you keep asking me that?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” He asks as the man ties a knot. 

The feeling of the man’s fingers skimming his arm lights his nerves aflame. He wants the touch yet it’s suddenly so overwhelming he can’t take it. 

When the man finally finishes the process of bandaging him, he stands up, beginning to walk off by himself. 

“Here,” The man says from behind him. He turns around and a few more pieces of gauze are placed into his palm. 

He almost thanks him, but the words don’t come out.

“Is this it?” The man asks. 

“I’ll see you there,” Wilbur says, turning around and walking into the patch of forest, a path zombies are less likely to take, a path he expects will slow them down or at least stop the smell of the blood from his arm from reaching very far. 

“I hope so,” The man replies. 

He disappears into branches and trees with desperation and fatigue lingering behind him like tracks to find him by. 

Hope. What a word.

Chapter Text

“Trust is a fickle thing, like a gift from your mother that you know she will soon sell. Trust is an antiquity. Trust is a fire and a smoking building and the woman trapped inside all at the same time. Trust cannot be taken or stolen, only earned. And trust is a foolish, foolish thing.”

“Please, look-” He struggled against the restraints.

“Didn’t you want to do this?” The middle aged man said with a lift to his voice. He was resigned. He wasn’t going to listen to him. 

“Not anymore,” He said.

He had the syringe in his hand. The boy looked up at the man, maybe 40 years in age, although he had never told him exactly. Dark hair with gray roots and the face of a man much older. He could see the reddened whites of his eyes, his hunger-panged frame. He had lost weight from when they had first started.

“I thought- I thought maybe this was just a backup plan.”

“You said you would do anything for the cause, yes?” He said, tugging up his white sleeves. 

“I said I’d do something, but this isn’t it! You can’t just- wipe half of the-”

“-I intend to do more than that.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I understand very well, Charlie.” He took a breath. “You said you would participate because you wanted to help,” He said in a chiding tone.

“This isn’t going to help. Who the hell is going to put everything back together?” He said, pleading. He was tied down, thrashing to the best of his ability. He would not escape. 

“Maybe it was always better broken. Maybe it doesn’t have to be put back together.” He closed his eyes and then opened them to look down at the boy. “We’ve never deserved to be here, have we?”

“It’s not about deserving.”

“Then what is it about?” He talked to him absentmindedly, like a father on the phone while his child babbles on about some mindless topic. 

“It’s about living.”

“A true pity.”

“It’s not supposed to end like this.”

“I didn’t know the test subject had so much control over the conditions of the experiment.”

“You can’t do this to people.”

“Memento mori.”

“Your dau-”

“Do not tell me this,” He snapped. “Never tell me this.” The man’s accent was dark and misshapen, a man from someplace Charlie had never been.

The other man faltered. He looked so young. 

“You’re just going to resign to this?”

“I am not resigning. I am prevailing. Now let me die standing.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“But don’t I? Who else will save us?”

“Who will be the goddamn downfall?”

“Me, and in this final act I still play the heroine.”

“You don’t care about anything but your own selfish need to play god, don’t you? You aren’t doing this for the earth or anything on it because if you were, you’d know.”

“Know what?” Charlie knew he would ask this. He wanted his last words to be strong.

“That the world is the people in it.”

“A foolish way to live.”

“No more foolish than the way you’re choosing to die. The way you’re choosing the deaths of so many people.”

“I will not listen to your generation. It’s all words with you, it’s all informing of the cause. It doesn’t do anything. But I’ll tell you something, boy. These are not words we will win with, it is infection and it is disease.”

“You want to watch civilization burn.”

“Maybe I do. So does everyone else. We all know this is the only way but no one will go through with it.” He paused. “Except me.”

The man mumbled something under his breath to which the doctor turned to him. “What did you say?”

“I said you could’ve made it painless.”

“I could’ve.”

“But you didn’t. Why?”

“Because maybe I do want to make it hurt, as they say. Maybe it is sins that have brought us to this.”

“Turn the world into purgatory, that’s your bright fucking idea?”

“I am not a religious man. But if this so-called purgatory idea takes an eye for an eye, so be it.”

The man pulled the greenish pink liquid into the syringe and tapped it with his finger. 

“Will I live long enough to talk to my mother for the last time?” The boy asked, no longer a plea but a small piece of desperation for a simple last word. 

“Of what importance would you possibly have to tell her?”

“Goodbye,” He whispered, tears forming in his eyes.

“Resign yourself to death and it will come easy.”

“I don’t want to die,” He said, his arms limp. He wasn’t fighting. He hoped his mother and father would never see him like this. To see their son suddenly not their own and enveloped into some disgusting macabre thing, a creation. 

“I admire your resilience. On your deathbed you still fight,” He said. 

When the syringe was inserted into his arm, he could only imagine the choices he could’ve made, the things he could’ve lived to do. 

The doctor was wrong, he’d already stopped fighting. 

“Thank you for your service to me, Charlie. They will not go unnoticed by me or by the world. And by that, the world will have no choice. To see them. To see you.”

Charlie coughed. He could feel it in his veins, the way his skin prickled at even the lightest sensation. 

“I hope you burn in hell,” He chokes. His thoughts are low and portentous. He can see the new world form in the glassiness of the doctor’s eyes. New forms, new life, new survival. 

“If only there was such a thing,” The creator says, but Charlie is already gone. 

Wilbur wakes up and a glint of sun is shining into his eyes from beneath the branches. He sits up, and for a moment, he doesn’t remember where he is. He turns around and looks down at the quilt underneath him. It comes rushing back to him, the events leading up to his sudden camp in the woods. 

It’s not a very safe place to camp, with only bushes and trees to cover his unconscious figure. He repremands himself internally.

He runs his hand through his hair and winces when a pain jolts up his arm. He’s wearing layers, he takes off his sweater and rolls up his sleeve. Blood faintly stains the gauze wrapped carefully around his upper forearm. He stands up and puts the quilt into his backpack, jamming it in and using any strength left in him to zip it up. He hefts it onto his back and takes his stick into his hand, beginning the first length of walking he must complete. 

The earlier he starts, the earlier he gets to stop. Daytime travelling is always superior to nighttime travelling, and although zombies are less prevalent during the night by consequence of their horrid eyesight, the lights once lining the pavement are gone and travelling at a time like that is like travelling as a blind man.

He tugs his sleeve up, remembering the man as he inspects the bandage on his arm. The man had acted almost caring towards him, something Wilbur has only experienced in his deepest darkest dreams, those he wakes up from in turmoil, distraught and unable to do much of anything until the dream has left him. 

It suddenly surges upon him. The dream he had last night. Perhaps if now he decided not to pursue the thought, not to let it linger so he would have the ability to keep going. But he is not that type of man, and so he stops, hesitating, just long enough for the dream to resurface. 

“I like seashells,” His brother reads from his school grammar book, the afternoon sun streaming through their living room window, highlighting the side of his face like a flashlight in the dark. “I used to like seashells,” He reads. “I have always liked seashells.”

“Have you really?” Wilbur teases. 

His brother laughs a childish laugh. He’s young. He hasn’t been young for a long time. How old is he now? “It’s just a book. I only like aquatic snail shells.”

“That’s oddly specific.”

“I’m oddly specific.”

Wilbur shrugs and nods. “Well, I guess that’s true.”

“I have some test this Monday. Spelling test. You would win it, it’s got all kinds of hard words. Like those you like from your… what is that book called? It’s on the bookshelf, the big one.”

“The Odyssey?”

“No. That book sucks.”

“Dad likes that book.”

“Dad’s boring. No. I’m saying about the big other one. The red one.”

“The dictionary?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“Well, if you read it you’d probably be smarter.”

“Hey!”

He shrugs and smiles teasingly. “Just a suggestion.”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean. Words like that. Sug-ges-ton.” 

“You’ll be alright, you’re kinda smart, you can do it.”

“Kinda?! I’m alllll smart. Every kind of smartness, I have it.”

“You’ll do just fine then,” He says, turning to ruffle the blond’s hair. 

The dream wasn’t a memory. That’s the most astounding part. He had dreamt it up, created a memory for himself. He heard their voices together again and there was no sign that it wasn’t real. His brother often came home from school and showed Wilbur his homework when he was younger, maybe 7, but never had he come home with those words, never had he asked about the red book on their shelves and called their father boring in the same conversation. Never had he said he liked seashells, and yet his mind continues to tell him differently, continues to make his dreams more like thoughts and designs so that it may seem his brother had never existed at all but in his imagination. 

Wilbur knows that today is going to be one of those days. One of those days where the pit of his stomach feels more empty than usual, a day where the horror and realisation of living falls on him all over again. He might as well fall on his own knife. He shouldn’t be the one left. He’s not the person that puts things back in their places, he does not have the heart to try to fix it all, he barely has the strength to keep himself upright. 

He keeps going.

Once he’s into the depths of the forest, way beyond the road, he lets himself float off into nothing again. It’s all slow. He does this almost every day, some days are worse. Sometimes he does it on purpose and sometimes it’s instinctual. Today he can’t tell. 

He walks for forever, lost in rhythm. He steps over branches and zigzags through a trail of rocks during the same period of time that he cannot feel himself thinking. He’s in someplace other than reality, a place to lose oneself in. Maybe the past, maybe memories, maybe simply disappearing all together. 

It feels like the hum of his old guitar, soft and thrumming in his ears. A simple sound to fill the emptiness. 

He’s not sure where he goes until he’s certain he exists again. 

And when he does finally exist again, he finds himself face down on the ground. He picks himself slowly, blinking, trying to understand. He’s tripped on something, it could be anything. A stray branch he hadn’t accounted for, a large rock he hadn’t seen. He stands up slowly and tastes iron in his mouth. He touches the top of his lip and feels warmth. Blood. His nose is bleeding. He wipes his nose with the back of his hand and looks down at its smear. He doesn’t want to think about what it reminds him of. 

He keeps going because there’s nothing better to do. If there’s something worth doing he would be doing it, if there was something better than staying alive he would run to it recklessly. Sitting down and camping has lost any worth it once had. He thinks of just walking until he can’t anymore, until he collapses; these are the thoughts that follow him like a cult of ghosts during a day like this one.

He trudges through low grass surrounded by sticks and pieces of plastic, a world under his feet, extinct and yet still shining through in the little things, in the shards of glass from old broken bottles thrown from cars on the interstate, in the words of carved out trees, black and tar-like remainders in scawled writings of lovers long gone. 

Half of the day goes by in strides upon strides. He stops once to sit down behind the trees like a hunter, holding his knife close to his chest while he breathes and catches his breath. Even at such a slow pace, he’s wearing himself out, little by little. 

A sign reflects the evening sun on a billboard, only some bit lengthier than a car. He stops at it and touches its charred edges, looking over its faded font. More often than anything else, he finds himself wondering about origins, about all the billions of people he never met as if they were all saints, never deservedly dying. 

During the next hour and a half he thinks for once about something other than his own sadness. Of course it does always happen to circle around to this–he’s stopped trying–but for a little while, he forces his mind to another topic. He speaks in his head as if he’s speaking to a crowd, making expressions and gesturing with his hands in the context of words that haven’t left his mouth. Maybe it’s loneliness, maybe it’s the world being robbed of its humanity and knowing there is no better audience than yourself. 

Wilbur passes houses on the way to the next town, lonely little things. American flags, worn and war-torn whipping back and forth in the breeze, clinging to themselves like their once adversary, poverty. In a way, this curse saved and killed everything they had ever worked for. Everyone had been dropped down to the same level of reckoning. 

He reaches another patch of forest and continues, feet sore and blisters rubbing up against the front of his shoes. He can wrap it in gauze, but he probably won’t. 

Would you rather solve a minor inconvenience or die later by a foolish mistake?

It pops in his head rather suddenly, that if he told something like this to the man who saved him, he would disapprove. It’s surprisingly humane, surprisingly persistent that a person could have standards in this world. 

Sticks crunch under his tennis shoes. A whistle sounds from his left side. 

He whips his head to the sound and begins lowering himself to the ground when another sound, much louder and humanlike hits him. 

“Are you alright?” The voice asks, and he flinches, turning around to face the man. He’s looking at him like a painting at a museum, observing him, trying to figure him out. He has a dark beanie on his head, thinner than the one on Wilbur’s, and layered jackets over him almost too big to fit.

Wilbur doesn’t answer, looking over the man’s camp. A simple fire blazes in the ground by the man’s feet. He’s standing by it, next to a small steel wagon. The sun is setting behind him. Is it later than he thought?

“You’ve set down camp,” Wilbur states.

“Are you? Going to set camp,” The man clarifies. 

He shakes his head and turns his head to the direction he was going. “No. I’ve got more ground to cover. I haven’t reached the mile quota yet and my damn foot is slowing me down.”

“Your foot?” The man asks. 

“A blister of some sort, I guess. It’s only inconvenient.”

He studies Wilbur’s arm, looking as if he might be able to see the wound through his layers of clothes. “Have you changed your bandages?”

No answer. He needs to continue walking before night comes. “I need to keep going,” He chooses.

“Have you even eaten?” The man asks. He sounds concerned, or maybe not concerned. Scolding. Like a mother might be. But he is not Wilbur’s parent and he does not need a caretaker. 

“Don’t burden yourself. I know how long I can last, I’ve timed it.”

“Timed-”

“How long I can go without eating.”

“You treat yourself like a science project.”

“Maybe I am one,” He answers. “A rodent in god’s rat race. See how far I can go.” He’s only really humouring him. His body is a poorly put together vessel, something serving him and not the other way around. 

The man arches his eyebrows, almost frustrated. He turns towards his fire and points to something Wilbur cannot see. “Come eat.”

“I’ll be fine. I’ve survived this long.”

“Surviving is blacking out on the pavement so someone can save you?” He asks. Wilbur shifts his jaw. “Just come and eat.”

“I should just assume you’re doing this out of the goodness of your heart like some canned-good philanthropist?”

“Like a decent person,” He says.

“I didn’t know those still exist.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“Why? For what reason would a man like you help a man like me?” He says, louder than before. 

The man hesitates. “Because I pity you, that’s why,” He says, more bitter than he expects. “I pity a man that lives just to see the light of day.”

“Do you?” Wilbur bites back. He hasn’t fought with anyone in a long time. In some sick way, it feels good. 

The man looks almost hurt by his comments, which he doesn’t understand. How could a stranger hurt you in any way other than physically? Why is he letting himself be hurt by Wilbur, just because Wilbur doesn’t give a shit if he lives or dies?

“Yes,” He says plainly, softly. “Please sit down. For god’s sake, you look like you’re on your deathbed.”

He tenses his hands and puts his hand close to his knife, yet still continuing forward. 

“You don’t have to act like I’m going to hurt you all the time,” The man says when Wilbur sits down on the opposite side of the fire, flames flickering in front of his face like a child with a flashlight.

“Yes I do.” He pulls his backpack off of him and sets it to the side but still close enough to get a hold of quickly if the need would arise. “I don’t even know your name.”

“What’s a name anymore?” 

Wilbur shrugs. “Maybe I’m too caught up in the old world. You’re right, it doesn’t mean anything.”

“I’m Quackity.”

He looks at him. “I thought names mean nothing.”

“If you’re alone. But I guess if you know someone it would be useful to know their name.”

“Do we know each other?”

“You know my name,” He says. It’s a subtle thing to say. Now what’s yours?

“Wilbur,” He provides. “Since there’s no one to tell.”

“Wilbur,” Quackity tests out. 

“Is Quackity your real name?” He asks. 

“No one calls me by my old one anymore so it’s taken the place of it,” He says. “Is yours?”

“It’s the only one I’ve ever had. I guess so. People used to call me Wil, but it’s been a long time. Names feel like constructs these days.”

“You sound like a realist,” Quackity observes.

“Reality is all there is. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusioned or dead.”

“A pessimist then,” The man says, almost teasing. The lift to his voice takes Wilbur by surprise. He’s lost the feeling of humour in his chest.

“Something.”

“Do you want to eat?” He asks. “There’s not much. There’s tomato soup and beets but I assume you’ve lost any preference.”

“Ah, preference,” Wilbur notes. “Not since four years ago.”

“Is that how long it’s been?”

“You haven’t kept track?” In reality, he doesn’t blame him at all. 

The man looks away. “They wouldn’t let us keep track of time.”

Wilbur doesn’t press. He has a suspicion of what Quackity could be referring to, but he hasn’t said it outright, and so he finds decency within him not to ask.

Quackity takes out two plastic spoons and Wilbur looks at him in confusion but doesn’t object when he passes him the can of tomato soup. 

“I used to eat that with grilled cheese,” He says as Wilbur takes it into his hand, looking into the can. He sniffs it cautiously. 

“I haven’t thought about grilled cheese in a while.”

“Sorry,” He stammers. “I didn’t mean to, uh, bring down the mood.”

Wilbur almost laughs. “What mood?”

Quackity shrugs, a small downturned smile forming. “I don’t know. I think about the past too much.” Wilbur takes a spoonful into his mouth and lets out a breath. Quackity eats some of the canned beets. 

“Don’t apologise. I think about it all the time. It’s like a default. I’m walking and I suddenly feel like the memories are coming back, from a couple years ago or ten. I can’t forget anything anymore. Or the things I want to remember, I forget.”

Quackity nods and eats more beets, gummy looking with a purple far too dark to be authentic.

Wilbur passes the can to Quackity after eating half. Quackity does the same, pushing the can to him as if he knows Wilbur is waiting for him to get too close, waiting for the moment he’ll be justified to be as wary as he is. 

“This is horrible,” Wilbur mutters in a splenetic chuckle when he takes his first spoonful, looking down at the can disapprovingly and yet still putting his spoon back in for seconds. 

“I know,” Quackity agrees. “Did they even try this before they put it on the shelves?”

“Probably not.”

“I’ve eaten worse than this,” He adds. “I’m sure it’s bad to complain about something like this. I’m fortunate to have anything.”

“But it tastes like shit,” Wilbur finishes for him.

“Yes,” He says, the edge of a laugh in his tone. 

They eat in silence for a few more moments, Wilbur eating and pausing to look around them into the surrounding dark forest. 

“How long have your shoes been like that?” Quackity asks. 

Wilbur looks down. “Like what?”

“Falling apart. You’ve got one talking shoe and one with the laces like you’ve never tied a shoe before.”

“My brother did that,” He says in a mumble. “The talking shoe is courtesy of running from zombies. These shoes weren’t designed to be worn for four years in rigorous use.”

Quackity nods, taking the spoon out of the can and putting the can to his lips, afterwards patting the bottom of the can for anything else he hadn’t eaten.

“Where did you get all this?” Wilbur asks. 

“Nowhere ethical.”

“Well, I expected that. Forgive me for being so incessant but I haven’t had as much food as you do in years.”

“I stole it,” He says quietly, as if it’s hard for him to admit. 

Wilbur waits.

“I stole it from the people I used to travel with. They were good at getting things their way, whatever it was.”

“Oh,” Wilbur says. 

“Don’t ask me about it,” He says. “Going through it once was bad enough.”

“Of course,” He says, biting the inside of his cheek at the sudden discomfort in his stomach. 

“Are you going to stay?” He asks. 

“What? Here?”

“For tonight. It’s getting late.” It is, later than Wilbur thinks is safe to walk in. 

He looks at the man. He doesn’t know what he’s made of, he doesn’t know his thoughts. He cannot look into his heart and know whether the man is planning to stab him with his own knife in the middle of the night. 

“I’m not going to kill you during the night, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I’ll put the quilt out and sleep on this side,” Wilbur says. 

Quackity seems to brighten, just so slightly, at this. 

“For the night,” Wilbur concludes, opening up his backpack. 

“Will you let me change your bandage?”

Wilbur looks at him with a puzzled expression. 

“I don’t think you understand how much bacteria collects on zombies. If you don’t clean it and change the bandage you’re fucked.”

“You know this how?”

“Experience. I didn’t get practice in the real world as a nurse but I did in this one.”

Wilbur took out the bandages and rolled them to Quackity. 

“Can I get close to you or will you pull out your knife?” It’s almost a jab.

“I’ll put it to the side if it makes you feel better.”

Quackity stands up and sits next to him, taking the bandages and moving his hand to lift Wilbur’s sleeves. 

“No,” He objects quickly, to which Quackity frowns. “I can do it.” He doesn’t like the way it feels, how unforeign and unkind it is to feel someone’s hands on him. 

He pulls up his sleeve and removes the bandage to reveal an angry gash. 

“It doesn’t look too bad,” Quackity notes. “It's not infected yet, at least.” He takes the antibacterial and pours a small portion over Wilbur’s arm. “Does it hurt?” He asks. 

“Not too much,” He says through his teeth. It does hurt, but it goes away in a few moments. 

He dabs at the antibacterial with the gauze and then turns it around to the other side, wrapping it over his arm. 

“Where did you put those gloves I gave you?” He asks as he wraps it around a second time. 

“Do you want them back?”

“No, I was just wondering. It’s cold, you might need them.”

“I’ll be fine. I like to be able to use my hands in case I need to. Gloves make it harder to handle a knife.”

“Do you ever think about anything else?” He mumbles under his breath, but not exactly in a mean way.

“Yes. Sometimes I think about death,” He answers. 

A quick exhale through his nose, although not yet a laugh. “Ah.”

Once he’s finished tying it, Wilbur speaks. “Thank you.”

He can tell Quackity doesn’t know what to say, so the man nods in lieu of response. 

“I try not to live off of the kindness of strangers,” Wilbur says. 

“I know,” Quackity says, and stands back up, walking back to his side of the campfire, sifting through his things as if Wilbur is not an intrusion to it all, as if he is nothing but a stranger now reduced to the position of a mere harmless man. He thinks Quackity can see right through him.

Wilbur lays out his quilt on the ground and sits down again as Quackity bundles himself in miscellaneous covers, none of them matching. 

“Goodnight,” Quackity says. No one has said that to him in a year, maybe longer. 

“Goodnight,” He says back, laying his head down and watching Quackity’s eyes close. He takes his knife from his holster and lays it to the side of where his head is resting. 

He doesn’t know, but he knows credence. He always was a sceptic, he always needed evidence. 

“Don’t you ever see things as they are?” His father asked. “Don’t you ever feel something and know that it’s there even if you can’t see it?”

Wilbur turns on his side to face the columns of trees shaping rows and paths in the void of the woods and closes his eyes. 

Chapter Text

“Sounds of death and desperation I hear knocking on my doors but I do not answer. In the beginning I’d been a better man, but not now. I would slaughter a man without remorse and they would too. I keep my doors locked.”

Neither of them acknowledge during the next day that they are travelling together. 

It happens without words, happens for a reason Wilbur still doesn’t understand. Wilbur slept as poorly as usual, if not worse, waking up in two hour intervals and making sure of Quackity’s presence on the other side of the fire. The entire night Quackity didn’t move from his position, and even in the morning, he didn’t walk to Wilbur’s side of camp (a generous name for a fire and a quilt on the ground.) 

When Wilbur asked what Quackity was planning on doing, he replied with simple ‘I’m not sure.’

“How are you not sure?”

He shrugged. “Obviously we need to get closer to Harbor, but I figured we could look for something… for you.”

“For me?”

He looked at Wilbur’s shoes. “You want to keep walking around in those things?”

“How do you plan on finding shoes?”

He hummed. “Dumpster diving is a good place to start.”

And so here they are, walking down in a dead end neighbourhood, half broken wind chimes ringing in the breeze. They’ve already scouted out most of the dumpsters behind establishments, so what’s next is individual trash bins in neighbourhoods, some dumped out and scattered on the ground and others eerily normal, closed and seemingly undisturbed. 

“Who throws out good shoes?” Wilbur asks.

“Rich people. When they were a thing, I guess. We’re just trying for luck.”

“We?” That word again. He’s used it a few times just this morning, as if they are now a pair, tethered together as one. 

He shrugs as if it doesn’t matter. “We. Now, I’ll look this way and you can look down there.”

Wilbur nods, going over to the trash bins, at first hesitating but after a few bins, all unhelpful to his goal, he finds himself rifling through it all quickly. 

“Find anything?” Quackity asks, walking over to him. 

“Nothing. Have you?”

“No. I found some really small shoes, but I figured they wouldn’t fit you.”

“Good call.”

“Do you want to go over to the other street?”

“Why not,” He complies. 

They walk to the other street and go through trash cans, Quackity tugging the small metal trolley behind him. 

“It’s quite clunky,” Wilbur had commented.

“It holds more shit than a backpack. It takes more effort to drag around but at least I can take more with me.”

Wilbur opens the trash bins and scouts for anything important, even other than shoes. 

“Wilbur, come look!”

Wilbur runs to where Quackity is standing, looking into a bin with a proud look on his face and a pair of shoes in his hand. 

“Luck,” Wilbur states. 

“Luck.”

Wilbur takes off his shoes and slips the others on. They’re the type he figures a grandfather would have, with ankle support and black and grey stripes on the sides. 

“Do they fit?” Quackity asks in anticipation. 

He walks a few steps forwards. “Maybe a bit big, which is surprising, but I can walk in them alright.”

“Do you want to keep looking or-”

“Fuck no,” Wilbur says, and lets out a low chuckle. “I don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Quackity sighs and settles on, “Neither do I.”

As they walk on, Wilbur puts his old shoes into the trolley.

“You still want to keep them?”

Wilbur turns his head to Quackity. “I wouldn’t usually. It’s just an object… it was something my brother liked, he would tie the laces in all sorts of ways and they all looked horrible, but he liked those shoes. I guess it’s redundant to keep-”

“No, it’s fine. I didn’t mean to say that you have to get rid of it. We all get sentimental.”

“The world doesn’t care about sentimentality.”

“Maybe, but I do. And you do. So it still matters, right?”

Wilbur doesn’t respond, although he doesn’t take the shoes off the trolley. They keep on. 

“What are we looking for now?” Wilbur asks after a few minutes of walking. 

“I figured we could just keep walking to Harbor and see if there’s anything we can find on the way.”

“I think we’ve exhausted our luck.”

“Maybe so. Or maybe that’s just what we’re supposed to think.”

Wilbur narrows his eyes. “I try not to be greedy.”

“Being hopeful is greedy?”

“In its own way.”

Quackity makes a disgruntled noise at this but Wilbur does not address it. He knows his point of view would be hard to understand for someone who has not seen what he’s seen. He wants to ask so terribly, ‘ What have you been through?’ ‘Am I delusional or do I just know more than you, have I seen the things your lucky self hasn’t?’

They walk until their feet are tired. 

“Do you want to take a break?” Quackity asks, stretching his arms. He fixes his beanie on his head, arranging the only visible hair he can see poking out. Wilbur thinks he’s never seen him without it other than the time in the backyard, of which it was too dark to discern. 

“Where?” He asks. 

“We can find somewhere. You look like you’re struggling.”

“I’m always struggling.”

“Well, more than usual.”

“Alright,” He begrudgingly agrees. 

They eventually find a secluded patch of green in the middle of it all, heavy with the smell of dirt and mud. They roll the trolley to a bush and rest by the truck of an oak tree. 

“Do you come from here?” Asks Wilbur as he drinks a sip of water Quackity gave him from the trolley. His mouth is dry, so he accepts. 

“Around here, but not here, here .”

“Across the border?”

Quackity shrugs. “I grew up there, but when I got older, I came to live here. It was good for a while, but my parents still lived back there when the whole thing happened.”

“How did it look? Before everything happened?”

“What? Mexico?” 

“I don’t know, I imagine it looks different now.”

“Everything’s different. No country was spared, so I’m sure it’s a hellhole like everywhere else.”

“I thought you were an optimist.”

“Not as much as I’d like to be.”

“Do you trust Harbor?” He asks offhandedly. 

“It’s not really about trust. Asking me if I trust them and I’ve never met them is like asking me if I have faith in the world, and that’s kinda hard to answer.”

“Do you?”

“Have you always been like this?” He laughs. A real laugh. “Digging into people’s skulls to find a moral dilemma?”

Wilbur shrugs. “More or less.”

“I’ll humor you. I guess I do have faith in the world. Less than before, as I said. But it’s not gone. It would take a lot to convince me there’s not a single good person out there.”

“Funny thing to say.”

“Why’s that?” Quackity asks, turning towards him.

“You talk about having to be convinced while life gives me a lecture.”

He seems to be pondering over what to say. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” He asks, taken aback.

“For last night,” He admits. “I don’t pity you, Wilbur. I don’t pity you any more than I pity myself. I just needed you to listen .”

“Don’t apologise to me,” He says, stilling the atmosphere. 

Quackity looks down at the dirt and then a tree behind Wilbur and then to his stick on the ground.

“Did you make it yourself?” He asks. He knows he’s trying to change the subject, but Wilbur would rather lose his morbid train of thought, and so he obliges. 

“I’d say it was mutual effort.” He leans over and takes it into his hand, turning it to look at the inscription. “Me and my brother. He insisted we call it The Punting Stick .”

Quackity snickers. “Wow, good name.”

Wilbur hums in agreement. 

“What does it say?” 

Wilbur rubs his thumb over the words his brother had carved so long ago. Property of Tommy. 

“His property.”

“He sounds like a character.”

“He was,” He agrees. Past tense drives a knife into his chest every time. 

They get back onto the road shortly after, talking about small things that eventually evolve into talking about big things by way of Wilbur’s unfortunately overactive mind. 

“Do you remember court?”

“Like… lawyer court?”

“Yeah, do you remember that? It’s all so humorous now, like stick figures and ants with so much power, governments, systems,” Wilbur says. 

“I mean, I wanted to be a lawyer before I wanted to be a nurse. I figured it was as good a job as any. But then I realized it’s all corrupt, in the end. You can try to make things better, try to do something right, but you’ll never change it all. In that bastard of a world there would always be some dick to screw it up.”

“The man at the top.”

“Right,” He says. 

“So then why nursing? Isn’t it the same thing? The medical field is a bitch, or so I’d heard. Pharmaceuticals and such. They rob you of all your worth and still don’t heal you.”

“I guess it was because I could see the results a little more. It was either in my hands or the doctor’s. I could have faith in myself and faith in the doctor to help the person, and as long as there was goodness in that, I could feel like I was doing something.”

“Sounds like the type of thing you would do.”

“What?”

“Nursing. You seem like that kind of person. As far as I can tell.”

Quackity smiles. “I’d always wanted to be. It’s just shitty that I’ve gotten to the point in my life where I can actually help people and now we’re here.”

He nods. “I was never made to do anything like that. It’s like there’s a strength someone has to possess for a job like that, that I don’t have. That I’ve never had. I can ask good questions, I can think. Or at least I thought I could. To be honest with you, I think I only ever liked watching people argue.”

“What did you major in again?” He asks, as if Wilbur had ever told him. He doesn’t especially enjoy speaking of it, as if the entirety of the major was a sin. 

“Political science. Whatever that was.”

“It suits you,” Quackity tries. 

“It doesn’t suit anybody, but thank you for that. It’s nice to feel like you’re good at something.”

“You speak better than I do, if that makes you feel any better. You speak like you’re writing a book, but I think that would be a good thing in that kind of field?”

Wilbur laughs. Unexpectedly, at that. It’s been a while. 

“What? It’s true. Some people are good at talking about complicated things and I’m not one of them.”

“Well, it’s not useful. Thought can only do so much,” Wilbur says. 

Quackity half shrugs. 

His shoes let him go on for longer without taking a break and they make it to the second to last town before the border by early evening. 

“Should we camp here?” Quackity asks. 

We.

“I’d look around the town first and see if there’s anywhere better. Look in the trash bins here if you want.”

They go street by street, Wilbur observing the lacklustre houses, some a dull shade of pink and others plain brown. The sidewalk seems to go on endlessly, and the longer they walk the closer buildings become in the distance. 

“Are there buildings here? Supermarkets?”

“Maybe,” Wilbur replies as they walk across the street to the buildings. “This town is bigger than I thought.”

The buildings are small, almost cubelike in shape, and cramped together against all the other stores like one entity. This one however, is bigger, a dark brick red, and older than the others. Next to it is a boarded up brown building, pieces of wood covering its various windows. Neither of the buildings look like they’ve ever been in good shape, although it seems right for this situation because they know there’s not many people who would possibly go in for shelter. 

Ghost towns used to belong to the wild west, Wilbur thinks to himself as they stand in front of the building. 

In faded dark letting, Thrift Store is written on the side of the building next to a small parking lot. 

They walk inside to find rows of clothes pushed over, some laying limply on their sides, hangers strewn about as if a single catastrophe had taken over the building long ago, something more than a tornado, something more deliberate. 

“I assumed old towns didn’t get the chaos the big cities did.”

Wilbut had seen how the terror wrecked his town more than any other force, zombies and earthquakes and otherwise. People decay slowly, over time, and slowly you come to find that they are not as they were before, less human than they used to be. And those were people who hadn’t been turned. In some way, they’re more worrisome than the undead themselves. 

Wilbur picks up shirts and sweaters and tank tops from the ground and holds them, inspecting them before throwing them off to the side. 

“They only left the rejects,” Wilbur comments, holding a half torn cotton shirt with the words ‘Live and Let Live’ on it. So much for that. 

The antiques in the shelves in the back of the building have been rendered into the sad sight of glass shards and the children’s books have been abandoned on the linoleum floors. 

“I read this as a kid,” Q comments, picking up a book from the ground. 

“What is it?” Wilbur asks, facing away from him and rifling through the donated nonfiction books. 

“El Principito,” He says. 

“The Little Prince?” Wilbur asks. 

“You know of it?”

“It was just as popular here, I imagine.”

“I fucking loved it. I’d read it over and over. It was just so full of whimsy, you know?”

“They read it to us in school, but I don’t remember it.”

“Something about a flower, something about this kid who lived on a planet.”

“What’s your favourite flower?” Tommy asked. 

“That’s a difficult one. And considering I’d normally have an answer for something like this, it’s surprising I can’t think of one.” They were walking on the road. Wilbur almost told him it was useless to think about such things, things they wouldn’t see again. But he didn’t. 

“Mine is pansies.”

“Why those? Where have you even seen them?”

He shrugged. “They just look nice, I dunno.”

“I guess if I thought about it… it would maybe be anemones?” 

“What in the fuck kind of name is that?”

“I see,” Wilbur says. He hates the past but the past seems to hate him more.

“Look at this fucking shirt,” Quackity says, and Wilbur turns around to see the shirt in his hands, a white tank top with print. “ Not my jugs? ” He reads. A cartoon man next to the text smiles and it makes him cringe.

“What the fuck does that even mean?” Quackity laughs.

“It’s still here, so I guess people still have standards.”

Quackity looks at him and then laughs. “You made a joke just now.”

Wilbur shrugs. “Comedy’s a bit decrepit, but-”

“There, you’re going on about shit again. Anyways, it’s refreshing.”

“Refreshing?”

Quackity doesn’t answer, only walks away from one section of the store to the other, apparently looking for anything else. 

Wilbur holds a book in his hand. Lord of the Flies. God he hates that book. 

He puts it back in its place and makes his way toward the section Quackity is standing in. 

“No shirts or shoes, not even any large shoes in the women’s,” Quackity says.

“I said-”

“We’ve exhausted our luck, I know.”

Somedays he understands who he's become and he mourns for the man that he was. 

“Alright,” He says. He doesn’t let himself apologise. It’s too late for apologies. 

Quackity puts his hands on his hips and sighs, looking over the rest of the store. “I think we’ve looked everywhere. Did you find anything?”

“No.”

“This place reminds me of the shops I used to go to.”

Wilbur doesn’t say anything. 

“Do you want to keep looking or leave?”

“We can walk along the street and see if there’s any houses nearby.”

“I imagine we’ll be camping out in the trees tonight.”

“You make it sound whimsical.”

“It’s all about your attitude, I guess.”

He clenches his jaw. He will not allow one more terrible thing to fall upon him, he will not be at fault for living in the world that has been thrusted upon him. He will not live a life in this hellhole, delusioned that it is just as it used to be. Society is gone and he is the survivor of anecdotes now told from word of mouth. He is a traveller, he is a nomad. He lives and he dies without grandeur. 

“You look like you’re going to cry,” Quackity says. This sobers his destructive thoughts quickly. 

“Don’t say that.”

“What?”

“That’s it’s all in the way I think about it, like I haven’t seen the good in the world yet. I have . And I had it and I held it to my chest and then it died there. I had it once.”

He blinks. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologise to me.” He knows he’s said it before and yet he still persistently doesn’t listen.

The words linger in the air and poison his senses. He coughs to make the world unfreeze. 

“I think we should find somewhere to camp,” Quackity finally suggests. 

“Yes,” He says, clearing his throat. “I think that’s right.” He wants desperately to explain, to make an autobiography that only few can read, to possibly make him understand that the world isn’t his. And yet the words don’t put together, he cannot convey that he has lost his ability to make decisions, to have a role in his own life. He’s turned into clay and tragedy moulds him like pottery.

They walk down the streets and keep to the sides where trees have unleashed themselves like predators, the only life form that has kept its freedom. 

Finally, after maybe 20 minutes of exploring the surrounding area and houses, looking for secure places to sleep for the night, they hear a sound. 

“Shh,” Quackity says. Wilbur hadn’t said anything. 

They listen for sound and hear it once more like thunder. Before, all they knew was that there was a sound, but now they can hear it clearly. 

“An engine. A car?” Quackity asks. He seems just as surprised as Wilbur. 

“That's not possible.”

“Well… technically, it could be. If it was old, whatever the hell they’re running it on, I don’t know, but if it didn’t have any electronics-”

The sound comes louder, the revving of an engine, loud and quaking to Wilbur’s ears. He hasn’t heard a working car in at least two years. It’s coming closer. Some squeaking coming from it, the type he might’ve heard years ago and thought of as something only partially annoying, an experienced driver, or a reckless one. Now he’s surprised there’s a car and a driver at all.

“We need to hide,” Wilbur says. There’s no room to suggest anything else. They can hear it down the road. It’s coming. Quickly. Run. Go. Hide. His father shouting in his ears, he can barely hear it over his heartbeat. 

Across the road is a bush and a few surrounding trees. 

Quackity is tugging the trolley and as Wilbur runs to the closest form of shelter, he whispers, “Where do I put it?” Panic takes his voice at the end. 

“Throw it to the side, it doesn’t matter. Put it behind the bush!” He says, pointing frantically. 

Quackity runs with him to the bush and crouches down next to Wilbur behind the hedge after securely putting the trolley behind a few fortunately close trees, just close enough to hide its wide frame.

The car must be close enough to see them now, they can hear it. Wilbur wonders if there’s a way to make himself stop shaking. Wilbur is on his knees, ducked down but still facing the main road so as to have the ability to see the street, and Quackity is sitting, back to the shrub, legs tucked close to his chest. 

The car is so close and yet he cannot peek to see the street without being at risk of exposure. The sound stops. Wilbur takes a breath and looks up from the dark green of the bush and the sticks on the ground and sees the car, directly in front of them, parked on the other side of the street. 

The car door opens and slams closed. Wilbur flinches. The car is a truck, low to the ground, maybe from the 60’s or 70’s. Tarp covers half of the truck’s bed and the other half is…

He squints at the figure at the back of the truck. It moves. 

There are people in the bed of the truck. He counts 3 and a young child. He hasn’t seen a child for years. Their faces are covered in ash and their scrawny frames exceed even his. His stomach sinks. 

A man with a face tattoo, the driver of the truck, walks to the bed of the truck and says something to one of the others. Nothing and then a shout, a cry from the child. Something isn’t right. They are not a family and there is something that makes Wilbur think they do not know each other at all. 

The man pulls the child from the truck and a woman yells something that sounds like a plea. The man does not say anything as he pulls the child by the wrist to the building close to the truck, a small rectangular hut-like structure. 

There is something in the man’s hand. A switchblade, like his. The child sobs but the man only yells back. Wilbur has seen this before. 

“What are they doing, Wil?”

“Tommy, don’t look.” They were on the top of the hill. The people below them looked small and yet Wilbur could still see it all unfold as if he was directly next to them.

“Wilbur, you’re scaring me.”

“Sometimes people do bad things.” As if he was talking to a child, and technically he was. 

“Why won’t you tell me?” Wilbur could smell the smoke of the spit below them. He couldn’t believe it, he couldn’t escape it. He couldn’t stop thinking of his father’s words. He knew what he once didn’t. 

“Don’t look,” He said. 

Once the boy has been pulled into the building, there is silence. 

He cannot breathe. He ducks down and turns to look at Quackity. His eyes are wide yet unseeing. He sees the panic in his eyes and knows that Quackity knows. 

“Quackity, we need to go. We need to go now before they come back out and see us, alright?” He sees it in his stillness, that he’s not all here. 

He nods and tries to stand but does so slowly; Wilbur takes his arm by instinct and pulls him back towards the trees behind them, farther and farther into the woods. He yanks the trolley in his other hand. He knows he’s hardly present either, he’s going on impulse and impulse alone. He’s out of his head, the rest of him only functioning physically. 

He doesn’t know where he’s going. They run until Wilbur can think clearly again. Quackity still hasn’t said a word. 

Letting go of Quackity’s arm, he sets down his backpack and takes out his shabby map, tracing over their route. There’s a town near here, smaller than the one they were in, maybe with a few houses or at least trees to hide behind for the night. 

This time when he ventures on, he doesn’t have to take his hand, Quackity automatically follows behind him. 

Walking usually goes by in a haze, but his mind will not let him slip away for long enough. 

After an hour and a half of walking, they spot a long patch of trees and weeds flowing over the rotting half removed fence behind a segment of houses. Wilbur takes a chunk of rotting wood off with ease and manoeuvres the trolley into the space of forest behind the fence line. He takes the stick in his hand and uses it to pave a way through the land, bushwacking as it was called. 

Once they’ve walked so far into the mass of nature that they can no longer see the street, they pitch camp wordlessly. The moon has already gone up into the sky, looming above them like a curse. 

As Wilbur takes out his quilt and bunches up his sweater to form a sort of makeshift pillow, Quackity walks off further and sits down behind a tree out of view. 

Wilbur puts down his things and walks.

“Quackity?” He asks softly. 

The man does not answer. 

He turns and sees Quackity in the same position he was when they were waiting in the bushes, listening and knowing all too well what they shouldn’t. His knees are up to his chest, hands covering his face. He knows that he isn’t crying, although it’s more worrying that he doesn’t seem to be doing anything at all. 

Wilbur gets onto his knees next to him and touches his shoulder. Surprisingly, he does not flinch at the contact, only taking one of his hands and extending an open palm to Wilbur. Stop . 

“Do you need to be alone?” He asks. 

A silent nod. 

Wilbur walks back to the camp and works on a fire, listening to nothing but the wind and its howls of shame in his ears that remind him of the days he was alone not so long ago. He wonders how it is that he’s already gotten used to seeing someone in front of him. 

He lifts his sleeve and unravels the bandage on his arm. It has almost scabbed over. To touch it is painful, but wearing a bandage restricts his arm movement even more than the gash itself. He lifts his arm and tests its mobility, then pulls his sleeve back down. 

When Quackity finally comes out from behind the tree he sits across from Wilbur and looks up to the shrouded sky. 

Wilbur nods at him as if to ask an unspoken question. 

Quackity opens his mouth to speak and then closes it, nodding once again, conveying something unspeakable that Wilbur still understands. 

Chapter Text

“The world has always been one’s passion project, despite its creator never being seen. In glances and breezes and the sound of laughter he shares his desires for it and in the blood seeping into the cracks of pavement we observe his true unbeknownst craving. Of carnage.”

They find the old woman an hour into their walk from the small town of Llano Grande to Harbour, a 2 hour’s walk away. When he first sees her his immediate reaction is to take a defensive stance, knife pointed outwards. 

He had mistaken her for a zombie. No one could blame him, she looked to be almost rotting. When she saw them she did not acknowledge them, only watched them walk until they noticed her, slumped on the side of a gas station door. 

She must be in her late 70’s, hair grey and skin paler than it should be. It is one of two types of people Wilbur does not see on the road often, if at all. The elderly and children. He distantly wonders how she’s lasted this long at all. 

Quackity stops and stares, Wilbur waits to see if she will say anything. 

She looks at them with dark eyes that have a long lived look in them, like a permanent face of horror. 

“Mijo, ¿cómo me encontraste?” She asks. Her voice is hoarse, as if she hasn’t used it in years or she’s used it far too much. 

She is looking at Quackity, hardly acknowledging Wilbur’s presence. He watches him approach the woman and follows closely behind. 

“¿Perdón, señora?” He says. 

“Mijo,” She says, and picks up her arm with a hitch of her breath, beckoning him closer. 

Do you know her? Wilbur mouths to Quackity when he looks back at him. Quackity gives him a puzzled expression, mouthing back a No?

“Lo siento. ¿Me conoces?” Quackity asks in a confused tone. 

“Véngase, mijo. Nunca pensé que vendrías, ¡pero aquí estás!”

Quackity startles, looking back at Wilbur and putting his hands up slightly as if to signal uncertainty. 

“Lo siento señora, pero no soy su hijo.”

She laughs at this however it fizzles out quickly due to a gravelly cough. “¿Olvidas a tu madre tan rápido?”

Your mother? “Is this your-” Wilbur starts to ask, but the woman interrupts him. 

“Who is your friend?” She asks in english.

Wilbur looks at her and the words don’t form in his throat. 

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know you,” Quackity says. It almost sounds like it hurts him to say.

“You don’t remember me?” She asks. 

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you remember Luis? Do you remember your birthday party, mijo? It wasn’t too long ago… or my memory isn’t like it used to be. Maybe that is the problem.”

Quackity shakes his head. 

“Oh. Well. It has been a long time. You wouldn’t remember my face like this.”

“What’s my name?” Quackity asks. 

“Are you so forgetful you forget your own name?” She laughs. “Eres mi muchachito . Eres mi Sergio.”

Quackity’s eyes are wide, and perhaps the woman does not notice, but Wilbur does. The way his expression flashes guilt and desolation for a quick moment before disappearing. 

“¿Qué necesitas?” He asks. Wilbur knows what he’s doing. Quackity lowers himself down to the gravel next to her and she takes his hand into hers. 

“In truth, I am not doing well. I don’t think I’m going to live much longer. But I need you to do a few things for me.”

“Dígame.”

“I want to see your father one more time.”

“Your-”

“Where I worked. At the office, you know where. There’s that picture of him on my desk.”

“Where did you work?” He asks. 

“¡Hoy estás olvidadizo!” She says. “Back at the school, where your sister went all those years ago. In the front office. Don’t you remember?”

“Oh, right,” Quackity says. He isn’t convincing, but the woman nods. 

“I don’t know how I’ve lasted this long without your father,” She says. “He was always so nice with you when you were young. He would make you pork chops and you would eat them so quickly! Eran sus favoritos también.”

He nods as if he remembers, as if this woman’s past is somehow his own too, just in a different way. “You want me to get the picture?”

“If it isn’t too much trouble. I see you have your friend, it’s very nice to see you have someone to travel with. Dios sabe que- we’ll die of loneliness before we die of starvation.”

“Um,” Wilbur walks up closer and looks at Quackity. “We need to discuss our route for a second, if that’s alright.”

“Of course,” She says. 

Quackity apparently takes the cue as he walks with Wilbur to the other side of the building. 

“You don’t know her,” Wilbur states once they are out of earshot. 

“No.”

“And you want to travel to find her something that might not be there?”

“We have time.”

“Any time we’ve kept thus far is borrowed.”

“You don’t have to go with me.”

“Why are you even considering this?”

“Because even though I don’t know her, I do. She reminds me of people, she reminds me of someone I haven’t seen in years and that I won’t ever see again and I think that it’s right to give something to someone who is less fortunate than you. A last word, a picture of her husband. No one else would do that.”

“No one else would do that for a reason, Quackity.”

Quackity looks down. “She says things like my grandma did.”

The use of the past tense makes him wince internally. He blames himself every day for all the things he did wrong, he goes over them like a checklist when he wakes up in the morning, and yet this makes him feel worse. 

“If we arrive and the picture isn’t there, then what? We’ll come back and tell her goodbye and leave her? Are you willing to do that? We can’t take her with us. Her life is ending, there’s nothing left. I’m sure she’s had a good life, I’m sure her real son and husband loved her. If there is a heaven, she can see them there. It’s instinct to protect the goodness of the world, but nothing is immortal. And I mean nothing, Quackity.”

“I know that, I’m not trying to save her from death. I’m trying to give her some sense of closure. She knows she’s going to die, she’s lived through her family’s death-”

“We all have.”

“And I have the chance to give her one last good thing.”

“How have you made a decision like this so easily?”

“Because it's easy to do when you know why you’re doing it.”

Wilbur’s sense of justice is gone, the rest of him has crumbled. And yet a sliver of remorse burrows itself in his gut.

They walk back to the old woman and she is staring off into the distance, eyes crinkled and skin rough with age. 

“I can get it for you, okay?” Quackity tells her.

“¿Qué dijiste?”

“The picture of your husband.”

She looks at them blankly. “Oh,” She finally says, releasing a harsh breath that distorts into a cough. “Está bien.”

They walk back up the road the same way they came, Wilbur following reluctantly behind. They are going for a reason intangible to him, searching for a picture they have never seen, old and reluctant like the integrity in his chest.

The sole reason they find the school is that it is the only school in miles. They had passed it on their way to the town where they found the woman, and although there was once a gate, it has since been trampled down. The windows have been punched out or otherwise, making the once dignified school appear as a bad house in a bad neighbourhood. Unsurprising and yet still unfortunate. 

The school is as empty as Wilbur had suspected, and as they walk around scouring for the front office, they hear nothing but an eerie silence. 

“We haven’t seen a zombie in at least a day.” Quackity comments. 

Wilbur shrugs. “It’s fortunate for us, at the moment, anyway. They’re like any other mammal, it’s possible they could be migrating.”

“That doesn’t really make me less worried,” Quackity chuckles. 

“It’s not really supposed to.”

Quackity makes a disappointed sound, as if he can make Wilbur believe his own words any less.

“It is a little strange,” Wilbur acknowledges for the sake of it, prodding a door to a classroom to open with his walking stick. “But I take it as good news.” He peers inside and sees nothing, turning back to continue down the rest of the hallway.

“It’s obviously getting worse.”

“What?” He knows it’s getting worse, but maybe he’d like to hear Quackity explain it. He cannot pretend he isn’t still interested in the mind, in perspectives different than his own, even if he shuts them down quickly.

“All of it. Do you think… they’re evolving?”

“It’s not been nearly enough time for them to evolve. I’m sure that by the time they start we'll all be dead.”

He narrows his eyebrows. “The earthquakes have been getting worse.”

“Earthquakes aren’t the worst of it. I’ve been caught in a fusion storm twice.”

“Jesus.”

“I survived,” He says.

Quackity walks ahead of Wilbur and looks around the corner. “I think the office is down here.”

“You see it?”

“Maybe. Or this could be one of two. It’s a weirdly giant school for being in such a small town.” Quackity clears his throat as they walk down the dark hallways only lit by the sun coming through windows, of which there is little. 

“Do you ever think about-” He starts. 

Wilbur cuts him off with a joking tone. “Most likely.”

“Don’t interrupt me,” Quackity says, although it's not a snap more than it is a jibe. “I was going to ask if you ever thought about the way it all started, everything. All of this.”

“I used to, but it was more useful to think about back then. I thought maybe we would know soon enough, that the reporters or the scientists would figure it out. Turns out now I have a better chance of knowing than they do. I always assumed it was a virus, but I don’t know. I suppose I’ve lost my zest for contemplation.”

“ Zest . Do you read a dictionary in your free time?” 

“I used to, funnily enough.”

Quackity snorts. “Why?”

“I guess I hated feeling stupid. People would talk to me when I was younger and I hated not knowing exactly what they were saying.”

“You studied a dictionary to feel better about yourself?”

Wilbur shrugs. “I don’t know what other motivation anyone could have. But anyway, I like to think of it in the past. Words are useless now.”

“Do you still read?”

“In the first year or so I read sixty or seventy books. But it all feels so formulaic these days, like I’ve already memorised the plots, so I stopped a couple years ago.”

“You should get a book or something.”

“When will I get the chance to read it?” He asks. 

He shrugs. “When we get to Harbor you’ll have all the time in the world.”

“Nice thought,” Wilbur says, walking into the office. It’s stuffier than the rest of the building, dark and shaded in the corners and crevices that dust and time has seeped through. 

“It smells fucking terrible in here,” Quackity says. 

As he walks farther into the room, he finds that he’s right, it smells horrible. 

“Did something die in here?” 

“I don’t see anything,” Wilbur says.

“Maybe something’s stuck in the walls? An animal?”

A row of desks sit in a fine line, drawing out the rest of the office. There are rooms hidden in the back, but the smell is close. He walks around, scanning any desk with a photo on it while Quackity ventures into the back.

Wilbur passes by a desk and winces. “Fucking rancid,” He mumbles under his breath. 

After probing the tops of desks for a few more minutes with no avail, he releases a sigh. 

“There’s nothing here,” He says to Quackity in the back room. 

No response. 

“Quackity? Is there-”

Footsteps leading out from the room. Quackity looks at him, pale and blinking slowly at the ground. 

“Is it a body?” Wilbur asks. 

“No,” He says. 

Wilbur walks towards him, craning his neck to see inside the room behind Quackity. 

“Don’t go in,” Quackity says. 

“Is it bad?” 

“Just don’t go in,” Quackity repeats, almost pleading.

“Okay,” He says, holding his hands out. “I didn’t find anything, let’s see if there’s another office, alright?”

Quackity nods and walks out of the office, not looking back. He won’t ask what was in that room because chances are, he’s already seen it once before in his lifetime, and there’s no reason to see it twice. The only thing he has gotten from this new existence is that his most terrible thoughts have nothing on what he’s already seen, and not even the gory pictures in his sleep can possibly add up to the horror of the real world. 

The second office is on the other side of the building and they find it quickly, old signs on the ground that had once been stuck to the wall leading them with comically large arrows.

Wilbur feels the same empty stomach lurch inside him as he walks into the room, the smell almost the same as the other. Quackity notices at the same time as him, stepping back and looking at him with wide eyes. 

He hadn't wanted to do this, it hadn’t been his idea. There is no knowing why he would possibly follow him here just to look for something out of the goodness of his own nonexistent heart. 

He doesn’t know why he’s going to offer to look through the office either. “I can look,” Wilbur suggests. 

“You don’t have to,” Quackity says.

Wilbur walks forward and looks over the desks. 

“You really don’t,” He says again, and Wilbur doesn’t respond, just works quickly, walking around the desks and looking in drawers for anything like a picture frame. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know anything at all.

Every desk, from top to bottom, is empty by the time he reaches the last two desks. Nothing but accumulated filth sits in the drawers. 

The second to last desk is the same. 

The last desk he gets to is like all the others, except that the drawer is open mere inches. This should alarm him more than it does, and contrary to his usual precaution, he opens it fully. There are three or four of these small drawers to a desk, each small enough to inspect swiftly and continue on. 

Wilbur opens two in quick succession before realising that neither are bare. He stares and for a moment, his train of thought is stuttering like an old computer, making sense at the things sitting limply in front of him and yet making no sense at all. 

He knows what they are, it doesn’t take him long at all with the blood streaking the inner compartments, and yet he feels like he must question their existence, as if they could be fake. 

The picture is nowhere to be found, but if it is, buried under everything else, he wouldn’t be able to tell. 

The dismembered ligaments look old, almost fake, and yet so physically real. He wants to tell himself he’s in a movie, that the director paid money to get the hand and leg to look authentic, that the actors almost puked the first time they saw it, thinking it was real. 

This is not a movie, and the more Wilbur looks, he realises that the hand is small. Smaller than his or any adults. A child. Oh god, a child. 

He doesn’t think his hand will move until it does, closing the drawer with a tremor that snakes through every one of his nerves. 

“Did you find it?” Quackity asks from the doorway. 

He cannot speak, he cannot say anything, he cannot. 

The words come out of his mouth before he can register his mouth moving. “We should go,” He says. “It’s not here.” 

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” He says. 

He doesn’t feel the bile rising in his throat until he’s bent over an empty bin by one of the desks, retching the last two day’s worth of food into the trash.

Despite Quackity’s warnings to take a moment to rest, Wilbur finds the exit to the school quickly afterwards, where they find the photo, sitting on the ground by the door to the playground like a mockery.

It is a black and white photo, unframed, and at first, they mistake it for trash until Quackity spots a face on it from out of the corner of his eye, almost like that of the woman they had met but younger. 

“Is it them?” Wilbur asks, arms folded into his chest. His entire body is still trembling.

“It looks like it,” He says. 

“Who would take it and move it?” Wilbur asks, peering at it in Quackity’s hands. It’s a picture of the two of them, both young and smiling at some sort of fair.

“No one who still exists, I’d guess,” Quackity says, turning the first edition picture around gingerly. Scribbled text.

“What does it say?” Wilbur asks. 

“It’s in Spanish,” He says. “Mi Mamá Lucita, la más bonita de todos. The prettiest of them all, it says.”

“He wrote that for her?”

Quackity nods and stows it away in his back pocket. 

They walk back the same way they came, through wide roads that turn into cramped residential streets, some with slanted puddles on the ground from a disaster that hit not long ago. 

“Do you think there’s a couple like them still alive out there?” Quackity asks after an hour of walking. 

Wilbur hadn’t been thinking about anything, for once, although he’s thankful for the topic because it distracts from everything his mind could be thinking about. “Maybe.”

“But do you think it could happen? Even in your pessimism?”

“You said it yourself, I’m a pessimist. You already know what I’m going to say.”

“You’re right.”

“I think it’s possible,” Wilbur says. Quackity turns his head to look at Wilbur. “Well, no one can say for sure. But if there’s a bunker somewhere or… a good place, maybe.”

“A good place, like heaven, you mean?”

“No, more physical. Heaven is belief, so who knows. But a place like Harbour, maybe.”

Quackity nods. 

“Do you think there is?”

Quackity takes a breath. “I hope so.”

When they return, the woman is the same as she was when they first saw her. Her eyes however are closed, and when they walk up to her, she doesn’t hear them until Quackity taps her on the arm. 

“Lucita?” Quackity asks.

Her eyes open and she looks blearily at the two of them. “How do you know my name?”

“We found your picture,” Wilbur says.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Quackity takes the picture out of his sweater pocket and gestures it towards her. She doesn’t take it, only looks up at them from the ground and knits her eyebrows together. “I didn’t ask for any picture. Are you here for pickup?”

“Here for what?” Quackity asks.

“Pickup. For your children,” She says. 

Wilbur has known people like this, his best friend’s grandmother in middle school that he would visit on the weekends. She never remembered his name as many times as he would tell her.

“You wanted us to give you this picture. Of you and your husband.”

She looks down at the piece of paper and takes it from his hand, studying it. 

“How do you know my husband?”

Present tense.

“We wanted to give it to you. Have a good day, Lucita,” Wilbur says, beginning to turn around towards the road.

“I don’t know why you are giving this to me,” She says. 

“It’s okay. We wanted to let you know before we go that your husband loved you a lot.”

“Loved?”

“He loves you very much, and he would want you to have it now,” Quackity corrects himself. “I hope you have a very good day, alright?”

She looks at them with an accusing look in her eye, although more than anything, confused. She nods anyway. “What was your name?”

It doesn’t matter, but Quackity tells her anyway. “Q,” He says. “Goodbye, Lucita.”

“You college kids are very strange,” She says, putting the piece of paper upside down on the pavement. Wilbur wonders if she will read the back. For some reason, he wants her to. He wants her to remember, even though it's selfish. If she thinks she’s back in a better time, she’s better off that way. “Goodbye, Q. And you?”

“Wilbur,” He says. 

“Is there anything else I can help you two with?”

“No, thank you. Have a nice day,” Wilbur says. 

“Have a good day,” She says once more, unknowing that the day has bled into evening.

They continue on until the sun is setting and they camp earlier than Wilbur usually would by himself. They make a fire and smoke ascends high up into the trees.

“Two options for tonight,” Quackity says, taking food from the trolley. 

“Two options? Luxurious,” He says.

“Yeah, really. Okay, two options,” He says, holding up the cans for Wilbur to see. “Spam and beans or Spam and Boston Brown Bread.”

“Hard choice.”

“Personally, I’ve been saving the Boston Brown Bread.”

“What does it taste like?”

“I don’t know,” He admits. “But it’s something bread-ish, which is better than I’ve had in a while.”

“Do the bread thing then.”

Quackity nods and ties it to the string dangling precariously over the fire on a low hanging tree branch, just as Wilbur had advised. 

“You’ve done this before?” Quackity asks, attempting to tighten the rope on the tin. 

“I’ve always done it this way, really. Although it’s never gotten easier. I’ve dropped it in the fire a couple times by accident.”

“Ah,” He says, pulling the rope and fastening it. “Okay. This should work.”

“Let me know if you need me.”

“I’m fine,” He says. “I need to learn how to do it.”

“It looks right from here,” Wilbur says. “Tighten the bottom and then you should have it.” He does as he advises. 

“There,” He says, taking his hands off of the can with a concentrated expression. 

“That way you don’t have to worry about poison from the can.”

“I always thought about that, before. They would cook it in the fire and give it to us, and of course I would eat it, because what else is there, but I always went to sleep every night wondering if I was going to wake up the next day with botulism or not wake up at all.”

They . There have been times he’s mentioned they and yet Wilbur still hasn’t asked. 

“Walking the line,” Wilbur says.

“I’m still here so I guess I was lucky.”

Lucky .

Wilbur turns and looks into the dark gaps in between the trees. “That woman didn’t thank you,” He says, finally. 

Quackity doesn’t hesitate and answers quickly. “She didn’t have to.”

“Do you think she’ll even remember the picture? She might not even know it's her, Quackity.”

“Maybe not now, but later. In Alzheimer's it gets worse over a long period of time, so there’s less and less times where the person is lucid, but unless… she’s close to death, she’ll remember, at least once.”

“She won’t remember how she got it.”

“No, she won’t. But at least she’ll have it.”

“You are better than me, Quackity.”

“I’m not better than you.”

“Yes you are. It’s not a matter of opinion. I’m not like you. I would’ve seen that woman and never acknowledged her. I wouldn’t have cared if she called me, I wouldn’t have looked at her at all.”

Quackity is silent for a moment. “I’m foolish, and I know that I’m foolish. You aren’t a bad person for that.”

“Only as bad as my mind makes me think that I am, I suppose,” He says. 

“You aren’t,” Quackity says, itching the back of his head. “Jesus, my hair is so oily.”

“How long has it been?”

“A month or so.”

“Two months for me,” Wilbur says.

“Does it itch?”

“Like hell. The next lake I find will be my saving grace.”

Quackity nods, looking vaguely downcast. He leans over and takes off his grey beanie, moving his hair aside with a hiss of pain. “God, fuck- it’s so knotted.” He flips it back up and sorts through it like mane.

Wilbur only now sees the scar at the top of his head, from the side of his forehead to the side of his face, a jagged deliberate line. It meets his eyebrow and has left a patchy section in its wake.

He notices Wilbur’s eyes and takes a strand of hair to cover it, putting his beanie back on quickly after. 

Quackity sits down across from him and feeds the fire with another stray stick, not looking at him.

Not a word exits Wilbur’s mouth even as the question is stirring inside him, beckoning for an answer. 

He itches his hair again and looks at Wilbur in the eyes and laughs. 

“What is it?”

Quackity shakes his head. “You’ll ask me what I think about the goodness of man and death and any shit you want, but you clam up when you see a scar on my forehead.”

“Do you want me to ask?”

“You might as well,” He answers, resigned. 

“How did you get it?”

He narrows his eyes. “In the beginning, I was dumb. I thought I could outrun them, that I could get away and never face the consequences.”

“From who?”

“That’s another story. But it was mostly my fault. I mean, I ran a mile the last time before they found me. I should’ve known that I couldn’t expect anything less than a scar for that.”

“I doubt it was your fault.”

“Well, whether I deserved it is something different. But I was more stupid than I am now, I made the wrong decision and I paid the price.”

“Why your forehead?”

Quackity looks taken aback. “Bleak,” He comments. 

Wilbur waits for him to say something else but he doesn’t, and for a moment he thinks the man won’t answer at all, until he does. 

He says it quietly, like someone would curse while inside a church. A low comment, almost a whisper. “They said they liked my eyes.”

“Your eyes?” He asks faintly. 

“They said they were too pretty to ruin.”

“Quackity-”

“It’s alright. I’m alright. The world is better, and somehow, even though everything is hell, it’s like I’ve… left the plane of it that I was at before.”

“A lower plane of hell.”

“Basically. I live now, not very much, but I do.”

Wilbur nods as Quackity takes another breath, settling into the break in conversation into silence, standing up and untying the canned items from the branch.

Quackity offers a can to him mutely, holding it with a tattered piece of cloth so as to not burn his hands. 

Wilbur takes the can like an endowment.

Chapter Text

“There is a woman I see in my dreams. She is pale and dark haired and ethereal. She sends me messages. She is better than a god, for she sees all the wicked that god sees and takes from her throne like a dove and flies down to earth and fixes what to a mortal is unfixable.”

They cross the border into Nuevo Progreso by daylight, crossing the bridge into uncharted land, looking around street corners like doomed tourists. 

The sun has set itself far above them for once, and a sliver of tinted yellow falls to the ground from a slit in the sky. 

The town is crowded with houses like a city might be, the likes of one Wilbur hasn’t seen in years. Quackity leads them and Wilbur tries to arrange the pieces of the map on his hand like a man sorting dirt from gold. 

The entire town is quiet and still, more uncanny than any other towns they’ve seen thus far. He’s waiting to see signs of people, bodies or otherwise, something to make them less alone, yet nothing presents itself. The buildings assemble over each other, slanting and moulding into each other like teeth in the mouth of a child in need of braces. Buildings are hardly cookie cutter in the town; houses in a line compete with each other in size and colour and find no common ground. 

“Did you grow up around here?” Wilbur asks, nudging the pieces of tired paper together to form a coherent map. 

“Not here, father out. In a city, so a lot bigger than this. The streets were wider.”

Wilbur nods. “Do you have tape?” He asks.

“Did you already assemble it? That was quick.”

“Well I’ve practically memorised it. And yes, tape, if you have it.”

Quackity pulls the trolley around and digs around in the plastic bags. It makes Wilbur think of how fortunate he is at this point in his life, to have someone with this much material on hand. Quackity has never commented on how Wilbur is taking the food and supplies without giving compensation, but each time he gives him something, it’s all he can think of. So he thanks him inside his head every time. 

Eventually, he finds it, handing it to Wilbur triumphantly. 

“Did they really store all of this?” Wilbur asks absentmindedly while he stretches the tape over the map in hopes of repair. 

“Who?”

“Those people you were with. They really stored all of this? The tape, the food?”

“Most of it wasn’t theirs,” He answers and continues forward, shutting down the conversation. 

When he finishes his second wrap-around of tape, he takes it in his hands and carefully holds it up. It reflects the grey sky overhead.

He squints, trying to make sense of the trails and roads. “We’re closer than I expected.”

“We are?” Quackity asks, slowing down to look at the map. 

“Today, Quackity.”

“What?”

“If we walk quickly, we can get there today. In a couple hours.”

“ Hours? ”

He lifts his head from the map and looks at Quackity. He thinks however small the smile on his face must be, it is a smile nonetheless. 

“Are you serious?” Quackity asks again. 

Wilbur lets out a shocked breath. “Yes,” He says, beginning to laugh. “Yes, we’re going to make it.”

Quackity holds the bottom half of his hand with his hand, eyes wide. “Holy shit,” He says. “Holy fucking shit.”

He hands Quackity the paper cupped in his palms like an offering; the map a saviour. 

His eyes flick back and forth, looking at the route until he’s certain it exists. 

“I was certain at this point the road was going to go on for forever. I was certain that I would circle the earth and never get there,” Wilbur says.

“Well it’s happening. We’re getting there. It’s real , it’s close. It’s 2 fucking hours away, can you believe it?” Quackity says, louder this time. 

“No,” Wilbur says. “I can’t believe it at all.”

They speak more than usual during the next 20 minutes of walking, Wilbur entertaining Quackity’s conversations and Quackity ever so subtly smiling at him, so much so that he only notices the action from the corner of his eye.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I’m excited,” Quackity answers. “Can’t I be excited?”

“Yes,” Wilbur answers. “That’s acceptable for a time like this.”

“It wouldn’t hurt for you to enjoy the feeling of hope, Wilbur.”

He looks at Quackity and stretches his lips into a wide smile, the same smile he did when he was taking his yearbook photo in fifth grade and the photographer’s told him he wasn’t smiling wide enough. “Is this good?” He asks through his teeth, a slight laugh pushing at the back of his throat.

Quackity cringes. “Not like that, you know what I mean.”

He releases the smile and then flashes a grin. 

“There,” Quackity says, gesturing at his face. “Like that.”

Wilbur shakes his head and chuckles. “I’ll attempt to do it more often.”

“Please do, whatever pout you’ve been doing recently is really fucking up this mood we have.” It’s funny to hear him talk like this, as if they are in another time, as if he’s forgotten that Wilbur witnessed a dismembered hand in a drawer, or that Quackity saw something horrific. He knows that coping is different for everyone, and Wilbur prefers to think about it until he can’t anymore, but it seems different with Quackity. He’s so determined to move on . 

“It’s a subtle brood,” He says. 

“Maybe to you,” Quackity counters, stepping onto the concrete sidewalk.

“Yes to me .” Wilbur looks up at the sky and turns his head, pondering. He changes the topic. “It's all grey and there’s still sun.”

“Weird,” Quackity observes. 

He feels something wet drop onto the bridge of his nose. “Is it drizzling?”

“What the fuck is this weather?” He asks, continuing to walk and then stopping a few paces after. “I just got a drizzle too.”

They keep walking and the drizzling slowly increases, even as the sun still peeks out from the clouds in situational irony. 

“Sunniest day of the year and it still finds a way to shit on us,” Wilbur mutters. 

“You don’t like the rain?”

“I used to. Back when I could watch it from indoors and it wasn’t pouring every other day.”

Quackity shrugs. “You wanted a lake to wash your hair, right?”

“I wish it was the same.”

The more they go on, the more the rain comes down, dampening Wilbur’s beanie uncomfortably and making Quackity pull up the hood of his jacket. 

“Do you think it’s going to get worse than this?” Quackity asks at the same time that a blast of wind comes from the north, making his clothes sweep to the side. “Guess that answered my question.”

“Should we stop?” Quackity asks again a few minutes later. 

“No, we keep going until we get there.” The rain doesn’t seem to like his reply, as thunder rolls above them. “Shit.”

“It’s not far, but I’d rather arrive there in one piece, Wil.” He doesn’t comment on the nickname even as he realises it, turning around towards the other side of the street. 

“There’s no good place to stop. We have to keep going.”

“The sun is going away. Either we hunker down now or stay on the street long enough to see if it's a fusion storm.”

Wilbur looks up, and he is correct. The sun has slipped away from his grasp just like everything else, his vivid expectations of getting to Harbour taken with it. 

In only a few minutes the rain has escalated to the point of hazard. It falls in streaks over the street and stains bright buildings a shade darker. 

“How did it escalate so quickly?” Quackity asks. His hair is being whipped back and forth and he puts his hands on his knees to withstand the blow. 

“You’re right,” Wilbur finally acknowledges, looking around him as if something new will appear to him, a safe place, any at all. “We need to find somewhere to camp until it stops.”

“Go around this way and see if there are any houses.”

“No. If we want a safe place, it can’t be a house.”

“An area with trees can flood.”

“A house’s roof can be ripped off. I don’t want to be in a house.” He wants to be able to watch the storm, he wants to have control. Being inside a house with mere peepholes to the outside is claustrophobic. 

“Alright,” Quackity begrudgingly agrees, however Wilbur knows that it is more for the reason of keeping on rather than actually believing it’s the better choice. 

When they arrive at the end of the street there is nothing but businesses and concrete homes, perhaps made to withstand natural disasters, but nothing as severe as a fusion storm. The wind roars in his ears and droplets of water roll down his cheeks like artificial tears. 

He looks around and finds no trees but an overabundance of abandoned cars, scattered around as if a child had left them, mid-play. If there is a world out there somewhere in the future, there is a chance Wilbur will not live to see it. 

Quackity turns to him frantically. “Wilbur-” He can’t hear him over the wind. 

“What?”

“We need to find somewhere. We can’t just stand here-” He says. 

A shout in the distance. Wilbur turns towards the sound and Quackity has done the same, apparently hearing it too. Any voice that isn’t their own-

“-Is dangerous. Even if they look nice,” Phil said. 

“But what if they have a dog?” Tommy asked. 

“Are you seven years old?” Wilbur laughed. 

“It’s a legitimate question. Serial killers don’t have dogs.”

“Take this seriously,” Their father warned. 

Wilbur takes out his knife and holds it forward, widening his stance. He knows how to use his height to his advantage, to make himself look more intimidating to someone like an animal would in the wild. Because just like such a creature, Wilbur is in the wild. 

The voice cuts through the wind once again, from a slightly different direction. Wilbur turns his head immediately.

A man is standing at the side next to an old and ruined automotive repair shop, one hand up as if to call them over.

“Don’t move,” He tells Quackity. “Who are you?” He yells to the man, loud but still uncertain of whether the man can understand him over the harsh wind. 

“When you lose fear, you lose everything,” His father said. 

The man gestures at them to come over, but Wilbur plants his feet into the ground. 

“What do you want?” Wilbur yells. 

He doesn’t answer, just keeps gesturing with his hand incessantly, like a man in old action movies, come with me if you want to live . 

Wilbur only puts his hands up in a shrug, face contorted in confusion, as if to convey a message without words. 

The man turns and points at something they cannot see. Wilbur cranes his neck to the side to see the edge of a blue tarp waving in the wind like a flag. The man continues pointing, giving him an accusatory hand movement as if he cannot understand why Wilbur wouldn’t just walk over. 

“The world has always been a trap, always. But now the trap isn’t about money or love, it’s about life and death, son. Don’t give them the opportunity to trick you.”

He knew what his father was subtly asking him. If it happened, if I wasn’t here and they found you, could you do it? Could you kill, could you live with yourself afterwards? Could you drive the same knife into your own chest if they made it slow and painful?

Quackity looks at him. “Should we go see?”

The storm pelts down on them like particles of ash raining down from a fiery heaven above. “ We cannot risk being vulnerable ,” Wilbur says through teeth.

“We’re already vulnerable, Wilbur. If he wanted to kill us, he would be over here by now.”

“It’s a trap,” Wilbur says, because by the odds, it most likely will be. 

A conflicted look between Wilbur and the man, a loud roll of thunder that makes the ground below them quake by some disaster or another. A sharp inhale of sudden fear from one of them, either him or the other, Wil cannot tell. 

“Pick your poison,” Quackity says and wipes droplets of water that have dripped from his eyebrows onto his eyelashes. 

Wilbur doesn’t have to pick, because lightning rings out across the sky and Quackity runs forward, trolley behind him. The chaos overtakes Wilbur too, following not far behind and thinking of all the little decisions he’s made thus far.

The tarp is only a cover for a brick shelter made from the man’s own two hands days prior to the storm. It is more spacious than Wilbur would have expected from the outside and yet still snug, leaving them huddled in a circle by the dwindling fire scrapped together with small sticks and cobblestone like the travellers that they are.

Wilbur looks at the man warily, legs tucked close to him and wrists propped behind him in case he needs to run quickly. Quackity’s position, although less defensive, is stiff and contemplating. 

The man has been heating water in the fire almost wordlessly since they trailed in. The wind slapping against the tarp drowns out Wilbur’s thoughts and so he does the bare minimum of observing the man’s work carefully, as he sets small half broken plastic cups next to him and watches the fire. Wilbur notes that there is dirt under his fingernails. Under all of theirs. 

His hair is messed to the side and his clothes are ragged. He wears a belt like Wilbur does, to tether tools on or otherwise. No doubt he’s noticed Wilbur’s knives, yet he hasn’t commented on it. His skin looks darker than it is in the low lighting but his eyes stay the same brown.

“You travel?” Quackity asks. 

The man looks up from whatever he is preparing and arches his eyebrows in thought. “You could say that.”

“What would you call it?” Wilbur asks. 

“Surviving, mostly. Maybe in the first days I thought walking was nice, but my feet are tired.”

“Are you going somewhere?” He asks. 

The man opens his mouth and hesitates. “Well, you know it is dangerous to share information.”

“We do,” Quackity says. “But it would help if we knew you weren't going to kill us.”

“You think I want to kill you?” He laughs.

“Most people seem to,” Wilbur comments. 

“I have not lost myself enough to start massacring.” He opens the pot sitting in the fire and looks into it. “Does anyone want tea?” He asks casually. 

“ Tea ?” Quackity asks, apparently dumbfounded. 

“Should I repeat?”

“I heard you,” Quackity defends, “but how do you have it?”

“I scavenge for things like all of you,” He replies, taking the water and pouring them into the plastic cups. “And you did not answer my question.”

Quackity agrees easily and Wilbur observes as he ritualistically takes out a tea packet from a sealed package. 

“Jasmine,” The man says. Quackity is too busy blowing on the tea quickly and Wilbur is watching too carefully to answer. 

The man turns his attention to Wilbur. “Do you both live here?”

“No. We crossed the border this morning,” He says. He safeguards information to the point that he would rather not answer at all, but a mutual exchange is the only trust he has. “And you?”

“I was in America on a trip when everything first happened. The solar storm and all of that broke loose,” He says. “So then I’m a little stuck. I thought, might as well get my stuff together and walk to Mexico.”

“Why Mexico?” Wilbur asks. 

“I could ask you that too,” He says, and when he doesn’t answer, the man rolls his eyes. “I was nice to let you people in and you still don't say anything about why you were in the hurricane?”

“Fusion store, I assume,” Wilbur corrects.

Quackity releases a content breath when he takes the first sip. 

“You still will not answer my question,” The man says. 

“Tell me your name.”

“I could be anyone, there is no reason to.”

“What can I call you then?”

“V. It’s a nickname. They had always screwed up saying my actual name.”

Wilbur says. “I’m Wil.”

“Q,” Quackity says in between a greedy mouthful, which surprises Wilbur. He hadn’t bothered introducing himself as Q with Wilbur. 

“I will tell you something, you tell me something,” V suggests. 

“We’re travelling to Harbour,” He says. 

“That is a funny…” He seems to be searching for a word. “Coincidence.”

“What? You’re going too?”

“I have been travelling for months,” V says. “It would be quicker if I didn’t have to avoid the hoards.”

“Hoards?”

“They finally used their useless brains and decided to get into groups,” He says. Zombies . “It is a good thing for them.”

“Horrible for us,” Wilbur says. 

“They travel in groups now?” Quackity asks. 

“I think so. I only saw them last week, but next time I’ll know what I’m in for.”

Quackity shakes his head and lets out a chuckle.

“What?” Wilbur asks. 

“I just never thought my life would come to this. Not being able to call my family because the power lines are shot, running from zombies every other day, drinking goddamn tea like a madman. I don’t even like tea.”

“The last time I talked to my mother was years ago,” V says. “She said to me, ‘Be careful’ and to turn on the news because something was happening. It was the first town with the zombies. In Texas, I think it was. Well, I didn’t really believe it.”

“It was a hard thing to believe,” Wilbur says. 

“And now she’s dead and I’m in Mexico , like- like a demon trying to be climbing over the gates of hell. I did not ever see how much I had.”

“No one could possibly be grateful for the things they had enough to keep all the things they would lose,” He says. People used to tell him to be grateful for things because others didn’t have it, as if that could possibly help anyone, as if someone forewarned of the apocalypse could hug their children enough to possibly save them. 

The rain has slowly lifted, and the downpour has turned into taps on the tarp above them, gentle wisps of wind entering under it. 

“It’s slowing down,” Wilbur says. 

Quackity nods. “Do you think we’ll still be able to get-”

A thunk from beyond the tarp sounds loudly, back where Q parked the trolley before they had gone inside.

V rises immediately, somehow knowing that it cannot be anything else except what he knows it is. 

“What was it?” Quackity asks. 

“I don’t know,” He answers, even though Wilbur thinks he does. He inches toward the end flap of the tarp like a wind up toy with a stuttering walk. “I will check.”

Wilbur has stood up by now, most likely indenting his hand with the knife by the pressure of his hold. “I’ll-”

“I’m going to walk out and see, and if there is something, I will yell and you will take everything and run.” He uses if and it makes Wilbur’s heart pound. He’s in a movie again and the audience is in anticipation of what will unfold just like he is and he hasn’t read the script. 

He creeps forward and steps underneath the tarp. Wilbur watches his shoes from the only visible slit under it. They are still and then a little farther away, farther and farther until Wilbur cannot see them. He hears something, not like one or two footsteps but three. At the same time. 

He looks at Quackity and whispers, “We need to run.”

“You can hear them?” Quackity whispers.

Wilbur slowly kneels on the ground, putting his head down to look for shadows or feet from the free space on the bottom of the tarp. He can see weeds and old grass coupled together and scattered bricks homed in them. He listens to the still air until he hears another footstep far too close to the shelter. 

And for a moment, he’s thinking that if there were birds, they would be flocking away from the sound. The sound of V’s yelling, louder than he’s heard in a very long time.

Wilbur stands up and runs out from the tarp, immediately watching a zombie run towards V, standing only feet ahead of Wilbur. 

They are hunting. 

V pulls a knife from his pocket and stabs it quickly with a precision and depth that he knows has been learned from experience. The monster plummets to the ground quickly, and for a moment Wilbur has allowed himself relief.

Until V is yelling at Wilbur to run and he knows there is something coming towards him.

It barrels toward him and he flinches back, falling back before he can catch himself. He closes his eyes as he falls back and plays the scene soon to unfold in his mind. And during this thought of demise, he finds it ironic that the only times he wants to live is when he’s soon to die. 

When he opens his eyes the sound floods back to him in high definition, a sound of screams, because he’s not been the one caught by the zombie. 

V and the zombie are on the ground in front of him and the first thing he sees when he looks is the blood dripping down V’s sleeve. 

The zombie is like any other, eyes greyed out and face half rotted. He can tell it hasn’t been long, however, since the person was turned because there is still hair on its- her hair, a light brown, once belonging to a person and not a creature of destruction. 

He witnesses her clamp down on V’s arm once more before he stands up fervently, running away his father had always told him to.

“What do you do if you see a zombie?”

“Am I in school again?” Tommy asks. 

“Survival school, sure. Whatever you want to call it,” He said. “Now tell me.”

“You run as fast as you can,” Tommy recited. 

“And you don’t-?”

“Freeze.”

“Because-?”

“Dad, I already know all this stuff.”

“Okay, then say it just for me. Just for the sake of knowing you understand.”

“If you freeze you’re fucking dead,” Wilbur interrupted, not knowing it was the exact thing he was doomed to do.

The zombies follow them for ten minutes. Ten minutes of his life being dangled before him on a string like a carrot. Ten minutes of running until there’s a fire in his chest and he can’t breathe but still somehow continues. Ten minutes until they stop hunting and Quackity and Wilbur are still sprinting through the streets and out of the city, the trolley Quackity had taken (quickly before the zombie had…killed V? Turned him? They’ve never seen the consequences of a hunt) rattling behind them like an old shopping cart. 

He assumes they've gotten as far as the end of Ribeña road when they finally stop, hauling their things into a lone section of woods until they find somewhere suitable enough to stop for the night. 

“How close are we?” Quackity asks weakly, sitting down on the bare ground when they finally stop at a generally flat area, the sun slowly setting around them in hues of orange. 

“To Harbour?”

An exhausted nod. 

“I imagine we can be there by tomorrow, midday. If it doesn’t rain any more.”

“My clothes are still soaked,” Quackity says. 

“So are mine. I’ll start a fire and we can take off our layers and warm up.”

Quackity nods, taking heavy breaths and staring at the rocks on the grown, dispersed and seemingly undiscovered. 

Wilbur takes sticks and old pieces of wood from the ground, assembling them into a pile and taking out his lighter. He blows on the pieces of wood and feels the ash rise into his throat. He coughs and stands, watching the fire rise slowly. 

Quackity stands and he assumes is going to sit on the other side of Wilbur as he always does, however, this time, he sits down next to him. 

They both take off their top two layers leaving the two in a rare state of vulnerability. The arms they used to see during the summer when all anyone could wear was a t-shirt and shorts are now visible, even in winters where the cold came quick and left even quicker, letting them walk as they usually did, unafraid and arrayed with moles and freckles and everything they took for granted. 

“Do you think he’s gone, Quackity?” He asks, and it shocks him, the way he’s asking a question Quackity would usually be the one to ask. 

He nods slowly and Wilbur looks down at his hands, looks at his left wrist and the white scar jagged through it. “Your scar,” Quackity notices.

“You were a nurse, I assume you can tell how it happened,” He says. “I’m sure you understand why even more.” He rubs his thumb over it as if it is a stain he can wipe away. “To put it in simple terms, I am not a resilient man.”

Quackity says nothing for moments that feel much longer than they are and Wilbur doesn’t pressure him to speak until he finally parts his lips and says, “You’re sitting here in front of me, aren’t you?”

They had heard a sound and Wilbur had let Tommy come with him. 

It was a mistake Wilbur will never allow himself to make again. 

“Is it a zombie, Wil?” Tommy asked. 

“Stay quiet.” He sounded like his father and had begun to echo him in ways he had not imagined possible.

They were huddled on the side of the house of which they had been staying for a week and a half, hearing gunshots and screams outside and never putting earplugs because it was better to know than not. 

They heard the lock of the fence break and Tommy held his hand and squeezed it tightly, as tight as he had the day their father died. They had been alone for only 6 months, but Wilbur could not imagine being any more so, not as alone as he would be after this night. 

The power lines stood out against the void of sky above them like a cardboard cutout reminiscent of an art piece Tommy had made in school years ago. Wilbur knew he had grown since then but still viewed Tommy as a child, which he technically still was, at 17 years old. Not an adult but still close, in a strange sort of limbo between the two. 

Then there were multiple people in the backyard, talking loudly and incomprehensibly. He could hear them coming closer, checking around, trying to unlock the back door that Wilbur had always kept closed. A ladder from the side of the house into a window was their only safeguard, and at the time, Wilbur felt it was as good as any. As if they were untouchable because of a mere object. 

Tommy was shaking harder than Wilbur.

The footsteps were heavy and so close that he did not know exactly where they were standing, only that it could only be a meagre few footsteps until they were discovered. 

The man had scars over his face and teeth half replaced with gold. He held a pistol at his side and had hair down to his shoulders. 

Wilbur had taken a breath that day at the first sight of the man and had never quite released it. It was the fear that no one should feel, the fear that makes your heart hurt and your mind dissolve into cotton. 

Reflexes allowed him to stand while the man dragged Tommy by the arm back to the rest of the raiders of the group. He could not feel himself yelling but he knew that he was. 

They were demanding something from him, his backpack and everything he had. He couldn’t think and no words left him, only sounds, wailing and begging miscellaneously. 

It was the truth that Wilbur had nothing to give them. They had been surviving on rations since the week before and they hadn’t eaten anything in the last day and a half. He was trying to tell them through the fog of his mind that there was nothing to hand over, that there was nothing there, that there was-

The barrel of the gun pressed into Tommy’s temple and the man’s finger hovered over the trigger.

Tommy was crying. Wilbur froze, falling into a sort of daze while his heart banged uselessly in his chest so hard he could feel it in his fingertips. 

“Wilbur. Please, Wil,” He sobbed.

He put his backpack on the ground and opened it and told them there was nothing. 

And a shot rang through the air. 

They were gone and Wilbur was left with the body of his brother and the crimson blood trailing down into the particles of rock below. Tommy’s body went still as immediate as the pull of the trigger and Wilbur felt a piece of his heart seized from his chest like a convulsion. He felt the blood on his hands become sticky and foul and even then he did not leave him. 

He sobbed until the blood stopped flowing and Tommy’s body was cold and stiff and only after that did he stand and take up a shovel from the backyard and begin to dig a grave.

Wilbur wakes up in stuttering breaths, clutching his shirt in his fist and with his other hand feeling the dirt under him, digging his fingers into the ground to feel anything at all. 

“Wilbur?” He hears.

“I can’t breathe,” He feels himself croak. 

The world is dark around him and he cannot tell the exact moment when someone has sat down next to him, rubbing his back in circles while he feels for the rise and fall of his breath.

His mind begins to go slow, winding down like it does when he can’t deal with the adrenaline in his veins and the horror moving through his lungs like it wants to escape him. 

“What’s- what’s happening,” He says. 

“You’re with me, Wilbur. We’re okay, but you have to breathe.”

“I’m going to- to faint,” He says through tears. Or throw up, or something because he cannot deal with this again, he cannot deal with the terror in his heart he cannot take it. “I don’t know,” He says to himself. He can’t think. He can’t feel himself. He’s away, he’s high up somewhere where the words of the person next to him don’t reach. 

A hand in his, warmer than his own. 

He’s humming, or someone else is. 

He’s blinking and he’s coming back slowly. He’s moving his hands and looking at him and someone is saying something like ‘it’s okay’ but he knows that it isn't. 

“He’s dead,” Wilbur says to no one but himself. “He’s dead. They killed him, they killed him.”

“Wilbur,” He hears. “Listen to my voice and take some breaths.”

Wilbur tries once and then again. 

The person beside him does this until he’s breathing almost normal again. His brain feels like it’s coming apart at the seams, everything fading until nothing registers even though he’s seeing the trees around him. He can’t understand any of it. 

The humming resumes shortly and the sound guides his eyes closed, letting him settle into the body next to him.

Quackity pauses for a moment and although Wilbur is too tired to notice, he is looking at him, putting an arm around him to give any sort of warmth he can offer.

Wilbur fades into sleep feeling warmth at his side, something close to comfort, and a continuous humming in his ears.

Chapter Text

“I was a writer before I was anything else. Once I wrote about a man who lived forever and about a little boy who could only live as long as life allowed him and the boy told the god that he wanted to be like him and the god replied that he missed the mortal blood through his veins like a lover and the boy said he understood even though he did not.”

The first half of the day is spent in downpour, Wilbur and Quackity walking as far as their legs will take them, looking for a house to coop up into until it concludes. 

They do not speak of the night before. 

Houses in this municipality are almost like the roads, patchy but always well used, always appreciated vaguely at the back of one's mind but never well taken care of. The foundations have suffered in the hazardous conditions of the past few years, clinging to any scrap of wood they can to keep themselves from falling apart. 

Wilbur has always thought of houses like people, for better and for worse. The outside never quite reveals someone truthfully. 

On the walk they were mostly quiet, more concentrated on listening and thinking than anything else. Wilbur found himself reverting back to old habits, imagining himself in a different place, walking through a bustling city in comparison to the current furrowed world. It’s silly of him, he knows, but it's nice to be somewhere better for a moment. 

It surprises him how much the world changes when it rains. That his mindset can change because of it, that it can make him feel something. The weather is more real than he is, he thinks. It changes more and has more impact than he ever will. It makes itself known. 

Quackity sticks behind him, walking in tandem. As paranoid as he is, he thinks Quackity might be more so when it comes to someone sneaking up on him from behind, so he lets Q follow behind. It’s something he can give. 

He’s begun calling him Q, not yet out loud, but in his head. It’s an interesting paradox. Wilbur thinks Quackity might view him as part of his small circle, extremely small, but known and with the ability to harness a certain trust. Q, he repeats to himself, mouthing the word just slightly as he walks. 

“It’s like we’re walking through a rainforest,” Q says as they walk by a pair of lonely palm trees. 

“Fitting,” He says. “With the drizzle.” It’s almost affectionate, as if it isn’t as much of a bother as it is and he’s back in the past, sitting on the rocking chair on his porch, observing and wondering what makes him love it so much. Young again, young again. 

Quackity nods. Wilbur has replaced his desire to know with his desire to feel. He wants to feel what Quackity feels more than he wants to know. A strange thing to ask for in a time like this, but Wilbur has seen himself to an intolerable degree. He’d rather focus on someone else, be someone else, if for only a little while.

“What are you thinking about?” Quackity asks, which makes Wilbur chuckle at the irony. 

“Everything I usually do,” He says. “And you?”

“Uh, not much to think about.”

“Sure there is.”

“Like what? Entertain me with your philosophy.”

“Well, I was thinking about how it would be nice to find a place to live forever.”

“Forever?”

“Well, maybe not forever . Everyone gets restless eventually. But to be able to relax somewhere for a while, stop being a nomad and that.”

Quackity doesn’t respond for a few seconds. “I wish there was somewhere not to be afraid of.”

“Because it doesn’t matter if you’ve settled down somewhere if you’re still worrying about whether someone’s going to slit your throat during the night,” Wilbur says, finishing his thought. 

“Right. Surely there’s somewhere out there?” 

“Maybe somewhere. Just pray to a god that can hear you that you’ll find it.”

“Are you religious?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. You say God sometimes, I just wondered.”

“It’s hard to tell, really. I can’t tell if I believe in him more or less than I did before.”

“Did you used to?”

“Oh no, definitely not. I don’t know how to describe myself in a way you’ll get the gist of but think… anarchy.”

Quackity laughs. “And so you pursued politics, the most obvious decision.”

“Well, I hated it. It wasn’t something I liked more than something that interested me. How clueless people could be. How corrupt it all is,” He says. “Was,” He corrects himself. 

“What was the purpose of doing it?”

Wilbur snorts. “Fuck if I know. I just thought, unlike most people, that it was unfixable, and there was no use in trying. But I did want to learn about it. Maybe I liked gossip, maybe I liked feeling superior for learning something nobody else wanted to. For good reason,” He adds. “But in the end, it was temporary. I mean, everything was.”

“This stuff just lives in your head?” Quackity asks.

“What?”

“All of this. Like, obviously I think, but it’s never been to the point that I’ve had enough to write a philosophical book about it. Your mind is just interesting.”

“Philosophy is pretty much the enemy of living a happy life, and it's generally pointless, but it burns time.”

“Armchair philosopher then,” He says. 

“Armchair philosopher?” Wilbur laughs. 

“What? You don’t think so?”

“No, no. I agree. It’s just funny to hear a word like that.”

“Are you an alien?” Quackity says in a joking tone. 

“An alien?” 

“I don’t know, you just say things sometimes that sound like something a martian would say, someone otherworldly .”

“Wow, thank you.”

“You get what I mean, I don’t know. You act like you’ve been in a basement for the last 4 years,” He says.

“Why a basement?”

“It doesn’t matter, I just mean that you make it sound like you haven’t heard the mention of a microwave in 40 years or something. You treat the present world like it never had a past, maybe that’s how I should’ve said it.”

“40 years…” He says, calculating it in his mind. “Are you telling me I act like a 64 year old man?”

“No! Oh my god, you’re missing the point.”

“No, I get what you’re saying. And to that I ask, how are you still talking like it still exists?”

They find a house sooner than later and take off their jackets sullied by the rain when they walk in. It isn’t much of a storm any more than it is a simple rainfall. He realises as he walks inside that he’s missed when things were simple. 

“So, what do we do?”

“Bask in the semi-warmth and protection of the elements?” Wilbur proposes, putting his backpack on the small plastic table at the corner of the house. It is a one story house, down on its luck, stripped of all its worth except for the pictures on the walls lining it like a shrine. 

“Do you ever look at the pictures?” Quackity asks, walking forward and taking the frame slightly into his hand, looking at it as if to be studying it. 

“It’s hard not to. But they’re just pictures, whether they’re alive or not.”

“I like to,” Quackity says. 

He can almost grasp a reason but asks anyway. 

“It’s nostalgic, for one. And I don’t know, it feels intimate to see someone in a personal way like this. With their family, at the beach, anywhere. It’s the next best thing to watching a tape about how people used to live.”

“You like them for all the reasons I don’t,” Wilbur jokes. 

“You don’t like to remember?” He pulls away from the picture. 

“Frankly, no.” And they left it at that.

They wandered upstairs almost expecting to find something horrid and only came up with emptiness. In these rare situations, nothing is better than something. 

“What do you want to do?” Quackity asks.

“We’re talking, isn’t that good enough?”

“Sometimes I get tired of talking.”

“So then don’t talk.”

“Jesus.”

“Should I be asking a different question?” He asks, and then settles on, "What would you like to do?”

“I don’t know,” He says in a sigh. 

Wilbur lays down on a rug in the middle of the house. He assumes there was a sofa here once but it's long gone. 

He closes his eyes and wakes up to a tap on his arm. 

He opens them again, blinking blarily. “What is it?” He rasps, tongue heavy in his mouth from sleep. 

“Shit, were you asleep?”

“Doesn’t matter,” He says, propping himself up with his arms behind him. “What is it?”

“Oh, I found a card deck.”

Wilbur looks at him and then to the card deck in his hand. 

“It might be missing a couple cards, but I haven’t played a game in years.”

“Is this a proposition?” Wilbur lets a small smile form and takes the hand Quackity has extended out to him, standing up and making his way to the table.

“Why are there coke logos on it?” Wilbur asks, pointing to the almost completely faded text on the plastic table.

“People here liked coke,” Quackity responds in a shrug, fanning out the cards in his hand. “Now, your turn.”

“When was the last time you had a coke?” Wilbur asks, disregarding his last sentence.

“Seems like it’s been a thousand years. I mean, I remember sort of what soda used to taste like, but I couldn’t tell you the difference between Dr. Pepper and Coke,” He laughs. 

“I wish there was redbull,” Wilbur says, and almost laughs at his own words. To be missing things. Back when he was younger, there was nothing he couldn’t have. The world was his oyster, and if he was missing something, there was always the knowledge that he would have it someday, or work towards it. 

“I wish there was electricity,” Quackity says. 

He almost says something about his brother, something about how he wishes he was here, but he doesn’t. “I miss shampoo.”

“I miss heaters and hot chocolate,” He says. 

“Do you have a queen?” Wilbur asks.

“Go fish,” He says. 

“But if you could have one,” Wilbur asks, “which one would you pick?”

“Of anything? I don’t think I could pick.”

“I’d pick my radio.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s music, of course, but also just to listen to the commercials, to people talking about stupid shit. I fucking hated commercials because they would play more than the music but now it would just be nice to hear catty celebrity gossip.”

“ That’s what you miss?” Quackity asks. “Hearing people talk about stupid things?”

“Not exactly. Other than obvious things. Just to pretend again that the worst thing in my life is graduating college and keeping a relationship with my father. Or celebrity gossip, that any of it matters in the long run.”

Quackity nods and shuffles his cards around, looking at his hand with scrutiny. “Do you have an 8?”

“Go fish.”

“Where are these cards from?” Wilbur asks. He had expected a normal deck, but what had appeared as Quackity shuffled was a pop culture card deck with faces he didn’t recognise. He always enjoyed a classic deck but was frankly impressed at its survival. 

“Some band. I can’t remember the name but I saw them on those morning TV channels once,” Quackity says. 

Wilbur hums and looks at his cards. He’s close to winning if he gets a queen or a 3. “Do you have a 3?”

Quackity looks down and up, releasing a sigh. 

“Seriously?” Wilbur asks. 

He itches the back of his head and leans on his hand, burdened by the deck in front of him. “Go fish.”

After two more rounds (Wilbur winning two and Quackity winning one) of Go Fish, the rain has halted and the atmosphere around them has been reduced to a glossy haze of wind, slightly more humid and cherished than the freezing temperatures before it. 

The walk to Harbour is one through abandoned fields invaded by weeds, one that makes Wilbur wary of snakes, with roads slowly cementing together by grass from the outerway of the tilled soil pathways. Wilbur and Quackity must be the first to go down it in ages, and the signs that there are people around have been few. 

“Are you sure this is right?” Quackity asks, looking into the acres of forest in front of them. They stand still, up to their knees in encroaching plant life, trolley tracks of their presence lingering behind. 

Wilbur takes from his backpack a piece of muddied paper he had found on the ground a few months prior and shows it to him. “It says it’s here, in the municipality.”

“Why isn’t there anyone here?”

“I assumed we’d have to go farther in.”

“If there’s people here, I guess I thought we wouldn’t have to bushwhack to find them. I’m not expecting a welcoming committee but I thought at the very least you could see signs of civilization.”

Wilbur nods in agreement. “Well, there’s only one way to find out.”

They step into the forest and keep their senses alert. Maybe back in time there would be other sounds, birds or anything else, but now it sits in dead silence. 

“I don’t hear anyone,” Q says. 

They try to take the trolley behind them without sound but it proves difficult. 

They wander, walking as the crow flies and only stopping when they both hear a sound to the left of them. It’s the sound of something moving in the forest, whether its footsteps or the rustle of nearby shrubbery. The trees whoosh above them.

Wilbur stills, looking to the side in mid step. 

“I heard-”

Behind the trees a figure reveals itself, someone much shorter than Wilbur with long dark hair. He thinks they’re a girl, but he can’t be sure. She looks at them with a distinct fear in her eyes.

“Are you from Harbour?” Wilbur yells, but they do not answer. “We’re not dangerous.” He knows this means nothing coming from strangers, but some don’t even have the decency to try to fool their victims. “Who are you?” He asks again. She is young. 

She snaps out of her still pose and runs back the way she came, leaving Wilbur and Q once again in more confusion.

They keep going for 10 minutes and do not speak until they see smoke in the distance. 

“There’s a fire,” Wilbur says. 

Quackity gives him a look that almost asks permission, or maybe not permission, but his opinion. Whether it’s in their best interest to approach it. 

He nods and walks ahead. Once he’s walked close enough he can see the scene well. There are tents dispersed around a large campfire in the middle. It’s more civilised than he’s seen in a very long time, and for a moment, the scene before him is almost salvation. 

A man walks from one of the tents and Wilbur watches him carefully until he inevitably notices them standing off to the side and freezes, jerking back and yelling something in a language Wilbur doesn’t understand. 

Quackity does, looking at him in alarm. 

Before he can plead their innocence, two men have run behind the first and stand gawking. 

Quackity says something lengthy and the men nod. He says something else and they loosen their grip on the knives in their hands, ones used in hunting that his father used to take with him into the woods. 

“This is Harbour?” Wilbur asks Q who nods.

The man in the front with a rugged jawline and a scar across his face says something else and Quackity says something in the tone of agreement. 

Around them the sun has gone behind the clouds in an indeterminate display of time. It could be nearing sunset or earlier, he can’t tell. 

“They say we should bring our supplies to the tent and sit down to talk with them,” Quackity says. 

“Do they seem alright?” Wilbur asks him quietly. It’s possible that they do know English and he doesn’t want to be caught asking the direct question of ‘are these men going to shoot and kill us?’ with the prospect of them overhearing.

Q nods subtly, walking closer to the men with the trolley behind him. Wilbur follows behind with his walking stick clutched so tightly his palm balms with sweat despite the cool air around them.

The men’s shoes are like his used to be, ragged and falling apart. They remind him of himself in many ways, most predominantly the way they look at each other, wary yet not as afraid, more like readying for attack.

They pull the trolley up to the tent where the men gesture them to sit down on the old patterned quilt on the ground inside of it. There are small candles placed in the corners of the tent for light, and it strikes Wilbur as if a faint sort of humanity emanates within it. He stands for a moment but eventually sits down when Quackity does, following two of the men. 

“Where do you come from?” One of the men asks Wilbur to his surprise. 

“America,” He says. “The border.”

“You’re wanting to stay here?”

“This is Harbour, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Another man says in a heavy accent, sitting down in front of them. The sun is lowering in a smog outside but Wilbur cannot see any of the colours in the sky. 

“Are there others?” Wilbur asks. “We saw a girl.”

“A girl?” The first man with the scar says. “How did she look?”

“Brown hair, short. Young.”

The second man makes eye contact towards the third as if they are sharing a classified conversation. “She isn’t allowed out of the perimeter,” He says in a low tone. “We will address this.”

Quackity clears his throat and moves past the subject. “You’re willing to let us stay?” 

“Yes,” He says. “But we haven’t gotten anyone like you in a long time.”

“Like us?” Wilbur asks.

“Well, not on the edge of their life. You are carrying supplies and don’t seem to be doing so bad,” The man says, shrugging. 

“Rations run out,” Quackity says. “How long ago did you organize this place?”

“A year ago,” The first man says. With the way the other’s quiet at his words, Wilbur knows he is the leader. 

“How many people are here?” Wilbur asks. 

“12,” He says. “We have two women and a child. We are hoping to get another soon.”

“It’s difficult to have a child in this kind of place,” Quackity says. “Without epidurals and anaesthesia.”

“You are some sort of doctor?” The second man asks with a positive upturn in his voice. 

“I was a nurse.” 

“It is useful to have a nurse,” The first man says, nodding thoughtfully, and Quackity stiffens slightly, just enough for him to notice. He looks at Quackity with a quirked brow, as if he’s trying to figure him out.  

“One of the women is going to make dinner,” The third man says. “If you are hungry.”

Wilbur nods. “Is this where we’ll be staying?” 

“Yes. We have more tents than needed.”

“Why?” Quackity asks. 

The men stand up and follow the leader back out into the open. He turns around. “Unforeseen circumstances,” He says, and leaves them to their own devices. 

“That was too easy,” Wilbur says after he hears their footsteps recede. “Suspiciously easy.”

“It is a place people are supposed to stay at, I’d doubt there'd be an application process.”

Wilbur chuckles dryly. “We should watch our things,” He says, standing up from the quilt and walking from the bare tent to outside where the sky is beginning to darken. 

“‘Unforeseen circumstances’,” Quackity repeats as Wilbur walks out to the trolley. “What do you think that means?” And for once he doesn’t know.

The meal is made by a woman that looks similar to the child, only a little taller and with the addition of a weathered expression women of her age might not usually have. The men sit around the fire and do not acknowledge her as she stirs the pot sitting in the fire, instead, talking to each other in various pitches, some quiet and others loud. 

Most of the conversation Wilbur doesn’t understand, and so he takes to talking to Quackity in a hushed tone. 

“This is strange,” He says under his breath. 

Quackity nods. “I can’t tell if it’s just because I haven’t been around people like this in so long.”

He nods and looks to the other side of the fire where the main leader sits talking to another man. They lock eyes for a swift moment and Wilbur looks away. 

“Todos, hay algunas personas nuevas aquí el día de hoy,” He says. An introduction of some sort. 

The group looks at them wordlessly and then resumes conversation. The leader gets up and walks over to the woman by the fire who has still yet to sit down since she began cooking and whispers something into her ear. Her eyes widen but she nods and the man sits back down. 

Both Quackity and Wilbur notice this development. 

The man next to Wilbur turns towards him. It’s the third man from before.

“Do you nurse like your friend?”

Wilbur shakes his head. “I’m not particularly skilled. I can build if it comes down to it, but not well.” The man’s expression changes slightly but Wilbur cannot understand what it means. 

“Are there other places like this?” Quackity asks, leaning to see the man sitting next to Wilbur. 

“No. Well there used to be. A group like this, maybe smaller. They had a nurse also, and we used to see them go around but they’re gone.”

“They’re dead?” Wilbur asks. 

“Yes,” He answers, and doesn’t elaborate. He stands and walks behind Wilbur around to the other side where the leader sits and says something they cannot hear. 

“Wilbur, this is different than I thought it would be,” Quackity says in a low voice, trying not to draw attention to himself.

He nods. The man claps his hands together and seems to be announcing that the food is ready. Wilbur is the first to receive the food and the rest is handed out afterwards. He stares at it. It sits in a silver cup, a stew of some kind. Mushrooms and other vegetables float in the broth. 

Wilbur, by principle, does not work with mushrooms. He’s seen them before, but has never eaten them for the reason of certain types being poisonous. Logically, he knows the odds of it being poisonous are low and yet he still hesitates. Does he trust this easily?

He looks around at the men sitting around the fire and sees neither women or children. 

“Where are the others?” He asks the man sitting next to him. 

“They will eat afterwards,” He says. 

Wilbur nods hesitantly but doesn’t eat the stew.

“Is there something wrong with it?” The man asks somewhat harshly. 

“No,” He says. “I just don’t eat this late. I have a stomach problem.” It is a lie he hopes they believe. 

“You are going to waste it?” 

Quackity has caught onto the conversation and takes the cup from Wilbur. “It’s alright. I can eat it,” He offers, which doesn’t seem to satisfy the man. 

“It’s not personal,” Wilbur says to him, which only seems to anger the man. “Look, I’ll-” He looks to where the leader was sitting before but finds the spot empty. Wilbur stands up and steps back. 

“I’ll eat it, it’s fine,” Quackity says again to the man. 

Wilbur doesn’t wait and stand around, walking back to the rows of tents to find the leader. He imagines that if there’s anyone with the ability to sort something out between one of his own men it would be him. 

He can hear voices by the farther tents, only a couple away from theirs. He creeps up by the side and sees the leader standing next to someone shorter than him. The girl they had seen in the thick of the forest stands in front of him, posture hunched and gaze lowered. 

“Serás castigado por esto.”

The girl begins to cry. Wilbur walks forward slightly and that’s when he notices her stomach. 

“We are expecting another soon,” The man had said. 

He pales. 

He doesn’t feel himself moving forward, his body seems to do it for him. He should be running, he should be running, he should be running and he’s not. 

“What’s going on?” Wilbur accuses. He wonders if the words are leaving his mouth. 

The man turns around and sees Wilbur, looking at the girl and issuing a commanding word, to which she seems to obey, running into one of the nearby tents and leaving Wilbur and the man in front of each other like old enemies. 

The man has yet to respond. “What the hell was that?” Wilbur yells. 

“She’s not allowed to leave Harbour.”

“Why?”

“She is with child, sure you understand.”

“How old is she?” He says, a hiss below his breath even though he’d rather yell. 

“13,” He says. He doesn’t seem to bother with lying. He says it in a shameless way, in a way that makes Wilbur’s stomach churn. 

“I-” He’s gotten too close to what his father had warned him about, the people who take a step past surviving and begin to kill for the hell of it, begin to do whatever they want without remorse. “She’s a child .”

The man opens his mouth to say something but Wilbur stops him. “You are the men I hoped I would never have the misfortune of meeting in my own sorry life, you disgust me.”

“Leave us to our ways and we will leave you to yours,” He says. Senseless. “Standards of an old world. Don’t you agree?”

“I won’t stay. I won’t stay while you do this.”

“And what will you go back with?”

“Everything we came with,” He says, turning around and beginning to walk to the trolley, opening his mouth to call Quackity. 

He realises his mistake of turning his back towards an enemy when he hears the click of the gun behind him. 

The effect is instantaneous, his body is frozen. His breath catches in his throat and a stuttered sob leaves him,  it’s only loud enough for him to hear and yet he feels guilty. His hands stay at his sides, the knives in his belt so achingly close and yet so far. If he grabs one he knows the trigger will fire faster than he can turn around. 

“Step back towards me,” The man commands, and he does. He backs up until he feels the barrel press into the back of his scalp and he cannot stop thinking, is this what it felt like when it happened to him? Is this what the moments before his death were like, blinding with fear?

“What do you want from me?” He asks, his knees threatening to buckle under him. 

“For now, your compliance,” He answers, and starts to say something else when another voice cuts through the air. 

“Wilbur? Are you over here? I ate your soup but he’s still-” He can hear the sudden stop of his voice and knows that Quackity can see him. Wilbur won’t move his neck to see, but he knows the scene has revealed itself. 

“Put down the knife, Alex,” He says. 

He swallows at the dryness in his throat. Alex. Alex?

“You-” Quackity says, and Wilbur finally moves his head to the side slightly to see him. “Okay,” He says, putting the knife on the ground and his hands up. 

“Quackity, don’t. Run,” He says. 

The gun pressing into his head adjusts and he winces. 

“What’s happening?” Quackity asks, his eyes looking between them. He doesn’t know whether to run or to fight, and Wilbur knows the feeling. 

“A trade,” The man says, to Wilbur’s surprise. He had expected him to reply, ‘a slaughtering .’ “You were familiar when I first saw you, Alex, and for good reason.”

“Please,” Quackity says. “Just let him go.”

“Him for everything else. You and your things stay here and I will let him run.” Quackity must be winding it through his brain because he doesn’t answer. “This is your only offer. Hesitate and he is dead.” His voice is cold and he wonders how many times the man has done this before. 

“Okay,” He says, voice void of emotion. “Okay. I’ll stay.”

The gun falters and Wilbur steps forward, for a moment not knowing what to do, like a fish released back into water. He doesn’t want to run, he doesn’t want to leave Quackity to these unspeakable acts. 

And yet he trusts Q more than he trusts himself, so he runs.

The forest is wide open to him and seems to tangle him like a web. He frantically pushes branches to the side and runs as far as he can before falling to the ground. There are places he remembers walking through, and certain spots have already been walked through recently. He knows he’s almost out. 

He runs on by himself and still does not see Quackity. He has nothing in his hands except a knife and nothing on his back to camp with. The cold wind cuts through him. 

“Oh god,” He says to himself. “God. Quackity.”

He walks down the road until it’s dark and he hears nothing but the ghost whispers of branches shaking together. He lays down in the front of a patch of trees and doesn’t care that someone from the road may see him because he’s not sure if it’s worth living if he is without someone else. He can’t do it again. He can’t go through the solitude of winter again. 

Oh how quickly he’s been won over by the comforts of another man to lay beside as he goes to sleep.

He wakes up to rustling and panting breaths and knows immediately who they belong to. He can’t see his face but he knows. 

“Quackity,” He says, reaching out towards him in a tired state. 

He drops to his knees and breathes for a while. “Wilbur,” He finally says back. 

“Are you okay?” He asks, and he thinks the man is nodding. 

“I ran when they were sleeping,” He says. “I never thought I’d have to do it again.” An edge of horror in his voice. “Have to escape again.”

“Did you take anything?”

The sound of a zipper. “Your bag. It was the closest thing I could find. They took the trolley and everything else.” He feels Quackity sit beside him and the echo of warmth emanating from him. 

“I’m freezing,” Wilbur says. 

“We can’t make a fire. They’ll see the smoke.” Wilbur knows it's true but he can’t get the thought out of his head.

They sit in silence for a few minutes until Quackity lays his head down next to Wilbur. 

“Why were you familiar to them, Q?” He asks softly.

“I didn’t recognize them at first. I.. we weren’t supposed to look them in the eye. The group that I was with before, the man who led us, he was friends with the leader of Harbour. We would pass them on the roads. They asked to take me once.”

“Why?”

“Nurses are useful. I was useful. You always need a nurse,” He says hoarsely. “There’s always someone to bandage, someone to check for a disease, a child to deliver. Anything they wanted me to do… I had to do it.”

“I’m sorry, Quackity.” So reminiscent of what he had said to Wilbur once. 

“I was so close. I was so close to living through it all over again. I don’t know what I was thinking, telling them I was a nurse so quickly. God.”

Wilbur takes his hand in his, light enough to not feel invasive. 

“You can go to sleep, Wilbur. I’ll keep watch.”

“No, if-”

“It’s okay. I won’t be able to sleep.”

“Wake me up when you get tired?” Wilbur suggests, laying his head back down on the damp ground. 

He remembers with his head in this space of dirt that he’s truly lost his brother. The walking stick and shoes sitting innocently in the trolley. He had left him. It makes his heart seize in his chest. He can’t go back now. He can’t rescue him. He can’t do anything at all. 

Wilbur squeezes Quackity’s hand. Every small ecosystem of his veins and muscles and nerves seem to hurt. He blinks and cannot control the tears that rise from within him. 

Quackity squeezes his hand once more and Wilbur shuts his eyes and hopes for a brief selfish moment that he will not wake up again. 

He knows he always will. At times it is one of the curses of living. 

Wilbur opens his eyes to look at Q. The dark sky reflects in them. 

He hopes that when he wakes up tomorrow he will be able to forgive himself. 

Chapter Text

“Society was doomed from the start. Think of me as a ridiculous man, incessantly cruel, but I am simply the one to dole out the punishments god above has not. A mere man as myself can see the variety of pain in the world, in its surface and below it and so I have ceased the flow of good things for only a moment to let it heal, plains of grass once more empty and wondrous.”

Something is wrong with Quackity. 

When Wilbur wakes up in the morning, rolls onto his side, opening his eyes and squinting at the rays of sun casting through the trees, he already knows. Quackity hadn’t woken him up last night. 

He sits up quickly, looking around, and finds no one laying next to him. Fear spikes in him immediately. He stands up from the ground, joints aching from having slept on the ground without even a quilt (he had foolishly forgotten it was in the backpack that Quackity had brought with him.) The emptiness of sound. 

“Quackity?” He says to no one. 

The first thought that comes to mind is that they found him, but his backpack is still sitting on the ground. Even with this fact, the scenarios in Wilbur’s head of Quackity being taken back terrify him. He supposes that the bond has formed slowly, in a way he himself hadn’t seemed to realise until he’s faring without it, without Q. 

He looks out into the road, not far from where he had slept, and sees nothing but an empty field of dried grass. For the first time in the days he’s known Q, he is completely alone. 

A whistle in the air.

The deeper into the forest he goes, the louder he says Quackity’s name. 

And then finally, he sees him. 

“Q?”

He’s sitting on the ground, back towards Wilbur, his face leaned to the ground. 

Wilbur sits on the ground next to Quackity. “What’s wrong?”

Quackity mutters something unintelligible under his breath. 

“What’s going on? Did something happen?”

“I don’t feel good,” He says, and Wilbur notices how much paler he is than usual. 

“What doesn’t feel good?”

“Everything,” He says, and turns away from Wilbur, heaving sick onto the ground. He takes a moment to catch his breath, trying not to choke, and repeats the sentence once more before leaning into Wilbur and letting his body go limp. 

“Quackity,” Wilbur says. “How bad is it?”

“Bad,” He croaks, eyes half lidded as he supports himself against Wilbur’s chest, head below his neck. 

“What should I do?” He asks, and knows how unhelpful it is but he hasn’t done something like this in a long time, not since they had medicine. 

He says something that sounds like ‘I don’t know’. 

“Do you think it’s a virus?” He asks. 

Quackity tries to sit up and gags, but nothing comes out. Wilbur rubs circles on his back the way Q had done for him.

“I think,” Q attempts to say, but his own laboured breaths cut him off. “I think it’s the mushrooms.”

“From last night?” Wilbur asks. 

Quackity nods and closes his eyes. 

“I don’t know what to do,” He says. He’s not prepared for this. 

“I don’t know,” Quackity says again, and his breathing slows until Wilbur is certain he is asleep.

Those mushrooms were meant for Wilbur and Quackity had eaten them. They didn’t need Wilbur, only Q. 

Because nurses are useful. 

His stomach lurches at the thought. He doesn’t want to know what Quackity went through even though he desperately does. Even though he practically already knows.

Quackity sleeps for an hour and a half, but when he wakes up, there is something distinctly off. One fortunate thing is that he is able to talk, and Wilbur is thankful, but what does concern him is what he’s saying. 

When he had first fallen asleep, Wilbur had taken out their only remaining form of warmth, the quilt, from his backpack, spreading it out on the ground and laying Q down over it. He hadn’t woken up then and Wilbur didn’t expect him to for at least a few hours. Although even this seemed to be too much of a hope, as Quacktiy woke up 45 minutes later in a frantic state, thrashing as Wilbur spoke to him, trying to calm him down with no avail. 

“Quackity, calm down,” He says, a hand on the other’s wrist. “What’s going on?”

He rips away from Wilbur’s hold and shakily pushes himself up into a sitting position, looking at Wilbur unseeingly, eyes bloodshot, as if he’s looking at Wilbur but not exactly comprehending him. 

Wilbur puts his hands up. “Breathe,” He says. 

He pushes himself back using his hands. “Don’t.”

“I’m not going to do anything. It’s okay,” Wilbur says. 

“I don’t want to go,” Quackity says. 

“Go where?”

“Go with you. Don’t make me. I will kill you.”

He’s not sure who Q thinks he is, but whoever it is, it’s not good. Years ago, he had read articles on poisonous mushrooms and a main point was that they sometimes cause hallucinations, which is extremely ill-fated for the two of them. 

“I’m not going to make you go anywhere, okay?” He says. “Just relax. You aren’t thinking straight and you need to rest.” He says this without certainty, he doesn’t know anything about what he needs.

Wilbur steps forward and the other scrambles backwards, hands shaking. “I’m not going back,” He says, almost like a plea. 

He takes a step back and Q untenses only slightly, watching him as he sits down on the ground a few feet away. “Q, I don’t know where you are, but I promise I’m not who you think I am.”

He doesn’t speak. 

“The mushrooms are making you paranoid, but you need to relax so I can figure out how to help you.”

For a moment, he thinks the man in front of him is beginning to relax, and he’s almost going to try to approach him before he stands up and runs into the forest. 

“Q!” He calls after him. It can’t be safe for him to be engaging in this much physical activity. 

He follows after him slowly to hopefully give the appearance that he’s not trying to chase him, but Quackity keeps running. At some point he must stop because Wilbur can no longer hear the sound of his frantic steps. He stands in the maze of trees and calls out to him to no response. 

He’s hiding, he finally realises. 

“Quackity, you don’t have to be afraid. It’s Wil, remember?” He speaks softly. 

From the corner of his eye, he sees black hair sticking out from behind a tree, undoubtedly Q.

He walks up to him slowly and finally says, “Q?”

He steps to the side to see him. Quackity leans against the tree and releases strenuous breaths. Somehow, he doesn’t seem to even recognise Wilbur’s presence. 

“Quackity, tell me how you’re feeling.”

“Dizzy,” He replies in a daze, shifting on his feet, hand against the bark. 

“I’m going to walk you back so you can drink some water, okay?” He says, putting his hand under Quackity’s arm to guide him. 

“My head,” He says, releasing his grip on the tree to let Wilbur take him by the arm. “Hurts.”

“It’s going to be okay,” Wilbur says. Once again he feels like a liar. 

He nods and Wilbur takes him back to where their things are situated, sitting Quackity down on the quilt while he goes through his backpack. He’s not sure how he’s saved it for so long without drinking it. Finally, he pulls it out. A mason jar, half-filled with water from a stocked home a few weeks ago, particles floating around inside only minimal. A commodity. 

“Here,” He says, giving the water to Q, helping him lift the jar to his lips. Some of it drips onto his shirt but he drinks the majority. “So you won’t get dehydrated.”

“‘M tired,” Quackity says. “It’s cold.”

He picks up the quilt and folds it over Quackity. If he wasn’t in such a dire circumstance, Wilbur might chuckle at the sight. 

“Why are you rolling me up like a burrito?” His brother said in a yawn. 

“Being rolled up like a burrito is the best medicine,” He replied. 

“I thought it was laughter,” He said in between a cough. He’d been sick for a week now, most likely a cold, and they had been camped in the same place for the same amount of time. Wilbur knew Tommy felt bad about slowing them down so he took every opportunity to relieve the situation.

He scrunches up his face satirically. “No, I don’t think so. And even so, it falls in second place. Or third. Behind hallmark movies. Do you remember those? They would have them on a 24 hour channel and I’d watch them when I was sick.”

“I’d sell my soul to see even a fucking hallmark movie, man. I shat on them for ages but now it’s like, I’d watch any movie.”

Wilbur sighs. “Maybe one day.”

Shortly after this, he falls asleep, head tucked into his chest in a way that cannot be comfortable. Wilbur manoeuvres him closer to his lap, letting Q lean against him rather than sleeping sitting up. The moment he does this, Quackity shifts his head back, letting himself rest on Wilbur’s chest. 

He thinks during this time of his sleeping what he’s going to do, what he can possibly do. Things like this can be fatal, and if they were trying to kill Wilbur, there’s no knowing how much poison he ingested. 

If it were Wilbur instead, Quackity would know what to do. 

Across from them is Quackity’s beanie, vulnerable without its owner. To see him like this is almost intimate, as if he’s seeing something he’s not supposed to. He looks down at his hair, greasy and shiny from accumulation, and has a distinct want to put his hands through it, to be comforting, to be good again. 

He rubs his hand over Q’s arms as if he is a precious thing, which he supposes has become true. The tide of civilization has swept in and out and nothing has been as constant as Quackity. He never thought he’d travel with someone again, and now here he is, so easily persuaded. Now he can’t imagine not travelling with someone; he’s not sure how he lasted so long before. 

Quackity shifts himself and Wilbur snaps back to the present, looking down. 

He murmurs something unclear and Wilbur takes his hand off of his shoulder. Quackity falters and makes a sound of distress.

“What is it?” Wilbur asks. 

“Turn on the TV or something, cn’t sleep when it’s this quiet,” He groans, turning onto his side and resting his head in Wilbur’s lap. 

He’s not sure what to say. “I can sing something for you,” He offers. 

“Sing?” He asks. “You h’te singin’.”

Once again, he seems to be confusing Wilbur for someone else. 

“I don’t mind,” He says, and begins to hum. He doesn’t remember the way it goes but he tries anyway. 

“Wh’ts it called?”

He thinks long and hard and comes up with nothing. “I can’t remember,” He says. It’s an unfortunate awakening. He can’t remember how it starts so he begins from the chorus.

“Do you remember every block, every minute of every walk we used to take, when we were young, so many years ago.” Everything else is a blur of instrumental banging in the corners of his mind. “And I think of every spark, every whisper in the dark, now it’s time.” He hums out the rest and Quackity lets him. It feels good to sing, or even murmur a song just slightly even if he doesn’t remember the tune. 

“Keep g’ing,” Q says, closing his eyes.

He hums the tune and when he can’t remember what comes next he improvises. He looks down at Q again and finds him asleep, the rise and fall of his chest a quiet symphony. 

“Just wanna die with the one I love,” He whispers to himself. “Beside me.”

Wilbur wakes up to a cry, sharp and precise that cuts into his heart like a blade. 

He jerks his head up at the sound, blinking and realising that Quackity isn’t sitting with him like he was when he nodded off. He hadn’t before felt the extent of the fatigue that had casted over him until the idea of sleep felt heavenly. 

Now, he’s wishing it hadn’t. 

Quackity is spotted quickly, laying only a few feet in front of him, curled in on himself with arms crossed at his torso, eyes squeezed shut. 

Rushing over to him, the only possibilities and scenarios in Wilbur’s mind are the worst ones.  

He kneels, hovering over Quackity, not knowing whether to touch him. Things have been out of his control for a long time, and now he has the ability to do something. To save someone, and he feels more useless than he ever has. For once in his life, he doesn’t know enough.

“Q,” He says, touching his back and soon regretting the action when the other winces. “Is it your stomach?” He asks, looking down at where Quackity’s hands are placed. 

He opens his eyes for a moment and nods before letting out a hiss through gritted teeth. “Cramping,” He gasps. 

“It’s not out of your system,” Wilbur says, trying to think of something to do with their limited supplies. “You need to throw up again.”

“Dn’t want to,” He says, clutching his stomach. 

“I know, I know,” He says, standing up and walking to get his backpack. He has an idea. It’s not a secure one, and it could hurt Quackity more than he’s already hurt. It could kill him. But this will too if he doesn’t work quickly. 

He misses hospitals. 

Inside his backpack is a pack of Marlboro Red cigarettes he had taken from a looted house maybe only a week ago. He takes one from the package, digging his nail into the tobacco and then rolling it between his fingers until it begins to fall out. He takes the mason jar he had given Quackity, only a quarter of water left in the jar, and rolls the cigarette until half of the tobacco has fallen into the water. He closes the jar and shakes it until it has turned a light shade of brown. 

The water itself looks nauseating and Wilbur doesn’t want to give it to him, he feels as if he’s standing on the edge of a cliff, gambling his fate and Quackity’s, to stand or fall. 

“Quackity, I’m going to give you this water and you have to drink it.”

“Wh’sit?” He asks.

“It’s tobacco mixed with water.”

“Why’re you mak’ng me drink it?”

“The poison is going to get worse unless you throw up again and this is the best cleanse we have.”

“You’re gonna double poison me?” He asks groggily.

“Well- It’s a risk.”

Quackity looks at the murky water and lifts it to his mouth, taking a sip and almost gagging. 

Wilbur watches in anticipation and guilt as Quackity proceeds to drink the entire thing, afterwards, folding over and hugging himself, body trembling. 

“I’m sorry,” Wilbur says. “I’m so sorry.”

Quackity doesn’t respond. 

They wait for twenty minutes quietly, Quackity seeming to get worse by the minute. His eyes start to close slowly, and Wilbur pulls him towards himself before he becomes limp in his arms, breathing raggedly. 

If he dies it will be my fault. My poison the first time and my poison the second. 

And then Quackity opens his eyes and leans forward, heaving everything in him onto the forest floor. Wilbur remembers the feeling so vividly that the sound carries a feeling, the sourness in his throat, the choking feeling of air in his lungs afterwards. He dry heaves twice until it’s clear there is nothing left. 

Wilbur holds his shaking figure, Q still silent. 

“How is your stomach?” He asks. 

“Sore,” He says, apparently more lucid. 

“Okay,” He says. It’s possible that Quackity is okay, and that is better than nothing. A possibility, a chance. “Okay.”

“I’m tired.”

“I know, but you can’t go to sleep for a couple more hours. In case you have a bad reaction.”

He nods drowsily, putting his head back on Wilbur’s chest. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to the feeling of being this close to someone else again, how real it is. Sometimes he thinks this is the moment he will wake up, and yet he never does. 

Quackity begins to nod off and Wilbur touches his hair, causing Q to open his eyes in a squint. “My hair’s gross.”

“Mine too. It’s okay,” He says, continuing his fingers through it, untangling the dark locks. 

“Why’s everything so colorful?” Quackity asks after a few minutes.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s so pretty here,” He says. Wilbur hums and sorts through more tangled hair. Even with the poison mostly out of his system, it’s still bound to influence his mentality. For how long, he doesn’t know. But at least it’s not hurting him at the moment. 

“What does it look like?”

“Like lights. Like streetlights,” He says, relaxing even more into Wilbur’s touch. “At night,” He adds. 

“Oh, yeah?” 

“When we were on our way back from the movies a few weeks ago,” He says, leading off. “They had wrapped lights around the trees. For Christmas. Remember?”

He doesn’t remember, but he nods. It’s the little things that kill him, all the things that made up his life that no longer exist. 

“That’s how the colors are now. Everything’s like a star.”

“A star?” On only select nights since the downfall of everything has he been able to observe the sky in the way he used to. 

Quackity reaches back and puts his hand on Wilbur’s arm, pulling it towards him, and he lets him. He pulls Wilbur’s hand to his chest and sighs. 

“I love you,” He says. 

Wilbur freezes, and almost wonders for a brief moment if Q can tell.

“Who am I?” He asks. In some way he’s guilty to ask something so personal but another side of him wants to know. 

“You’re you,” He responds simply. 

“I’m me?” He asks in a chuckle. 

“Yes,” He says, and then sighs. “I’m hungry.”

“Your stomach doesn’t hurt?”

“Just a stomach bug,” He says, which isn’t true at all, but Wilbur doesn’t have the heart to tell him. “What do we have in the pantry?” He says, yawning. 

“Uh-” Wilbur looks at his bag. He’s not sure there’s anything left since the majority of their food had been carried in another bag situated in the trolley. “Here, I’ll go check. Rest here, okay?” He stands up and leaves Quackity bundled in the quilt. 

Rifling through his bag, he finds a mere can of pea soup. He imagines it tastes as gross as all the others, but it’s the only thing they have. 

“I can make pea soup,” He says to Quackity.

“Pea? When did you learn how to make that?”

“Um, recently,” He says, and then realises quickly that he doesn’t feel safe making a fire to heat it with. There’s a higher chance of bacteria eating it cold, but if they want to eat anything it’s a small risk in retrospect. 

“Dad,” Tommy whined, “why do we have to eat it cold? It already tastes like mud.”

“Because there are survivors around and smoke attracts the wrong kind of people. If they know we have fire, what else do we have that they want?”

“I know, it was rhetorical.” He poked the cold soup with his finger. “Isn’t it dangerous not to heat it?”

“Well, it’s only slightly more risky since the canned good companies were required to heat it up before they put it in the can to kill bacteria, so technically it's safe to eat cold.”

“How do you know that?” 

Phil shrugged. “I always thought it was good to be in the know.”

“Are you hungry enough to eat it cold?” Wilbur asks. 

Quackity’s nose wrinkles. “Cold?”

How had they used to prepare it? On the stove, he distantly remembers. “The stove isn’t working,” He lies. 

The other groans but nods, accepting the excuse. It’s a different way of seeing the man, a part of him locked away by the situation at hand. Remotely, he thinks this is a Quackity he will never see again.

As Wilbur takes his knife and attempts to carve into the can, he hears a sound of discomfort from Quackity. Turning around, he watches the man throw the quilt to the side, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. 

“I’m sweaty,” He says. “I think-” He seems to lose his thought for a moment. “I can’t remember what I was going to say.” He lets out a pained sound and pinches the bridge of his nose. 

“Is it your head?” 

He nods, eyes squeezed tightly like they were when he had first been found in the morning. 

Wilbur turns around and finally cracks open the can, a sound of achievement. He feels like a fisherman with an oyster. It reminds him of going fishing with his father as a child, eating the fruit of his labour in the evenings, warm and fresh on his tongue. 

For a moment he thinks he might have a spoon for Q to eat it with, but when he scavenges his bag for one, he comes up empty. 

“I guess you can just drink it,” He says, turning back towards Q. “Just be careful not to cut your-” He stops when he sees the current state of him, now scrunched up, hands on his head.

He kneels down. “Does it hurt more than before?” He asks, but no answer surfaces. He reaches out and touches him on the arm, and he flinches back, taking Wilbur by surprise. He lifts his face just slightly and he can see the beginnings of tear tracks on his face. 

“Hey, what’s wrong?” He’s trying not to sound as worried as he is, trying not to project his own stress onto the man in front of him. 

“‘M sorry,” He says, breaking off into a sob. 

“There’s nothing to be sorry about. What’s going on?” He feels like he’s talking like the school counsellors used to, too friendly and too nice, but it’s the only way he can make himself sound safe, even if he always hated the way it sounded when they would speak to him. 

“I’m sorry, I-” A shuddered sob. “I’m sorry I got sick.”

He blinks. “You don’t have to be sorry at all, Quackity. None of this was your fault.”

“I-I was supposed to cook,” He says through ongoing tears, and Wilbur has the strange impulse to hold him close and shush his worries. He doesn’t want to see Quackity like this, he doesn’t want to know the extent of the things he’s gone through. 

He frowns. “You didn’t need to cook,” He says. 

His hands dig into his hair and his back shakes with the force of his quick breathing. “I was supposed to.”

Wilbur tries to touch his hands, tries to get him to understand that he’s not upset, but it only seems to make things worse, as Quackity only wails harder. 

“I’m not upset, I’m not upset at all.”

“Please don’t do it, I don’t want to do it.”

“I’m not going to do anything,” He says. 

“You’re going to do it again, I don’t want to-” His body is trembling and as much as it hurts him not to, he doesn’t touch him.

“Quackity, you need to breathe. It’s Wilbur, okay? Nobody else. Just me.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” He babbles. “Please don’t make me. Please, it always hurts.” Wilbur digs his fingers into his own palm so intensely that it shakes. 

“Listen to me,” He says, more of a command, and the fact that Quackity stops crying immediately makes guilt pool in his stomach. “Tell me where you are,” He says, this time softer.

“At camp. With you,” He says, sniffling. 

“We’re not at camp. We’re in the forest, and it’s just me and you. I’m Wilbur, okay?”

“Wilbur?” He asks, as if the name is foreign. 

“Yes, Wilbur. And we’re safe, and nothing’s going to happen.”

“Nothing?” 

“Nothing,” He confirms. “Okay?”

“Okay,” He says, lifting up his head only slightly, seemingly still hesitant. 

“I made you soup. Do you want to eat it?”

“I’m tired,” He admits. 

Wilbur looks into the sky and finds that there is no telling what time it is, only that it is most likely later in the day, maybe 3 or 4. He hasn’t seemed to have any symptoms except a headache and confusion in the last hour. It’s still risky to let him go to sleep, but he imagines Q will wake up if he’s in pain. More than him, Wilbur is the one who needs to stay awake. 

“Do you want to go to sleep?” He asks. 

Quackity nods. “Everything’s so fuzzy. Where are we again?”

“In the forest, camping for the night.”

“When did we decide to go camping?” He asks, his eyes becoming heavier. 

“A while ago,” He answers, and pats the quilt. “Do you want to lay down?”

“What drugs did we take?” Quackity asks. 

“Nothing bad,” He says. He doesn’t seem to be thinking he’s back where he was before, but even farther into the past, back when someone could choose to go camping for vacation. “I know it feels weird right now, but I imagine that if everything goes well, you’ll be feeling better tomorrow. How is your stomach?”

“Okay. My head is so heavy.” He lays back down on the quilt and closes his eyes. Wilbur sits next to him. Quackity reaches out his hand to Wilbur to take.

“I’m Wilbur, remember?” He says. 

“‘M Quackity,” He says, and turns on his side towards him. “Goodnight.”

Wilbur lets out an uneasy breath. “Goodnight.”

The night passes at a snail’s pace, and Wilbur shivers with such a ferocity that it wakes up Quackity.

“You’re cold,” Quackity says when he touches Wilbur’s hand next to him. “Get under the blanket.”

Wilbur nods tiredly. “How do you feel?” He means it earnestly but the tone is more or less exhausted. 

“Better,” He says when Wilbur settles under the thick layer, legs curled up to maintain warmth. The quilt isn’t long enough to cover his entirety. They are close enough to touch, but they don’t. 

Wilbur still shakes. 

“I can still feel you shaking,” He says, opening his eyes and looking into Wilbur’s. Looking into Quackity’s eyes is like looking into the unknown. 

“I’ll warm up,” He assures him. 

“No you won’t. You’re going to catch hypothermia.”

“I’ve gotten through colder temperatures.”

“It’s not safe.”

Wilbur knows it’s not safe. “I’ll be okay.”

“Take off your top layers.”

Even in his groggy mind, he is taken aback. “Why?”

“I’ll take mine off too. We can wrap ourselves together in the quilt and preserve body heat.”

“Quackity, you know who I am, right?”

“Wilbur,” He says. “Now do it before you freeze.”

If Quackity is lucid, he knows more than Wilbur does. And more than that, the idea of warmth is convincing, so he does as he instructs. 

“Tuck the quilt under you and I’ll tuck the other side under me,” Q says. 

Once they have done this, Quackity makes the first move, putting his hands around Wilbur, pulling him closer. It’s true that there is warmth this way, but all he can focus on is the feeling of a bare chest against his, almost a hug. He counts the years since he’s had a hug like this, a hug he can soak up that isn’t a mere glimpse, the feeling of affection at all. 

“What happened?” Quackity finally asks, long after Wilbur thinks he’s gone to sleep. “Why were we back there, Wilbur?”

There . The elusive there . “We weren’t. It was just the poison, that’s it. We’re okay.”

Quackity nods into the crook of his neck. “Okay,” He says. 

“Okay,” He says, settling into the forthcoming night. 

Chapter Text

The view from the window of the facility was a beautiful sight to the scientist. He was in awe of his work, as many times as he would come to see it. He loved every part of it, even the pain. That was it, wasn’t it? Beauty, pain. Not so different. In fact, they do not exist without each other. 

Oh, what a world.

From where he stood he could see groups of them clearly, and for a moment he realised how nature must have felt, watching her children walk from the nest rather than fly, working to make things better rather than merely procreate. She surely had loved them, and what had they done to repay her? Destruction. 

Even as a child he knew he was destined to do something, make a wonderful change in the world, and he had. Contrary to many other beliefs, some of which were made by old colleagues, it was the right solution. Nay, the only solution. There had been protests for years, people saying there was something to be done and that they were only ever so close to its completion. 

Fools. 

He lived in the facility full time at the end of his life, standing by the window or reading over his calculations and theories in leather-bound notebooks, checking for even the smallest strain of error, of which there was none. His creations were perfect, as if provided to him by god. Although he sometimes viewed himself as a more just god, a more fair god, he knew he was doomed as a mortal, and he would die as one. Cursed as one. 

The last day that he stood by the window was an ordinary one. She slept in late and the television buzzed indiscreetly by his workspace where he often slept. 

However, he knew well that this was the last day. He had counted down the days on his calendar for long enough, the news had spread the wonderful words of his success and he rejoiced, although still confined, in these rooms. He wasn’t made to die in a room like this.

It was a beauty in this time to choose the way you would die. 

He looked in every room and found nothing to last tidy before leaving. Everything was in its provided place like the stage shows he had always enjoyed. Everything was set. The note on his desk ready to be read, the liquid solution along with it. 

An inhale of stuffy air and he could take it no longer. 

The exit door had been taped and boarded shut, but this morning he had taken it apart, one wood plank after another. The push of a handle and his fate was sealed. His purpose.

He walked out with nothing in his hands to take with him, out into the wondrous field and the wondrous world from which he would never return. He stood still. The wind swept through his hair.

The air had never tasted sweeter. 

The next three days of walking after Quackity’s poisoning were of the roughest Wilbur had ever experienced. 

Quackity, for the first day after, walked slowly and took more frequent breaks to preserve his energy. And for Wilbur, hunger was his only thought, waking and sleeping. Everything slowly crumbled around him like clay. He couldn’t remember why he was continuing on. 

They never once spoke about where they were going, what they would do with their newfound sense of fruitlessness that stuck beside them. They can only keep going, keep trying for something good, for luck, whatever that may look like. 

Food is a start. 

The third day, today, can be summed up very simply. Walking. Walking, until Wilbur thinks he can’t do it anymore. Walking, until Quackity has to ask him if he needs to stop even though they can’t possibly afford to stop. Walking, endlessly. 

In every step, the world feels less round, as though they march toward their fate like army troops, waiting for the sidewalk to end. When the Sidewalk Ends. He remembers the Shel Silverstein book nostalgically, its beautiful strangeness something that had always attracted itself to Wilbur as a young boy. His father had gotten it for him for a birthday years ago, and for some reason, he remembers it now. 

“If we find a thrift store,” He says, the first words spoken in at least two hours, “I’ll get a book.”

Quackity nods. “Good. I might too. The nights get too quiet.”

And dark, Wilbur wants to say. Dark like black holes, dark like deep seas, dark like closets and horror stories and every other suffocating thing that draws in and doesn’t give back. 

Quackity spoke little of the day in the forest, most likely feeling like a dream would, not a memory. Even though having no way to know what Quackity remembers, Wilbur hasn’t asked. He figures he will. There’s no reason not to, there’s no goodness to preserve in their conversations. 

Yesterday had been their supposed breaking point. Wilbur walked with the intent of a homeless man, futile but still fervent, with a manic way about it that made him feel like he almost had autonomy in his life. Quackity hadn’t kept up his pace, choosing to linger behind him and walk in a daze. After an hour, Wilbur finally asked him to keep up. 

“What are we even going towards?”

Wilbur couldn’t answer truthfully. “It doesn’t matter. The faster we walk the faster we get to a town.”

“I’m not going to walk any faster, Wilbur. My legs are killing me.”

“I know, and I’m sorry, but we need to. We find a town, we find food.”

“That’s not a given.”

“It’s a chance.”

“I’m fucking tired. We’ll get there when we get there.”

“And what if we don’t?” He asked, voice irritated. 

“Then we don’t. Just, for god’s sake, let me keep this pace so I don’t want to kill myself.”

“I could go off by myself,” Wilbur had said. A spur of the moment decision. 

“Then go off by yourself. Go. Find this magical supply of food, find a better Harbour. Where is it? Because I don’t see it. It’s not in front of us and it’s not behind us and I don’t think it ever has been.”

“I thought you were the optimistic one.”

“I was, when I thought I wasn’t going to have to starve and fight for my fucking life again.”

“God, Quackity. Do you want to live or not?”

“What kind of a question is that? Yeah, I want to live. But there’s jack shit here. Not one thing have we found in this goddamn wasteland. I’m tired of this. So go off by yourself, go off and die, see where it gets you.”

They had apologised after, when Wilbur hadn’t walked any faster and stopped pestering Q. 

“I’m sorry.” It didn’t matter who said it first because they had both been thinking it. 

“I’m just so hungry, I don’t know how much longer I can go like this.”

And they took a break and apologised a few more times and in that moment Wilbur was reminded of the fragility of man. One missed meal, one sleepless night. It all added up and totaled how long someone could last. The walls of structure around him were crumbling and he was too. 

In a world before, one might tell another not to make excuses, not to try to justify their actions, but Wilbur let him justify every word. He knew that Quackity hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept, hadn’t forgotten any of the terrible events that had befallen him since the day they occurred. The conditions of people in the past do not equate to now. 

He never asked to know the conditions that could break Q but he did not have a choice, and so here he is. 

“Q?” He asks. 

He hums. 

“What do you remember about the day, with the poison?”

“Um, not much. Just a couple things.”

“Like what?”

“Well, you were there. I imagine you remember having to pin me down on the ground because I was flailing like a madman.” In the back of his mind, he wants this hunger to end. He wants every sentence they speak to stop having a hint of frustration, a hint of their fight. He wants to forget they had a fight at all.

“I didn’t pin you down,” He says.

“Oh,” Quackity says, and leaves it at that. 

The days assume their tiredness and drag on slowly just to spite them. Wilbur tries to shut himself off and he can’t so instead he converses with Quackity about everything other than their situation. He made himself entertaining the way he used to be, a talker and chronic oversharer. He finds that once he finds it, the role is easy to slip into. Sometimes in the middle of his sentences he finds himself talking to a different person. 

“Do you remember when we-” He stops. He wasn’t talking to Quackity. Who is he talking to? A ghost.

“What?” Quackity asks. 

“Sorry, I lost my train of thought.”

“You’ve been doing that a lot.”

“I have?”

Quackity’s eyebrows furrow. “Yeah. Do you not remember?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Are you doing okay?”

“I’m alright. Or I will be. Once we find food.”

Quackity looks forward and he imagines his own words echoing through Q’s mind. He knows that he thinks Wilbur is a fool. 

He spaces out until something taps his shoulder and he flinches out of the stupor. 

“Hey. I asked if you wanted to break for the night.”

“How late is it?”

“Not too late. Maybe 3 or 4.”

“Why would we break?”

Q shrugs. “I don’t know. You just look tired. I’ve had more to eat than you in the past few days.”

“Well, you did throw most of it up.”

“At least there was a little nutritional value.”

“No, let’s keep going.” He yawns. 

They walk until the road seems to collapse into itself for one reason or another. Lopsided and overgrown with yellow grass, it seems to consume itself. Wilbur tries not to swallow. His throat is like sandpaper. All the roads feel familiar. 

The dull ache that has been present in his stomach slowly melts away. He knows he’s hungry but he can’t feel it anymore. He stops talking. 

Quackity talks about something he used to do, some board game or card game he would play. Wilbur melts into the memory like it’s his, the glossy paint of his dining room table and the gritty cards in his hand with shoddy corners worn from use. Tommy’s voice echoing in front of him. He wants to go there. Back there. His father is laughing and he forgets where he is. They aren’t saying words, per se, more like breaths and laughs filled in by their intelligible voices. 

It sounds appealing. 

He sees them. 

It’s like he’s in a rocket trailing up towards the sky, vast and open and blue. 

The sky isn’t blue, he realises. 

Plummeting back to the ground, he feels gravity rush to greet him. 

He falls. There is dirt beneath him. There is

Humming and hands in his hair. 

Opening his eyes. 

Not hearing the voice speaking to him, ears ringing. 

He looks up and imagines sunlight. There is only grey. 

Distinctly, panic rushes through him with the force of a river through his veins, but he doesn’t move. He’s laying down, he registers. He forms his hands into fists, squeezing them and releasing. He doesn’t know where he is. 

“Wilbur?” It doesn’t sound like anyone he knows. Not Tommy or his father or any of his friends from school. 

“Yes?”

“Wil, you fainted.”

“I fainted? Where?”

“On the road. I was talking and then you just went down.”

“Am I okay?” He asks, which is a stupid question that he only registers after he says it. 

“Uh, I think so. Can you spell your name?”

“W-i-l-b-u-r.”

“Okay. Does your head hurt?”

“A little bit.”

“Who am I?”

He searches his mind. “Q.”

“Full name?”

“Quackity,” He says. 

The hands previously on his head have ceased and he frowns. 

“I think it was hunger,” He says, a distant void where normalcy should be in his voice. Wilbur knows this can get worse. And once it does, he’s dead. He hasn’t eaten like he should in a year. His muscle mass is gone and the only thing that remains is a stubborn backbone that keeps him going. “Can you get up?”

Wilbur pushes himself up and feels dizziness take over. “I can keep going,” He says, even though he feels nausea in his gut. He reaches for a walking stick that no longer travels with him and falters. The sorrow pools into his gut like a waterfall until Q interrupts the stream.

“Really? Wilbur, I don’t think you should. I don’t want you to faint again.”

“I won’t.”

Quackity eyes him warily. 

“I won’t,” He repeats. 

“I don’t want to wait for you to faint again just so you can get a concussion.”

“I know how this goes. I’ve done it before. What’s dangerous is if we don’t get food.”

He seems to want to say something, but closes his mouth and nods. “Okay. Alright.”

They walk.

And walk. 

And walk. 

Repetitive motions. One leg in front of the other. It’s cold and yet sweat still accumulates on his forehead. Everything is cold. He imagines himself turning into ice. 

He wishes they hadn’t already talked about everything there is to talk about. Childhoods, school, their old careers. The world at large. And he wants to speak more, but in his exhaustion, he simply stays quiet and sails through the coast of his mind. 

The building stands high as the tower of babel when they see it from down the road. He feels lowly beneath it when they stop to observe it from the other side of the road; he hasn’t seen a building in at least a year. It is fenced in with barbed wire, standing in solitude amongst overgrown foliage that has collected around it, a field of yellows and browns. It looks like the apocalypse itself. 

Appearing three stories high, grey and rectangular, it stands out against the flatland around it. It feels like a prop on a high production stage. 

He feels the gears turning in Q’s mind. 

And yet there’s something so off about it. Silent and eerie and unknown. Wilbur doesn’t wish to see any more things he will want to forget. 

He knows. He knows, and it’s not the paranoia. He knows there’s something in there he doesn’t want to see and he can feel it. 

“Wilbur,” Quackity finally says. 

“I’m not going in there.”

He doesn’t have to look to know the man’s expression. “Why wouldn’t we?”

“I don’t think there will be anything in there.”

“This is the best we’ve gotten in ages.”

“There’s something wrong with it. I can feel it.”

“It might not be looted.”

“If we’ve found it, someone else has too.”

“The fence is intact.”

“I know.”

A harsh quip of a sigh. “Wil, I can go.”

“No,” Wilbur interrupts, turning to him. 

“Why not?”

“I’m not letting you get into another situation with raiders and that place is a perfect place for someone to hide out, waiting for people like us to get curious.”

“You are starving Wilbur. You’ve been pushing us all this time to keep walking, keep walking, and now we’ve found something and you aren’t thinking.”

“I’m hungry, not incapable of making decisions.”

“I know that. But what you aren’t making are logical decisions. The odds of there being raiders in there are low.”

“That’s not good enough. I’m not letting you get fucking- fucking poisoned again.”

“And I’m not letting you die.”

“I’m not going to keel over because I haven’t had food in 4 days.”

“Why would you put yourself through more suffering than you have to?”

“Because I’m being careful, Quackity.” He says this softer. More delicately. 

“I’m going to tell you this now. Being careful will not save you. Sometimes you do everything the best you can and you still die, and sometimes you do everything wrong and you live. This shit is impartial.”

Wilbur doesn’t speak.

“I’m going to go in and once I come out, I’ll give you the okay to come in.” The stress on his face is imminent. 

“Quackity, don’t do that. Please don’t do that.”

“You need to eat.”

“If something happens to you I won’t leave you.”

“Well, you should. If there’s nothing you can do, you should run. Always.”

“I’d sooner fall on my own knife before living by myself again.” His voice has slowly melted in his throat, runny and sobby in all the ways he’s never wanted to hear himself sound. 

“I’ll be alright,” Quackity says, lowering his voice. He walks over to Wilbur and puts his hand on his chest, right on his heart. He wonders if Q can feel the pulse under his sweater. He takes his hand off and turns at the exact time Wilbur sinks to his knees. He turns around and Wil can feel the eyes on his back. 

Q kneels down by him. Puts Wilbur’s hand in his. He knows they’ve done this before but it feels different this time nonetheless. 

He feels a tear drift to the bridge of his nose, head dipped down in something like a bow. 

A few moments of silence. 

“I’ll be back, okay?” Wilbur doesn’t nod, only lets the hand slip away, hearing the soft crunch of ground falter under Q’s feet as he walks farther and farther away. 

He waits. 

And waits. 

Like a servant at a beck and call. 

After a long while, he hears a door open and looks up, body turning ridgid. 

Quackity pokes his head out of the door, looking at Wilbur, and smiles. It’s a smile he’d not expect to see anywhere near this place. He tries to smile back. 

Picking himself off the ground, he feels a sudden sense of clarity. He can’t tell if it is impending doom or relief. 

“It’s… completely clear?”

“I went up two levels,” Quackity says. He feels like he should hug him, tell him that it all felt so real, all so much like the end of the world . That phrase has never been so funny until now. 

The answer makes him fear asking, but he does anyway. “Are there supplies?”

“Wilbur, I think you should just come look.”

“No bodies?” 

“No, not that I’ve found. Now please just come up, the anticipation is killing me.”

The staircase is winding, and Wilbur feels the clunk of his steps on metal slabs as he marches higher and higher. 

“First level. Not much here. An old radio. This is some sort of facility, I guess.”

Wilbur walks around and looks in small cabinets, finding old medical supplies, few but present. A dusty red first aid kit sits lonely on an upper shelf, waiting for him. He grabs it and holds it in his hand. He feels stupid for the object's ability to make him so giddy. 

Walking towards the steps, he notices a small black shape behind the small radio in the corner. 

“Wait,” Wilbur says, even though the other hasn’t said anything. He walks over and looks behind the radio, knowing immediately what it is. 

“A gun?” Q asks. “Is it loaded?”

He takes it into his hand, relishing the unfamiliarity. He pulls it open to look inside. Inside, four or five bullets. 

“5 bullets.”

“We’re going to take that, right?”

He holds the gun in his hand with a certain kind of uncertainty. He’s never held a gun like this before. He knows there’s inherent risk in carrying one, but that at this point, it's the best form of defence. 

“I’ll put it in a holster for now,” He says, slipping it into a free slot in his waistband. He looks up at Q, who’s laughter is coming in stutters. This is good news, after all. “Jesus, does it get better than this?” 

“I guess you’ll have to see,” He replies, trying to flatten his smile but failing. 

Wilbur takes the steps quickly up to the next level, so much so that Q has to tell him to slow down. “You’re going to slip, I won’t take care of you if you actually get a concussion.” Yes, he will. And they both know it, but the banter is still enlivening. 

His lightheadedness has faded into the background as he steps into the second level. The room is much wider, with separate doors leading into supposed divided rooms. The main room has a glass window into another, white and empty. 

“What’s here?” He asks. 

“Do you see the bags?”

What bags ? He almost asks, and then turns around and sees them in the corner. Bags and bags of food. 

Food. 

Food. 

Wilbur almost flinches back at the sight but instead runs forward with reckless abandon, kneeling on the ground to address them, rifling through them. He had expected possible soups and canned items but what he finds in place makes him stop in place. 

Rice. Bagged. Packages upon packages. Beans. Honey. Cereal. He doesn’t care if it’s stale. And of course, canned foods. Canned foods, the expensive, good ones. Saltine crackers. 

He scans over expiration dates and sees they are almost all still good. A brand of graham crackers he used to eat as a child that never seemed to get old sit in the bags innocently, as if they do not know how much they are valued, how much they are in heaven. 

“I’m not dead, am I?” Wilbur jokes. 

“I imagine the food supply is better in heaven, but this is heaven for us, at least.”

“It’s just been sitting here?” And then he pulls back. Food can be poisoned. His expression drops. 

“It’s not poisoned,” Quackity says. 

“How do you know?”

“Every bag except one for rice is unopened, and I really doubt someone would have glue to put it all back together.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Maybe we can eat a little and see what happens.”

He looks over the food once more, pulling at the points they are sealed and trying to see if they give, which they do not. It’s too good. It’s too good to be true.

“I know it’s not foolproof, and there’s always that chance-”

Wilbur nods. Quackity had been right about one thing. If he hadn’t gone in, Wilbur would never have this food in his hands. 

“We test it first. Some cereal or soup and see what happens.” It doesn’t sound right. It sounds like a test, but Wilbur knows there’s no one except maybe god that could be testing him. He knows by now not to get comfortable. Or he should. But he’s trying to not die, first and foremost, and this seems most practical. 

Q does not chide him for not being willing to investigate the building, but he knows this is because, paranoia or not, the thought is not one anyone could blame you for having. 

Wilbur walks to the other drawers on the second side of the room, pulling one open and looking down at the notebook staring blankly up at him. It’s leatherbound, something that probably costed money before the fall of everything. He opens it, flipping through raw and slightly water damaged pages. 

“Trust is a fickle thing, like a gift from your mother that you know she will soon sell. Trust is an antiquity. Trust is a fire and a smoking building and the woman trapped inside all at the same time.” 

Some sort of diary. He takes his backpack and puts it inside. Quackity and Wilbur have been taking shifts of holding it. 

“Have you checked the third level?”

“No, not yet. We can go look now, if you want.”

Wilbur follows him up the stairs. There are always these moments in between terrible sorrow and wonderful revival that feel like limbo. To get out of limbo is to win the game. Maybe not forever, because of course it seems there is always a new game to play, but you at least win the most current one and that is good enough for a while. 

The next flight of stairs is less whimsical and makes Wilbur’s legs ache more than they already do, but a buzz of hope under his skin makes it feel worth it. 

Unlike the rest of the levels, this one starts with a closed door. They turn the doorknob and attempt to push it open, but it only seems to open part way. Wilbur throws himself against it once and it doesn’t cease, so Quackity stands in front of it, preparing to use his next best strength to knock it down. As far as they can tell, the door is not locked, moreso blocked. 

Finally, Q throws himself against it and the door opens, revealing another similarly sized room. However, Wilbur gets no time to observe it. 

They stop in time with each other as they look at the sight ahead of them. Wilbur grabs hastily at the gun in his holster that he cannot seem to retrieve. 

The young blonde woman in front of them holds a knife too, extended towards them in a shaky hand. She seems to register them slowly, slowly letting the knife descend down as she lowers her hand, eyes terrifyingly wide. 

Quackity, using a different approach than Wilbur, puts his hands out in front of him. The girl seems to recognize this. 

Silence abrupts as the knife clatters to the floor and the woman stares in awe. 

“I thought there was no one left.”

Chapter Text

“People do such horrible things. And you sometimes do not forgive them. It is a trial to know whether someone is worth forgiving or whether there is something to be paid, some compensation you must take for yourself because no one else will, and I have made my decision. Is life really so ridiculous and cruel?”

The woman stands tall and yet there is still something off, something concealed that he can’t figure out. She meets his eyes with a fierce sort of determination that reflects someone he hasn’t seen in a very long time. 

No one speaks for a few moments until she lets out another phrase, low and unbelieving. “There’s not supposed to be anyone left.”

“Well. There are. Some of us,” Wilbur says, because he doesn’t know what to do and pretending he does would be a blatant lie. 

She lets out a hitched breath. “I thought I was alone, I thought I was the last one left. But here you are.”

“There being people around isn’t always a good thing,” Wilbur says. 

“I’m aware,” She says. 

“How long have you been here?” Quackity asks. 

“Since it started.”

“You still have supplies.” A subtle question. 

“To last two weeks or so,” She says, much more straightforward than Wilbur would’ve thought. No one answers questions unless they believe they’ll get something in return. “There was a stockpile in the storage room.”

“Two weeks?”

“I was going to leave soon. To go and see if I could find anyone left. I assumed there wasn’t.”

“Have you seen them?”

“What?”

“The zombies.”

“Maybe only once in person, but I used to see them on the news,” She says, somewhat anxiously. “I’ve been here since the beginning of all of it.”

“You’ve been here for years ?” Q asks. 

“A while. I’ve been starting to feel like Rapunzel,” She says in a sort of laugh. “Do you both just travel?”

“Not really by choice. We’re travelling to find materials.”

“Just the two of you?”

Wilbur looks to his side, at Q.

 To a normal person, although there’s no such thing anymore, it would seem like a normal question. But to someone like him, it’s a question of vulnerability. She’s asking ‘ Can I take you in a fight?’ 

He narrows his gaze. “For now.” He forcibly relaxes the muscles in his arms. “And you? Just you?”

“Just me. It’s been lonely.” Of course it would be, to be by yourself for all these years, not knowing what the hell is going on in the outside world. He can’t imagine it. “So, I guess I should ask the question now. How is everything?”

“How is what?” Wilbur asks.

“The outside world. You’re here, so not everyone is gone. Have they brought back government?”

Quackity prepares to talk but seems to be taking his time to formulate the words that there isn’t any good way to say. 

“Well, there’s not many left. Things are pretty harsh.”

“We almost died twice in the last week,” Wilbur says, because he prefers to rip the bandaid off rather than scoot around the issue. 

She blinks. “I see.”

You see? You see?

“I imagine it’s hard to process.”

“What are people like?” She asks. 

“What… just in general?”

“Well, I imagine people are different now. Survival and everything.”

Quackity looks at Wilbur. 

“They’ll kill you if you let them. You have to be careful about who you trust.”

“How do I know if I can trust you then?” 

“You can’t. Not now. Maybe in a different time. But not now.”

She looks down and half seems to slip into thought. God knows what she could be thinking. Wilbur might be crying in her situation, to be locked up in a place like this just to know it was for nothing, that people are eating people and food is hard to come by. There’s nothing better out there than in here. 

“What’s your name?” Quackity asks, extending his hand. A ballsy thing to do in retrospect, but he can admit he likes that about him, to be the type of person who throws caution to the wind in favour of being a decent person. 

“Niki,” She says, shaking his hand. When they both pull away, Quackity introduces himself next. “Nice to meet you.” Oh, to have common courtesy. He can’t tell if he pities this kind of person or envies them. 

“Wilbur,” He introduces, leaving his hands at his sides. 

She nods and doesn’t attempt to put her hand out to shake his. 

“So, what’s after this?” Wilbur asks. “For you.”

“Oh. Well. There are options. There are always options, choices. But the problem is knowing which is the right one to choose.”

“So what are your options?” He asks, out of curiosity. It’s like watching someone from the past, it intrigues him like nothing else. When everyone else has been weathered and eroded in the storm, Niki has stayed here, relatively unscathed. 

“Well, I could stay here until I starve to death. Not too excited about that one. I’ve thought about it before, actually I think that’s all I really think about here. But there’s that, and then there’s going out in a world I’m not sure I can survive in. Or whether it’s worth it to survive. There’s always going to be death.”

“Well, you have supplies.”

“For now.”

“And afterwards?”

“After they run out? Oh I don’t know. I always figured I would try to live off the land. Humanely, of course. The world before us was so keen on everything being so produced rather than grown. I’ve always wanted a garden.”

Can anything still grow? Is the soil rich enough to host plants anymore?

“You wouldn’t scavenge?”

“Well, maybe once. Or twice. But it’s never been my top priority. It still feels like stealing, even now. I know you must think I’m so sheltered, and I mean, I am,” She says, in a sort of laugh. “But there’s a better way to live. There always is.”

“Well, we’ve tried,” Quackity interrupts. “It’s just a difficult thing to do when zombie hoards are behind you everywhere you go. The earthquakes have been getting worse.”

“That’s unfortunate,” She says, in a sigh that seems only inconvenienced. 

“Would you be able to just… go out? Take care of yourself like that?” Q asks. 

“Well, maybe. But I don’t have the highest hopes I’d make it very far. It feels like I’m just here to be an observer, at this point. Locked up in this place. Is that how you feel when you go out there?” She addresses both of them. “Like observers?”

“No,” Wilbur says. “I feel like a pinnacle of bad luck. But then that makes me feel bad, because who’s got it the worst? The half-dead people or the people that have to watch them and kill them?” He tries to laugh but it comes out shaken. 

She seems to pity this. “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” He asks, a real laugh this time. “You weren’t the person who caused it.”

“No,” She says, pursing her lips. “I wasn’t.”

“We wish you the best of luck,” Wilbur says, signalling their leave. 

“Thank you,” She says, although an air of darkness follows her voice like storm clouds. 

“Niki,” Quackity says. “Do you mind if me and Wilbur step to the side and talk for a second?” 

He looks at Niki who nods and finds himself getting tugged out the door and down to the second level. 

“What is it?”

“Wilbur, I have an idea.”

“I don’t think it’s right to take her with us.”

“How did you know I was going to say that?”

“Because travelling with someone at this point is like looking into their soul. Quackity, I love that you love other people and want to help them like a decent person.”

“There’s a but to this sentence.”

“Yes, there is, because we don’t know who she is.”

“Wilbur, she has supplies. When does an opportunity just stroll up to us like this? She needs someone to show her how to survive and we need food. It’s mutual help and she seems like a kind person.”

“What happened last time? When we were too fucking trusting and you ended up on the ground throwing up for a full day?”

“I understand that. But this is different. Can you please hear me out?”

He sighs and gestures for him to go on.

“She’s not like other people. First of all, I haven’t heard someone say they wanted a garden in casual conversation in like… 4 years. She’s not the kind of person that’s going to murder people because she’s hungry. She hasn’t been forced to that. Second, if we teach her how to kill zombies, that’s one more person to help us.”

“If she agrees to kill at all. Remember when they used to talk about the ethics of killing a zombie, Q? She’s a relic, she’s someone from another time and now we’re trying to tell her how much of a shitstorm it is out there but she can’t get it.”

“That’s because she hasn’t seen it. The only thing we’d have to even worry about is insanity and we-”

“Deal with that on a given Tuesday,” Wilbur supplies. It’s funny to use a phrase like that but he likes it, likes the feeling of being able to bring something from the past like a souvenir. They hardly even use the concept of days. Who's to say whether it's a Tuesday or a Wednesday?

“Right. Are you starting to understand why this would be a good idea?” Q asks. He’s being more persuasive than usual. Whether it’s the hunger or tiredness at having to deal with Wilbur’s paranoia, it shows. 

Wilbur doesn’t want to admit it’s a good idea, but it is. It feels almost as if they’re taking advantage of her, but he knows it doesn’t seem that way from Quackity’s point of view. 

“Do you think… it’s possible that we ask her to come with us for a while? Just so we can survive?” Q offers.

“Alright. We can ask.”

“Thank you, Wil.”

Wil. 

Wil!

“Wil!”

“Yeah?”

“Look at the drawing I did!”

“Oh, that's sick. What is it?”

“You really can’t tell?”

“Uh, am I supposed to be able to? It’s like a glob of blue and grey.”

“It’s a blobfish. In the sea, dumbass.”

“Okay, well I thought it was cool. Now it just makes me think of a 5 year old’s school drawing.”

“Dickhead.”

“Unable-to-write-fucker.”

“That was a dumb one. Do better next time.”

“Oh, I will, won’t I? Just to please you.”

“Just to-”

“Wil?”

“Yeah?” He asks. 

“You spaced out. I was going to say we should just tell her now.”

“Best way to do it, I suppose,” He mumbles.

They walk up the creaking stairs and open the door where she stands in the same position as she was before. 

“Sorry,” Quackity says.

“Oh, it’s no problem.”

“So me and Wil were talking.”

“Yes,” She says, nodding. 

“-and we think you should come with us for the time being.”

“Come with you?” 

“Well, if you want to.”

“You need supplies.”

“Yes. But we also want to help you.”

“You said I couldn’t trust you.”

“By principle you can’t trust anyone,” Wilbur says. “But you also won’t get many offers like this either.”

“Truthfully,” She says. “And I mean this. Truthfully, how bad is it? Could I survive by myself?”

“In the current climate? Maybe a few days, at most,” Q answers, but Wilbur knows this to be false. He doesn’t object to this, however. 

“And how do you survive? What are you travelling towards?”

“Nowhere. We just walk until it’s time to set up camp and do it again the next day.”

“That seems repetitive.”

“It is. But what else is there?”

“I don’t know,” She says, seemingly to herself and less in response to his question.

“We can teach you everything you need to know and then you can go off by yourself if you want to.” If it were Wilbur on the other side of this, he would be running. When things are too good to be true, they usually are. He knows that she should trust them, but she doesn’t. Wilbur wouldn’t even trust himself in her shoes.

Her brows knit together in thought. 

“How long would I stay?”

“As long as you want, really. It’ll be harder to get food for three people, but there will be more of a chance of finding food with three.”

“How long has it been since you’ve eaten?” 

“Almost a week.”

He sees sympathy in her eyes but behind it something else, fear, something he cannot name without projecting his own feelings onto her. All he knows is that it is something. 

She nods. “I’ll go. For now. I can’t guarantee I’ll stay. I imagine you know why I would be hesitant.”

“Do you have things with you?” Wilbur asks. 

“Yes,” She says, as if she’s just remembered something. “Let me collect everything and we can go. Today, right? You weren’t planning on staying here for the night?”

Quackity looks at Wilbur in silent question.

Wilbur shakes his head, more to Q than Niki. “Today.”

Another nod as she turns around to survey the room and moves to begin to take her things. Wilbur wonders if he would be this easy to convince even when he was young and foolish. 

“We’ll be downstairs while you get everything?” Quackity asks. 

She puts her hand up and gestures behind her in silent agreement. 

They walk down one level to the dingier second level, seeming just a tad more ominous than the last time they had seen it, too overwhelmed with the joy of finding food. 

Wilbur would be lying if he said his first impulse wouldn’t be to take the food and run, but surprisingly there is still enough fellow feeling in his brain to keep him somewhat morally sound. 

The floor is made of a glossy sort of stone, the kind that Wilbur remembers at the doctor’s office he used to go to as a child. Satisfying to walk on. When his doctor would walk into the room he would hear the clack of her high heels. 

He read a book once that used the phrase, ‘day to shape the days upon’ and although he’s unsure of the name, he’s always remembered the words. Now, what seems like a day to shape the days upon is something mundane, something like going to the supermarket after school to pick up a frozen pizza for dinner. Something easy, something he wishes he could do now that once seemed like a chore. 

Tommy’s mischievous grin as he walked through the door of his dorm room, bag in his hands. The way Wilbur would pretend to scold him for getting his roommate to let him in without Wilbur knowing. Tommy rolling his eyes and talking about how much he hated high school but how much he loved his friends. 

Day to shape the days upon. A day like any other that he will never have again.

Niki paces around her room and looks down at the floorboards of the third floor, a floor unlike the second or first with their glossy finish. She’s trying to remember where the hell she put them. They must be somewhere, afterall, there’s only a few planks of wood that she could possibly fit them under. 

She bites her nails, a terribly bad habit, but doesn’t help to stop herself this time. 

She has to find it. She has to. There is no way she could possibly leave without it. She’ll tell them to stay the night if she has to, just so she can find the two small things that make and break civilization. 

She almost trips on the side of the cot she sleeps in when she finally remembers she had stowed it by the side of her bed; at the time it was a place she thought she wouldn’t be able to forget. 

Muttering a small phrase to express her relief, she pulls up the plank. It’s been rotting for years and has become fairly easy to tear. Niki had made sure she would be able to retrieve them quickly if it came down to it, and now seems to be the time. She’s never had a chance like this. It’s almost too good to be true. These are the exact types of people she needs. 

A sigh leaves her. “Thank god,” She mutters again, taking the two small objects into her palm.

She takes the two dark pink vials and slips them into her pocket.

They leave quickly in order to find camp in reasonable time. 

Niki seems to be the physical manifestation of awe as they walk. She stops every so often and just stares upwards, as if she expects there to be a roof above her but is only met with sky. Given, the sky is grey, as per usual, but she doesn’t seem to mind. 

“It’s amazing,” She says, low under her breath but loud enough for him to hear. “There’s such a beautiful world here and I never got to see it for all that time.”

He wants to correct her, that it used to be beautiful, but at the same time knows how monstrous it would sound and so he lets her be joyful. 

“You never went outside?” Q asks, lifting his leg up high to step over a row of tall weeds. Niki and Wilbur lug her things in three separate bags. Two bags of food and one for the things she’s taken with her from the building.

“I did. A few times, to start a fire and cook. But I started to see zombies in the distance and went inside and boarded the windows. After that it was mostly dark and the next time I unboarded the window I couldn’t see the sun.”

“It’s been a long time, for all of us,” Wilbur admits. 

“Is this where you lived before everything?” Q asks, discreetly changing the subject. 

“My father moved here from Germany when I was young for work. Ever since then I’ve been here.”

“So you found that place?”

“We used to drive by it sometimes,” She says. “I ran away from my home when there were protests and found it. When there was no one there I sort of made it like a bunker.” There’s an uncertainty to her voice, but he doesn’t comment on it. 

“What do you think it was for?” Q asks. 

“The bunker?”

A nod. 

“Uh, some sort of facility. Maybe science. There were things about cells and pieces of paper from anatomy books on the walls. I moved things around when I knew there wasn’t anyone left in the bunker. Made it my own.”

“No one ever found it?” Wilbur asks. 

“Once I heard a group of people trying to get in, but we- well, I had boarded up everything and they didn’t get in.”

“How did Quackity get in so easily?” He counters. 

“I started leaving the lock open, after a while,” She says. “I thought there was no one left to open it.”

When they eventually find camp, it is late evening but they can still see the greenery around them due to the recent rain storms. It is a generally small patch of flatland amongst the wide forest to their left, but it is suitable for the night. 

Wilbur’s eyes have been on the bags for the entire walk, imagining what it will be to taste something other than canned soup for the first time in months. Niki seems unphased by the mention of dinner, and even offers to prepare it once they’ve unpacked. 

Q has taken to carrying Wilbur’s backpack on his back, whether out of needing to know where it is every second of the day or out of kindness, he doesn’t know. However, he figures the latter. 

“Do you cook well?” Wilbur asks Niki as they unload supplies. The bags are heavy and letting them down is a physical weight off his shoulders. 

Niki laughs. “I guess there’s really never been anyone to taste my food except for me, so we’ll only know tonight.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I haven’t had food not out of a can in quite a bit. You could burn it to hell and I think I’d still praise it.”

She giggles. “Oh, good to know.”

Wilbur unloads more and more food from the bags. “Quackity, do you want to start the fire?”

Quackity prepares the fire with a precise energy that he hasn’t seen in a long time. As food diminished, they have become nothing short of careless in their putting together of things, specifically the fire. 

“Why are you tying a string to it?” Niki asks. 

Quackity stops and looks down at the string. “I guess it’s muscle memory at this point, I assumed we’d be making soup. Do we have something to cook the rice in?”

She holds up a metal bowl. “I haven’t cooked anything on a fire in ages. I hope I still remember how to do it well. After I boarded up the windows I stopped cooking things outside and survived off the premade food.”

Quackity hands her the package of rice and she begins to prepare it. Rice is the best they’ve had in months, and Wilbur would be content with it by itself, but Niki has persisted on making beans along with it. 

The process goes by quickly once Niki seems to get the hang of it, and the two of them take to supervising the food as it cooks. 

“Thank you, for letting me come with you,” She finally says. 

“It’s no problem,” Quackity says from behind them as he takes out the blankets to sit on when they eat the meal. “It’s mutual.”

“Still,” She says. “I don’t think I can make it out here by myself. I hope this food can show some appreciation but I’m not sure how I can really repay you.”

“Food is payment enough,” Wilbur says, watching the rice and water inside come to a boil. 

With careful consideration to not smother the fire, Niki takes it off the fire and stirs it with a wooden spoon. 

“Is it ready?” 

“Should be,” She nods. 

“And the beans?” Quackity asks. “I haven’t had beans in years. God, I never thought these would be the things I’d be missing.”

“Almost ready,” Niki says. 

“I’ll cook tomorrow, Niki. Just so you won’t have to cook two days in a row,” Quackity offers.

“Oh it’s fine. I don’t mind. I know this was your idea but I should tell you how grateful I am you would even think of extending a hand to me.”

“I should be thanking you. I mean, food and supplies are hard to come by.” He seems to remember something. “Wilbur, do you want to keep walking tomorrow? See if there’s another small town?”

He nods. “I’ll look at the map tonight.”

They pull out small bowls and take turns using the spoon to put the beans and rice into them. Wilbur can smell the warmth of the rice and beans and melts into the strange nostalgia of it all. 

The first bite tastes like coming home and making dinner for himself off of limited funds, Tommy by his side. It never tasted heavenly before, so why does it now?

Quackity closes his eyes during the first bite, and he waits in anticipation of his words. 

“How is it?” Niki says, apparently feeling the same. 

Quackity opens his eyes. “Like I just went back for a single second.”

Neither of them have to ask back to when or where.

Wilbur has felt romantic love very sparingly. Love has never seen to befall him, even back when everything was normal. He didn’t fall in love. It’s always been a choice. A single thought. 

What makes the thought rise to his mind is unknown, but it always asks and beckons him to accept. Could you fall in love? Could you love this person?

The answer is frugally yes. 

He eats his food slowly and tastes it as if to relish it, as if it’s something new. Which is almost is. He’s forgotten what it tasted like. Something fresh and warm and comforting. He wonders if this is a sort of love, an admiration but not to something as physical as food. An attachment to care about something that no longer exists. He no longer grieves, he only looks longingly. 

“This is insane, Niki,” Quackity says between bites. 

“Is it? I’d always wanted to be a cook or a baker, something to do with food. Ever since I was a kid.”

“You would’ve made a lot of money,” Quackity says. “This is fucking crazy. Oh my god. I could run like a mile.”

Wilbur gives a half-suppressed laugh at that. “Please stay seated, Q. I don’t think your body could take it.”

“I won’t, I won’t. But fuck, I forgot food could taste like this. Is that insane?” Quackity says with a toothy smile. 

Wilbur copy’s him, smiling as he takes another bite. “I think I can die happy now.”

“Tomorrow I can make pineapple rice,” Niki says. 

“ Pineapple? ” Q asks.

“It’s my own recipe. Rice with nuts and pineapple. I used to eat it every week back when it was easy to make.”

“Niki, I don’t think I’ve made this clear enough but I don’t know if my tastebuds can actually comprehend something this good. I might just ascend if you give me something better than this,” Quackity jokes. It’s corny but he still laughs.

Niki laughs at his joke and takes another bite. 

The sun is falling even though they cannot see it, and slowly the cloak of night has overtaken it. 

“Do you ever see the stars out here?” She suddenly asks. 

“Not in a while,” Wilbur says, sighing and watching his breath drag upwards.

“When was the last time?”

He thinks about it. “Maybe a year or so.”

Wilbur looks at Quackity sitting next to him who seems to be formulating a response. “I know it should be sad but I feel like I’ve thought about it so much that I’m numb,” He finally says. “For once I have all the goddamn time in the world but nothing to do with it.”

“You both have each other, don’t you?” Niki asks, and Wilbur blinks. 

“Now, yes.”

“It must be better to have someone with you that you can trust. Instead of having to be alone with everything else,” Niki says. “Is it?”

The fire emulates the sun even in darkness, highlighting the side of Quackity’s face as if he is a mirage or legend, something to look at. A beauty in a toiled land. 

Quackity takes off his beanie and holds it in his hands, then pushing back his hair to reveal his long scar for only a swift moment. Wilbur stares even though he doesn’t mean it. 

“Yes,” Quackity says, and looks at Wilbur. 

Wilbur has never fallen in love. It has always been a choice. But this time he knows at the same moment that Quackity looks at him that something is different. That he is not fundamentally the man he thought he was or the man he used to be. 

He has fallen and it had only taken a simple glance for the rug to be pulled from under his feet. He is falling and Quackity is the only star he can see in the void of black. 

Quackity smiles at him in a way that makes Wilbur return to flat ground. 

“Yes,” Wilbur agrees. “It is.”

He seems to fall all over again.

Chapter Text

“I have never looked at the world and seen the beauty others have. Not with humans inhabiting it. Not with my own life or eyes to see it. Maybe there was a woman whom I loved once but she has gone with the tides and with the wind just to make me realise that the world has never lived off of love but off of the choices we make, of which humankind has never made well. And so I decided to end the reign of terror.”

Wilbur wakes up and knows the dream immediately. He holds it for a moment so as to not forget it, tries to gather details in his head like trying to catch the wind. Little things he had said or heard. 

His dreams are never realistic, and it takes hours to finally realise what happened. That’s what usually happens. But last night’s dream was anything but usual. 

The past always seems to show up in his dreams, whether the dream involves Tommy or his father or anyone else he used to know. But last night’s dream involved nothing but the present. How long has it been since he lived in the present?

Groggy, he opens his eyes and hears chatter, two people talking. It takes him a moment to recall who they could be, but once he does, the dream seems to present itself even more. 

“Quackity, I’m in love with you.”

Dream’s don’t make sense. In real life, he wouldn’t have ever been that forward, and even now he can’t say he’s in love with Q, but the words still bring warmth to his cheeks.

His dreams are like movies, like watching something pre decided and being unable to change the dialogue or plot as much as he tries. 

“Wil.”

He held him and Quackity smiled and the sun was in his eyes. 

In the dream he hadn’t even questioned the fact that the sun wouldn’t have been visible beyond the clouds. 

He turns over and stretches his arms, slightly opening his eyes. He’s cold, as always, but uncurls himself from the quilt. 

“Someone’s finally waking up,” A voice says, and he knows it’s Quackity from the laugh. 

He groans and sits up. “Have I slept in for long?”

“No, only like 30 minutes. You looked tired so I figured I’d just let you sleep,” He replies.

Simply talking to Quackity almost makes him redden by itself, the dream playing over and over in his head. 

“Oh. Thank you,” He stutters. 

Niki is crouched close to the fire and turns back to look at him. “Good morning.” 

“Morning,” He says, pushing himself up to standing and running his fingers through his hair. 

He looks over to the fire and notices it’s fallen slightly to the side, stray sticks leaning awkwardly to the side. “What happened?”

Quackity laughs awkwardly. “I tried to make toast. You can probably see that it turned out shit.”

Wilbur cranes his neck to see a piece of completely blackened toast in the grass. He tries to stifle a snicker but Q elbows him playfully. 

“Hey! I tried.”

“How did I sleep through that?” Wilbur asks. 

“I don’t know,” Niki says, shaking her head in disbelief. “It caught fire and you slept through us yelling trying to stomp it out.”

“Jesus,” Wilbur mutters. “Did you get to eat anything?”

Q sighs and shakes his head. “Maybe if we go into town today we can find something. I don’t know about you but I’d rather ration Niki’s supply as long as we can.”

He nods. “What town?”

Río Bravo is a city of ghosts. He feels like he’s walking around props, a human engineered stage that exists for him to look at and nothing more. 

Q seems to follow with a sort of grief. 

“I used to come here sometimes, when I was younger. I had a cousin that lived here,” He says, looking around. 

“Did it always look like this?” Wilbur asks, trying not to be insensitive. In all clarity, the roads and stores seem to be in ruin, looted for all their worth and left abandoned. 

“No. Not like this. Maybe it used to look a little messy, but I liked it. Not like this. It’s not even a city anymore.”

They walk until they reach something called a ‘ Papeleria’ where Q asks to stop. 

“What is it?” Niki asks, looking at the small building. 

“They used to sell paper here. Like stationary.”

“Why here?” She asks. 

“I used to come here with my Mom. She would always write letters to my family even though she had a phone,” He laughs, and looks at the place sadly. “Do you want to go in? I remember they had books here.”

“With the stationary?” Wilbur asks. 

Q shrugs. “Nobody gave a shit. If you wanted to sell stationary and Los Miserables in the same place, you could.”

They walk into the building, old decorations knocked over. An inflatable, heavily stepped on snowman they must’ve put up for Christmas now lays on the floor at the entrance. 

“Oh, Wil, look! They have books here,” Quackity says, looking at the shelves lining the side of the wall. “Hopefully they have something in English.”

As he expected, most are in Spanish with the occasional bootlegged child’s cartoon comic book. Most are old plays, he spots Romeo and Juliet on one of the shelves and takes it into his hands. He always liked reading Shakespeare in school even when others complained. 

Quackity walks forward and loses himself in the aisles as Niki looks around but stands still at the entrance as if she doesn’t know what to do with the freedom. 

They stay for longer than they intend, Wilbur walking around and trying to make sense of words written on walls and papers on shelves in a language he doesn’t understand. 

“Did you find anything?” Q asks both of them. Niki shakes her head. 

“Romeo and Juliet,” He says, holding the book up. 

“You mean ‘ Romeo y Julieta’ . Are you going to learn Spanish to read it?” He teases. 

“Maybe I will,” He says defiantly. “I haven’t got anything else to do, do I?”

“Fair point.”

Most days he forgets his own boredom in favour of survival, but being in a room of books people used to live brings it back again. His willingness to do things and craving to learn, to improve, to know .

“Niki, take whatever you want,” Quackity says. “There’s nobody here anymore.”

“No, I know,” She says, but lacks any proper enthusiasm that would make Wilbur think she actually knows. She rubs the back of her hand. “It’s just strange.”

“What is?”

“Being in a place like this. Obviously I understand how- I mean, I understand why everyone’s gone, but it’s still so strange. I expect someone to walk in and tell us we need to pay, is that silly?”

“No,” Q says. “We’re just… what's that word. When you’re numb to feeling something-”

“Desensitized?” Wil offers. 

“Yes. We’re just desensitised, Niki. If you want to take something you can, but I understand why it would feel weird as hell just waltzing up to a shop and stealing something.”

She smiles. “It’s funny to think I’m saying this now. I stole a book once, when I was young.”

“You stole ? I don’t know why I thought you were a goody two shoes,” Quackity says. 

“People used to call me that. It was a dare. My friends in school wanted me to take something from this old catholic building.”

“And did you?” Wilbur asks. 

“Maybe.”

“Did anyone find out?”

“Well, I felt so guilty that the next day I took it back to the woman who owned it but she told me to keep it because I needed god.” 

Quackity bursts out laughing. “Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh. That’s just fucking hilarious.”

“It is,” She acknowledges. 

They walk out of the shop and Wilbur rolls up the book and crams it into one of his pockets. 

“It doesn’t fit in there,” Quackity says, but Wilbur buttons it up with enough force to prove him wrong. Q snorts. “Okay, I stand corrected.”

They continue down the street carrying equal loads of supplies, knowing that at any moment they could be sniped from a hill but somehow hoping enough that they won’t even though the hope is blind. They carry on talking to distract themselves, or at least Wilbur and Q do. 

The sound of tarp slapping in the wind alerts them as they draw closer to the main street. Wilbur looks up from the sounds of his own breathing, laboured with carrying the bags on his back. He notes silently that Niki is carrying the load without breaking a sweat. 

“What is that?” Quackity asks, squinting into the distance. 

“What is it? Zombie?” He asks. 

“No, no. Not like that, it’s an object. Sort of big and tipped over.”

“I see it,” Niki says. She drops her bag and runs over to it before Wilbur has the time to warn her of its potential danger. 

He can see her smile even from far away as she pulls it upright. “Come over here!” She yells. 

Quackity follows, running to look at the object. 

“What is it?” Wilbur yells to them, standing still. 

“A tent, we think,” Q says. 

“Is it torn?” 

“In a couple places, but I think we can put it back together.”

Wilbur walks over slowly and finds that they are correct. The tent, half broken but still glorious, hangs half draped over and bent to weird proportions. 

Niki and Q pull it up and try to pull it to the side without ripping it any more than it is. 

“Wil, do you want to take a break from carrying the bags and you and Niki can take the tent until we find somewhere to camp?”

“You want to set down camp this early?”

“We need time to fix it, and we’re not going anywhere, right?”

As Quackity had said. All the time in the world and no way to spend it.

They find a place to camp behind a house on the side of the road. It feels almost swamp-like, a mix of dark greens and brown leaves. 

Wilbur tries to tie the edges and ripped seams with leftover rope but fumbles. He blows on his fingers every once in a while to keep them from freezing. Quackity looks at him concernedly but says nothing. At this point he must know Wilbur is too stubborn to take his advice. He tries to assist him once or twice but seems to rely on Wil to lead him. He’s never been exactly confident in fixing things, but he supposes the carpenter blood, the blood that would make someone capable of fixing something, still exists inside him somewhere. 

He takes a break from the work when his fingers are shaking so hard he can’t get a good grip on the fabric of the tent and Niki offers him a pack of fruit snacks that he takes without persuasion.

Sitting down on a misplaced log, he tears the packet open and puts a handful of the sweet gelatin gummies in his mouth. They are slightly stale but not nearly enough for him to complain about. 

“Good?” Niki asks. 

“Better than soup.”

“ Much better than soup,” Q says, walking by Wilbur and plucking a gummy from his bag. Wilbur playfully bats him away. 

“Get your own bag,” He says without any heat to his voice. 

“I just wanted a sample,” He replies. 

When he finishes the bag (in record time, he’s sure), he stands up and tosses the bag on the ground and walks back to continue on with his work. 

“Hey!” Niki says from behind him. He turns around. 

She holds the bag in her hand, lips turned downwards. 

“What is it?”

“You shouldn’t just throw it on the ground.” 

“Where else am I going to put it?”

“You can go in the house. I’m sure they have a trash bin.”

“Nobody’s coming to pick up bins,” He says. 

“I know. But nature still matters.”

“Does it?” He asks. He knows he shouldn’t pick a fight. He knows very well. 

“Yes,” She says, no irritation in her voice. “I think so. It doesn’t take much to throw it away. I know that this won’t magically make things better, but the earth matters to me.”

To me. To believe in something. That’s what she’s saying. Please don’t do this because to me it matters. And in some way, Wilbur respects her. He doesn’t believe in anything anymore. He used to believe in himself but now even that is a challenge. 

He nods half heartedly and walks over the house, beyond the overgrown backyard, finding a tipped over trash bin at the entrance. He picks it up and puts the small piece of plastic into it, staring into the lidless metal bin. It seems to say something scary about this world, that its existence no longer matters to anyone but the scarce population of people like Niki. Or maybe only Niki. A thought indeed, that there is only one real person left. 

Shuffling back to their camp (a newfound name on account of there now being 3 of them rather than two), he can hear the two talking. 

“I can help, if you want,” Niki says. “I’m not sure I could help you very much with technical things but I don’t want Wilbur to be stuck doing all the work.”

He’s not sure why, but sometimes it catches him off guard to hear someone acknowledge his existence, say his name, like he exists outside of himself. 

“I can do it if you and Wilbur want to work on dinner?” Q asks. 

She nods. “Oh, I did say I was going to make pineapple rice.”

“Q,” He says, now in their field of sight, “I can do it. You and Niki can do dinner. I’ve almost finished it-”

“No,” He says. It’s a firm objection. “You look tired.”

He laughs. “I look tired ? Q, I’m sorry to break it to you, but I am always tired.”

“Well, I’m going to work on it because you’ve been lugging things around all day and it’s my turn to do something.”

“You already do things.”

“Just go make dinner,” He says, shooing him away with a gesture of his hands. 

Wilbur rolls his eyes. He wonders if Quackity notices the smile he brings to his face every time he talks or does something for Wilbur that doesn’t just feel like decency. He has to see it, someone has to. He’s not blatant but he hasn’t hidden it at all. It feels like a sin, a sin that Quackity can’t tell how much he’s saved Wilbur. He’s almost confused at the sensation, how long it’s been since he’s felt something so… domestic.

He leaves Q to his work and walks to Niki who is pouring rice into the bowl they used the day before. 

“So… this amalgamation rice,” He starts. 

She laughs. “It is sorta like that, yeah. My father wasn’t home a lot so I had to improvise.”

“What do you need help with?”

She shows him how he is to drain the canned pineapple juice into a cup and only use the best parts. She takes charge of the packets of nuts and puts them to the side. 

“When the rice is almost ready we’ll put them on the other side of the fire in a cup and roast them until they get a little black on the sides.”

“When do you put the pineapple in?”

“At the end,” She says, in a slight whisper, as if she’s telling a secret that no one else should hear. 

They wait for the water to boil with the rice. She frowns. “I would add salt. If we had any.”

“It’s alright,” Wilbur says. “We can pretend we’re camping.”

“Camping?” 

Wilbur nods. 

“Camping,” She says to herself, seemingly accepting the idea. “Right.”

They cook the rice for 16 minutes and check it with a plastic fork. They leave it for a minute more and then add the meat of the pineapple. 

Wilbur puts the cup of nuts over the fire. “Should I be doing something?”

“Stir,” She says, and so he does. 

He almost burns the slivered almonds but Niki manages to save them. She lets him stir everything together, mixing the rice and almonds and pineapple into a surprisingly appealing mound. 

Q continues to work on the tent, he can hear him groan when one of the ropes comes undone and offers to help, which Q denies. “I’ll be fine, I just-” He attempts to tie it again. “There.” He steps back and looks at the tent. 

“Did you get it?” Wilbur asks, sorting the rice onto used paper plates. 

“I think so!” He says, a smile he can hear in his voice. 

“It’s ready!” Niki yells to him, and he comes over, a line of sweat visible on his forehead even in the cold. He lazily puts down the quilt and sits on it, stretching his arms. 

Wilbur sits down next to him with two plates in his hands. He gives one to Q and thanks him for helping with the tent. Q laughs and thanks him for the food. 

He takes a plastic spoon and digs into the rice. 

As he expected, it’s even better than it looks. 

There’s no use in trying to explain this to someone who eats three meals a day, how fucking amazing it is to eat a warm fresh meal. There’s something about it that makes him feel tender again, something that makes him a little more euphoric than it should. 

“How do you like it?” Wilbur asks Q. 

“I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like… making me sentimental. For fuck’s sake,” He laughs wetly. “I don’t know. It’s just nice. It’s nice to eat something and know that you don’t have to enjoy it like it’s the last time you’ll ever have it. It makes me feel like I’m somewhere else.”

“Isn’t it funny how cooking can do that?” Niki asks. 

He understands how it feels. That somewhere in the world there is still happiness to be found.

Nighttime is a man in an alleyway. A woman with a dagger in her dress. There's something to be said about the adrenaline it leaves you with, that before it is terrifying, it is addicting. Some people like to stand on the edge of cliffs and voids and valleys and hope to themselves that they don’t fall. 

Wilbur is dangling on the edge of a cliff, standing too close to the fire, and still he can’t forget the dream he had. Because he knows that if the thought wasn’t there before, the dream wouldn’t have surfaced. His dreams often humble him because they are the only thing that can tell him exactly how he feels and he can’t argue back. 

Quackity’s jerks out of sleep, blinking to keep himself awake. And something in Wilbur’s heart jerks too; he tries to hush it away but it stays. It’s the second time he’s done it in the last hour or so. 

Wilbur shakes his head at the man, a smile playing across his face. “Q, you’re even more tired than me.”

Quackity sighs. “Well, one day of being the most tired won’t kill me.”

“That’s horrible logic.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. God, why does everything I do take so much out of me?”

“Because we eat terribly and still expect to get up every day and walk 6 miles. Quackity, you’re the nurse here.”

“Nurse?” Niki asks. 

“I was . Sort of. It was only a couple weeks in practice before the world shut down. Most of the stuff I learned in school I’ve forgotten. I’m a nurse but not a very good one.”

“Sure you are,” Wilbur says, nudging him with his arm. “You’ve always cared about me far too much than you should.”

“ You saved me from poisoning.”

“You would’ve done a better job the other way around,” He mutters. 

Q doesn’t make an objection to this statement, only sighs and pats Wilbur’s arm. Even with as much as he’s touched Quackity out of necessity something is different. His feelings have never been easy to decipher, and even though they belong to him they’ve never been something he can see easily. 

“So, who’s taking the tent?” Q asks, wiping his eyes tiredly. 

“Niki?” Wilbur prompts. 

“Oh. No, no. You two should take it. There’s room and besides, the sky is so nice tonight.”

“The sky is grey,” Wilbur says, trying not to sound so deadpan but most likely failing. 

“I know. But if even one star shines through I want to be here to see it. Living without the sky feels like injustice to me now. The world is all we have.”

People. People, he wants to say, are all that we have. He doesn’t blame the world, he never has, at least not the physical aspects. He’s sure any fusion storm is humanity’s own fault anyways. But the thing about the world is that there’s nothing quite like a conversation. Unfortunately, the trees don’t respond when you speak to them, even as insane as you become.

“Alright,” Quackity agrees. “We can switch. Tomorrow you can sleep in the tent.”

She nods without much enthusiasm. 

Quackity closes his eyes for a moment. His head begins to tilt back but he yanks it up at the last second. 

“C’mon, Quackity. You’re falling asleep.”

He groans and Wilbur stands up, extending his hand to Quackity on the ground. 

They get their things and load it into the tent. Wilbur’s backpack, the bottle of water Quackity has been sipping for hours in order to preserve it. 

As always, Wilbur is tired, but curiosity takes hold and before he knows it, he’s laying on the floor of the tent with the leather-bound notebook in hand. 

“What is that?”

“It’s from the facility. Some diary entries. Not hers, someone else's. It looks old.”

“You stole someone’s diary?” He snorts. 

“I don’t know. I need literature or I’ll lose it. It’s reading.”

“What about Romeo and Juliet?” He asks, sitting down next to Wilbur. They have two covers. One under them and one over them. He’s not yet warm but hopes for it to come as he does every night.

“I’ll read it when we take breaks. You can help me decipher it and maybe if we do it enough it won’t read as gibberish.”

Q smiles. “I’m not a miracle worker,” He says. 

Wilbur snickers and opens the book, reading with only the light of the fire shining into the tent. He reads from the first page. Quackity shimmies under the covers and turns onto his side. 

“First entry. I may forget to do this every day, but the chances are low. I’m not sure if it would be worse or better for someone to read this. It’s important to document just as much as it is dangerous. If there is ever a reader, I hope you do not blame me for the things I did. This is not an apology, I should add, but a disclaimer. The world may call it an apocalypse but I see it as the hour of judgement. Let me begin with one thing. I am not a religious man.”

Wilbur reads the words again. Once more. Again. He flips the page and begins to read the second page. 

“I do things because no one else will. This is a fact. I am the first and the last and there is no pride stronger than this in my life. To raise a child is much like this. To live is to destroy. To live and to let live is cowardice.”

“Wilbur,” Q groans. 

He looks up from his book. 

Quackity turns over to face him and the covers twist with him. He yawns. “I’m regretting telling you to take up reading. Go to sleep, it’s late.”

“I imagine it’s 9 o'clock,” He says. 

“I know, but I can’t go to sleep when you’re awake.”

Wilbur sighs. “Alright.” He shuts the books and tucks it under the covers next to him. 

“Good. Sleep,” Q says, yawning again. 

Wilbur tucks himself under the covers and lays facing Quackity. Their faces are close to each other but he won’t move any closer. He just lays and traces his eyes over Quackity’s face, every freckle and mole and crease that makes Q himself. 

Quackity opens his eyes and for a moment everything seems to stop. He speaks and the world unpauses. “Goodnight,” He says. 

Wilbur’s hand is curled up next to him. It’s a habit that makes his hands go to sleep and tingle when he wakes up in the morning. Quackity takes Wilbur’s hand and squeezes it, letting it go a few seconds later. Wilbur squeezes back and then lets go even though he doesn’t want to. 

“Goodnight,” He says back. 

He remembers vaguely what Tommy used to say every night before he would go to bed. 

“Goodnight. See you in the morning.” As if the morning was so assured that there was no reason there wouldn’t be a tomorrow. 

“See you in the morning,” Wilbur says. Q doesn’t open his eyes but his lips turn upwards. He turns over to the other side where Wilbur can’t see his face. 

“See you in the morning,” Q repeats, making himself comfortable in the new position. 

Wilbur keeps his eyes open and looks at Quackity’s back. He thinks of the leather notebook and its words but even more than that, his dreams. He thinks of the worn out laces in his old shoes and the grooves in the walking stick where he had carved his brother’s initials. 

He thinks of dreams and wonders if another good one will save him or lead him to his downfall. He closes his eyes and doesn’t sleep for a long time. 

When he does, there are no dreams. 

Chapter Text

Niki stood in the mirror and knew then that something was different. 

Her hair was longer. She had lived in the facility for years. She didn’t know how many but it could only be one or two. She was alone on the top wooden floor and she was far too aware that there was no one left to hear her throughout the building. 

She stood at the mirror and cut her hair with a pair of old rusty scissors because it was the thing she ought to do in a situation like this. She was trying to conform even in a world where there was nothing to conform to. Niki was a follower. Or at least she used to be. She knew he was dead. There were no ifs. 

Niki thought about things more than she should’ve. She had the time. She read the same books he left her to read over and over again. Classics, tales of adventure and insanity. She often wondered if he found her to be a tool, someone to further his agenda. She had always believed him, but not then when she stood in the mirror. 

There was always a question she couldn’t keep away from answering. It was given that she hated him but still believed the things he said to be true. That he was the only one that could possibly fix the corroded world because no one else would. He sometimes referred to himself as a messiah, a saviour. A god even though he wasn’t quite sure one existed. 

She hated her reflection. She felt the anger she did on the same day he left and turned it inwards onto herself. She believed him when she was 12 years old and she did as a 22 year old in the same way. Blindly. Because what 12 year old questions her father’s actions?

As much as the question spiraled in her head she couldn't configure it. The only thing she could do was resign in knowing that all that he wanted had been done. Almost. He left her here to complete his last selfish requests. To make sure the annihilated stayed annihilated. He left her with a choice.

But he never told her it was a choice, and only then did she realise that it was. That she had more power than he did. She had the choice to burn the vials or leave with them. 

The world was over. There was nothing left to save. 

She screamed until her voice was hoarse. She broke the mirror that showed her the traitorous features of her face. 

She was not a good person and neither was her father. She was selfish. She would soak up her final moments in a field while a new hell spawned out of her own hands because who was she if not her father’s daughter?

She never answered the question of whether she loved her father or hated him. Sometimes there is no clear reason why anyone chooses to do anything. 

The broken shard in her hand pulsed on her bleeding palm. She could feel the veins under them. She wasn’t going to destroy the world for her father, she was not that misguided. This time, she would destroy the world for herself and live to watch it burn. 

“Stop! Look!”

Wilbur looks up from the book in his hand, mid-step. 

Quackity is pointing down at the concrete sidewalk in front of him, seeing something that he does not. He closes the book and squints. Something brown. 

“What is it?”

Q hums questioningly, getting down onto his knees on the sidewalk. Niki cranes her neck to see. 

“It's a lizard,” He whispers.

“A lizard?” Wilbur moves slowly, putting his book back into his pocket and sticking his neck out warily. “Are you sure?”

“Small, but it’s there. Lean down.” In the midst of weeds growing in between the concrete is as Quackity said, a small lizard. It stands completely still, as if they won’t be able to see it unless it moves. 

“I almost stepped on it, jesus.” He gets on one knee and sees it clearly. He used to be interested in animals but has forgotten most of the things he once knew. If you asked him what type of lizard it was 5 years ago he could’ve told you, but not now. 

Its tail is long but its body is small, and it jerks its head suddenly when Quackity tries to get closer. “I don’t know why I assumed animals didn’t live here anymore. I guess it would make sense for there to be more animals now that humans are gone but I haven’t seen one in a few years.” 

“I used to go looking for them in my backyard,” Niki says. “Ones exactly like these. I think they can change colour, no?”

“Hmm.” Wilbur sticks out his index finger and slowly hovers it over the lizard. He’s not sure why he still does this, he used to do it when he was younger and the lizard would always run away before he could touch it. Old habits return quickly. He supposes they must just linger until they are needed, until everything can go back to normal . Maybe his body still doesn’t understand that normal will never happen again. He pulls his finger away when it twists its head. He thinks it is looking at him but he can’t tell. Its eyes are the size of peas and even then they seem to stare into his soul. “It’s looking at me.”

Quackity laughs. “Why hasn’t it run away?”

“It’s probably never seen a person before,” Niki says. “Can you imagine?”

“We must look like giants,” Q says. 

“We are. To most things, I think,” He says. 

It suddenly runs closer towards the street. It stops for a moment and Wilbur can tell that its colour has changed, although only slightly. Its green coloration slowly darkens. He stares at it in awe. He suddenly remembers the zoo he used to go to when he was younger. He and Tommy, loudly commenting obvious facts about the animals they saw. He hopes they let the animals out when it was decided there was no hope left. 

Wilbur stands back up and pats the dirt from his pants. He looks at it and it looks back. It scurries away into the street and he watches it until it’s only a line past the road. 

The events of yesterday flash in his mind as he observes the cracked roads. They’ve had Niki in their group for 3 days now, and it would only make sense for life to throw them a curveball just to see if they could survive it. 

The ground shook with a ferocity that startled them all, small pieces of rock bouncing on the ground, a faithful witness to the earth’s sudden rage upon them. 

“What is this?” Niki shouted, arms out as if to walk an invisible tightrope. 

“Fusion storm,” Wilbur said, holding his balance by stooping down to the dirt. 

“We need to get out of here,” Quackity called to the two of them. 

It was starting to rain. 

They had ran and survived until world’s vengeance came to a stop and they could peer out from the patio roof they had taken shelter in, shivering from the wet wind blowing in their faces. Niki didn’t seem completely shocked at the storm, the way Wilbur would’ve thought, but only stared out into the yard, beginning to flood, with a strange look of awe.

He had huddled next to Quackity, standing stick-straight with his arms wrapped around himself like a child waiting for a bus on a cold winter morning until Q had offered himself as warmth. They stood together as Wilbur tried to hide the fact that his shaking was not only from the cold whilst also looking at the other’s hands, thin but warmer than his own, with scars so small only someone standing close could notice. 

The rain let up after thirty minutes, a short time that Wilbur could only feel relief for, and kept on moving. They travelled until the sun set, spawning a strange orange haze over the normal downcast. 

“How would you say that, Q?”

“What?”

“The sunset. In Spanish.”

“Atardecer.”

He tested it out. “Like that?”

“Atar-decer,” He said, slower. Wilbur hadn’t said it correctly. 

He tried again. 

“Better.”

As they walked along the road, Quackity began to hum a tune. 

“What song is it?”

“Some song my Mom used to play. It must be really old. Probably from the 70’s or something.”

“How does it go?” He asked. 

“I only remember the chorus. Libre, como el sol cuando amanece, yo soy libre como el mar,” He said, talking through the lyrics quietly, becoming more steady in tune as he goes on. “Como el ave que escapó de su prisión y puede, al fin, volar. Libre, como el viento que recoge mi lamento y mi pesar. Camino sin cesar, detrás de la verdad, y sabré lo que es al fin, la libertad.”

“What is it about?”

“The singer, he’s talking about liberty. About being free. I’m pretty sure he died a year after he made this song. It was something about history, one of the past wars, I can’t remember which one. My mom tried to explain it once but I never understood. At the end of the song the person dies or something, pretty depressing,” He laughed.

“Freedom.”

“Liberty,” Quackity said, like a new word. 

It seems like all they do is walk these days, but they’ve tried to make the best out of it. Niki explains things she did to pass the time in the facility and Quackity pretends to take down notes in an invisible journal. She realises once that she’d forgotten something at the facility and seems downcast until dinner, some piece of writing her father left her, a letter or something else. The food, however, seemed to be soothing enough.

They take the first break of the morning on the side of the ground, sitting all together and drinking water like they’ve never had it in their lives. Niki goes off into the trees to use the bathroom before they continue on and Q and Wilbur slip into comfortable silence. He closes his eyes and Quackity makes drawings in the dirt with a stick he found on the ground next to him; he’s humming something new today, something upbeat that he hasn’t heard before.

He takes the time he has to relax, sighing and letting himself untense. He lets himself go slowly and never once realises he’s fallen asleep until he’s suddenly startled awake by a tap on his arm. 

He shoots up, looking at Quackity, who presses a finger to his lips. 

What is it? He mouths. 

Q doesn’t reply, just looks into the forest behind Wilbur that he can’t see. 

A sound comes and he knows exactly what it is. 

He shoots up on his feet, whipping his head back to see a zombie coming out of the forest. Directly following it are two others, all in different states of decomposition. 

Shit. He fumbles to grab his backpack, slinging it over his shoulder, ushering Quackity to run. They’ve undoubtedly seen them already and their best bet is to run. This confirms his prior suspicion. Wilbur cannot have 5 good minutes of uninterrupted rest. 

Quackity mouths Niki’s name to Wilbur even though there’s no use to act like the zombies don’t know they’re standing there. 

“If they came from that direction she’s gone,” He says blatantly. He cannot even comprehend his own words but still says them. 

Quackity looks to him and back at the forest. “Fuck, fuck, fuck .”

“Niki!” Wilbur yells into the ether of trees. No answer. He takes his backpack, hastily pulling out the pistol he’s kept in his backpack for special uses. This is as special of a situation as he’s going to get. He turns off the safety and backs up as they move closer. They aren’t fast, but if they start hunting it’s safe to assume he’s fucked. 

Quackity stays behind Wilbur, moving closer and closer to a house on the other side of the street. If they would run, they’d have to break open the door in record speed to get in without the zombies in tow. 

His heart seems to race. He will never get used to zombies. These are not the creatures hiding under your bed as a child, these are something entirely different. 

“Niki!” He screams again. 

The zombies are too close, far too close. In his shaking hands, the bullet cannot afford to miss. He only has two. He has to hit the heart, he has to be precise. He can’t hardly think, the adrenaline feels like alcohol in his blood. 

He closes his eyes for a split moment and then opens his eyes, stepping onto the sidewalk behind him without looking. 

The bullet fires, lodging into the zombies chest. It falls to the ground. 

The second zombie begins to hunt. 

He turns and runs, up the steps of the front yard and up to the door, smashing the pistol as hard as he can into the window on the side of the house. He hits and hits. He always assumed glass was as fragile as they showed in movies, but it hits with a clunk of defiance. 

Colours flash in his head, fireworks in his brain. That’s the thing about when you die. Near death experiences show you something about your life, a ‘life flashing before your eyes’ moment, and real death takes you with less than a thought. 

They are so close he can feel their presence behind him. He can’t tell where Quackity is, what he’s saying even though he knows it must be something judging from the yelling in the peripheral of his mind. 

A hand on his leg. He kicks it, turning around and stomping on its decaying fingers. It doesn’t let out any physical register of pain but opens its mouth. The rest seems to be in slow motion. He struggles against its hold.

Quackity has rushed forward, taking the knife from Wilbur’s pocket that he hadn’t been able to retrieve and stabbing it multiple times in its chest. His own breathing has never sounded so loud. 

Despite any hope he had of Quackity somehow hitting the heart disappears when it doesn’t fall. 

He’s flailing, kicking as it tackles him to the ground. Quackity shrieks in the background. It’s face is right up to his, hissing and bearing its rancid teeth. He doesn’t know that he’s yelling until he hears the sound of his own voice. 

And then the zombie stops, face suddenly blank, dropping like a fly. Blood spatters his face and he closes his eyes for a moment before opening them, shoving the body away from him and clambering onto the porch. He looks up in confusion. Standing like a heroine stands Niki. She rips her knife from the zombie’s limp body, and specks of blood follow with it, adding to the already crimson stains on her clothes. 

She stands and breathes, wiping her face with a hand that only smears more blood onto her cheek. She extends a hand to him and with her help he stands, looking behind her to see the other zombie dead on the ground, laying in a pool of gore. He tears his gaze away and looks at Niki, nodding.

“Are you okay?” She asks, face contorting in concern.

He blinks and nods. “We need to get inside. If there’s any zombies left, they’re coming.”

Quackity puts a hand on his shoulder and he jolts. “Sorry,” He says. “Thank god it didn’t get you. Niki, jesus christ.”

She doesn’t comment, only puts the knife back into her back pocket and punches the window with all her might. It shatters and she reaches a bloodied hand into it, feeling for the lock of the door. She seems to get it and finally pulls the door open. 

“Jesus,” Quackity repeats in a fizzled breath, walking into the house. 

Wilbur hesitantly runs back to their resting spot, not stopping to check for zombies, and lugs their larger bags back into the house. 

Quackity helps secure the window so that if any zombies do come, they will at least have to put in effort to get in. 

The house is completely empty, void of furniture or pictures on walls. 

They sit down on the floor in the kitchen where there are no windows. Mould grows in the corners of the room so they sit in the middle, leaning on their own arms and taking deep breaths. It occurs to him that he’s never been the one to kill a zombie in all the times they’ve been near one. Quackity the first couple times, and now Niki. He knows if he said something Quackity would assure him that it’s nothing to be upset about, but it doesn’t exactly upset him. Only worries him. 

Silent, they listen for any movement outside. 

“Should we just stay here for the night?” Q asks. 

Niki nods. “Maybe that’s a good idea. I don’t want to be near here in the forest.”

Wilbur clenches and unclenches his fists. The trembling has reduced to a slight tremor. “Okay,” He whispers hoarsely. His throat has gone dry with the effort of yelling.

“Is anyone hungry? I can put some honey on bread,” Niki says. 

Quackity nods. “Thanks,” He says, and she nods, taking two packages of MRE snack bread and opening them, revealing strange bread-like shapes, thicker than a normal loaf but still seeming to be okay to eat. “What is it?” Q asks, judging the slabs of wheat. 

“They used to eat it in the army. I’ve had a couple, but I’ve saved more.”

“Do they taste like bread?”

“Mm, almost like a big graham cracker but softer.” She slathers on the honey and hands it to Quackity. She turns to Wilbur. “Do you want any?”

He raises his hand. “No, thanks. I can’t eat now.”

She nods, making one for herself and settling down, legs extended, arm by her side to hold herself upright. As if she’s in a field rather than in a stuffy abandoned home. It would be unnerving if he hasn’t wanted to be that person for so long. Able to live and move on and enjoy the little victories. 

They sit in silence for a moment until Quackity speaks. “It’s not bad. I bet it would taste good if you put it in a… toaster,” He says, apparently forgetting for a moment. The conversation stills. 

“It’s okay, I forget too,” Niki says, eyes downcast to her shoes, laces mangy and slightly yellowed from their original white. 

Wilbur wants to ask how it’s done. He never forgets, not for a moment. He tries. 

“Solar storms are a bitch,” Quackity says, taking another bite. 

She laughs. “Never heard anyone call nature a bitch before.”

“Well, it is. I mean, maybe it doesn’t know it ruined my life, but it has.”

“Everyone knew it was going to happen,” She says. “It was only a matter of time.”

“People knew?”

“Not everyone , but enough that they thought they could just outrun it. Turn off electricity to prevent it, that with such a big storm they would have time to put orders in place. But they were wrong. Like all of humankind.”

“Had something like this happened before, then?” Q asks. 

“Nothing as big as the last storm was. The last time a storm that big came along the only thing it had to fry were the telegraphs. I’m not sure whether it was insolence or stupidity but somehow they thought they could just prolong it,” She laughs bitterly. 

“How does it happen? Like, there was never a good explanation.”

“Basically, bursts of radiation happen on the sun called solar flares. This sends electrical charge and magnetic fields to earth. Depending on how powerful it is, it could make your internet choppy or destroy it entirely. The entire system. Anything with copper. The reason they thought it wouldn’t happen was because it was rare. A lot of things would have to go right, or wrong, for something like that. But here we are, just because we happened to be unlucky.”

“It was bigger than the one with the telegraphs?”

She nods. “Supposedly, the radiation could let you see aurora borealis, but with the weather and the time passed we probably missed it.” Her voice is downturned. 

“Oh,” He says. “That sucks.”

“Yes. Zombies themselves are amazing, they’re unlike anything we thought possible to achieve-” She stops herself. “Interesting. That’s a better word. Zombies are interesting. But solar storms aren’t observable anymore. It’s unfortunate.”

It’s unfortunate. Wilbur bites his tongue. 

Quackity finishes eating and lays on his back, eyes fixed up on the water-damaged ceiling. 

Wilbur scoots forward, bringing himself close to Quackity and then following the action, laying down on his back. 

“I’m fucking tired,” Quackity says. “I could sleep right here.”

He smiles. “You should go to sleep then.”

“A nap,” He decides. “Wake me up in a while, okay?”

Wilbur laughs. “Okay. In a little while.”

“Good. Commencing sleep.”

He snorts, holding his arms over himself as Niki moves positions, tucking herself up by the sink and closing her eyes. Anxiety keeps him awake most nights more than anything else and this time is no different, but he closes his eyes slowly, keeping his mind on simple things for once. What he’ll eat for breakfast tomorrow, the leather journal in his backpack. The scars on his arms he wishes he could tear off. 

Quackity’s breath slows and without opening his eyes he knows the man next to him is asleep. There’s a certain comfort in knowing there’s someone next to you; something he feels greedy for enjoying but nonetheless lets himself feel. He soaks it up like there’s nothing better in the world. Because now there isn’t.

What little of the sun there is has retreated back into the depths of sky in favour of a pitch black. He can barely see it when he wakes up, dragging a hand across his fatigued eyes, but he knows it's there. He’s never understood his internal clock, but either way it continues working despite everything. 

Quackity still sleeps soundly next to him and he’s endeared at the sight, Quackity’s head lolled to the side, a dribble of drool on the side of his lip. When he turns his head in the other direction, he expects to see Niki doing the same, but her eyes, catlike in the low lighting, watch him from the left. 

He stands up, vaguely wondering how late it is, and walks over to her wordlessly, sitting down next to her with his back leaned against the wooden cabinet beneath the sink. 

“Did you get to sleep?” He whispers. 

She shakes her head. “No. It’s hard to fall asleep these days. Too many thoughts. I shouldn’t be this particular about sleeping, I know, but it just makes me feel sort of out of place.”

“I wish I could say I understood,” Wilbur admits. “But it’s been a while since I’ve had a normal place to sleep.” He cracks a smile, as if it's a joke. Both of them know it’s not, but she reciprocates the action. 

Her smile fades slowly and he tries not to give the impression that he’s staring so he looks away. Finally after a few stiff minutes he looks back. “Are you okay?” He asks, because his social skills have gone to hell and it’s the normal thing to ask. 

She blinks, gaze brightening as if she’s returned from thought, and turns to him. “Oh, yes. Fine.” She frowns. “Sometimes it’s just hard to make decisions.”

“I know. We’re always here though, just so you know. Me and Quackity. We’ve been through the lot of it.”

She gives a sad smile. “Thank you.” She takes her arm and puts it on his shoulder, giving it a small squeeze. “Really. I don’t know if you understand how much this means. All of this.”

“Yeah, uh, no problem.” 

She seems to hesitate, as if she wants to say something. Instead she turns to him and takes a breath. “Oh, this crazy world.”

He’s not sure what’s prompted this, but nods. “Crazy world,” He agrees. A few minutes later he decides to stand up and go upstairs, backpack in hand. He imagines he’ll sleep there unless another storm rolls around and so he carries his quilt up with him. Niki doesn’t object, just watches him for a moment and closes her eyes. He can still see her eyes moving beneath her eyelids when he goes up the stairs. 

He checks the closets and finds two candles. He lights them up and places them close by on the ground but not close enough to be dangerous. He sets down the quilt and pats it before laying down against one of the walls. His shoulder blades ache but he doesn’t address it, pulling out the slightly battered leather book. He won’t lie, he itches to read it all day. The topic material is interesting enough, some scientist at the facility, a creator, an experimentalist, but more than that, a naturalist. 

He squints at the small lettering, trying to figure out where he stopped last. 

The man is talking about his life, his childhood and mother. His daughter, albeit precariously, as if there's a reason he should not speak of her. 

“Anyone reading this book in order cannot see what is sorely ahead of them. Whoever holds this book is most the most fortunate and unfortunate man to live. If you do not understand soon, you never will. My daughter said I was a cryptic man, and that I am. She is her father’s daughter. I told her once that everything I do is intentional and she said I was a liar. She may be correct. But I to this day will never ask her what she meant by that. I know I’m a liar. But not about this. I believe with conviction. I have something to believe in. I do not wish to be erected in gold or receive an award for my due diligence. All I live for is this world. I live for neither my family or society or my daughter. She once called me selfish. I’m not so certain she will hold up to her duties as well as she should. She once said I could trust her with any task I needed her to fulfil. It seems she is more of a liar than I. But the thing about being selfish, I told her, is that none of this benefits me in the end. I have never done this for my own sake. These are not delusions of grandeur. These are the thoughts of a revolutionary. Of a new man. And the radio tells my tales unknowingly as I sit down by my desk, smelling the air of a collapsing city outside my window as I write this to you now. No one will miss it, not even if they think they will. I have lived to die, how could a man be so selfless?”

He flinches when the door creaks. He jolts up in alert, relaxing when he sees Quackity close the door behind him, shuffling towards Wilbur and sliding down to sit on the quilt next to him. 

“You’re still readin’ th’t book?” He asks, yawning, peering into Wilbur’s lap at the book. His voice makes Wilbur smile. 

“You woke up,” He says. 

“Well, you got up. So.”

“You gonna sleep here?”

He scoots closer to Wilbur. Wilbur’s eyes widen and he stares at him when Quackity puts his head on his shoulder, hands resting on his waist. 

“You look nice,” Wilbur says, partly because he can’t help it, and partly because he’s too tired to regret it. 

Q opens his eyes. He snorts. “No you.”

Wilbur shakes his head, readjusting the book in his lap. “Are you going to sleep now? You can lie under the quilt if you want. It’s more comfy, I’d imagine.”

Shaking his head, he burrows his head into the side of Wilbur’s neck. “I’m comfortable here already.”

He sighs. “Okay. Goodnight Q, sleep well.”

“Gnite,” He mumbles, fingers beginning to untense around Wilbur. He smiles at Quackity’s tired form even though he knows the man can’t see him. He’s not sure what the feeling is in his heart leading him to do this but he knows it's powerful. 

He continues reading his book, hand rubbing over Quackity’s. He begins to snore and Wilbur stifles a chuckle. 

Howling of wind outside travels through vulnerable spaces in the windows, making the candles seem to shiver. 

Wilbur has never felt warmer. 

Chapter Text

“And the first time I saw it in her I knew it was destined for something great. Something new and extraordinary. I loved her once. She was the sun and the moon and thus the world continued to turn. I was a scientist and she was magic. I did not believe in her and I still do not. But she is me, even though she hasn't seen it yet. And in this world you can only ever trust yourself.”

When Wilbur awakes, his eyes are looking into Quackity’s. 

His body does not shiver or shake, bleary eyes blinking as his vision restores. “Q?” He asks, mind beginning to recall how he got to this position. Always small flashes, knowing he did something but being so tired he can’t exactly recall. 

Last night, after reading for a few minutes, he got under the covers with Quackity, still holding his hand until he fell asleep. He’s not sure what that means. But it was wonderful. 

“I’m here,” Quackity assures, readjusting his head closer to Wilbur’s. They had folded up the top of the quilt to act as pillows. He observes the smooth skin of his face, his downturned eyes, his nose. He’s not sure how he hadn’t noticed it all before, how beautiful Q is. 

“Have you been awake for a while?” He asks. 

“Only a little while.”

“And so you just watched me sleep?” He teases. 

“You twitch in your sleep, did you know that?” Q giggles. 

“I did not,” He says, his line of a smile upturning. 

“And you have a lot of freckles,” Quackity says. He takes his arm out from under the covers and cups his hand on Wilbur’s cheek. He flinches briefly, closing his eyes on instinct. When he opens them, Quackity is looking at him with a concerned expression. 

“Sorry,” Wilbur says, in a whisper of a laugh.  

Q rubs his thumb over the side of his face, just above his cheekbones. When people have observed him like this, looked into his soul, they don’t usually seem to like what they find. Their eyes trail over him as if he’s something to be judged, but Quackity doesn’t. Quackity doesn’t observe him, he looks at him. Looks at him like he’s something worth looking at. 

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Wilbur asks. 

“What way?”

“Like… as if you want to look at me.”

“Well, I do ,” Q says. 

“Why?”

“Because maybe if I look hard enough I can see into your heart.”

“Whyever would you want that?” He jokes. 

“I want to understand you.”

“What is there to understand?”

“I just want to understand how I found the most wonderful person I’ve ever met, in the apocalypse . We wouldn’t have ever met, right? Before that?”

“Do you believe in fate?”

“It would be easier to explain that if I did,” He says. 

“Then make it easy.”

Q smiles. 

“I think… I really like you, Quackity. And I keep going through it in my brain over and over and I can’t understand myself, but I do,” He rambles on, feeling the heat on his face rise as he talks. “I do, Q. I like you. That’s the only thing I know.”

Despite his own embarrassment at the words flying out of his mouth, Quackity only keeps his endeared expression, apparently amused at his words. 

“Did I sound that bad?” Wilbur says, putting his head under the covers to hide his face.

Q lifts the covers off of him. “No. I just think it’s so nice to see you happy.”

If he wasn’t already red, he definitely is. “Oh,” He says, because that’s all he can possibly think to say to something like that . 

“And I don’t mean it like ‘I’m seeing who you used to be’ because I don’t know if that person still exists. But what I am saying is that I see you now.”

“The me now has been scarred to hell and back, if you haven’t noticed,” He says. 

“And that’s okay . I mean- it’s not like.. Okay, but I’m just trying to explain-” He huffs, frustrated at his own words. “I’m trying to say that even if you don’t like the person you are now, I do. I love him, and I think he’s funny and sweet and- you are. You are sweet, and funny and all the other things you don’t seem to see, but I do.”

Love.

“I wish I had better words to express that you are the sun that never was, but christ that sounds so stupid- I hope you can at least understand me when I say that when I look at you, I see the most beautiful part of the world, but even then I don’t think you could really understand.”

And then Quackity leans in and kisses him. 

He feels all of it, every sensation of Quackity’s hands around his face, every selfish breath he is taking now that his brother never did, every breath he can’t find it in himself to feel guilty for. He’s never felt this before. He can’t understand how love like this could ever be selfish. 

His mind screams that he doesn’t know what he’s doing he doesn't know what he’s doing and what does he do next -  and somehow he ignores it. Because he only gets one time to have a first kiss with Quackity and if he doesn’t take in every sensation now he never will. 

Although he’s unsure how long a kiss should normally last, he knows that he never wants this one to end. He knows crying would be the wrong reaction to this sort of action but he feels tears prick his eyes anyway. It’s overwhelming but at the same time it’s everything he’s ever wanted, complex but ever so simple.

He lays his hands over Quackity’s arms and feels the softness of his skin. Quackity moves his hands to Wilbur’s neck, gently fiddling with strands of his hair. It’s an electric pulse moving through him, knowing the connection between one individual and another and blurring it until everything is hazy and soft and wonderful. 

They seem to sense each other’s need for air and release the kiss. Disconnecting from a kiss feels like coming up from the water of baptism, the world new and larger than before, colours brighter and breath renewed. 

He looks at Quackity and feels the world at his fingertips.

The memory of the kiss seems to follow Wilbur as they walk downstairs, hand in hand. The act makes him nervous, or maybe more like excitement. His palms sweat incessantly, Quackity thankfully doesn’t mention it. 

Niki doesn’t look at them when they get downstairs, only continues packing up the few things they had taken last night. 

“Good morning,” Q says to her, releasing Wilbur’s hand for a moment to stretch his arms. 

She nods curtly. “Good morning.” It’s unlike her to sound dry, but Wilbur knows she most likely didn’t sleep well. She stuffs a blanket into one of the bags and continues with a concentrated expression. 

“So, where are we going today?” Quackity asks. Wilbur notices he speaks out of compulsion in awkward silence. 

“Thought we could get to town, look around. Food is running short. Niki, how much left do we have left?” Wilbur asks. 

She lifts her head for a moment. “Not very much, but it will last if I ration it all out. Bread gets boring, but you know,” She says dryly, no usual pleasant expression on her face. 

He nods. “Closest border city is Reynosa . Did I say that right?”

“Little more emphasis on the o. Like, Rey- noh -sa,” Q says. 

“Right. So, we go there and then travel next to Monterrey ?” He asks. Quackity lets out a sound of agreement but Niki doesn’t answer. “Niki?” He asks. 

“Sorry?” She asks, blinking. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“I said we should go to Reynosa today and then get to Monterrey by next week.”

“Oh, yes. That’s fine,” She says, but her voice doesn’t sound completely focused, as if she’s responding simply to respond. 

They pack up their things quickly and take turns on the road to the next city carrying the heaviest bags. Wilbur’s hands become dry and cracked with calluses and Quackity offers to switch off when they take a break. 

The break doesn’t seem to come quickly enough, as Wilbur practically falls to sit on the ground, legs like jello, when they finally put over to the side of the road and into the trees. 

They pass around a bag of stale cereal and call it lunch. In rationing, you resort to strange meals, and Wilbur is no stranger to them.

Little slits of sunlight shine  as they sit down, limbs heavy, the sound of their collective breathing a quiet dialogue between them. 

“Wil,” Tommy breathed heavily. It was hot, unbearably so. This was their third stop of the day. 

“I know,” He said. 

“What?”

“That you’re tired. And you want to go home or go back to Dad’s Spot or camp. And I know you’re hungry. I am too.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” He snapped back in the way brothers do. 

“What were you going to say?”

“That the grass here looks nice.” His voice had softened. “It’s green. It hasn’t been green in a while.”

Thoughts like this, although he may choose not to address them, make his life unnecessarily heavy. A weight like a shackle or padlock on his heart that tears him down. Makes him love with a pavlovian response that he has to suppress, a love that makes him hurt. 

But today it doesn’t come. It only buzzes beneath his skin like a nag of the past. He can’t ignore it and he doesn’t want to. And when it comes and goes like it always does, it doesn’t leave him in tears. It leaves him looking up to the sky, heart opened and flying above him like a dove. It leaves him remembering and wanting to remember. 

He misses it all and allows himself to miss. 

“You okay?” Q asks, hand on his shoulder. 

Wilbur nods. “I hope so,” He says, with the tone of a light joke that isn’t one but still that Q accepts. 

Q nods. “God, the world is so much better when you don’t have to weed whack your way through everything. You can just sit and enjoy it. I don’t know how the hell Tarzan did it.” A gust of wind rolls through and for once it is almost pleasant. “Is it warmer today or is it just me?”

Wilbur hums. “I mean, if it were even just a few degrees higher it would be better.”

Niki doesn’t speak. 

“What kind of weather do you like, Niki?”

“I don’t know. Maybe spring. Or something else. I don’t know, whenever things are green again.”

They leave it at that, travelling for another two hours and letting Niki carry a couple bags. Wilbur and Quackirty talk as they usually do, making jokes (a new progression for Wil but nonetheless a good one) and talking about anything that distracts them while Niki stays eerily silent. 

Quackity once waved his hand in front of her jokingly. “You good? You’ve been staring into space for forever.”

“I’m fine,” She replied, and although Niki may have missed Q’s glance at him that said, ‘what’s going on with her?’ Wilbur did not. 

They stay on the main road even though Wilbur has come to prefer travelling through back roads and arrive at Reynosa during what he supposes is the mid afternoon. 

The city is deserted. 

They look through as many shops as they can, finding old miscellaneous vegetables, inedible as all the rest. They find one bag of arroz as the package reads, and one can of frijoles negros . 

“Thank fuck,” Quackity says, putting the can into the bag. “I was getting sick of brown beans. I’ve always liked the black ones better.”

“What’s the difference?” Wilbur asks, and Q fakes a shocked expression. 

“You’ll see when we make them. But trust me, they’re better.”

Wilbur puts his hands up in faux surrender. “Okay, okay. I trust you. Didn’t mean to disgrace black beans.”

“Forgiven,” Q says, and walks ahead of him. 

After searching streets upon streets, a noticeable darkness has spread out in the sky somewhere beyond the clouds like a black sheet covering the sun.

“How late is it?” Q asks. 

“Not late. But storm clouds accumulated so it seems later.”

“Shit. Should we camp or try to find a decent house?”

“I don’t know. If it rains we can camp but if it storms we’ll have to find a house.”

They walk to the outskirts of the city, an hour of dragging themselves along and trying to maintain their stamina, and find a good patch of trees and tall grass beyond a fence, already trampled over for their apparent convenience. Weeds have gathered over the fence on the ground in a way that tells them the development is old. 

They walk until they find a completely secluded spot with no space between the trees to see through. There it begins to drizzle, small raindrops adorning Q’s face like pearls. Wilbur thinks he’s the only one that notices. 

The atmosphere makes it easy to believe that this is a simple outing with his friends, a weekend away or something akin to what he used to do. If not for his itchy hair and smelly clothes (that no one mentions but he feels at an extreme degree), it would be. He thinks about normal too much, he thinks to himself as he sets up the tent with Q. Far too much. 

Niki doesn’t offer to help them set up like usual, only walks farther out and sits on the grass. Maybe before he might warn her of snakes but he’s almost sure there’s no more snakes in places like this. Something about the zombies scared them off, changed the way and order things used to go. He knows they must be somewhere out there, all together in a remote place. Or they’re dead. Although he would rather think of nature as a protective thing, something that bends but never breaks. 

Once the tent is set up, the drizzling amplifies, and Wilbur and Quackity take refuge in the tent, huddled up in a quilt as the wind increases. Wilbur comments on the fact that they had just said the weather might be improving and scoffs at the irony. 

He doesn’t think of normal when he does this because he notices the fault in reasoning that anything could possibly be normal again. Instead, he uses the word ‘simple’ to describe the action of sitting in the tent, saying things quietly to Q and laughing like a child again. It is not normal because it can’t be, but it can be simple. For only this once. 

Niki sits inside the tent along with them unspeakingly, staring at her fingers as if they’ve been dirtied. 

Wilbur’s mind can’t stop itself from recalling a quote from the leather diary. He reads mostly when he’s alone, like he must keep it a secret for a reason unbeknownst to him. It’s curious, the entire thing, and makes him feel special by association. As if he’s holding a book that now carries more significance than any other. The man’s philosophy is strange, but then again, everyone did develop strange ideas during the end. 

“She was unsure but she had conviction. I had given that to her when she was young, the morals of the modern man. But as she grew, things changed quickly. A man without power was once nothing. But what is power now but a sickness of the mind that tells you there is still honor to be had? The only honor is mutual destruction that only one can achieve. I told her this once. She only stared. I wish every day I could go back to that moment and ask her what she possibly could not understand.”

The man sounds delusional but Wilbur can’t stop himself from feeling sympathy for him. If he himself had just a little less sanity he would be just like the man. All you need to do is fall. Once you’ve fallen you keep falling, spiralling until you reach the end of the rope. And then after that, death. He at least likes to imagine that he has the bare minimum of sanity. Or that he’s possibly gained some. Most he can attribute to Quackity. 

Under the covers, Wilbur warms Quackity’s hands in his own. His backpack sits next to him. In it reveals the one bullet pistol. He takes it into his hand and examines it, then slips it into one of his holsters, next to his knife. He likes the feeling of security it gives him while it’s in his possession.

Niki finally seems to snap out of her haze, standing up and looking through one of the bags. “Do you both want hot chocolate? I have two more packets,” He asks, looking at them hopefully. 

Wilbur looks at Quackity, who nods enthusiastically. “I never saw them. If I knew we had it I would’ve made them earlier.”

“I was saving them,” She says. “Wilbur?”

“Sure,” He says. The last time he had hot chocolate was years ago.

“Will you be able to start the fire and everything?” Q asks. “By yourself?”

She nods quickly. “Yes, I’ll be fine. Thank you. You can stay here and I’ll bring it.”

“It’s still drizzling, isn’t it?” Wilbur asks. 

“That’s never stopped me,” She says, a small smile across her face. It wavers for a moment and then drops when she takes the packets of hot chocolate and opens the tent, disappearing into the dark.

“She seems upset today,” Q whispers. “Or maybe not upset. Just really down. Do you think something’s wrong?” He frowns, forever with an empathy Wilbur imagines he will never have. 

“I don’t know. Maybe we can ask her about it when she comes back.”

“I don’t want to be invasive,” Q says. 

“Well, we won’t demand her or anything. I mean, we do care.”

Q nods, shivering when wind comes through the loose flaps of the tent. 

“Are you cold?”

“I shouldn’t be, but it's freezing. The quilt still isn’t enough. I guess it’s really a good night for hot chocolate then?” Q says, tugging the blanket up to his neck. 

“You look like you’re in a cocoon,” Wilbur says affectionately. “It’s cute.”

Quackity reddens and laughs. “Glad you clarified that.” He shivers again.

“Here, I’ll go out and get you another blanket from one of the bags. We can share it,” Wilbur says. 

Q nods. “Okay. Come get it and run back. If it’s cold for me here it’s going to be even colder out there.”

Wilbur agrees and slips out of the tent, zipping it up behind him. He sees Niki with cups on the ground next to the fire, back facing towards him. He watches her take two vials from her pocket into her hand. His eyebrows crease. 

“Niki?” He asks. 

She twists around so quickly that she has no time to hide her surprised expression, a slip of horror in her face. “Wilbur! I-I was just-” She closes the vial she had been opening and hides them in her fist, putting her hands behind her back when she stands up. They are small but he can see the pink colouring. 

“What is that?” He asks. If she had not given such an intense reaction he might go about this differently, but the nervousness in her eyes gives her away. 

She doesn’t answer. She’s shaking. Wind howls around them. 

“Niki, what are those?”

“I-I they’re not anything. I- they’re medicine. My medicine.”

“What type of medicine?”

“Cough syrup,” She replies. “I’ve had a-a cough, um, recently.” 

“Show it to me.”

“I don’t have to show you anything,” She says, which takes him aback. 

“Niki, I’m going to ask you now very clearly. What are in those vials?”

He hesitates in pulling the gun from his pocket, but he still does. Every part of him seems to be frozen in fear except his hands, finger on the safety. 

Her lip wobbles like a child and he wonders if she’s about to cry or scream. “Wilbur, listen to me. Listen. If you could only understand what this would mean, if you let me explain this to you.”

“Then explain.”

“My father. He- he did all this.”

“What?” He accuses. Tears finally begin to roll down her cheeks and the fiercer part of him comes forward from hiding. Wilbur’s jaw clenches. “Niki, if you don’t explain right now I’m going to assume the worst.”

“My father made them. It’s… it’s the- it was the only solution.”

His blood seems to freeze along with the rest of him. He can’t feel his body.

“I don’t know if it’s right. I don’t. But it happened, that’s it. There’s no fixing it, Wilbur. I need you to understand there was no other way to permanently solve everything.”

“Solve what?”

“You see it, he saw it. The world was dying.”

“Who?”

“My father. He knew this was the only way he,” She trails off into sobs, “he could possibly fix it.”

He approaches her slowly but swiftly. With her head lowered she can’t tell. When she looks up he sees the world in her eyes. 

“You can’t be saying this is a human creation. You’re lying.”

“My father was a scientist. The world was dying so he had to save it.”

“How is this saving it? He- he worked at that facility didn’t he? You’re his daughter?”

She doesn’t nod but she doesn’t have to. 

“What’s going on?” Quackity asks, suddenly behind him. He doesn’t take his gaze off of Niki. 

Wilbur can’t say it. 

“Niki, explain exactly what you mean or I’ll shoot.”

“Wilbur, what the hell is going on,” Q says harshly. 

“My father made the zombies.” She can’t stand to look at them. She studies the ground. “He knew what everyone else knew but no one wanted to say. If you got rid of humans, all of them, if you stopped carbon emissions and everything else, you would get what you wanted. The earth could live. And so he did. He worked for my entire life on this project. He wanted the best for the environment, he said. But I don’t know if that was correct or not. But he did it and now that’s all that matters.”

“What’s in the vials?” Q says.

“Wilbur, you were the perfect candidate! You were healthy enough, you were trusting enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was the final equation. I was the part he said that mattered the most. He knew there might be people who survived it, who would have the ability to reproduce and start society. So he left the vials.”

“You were going to… poison us?” Quackity yells. 

“No, not poison. Never poison. Just… change you,” She says, her eyes wide. “A higher strain of the virus. Stronger, faster, better. When we lived in the facility, he created it and told me that if he died first I would carry on. I had to promise.” Her voice breaks.

“Niki, throw them in the fire,” Wilbur says. 

She holds them tighter in her fist. “I can’t do that, Wilbur. If you could understand that this would save the world, that all the animals would come back, that the world would be restored to paradise , you would do it. It’s the greatest cause known to man-”

“Your father killed my brother. He killed him, in cold fucking blood because he was delusional enough to believe that killing everyone could save the fucking world. Your father caused my father to die . What is the world worth if there’s no one to fucking live on it?” His voice shakes. He turns off the safety on his gun. 

“Wilbur, you have to understand-”

“I don’t have to understand anything. I can’t even fucking comprehend what you’re telling me right now. You did this- for what ?”

“They decompose over time. After long enough the soil will enrich, the world will be beautiful again-”

Quackity steps closer to her and she steps back. “It was my father’s whole life,” She whispers, pathetically, tragically. 

“It doesn’t have to be yours,” Quackity says, stepping close to her and holding his hand in hers, the one with the vials. Wilbur lowers the gun slightly. “If you let us burn it, you can live. You don’t have to do any of this.”

“It already is. It always has been. I’d rather die honourably than live with guilt.”

“What is honour now?” Wilbur asks. 

“The only thing I have,” She says.

A pit of sorrow digs into his chest. 

“Every day of my life, every day of my childhood he said this was the only way. The only right thing. And when I got older I questioned it. But it’s not about questioning anymore. It’s not about believing or not. It’s about not making my father’s death for nothing. I hate him, I think he’s the most horrible thing to ever come out of the world. But he’s destroyed it all. Now there’s no way to go but down, right?”

“Niki-” Quackity tries, but she shuts him down. She rips her hand from his hold and takes the vials, unscrewing one and holding it up. “Your logic is flawed. You can’t possibly know if this is going to work, Niki-”

“You were the perfect one,” She says, cutting him off, facing towards Wilbur. “You were for this. But to tell you the truth, I only chose you because I didn’t want it to be me. There only needed to be one recipient,” She says, and holds the vial up to her mouth. “The solar storm was luck, the fusion storms are a consequence, but my father’s force of reconciliation is fate .”

Quackity shouts something but he doesn’t register it. He feels his body move without thought, with only a simple motion of his hands. 

She puts it to her lips, tilting it upwards like the moment after a toast, and the gun goes off. 

She always wondered what death would be like, but she never expected the darkness. 

The pain only lasted for a split second. She felt the blood run down her forehead for a swift moment and then she was somewhere else, somewhere where nothing exists and she doesn’t either. She can’t feel her body. She tries to blink but the darkness doesn’t change. 

She doesn’t remember how she got here. Maybe she did at first, but as seconds stretch on everything seems to have been wiped clean. There is no sound. No shuffling or sounds of movement. She’s neither sitting nor standing. She doesn’t remember her name nor the concept of one. 

She’s disappearing. 

Moments stretch on. 

A blinding light appears in front of her like an incision in the dark. Like ripped thread. She’s seeing something but she cannot give it a name. 

She is leaving. 

Her eyes have gone. Her ability to feel is dull. There is no heart in her chest or blood to make it beat. 

She is okay.  

There is a new emotion, one she has only ever seen in dreams. Nothing is certain, but nothing is uncertain either. She is being unstitched, ununified, but she has no protest. It is soft. She is love. She is a system of things. She is a soul in a vast open space and she is not alone. 

She is gone and she is here and everything is there to greet her. 

Chapter Text

Wilbur runs until he can’t run anymore. 

The sun is shining above him and yet it’s raining. Clouds separate the sky into two halves and he’s slowly being taken into the darkness of the clouds. It’s subtle but he feels it. Wind sweeps across his face and he still can’t catch his breath when he kneels on the side of the road. 

He had always felt older than he is, but now he feels his youth. Oh how young he is now. 

He lost his brother. 

He is alone and the world is ending. 

It is the first real day, but he does not know this now. It will take a year or more to truly realise that this is the day, September 10th, that will be the last of one civilization and the start of the next. 

When the first news of the… creatures (they weren’t certain of it exactly, only that they were dangerous and otherworldly) began to spread from nearby towns, he, his father, and his brother travelled to the next nearby city to live with their grandparents. Tommy complained about the close quarters, but Wilbur’s greatest concern was the risk of the nearest city. His father was especially worried about his mother and father at home, and so Wilbur’s concerns were left behind. 

It had been 5 days until the reports began to come out, that the government warned them to stay in their homes like hermits until they found a cure. Everyone had joked in the beginning, the internet had a field day discussing and dismissing believers in ‘real life zombies’ or anything of the like, but as things got worse and worse, no one was laughing. 

To Wilbur, it was a far out concept, like aliens landing on earth or the legend of the loch ness monster. He never thought it was possible. He joked too, like everyone else. 

He drops fully down to the ground in a sort of prayer stance, stifling sobs but not well, tears pricking his eyes. 

In only hours he has lost everything. 

He stands after long minutes and looks out on the road. He flinches at a gunshot in the distance. Nothing but the clothes on his back, he searches through the trees aimlessly, looking for a spot to sleep for the night. He doesn’t have a notion of what he’s doing and the identical trees surrounding him like a maze do nothing to help. 

Never would he have thought before that the detachment from his family would make his eyes so wild, his senses so heightened, his actions so sharp. He feels like an animal in these woods, trying to stay alive. 

They were at a grocery store, running around and throwing everything they could get their hands on into the cart. People pushed each other and yelled and fought for the most simple essentials. They had to push their car and jump in because gas stations were running out of gas. 

They arrived home afterwards, hands glistening with sweat, breath’s ragged. Wilbur went outside to get the rest of the groceries from the trunk and found his next-door neighbour shot to death on the porch. She was 80 years old. He couldn’t imagine who would do such a thing, but he would soon find that most everyone would if in this worst circumstance. 

Police sirens rang out and seemed to circle neighbourhoods without stopping. The trees swayed like they knew. Every step made his heart jut in his chest like he was dying. 

He ran back inside and said nothing of what he had seen, shaken to the core, locking the doors behind him and helping his father stow away the groceries. Only Tommy, Phil, and Wilbur were in the house. His father seemed unaware of the whereabouts of his parents but something in his eyes knew. 

Tommy stood out of place, waiting for a direction or command to tell him what to do next, how to process, how to move on from the fact that he had just watched men trample each other down for a slice of bread. 

“Toms, c’mon, let’s go to your room,” Wilbur said, arm on his shoulder to guide him. 

Tommy sat down on his bed and looked down. It was a guest room before, and Tommy had only brought the essentials. Nothing on his walls to decree it was his or any comic books lining the shelves. No shelves. 

“Hey, it’s gonna be okay. Let’s just focus on something else,” Wilbur answered at his brother’s silence. Stupidly. Unknowingly. 

He blinked and nodded. “Okay. W-What are we going to have for dinner?”

“I don’t know. Dad can make spaghetti, I guess. I’m not really hungry. Are you?”

“No,” His brother answered.

Wilbur looked down at his shaking hands and found they could not ignore the world burning outside their window. “Toms. Mass panic, wars, lack of food or materials. This has happened in history over and over again. And we’re still here.” He wouldn’t look at him. “Look at me. It’s going to be okay. Okay?”

He nodded shakily. “Okay.” His voice was dry. 

“I’m going to go get you some water, alright?” 

A nod. 

And then they heard the sound of glass shattering. 

Wilbur ran faster than he ever had in his life. The side door had been kicked open. He looked down where his father had been standing and saw glass on the floor. Cups splintered on the floor. 

He looked up by the backdoor and saw his father outside, yelling and thrashing against another force, another body. His first thought was a zombie, whatever creature had been infecting people, but as he looked closer, he found it was a simple man in a plaid shirt. The man was yelling and his father was fighting back, pushing the man to the ground. 

The man looked sympathetic then, for only a moment, before punching his father in the face and standing up, taking something from his pocket that glinted in the light. He stabbed his father in the side and ran. 

Tommy didn’t freeze the way Wilbur did. After a moment of realisation, Wilbur followed behind him, running out the door to kneel at his father’s side, hand over the wound. He could feel the warmth of blood on his hand and had the instinct to flinch back but didn't. It is in these rare occasions where a man realises that he matters less.  

“Go,” His father said, mouth open like a fish out of water, seething in pain. 

Tommy rushed inside and came out with a first aid kit they kept under the sink, tearing off a thick piece of gauze and handing it to Wilbur. It was the first time he had ever been tasked to wrap a wound but it would not be his last by a landslide. 

“Wilbur, the both of you. You have to run. You have to do it now.”

“Dad-”

“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. Take Tommy to the woods by the highway and stay there. I’ll meet you.”

“Dad, how are you going to-”

“Trust me- god-” He winced at the motion of trying to sit up. He was propped up by the side of the house. “Trust me, Wil. Go!”

Wilbur took Tommy’s hand and ran. 

They travelled halfway down the highway. They stood by a convenience store for a moment, looking both ways to cross the street. Cars flew past them in reckless abandon of street signs. 

Behind them they heard a shout and turned in unison. A skinny woman stood by a broken down car in the parking lot, holding a gun in her hand. 

Wilbur put his hands up the way he was taught to from television but Tommy ran across the street without looking. That had always been Wilbur’s flaw. Not thinking and moving fast enough.

He stood and stared. “Look, we don’t- we don’t have anything to give you-”

“You’re a fucking liar,” She said. “You’re a fucking liar!”

She held her gun and shot into the air. Wilbur cowered for a brief second and turned around to see Tommy on the street across from him. 

“Run! Go!”

“I don’t know where-” He began to yell back but Wilbur shouted louder and Tommy ran as fast as his adolescence allowed him. 

He stood in front of the woman. He willed himself not to faint. 

“I don’t have anything!” He screamed. “I don’t have it!”

She swayed on her feet as if to be drunk, pistol waving from side to side in a lazy aim. “I’ll kill you, kid,” She slurred. 

Her finger moved and a bullet sailed through the air, whizzing past him. He closed his eyes. He opened them and lacked the pain he had been expecting.

Life would not give him any more mercy than this, he realised. 

He ran. 

The forest was near and as much as he shouted for his brother, if Tommy was laying low, he doubted he would reveal himself. 

Wilbur runs until he can't run anymore. 

Finally, he enters the forest and a still and eerie silence washes over him.

The drops of water he at first mistakes for tears drizzle over him. Everything seems to ache, all the way down to the trees surrounding him.

He yells for Tommy for 30 minutes until his voice is so hoarse his name tears through his throat like a cough. 

He sits down on the ground. 

The darkness begins to overwhelm the woods, making everything quiet. The bustle of the cars on the street are gone. 

He lets himself cry for minutes at a time. 

From his left side, the sound of rustling leaves cuts through the sound of his sorrow. He stands up quickly, grabbing a weak stick from the ground that couldn’t hurt someone if it tried, and steps back slowly. An animal or a human, he doesn’t know what’s worse. 

Tommy’s blonde hair in his vision. He drops the stick and holds his brother in his arms and slides to the ground. Tommy’s sobs sound like hiccups. 

“Oh, Toms, oh god.”

“Dad’s going to meet us, right? He’s going to meet us because he said he would and he wouldn’t tell us something if he didn’t mean it or didn’t think he could do it,” Tommy rambles. 

Wilbur doesn’t know but he wants to hope so he nods. “Yes, he’ll come back. He’ll be here.”

And he had, late at night when Tommy shook him awake asking if there were bears in this forest. 

Phil stood before them for a moment and then fell to the ground. He had a backpack on his back. Late that night he stitched himself up. 

They thought he was better. That everything they expected to happen did and after that their optimism would prove to be worth something and so the cycle would continue of all good things. 

The knife did more than wound him, they would find.

But that night they squeezed each other’s hands just to know they were real. The next night they would make a fire, but the first night was entirely one of darkness. 

They would come to know it well even in the warmth of each other’s arms. Somehow Wilbur always knew things would not get better.

They buried her in the woods that very night and laid the leather journal next to her as they shovelled the dirt. 

It took hours to dig, they finished deep into the night, but neither of them could sleep. Quackity cried and apologised for doing so while Wilbur wiped his tears and held him. 

They rose in the morning and travelled on the road. The sun shone through the clouds for the first time in a year and reflected on the road like a mirage. 

They burned the vials in the morning on the side of the road in the dry grass. It’s harder to carry the loads with only the two of them but they manage, walking down the road toward nowhere and everywhere. 

For what seems like forever they don’t speak of her. They talk about other things, things they used to talk about before Wilbur had killed a person and had to live with the consequences. And in all honesty, he still doesn’t know if it was the right call. He doesn’t. He doesn’t give himself the power or pride to say he’s just in taking another person’s life and he never will. But he’s not sure he regrets it either. 

Quackity smiles for the first time that day when he finds quartz on the side of the road, small and shiny. If you blinked you could miss it. This statement applies to both his smile and the rock in his hand. 

“I used to collect them when I was a kid,” He says, turning it to sparkle in the rays of the sun. 

“It’s nice,” Wilbur says, and Q lets him hold it. He picks at the dirt embedded in its rough sides with his nail. “If we find someplace to clean it we can wash it off.”

Q nods and puts it in his pocket. “Fuck, I miss that trolley,” He says in a sigh, a few minutes later when they stop to rest and he takes the third bag, the heaviest, into his hold. They’ve been switching it between them for the past few hours.

Wilbur can’t think of any comforting words and so he just stands up and pulls Quackity into his side, resting his head on Q’s. 

The two of them are thinking the same thing even if neither of them say it, because if they do they might break. 

It’s a fear Wilbur has, an irrational one, but a fear nonetheless, that anyone he admits to himself that he loves will die. It’s one of many truthful irrational fears he has because in all his life not one of the people he’s loved so far has survived. To love someone is to allow yourself to be hurt by them. To be vulnerable to death and its claws. 

He loves Quackity and he can’t help it. 

He doesn’t want Quackity to live, he wants Quackity to thrive. He wants to give him everything even though he himself has nothing. He wants to take him to the field by his old house and show him the stars, he wants to be a good person for him. He wants to do all the things that feel normal. He wants to be a person again and wash his hair and feel clean and in love. 

But Wilbur doesn’t have that. He only has Quackity. And maybe all else will fall into place.

They speak about it finally as they enter another small town he doesn’t know the name of. There are small pieces of immortality in its foundation, in the sidewalks and pavement where dead lovers once wrote their names and said they would never part. Maybe they haven’t. 

They find a can of peaches and sit down and eat it in the wooded backyard of a house long gone. 

“I still don’t understand,” Quackity says and he doesn’t have to elaborate. 

“Sometimes you can’t, I think. Some people are just that way. You can’t shake them out of their own thinking. They’ll invent new ways to say your logic doesn’t make sense while they don’t even realise that they’ve created paradoxes in their own.”

“I guess.” 

“I don’t know if it was right. What I did, Quackity.”

“I don’t either. But you can’t fix anything, can you?”

“I want to. I want to reverse it and somehow know that I was doing the right thing. That Niki,” He says in a whisper, he doesn’t like the way it feels to say her name, “couldn’t be helped.”

“We don’t know what could’ve happened, Wil. You can’t torture yourself over the things she did. Maybe she was good in some other world and maybe she wasn’t.”

“She had a life and I took it.”

“She was going to kill us.”

“Maybe she didn’t understand that.”

“But we did.”

“Yes. We did.”

Quackity holds his hand. “It’ll be okay.” He’s not sure how Quackity can still say something like this but he respects it. 

“What are we going to do now?” He asks. 

“Walk to the next city.”

“After that.”

“I don’t know. But we’ll see, right?”

Wilbur nods silently. 

“I don’t know if it’s right of me to think this, and I’m only telling you this because I don’t think I can keep it in my head. But I’ve started to trust life. I don’t trust it enough to give up and let it take me but I still trust that it will take care of me and you. It’s not god because if there is one he’s already fucked us over once before, and honestly, fuck him. But I trust the way things’ll go.” He takes a large breath at the end of his sentence and releases it into the wind. “And I trust you,” He says. “I trust you more than life or anything else. I can’t believe in anything I don’t know. But I do trust you, Q.”

Q squeezes his hand twice and stands up. 

They walk the roads and lengths of the world and when they finally step onto the first dirt road, muddy and grassy, they feel their feet melt into the earth. Wilbur is certain there has never been a more human sensation.

Wilbur always remembers the first time he couldn’t figure out the time of day. When the minutes slipped away from him and left him blank of time or reason. Like a black hole that sucked him in and held him in a swirl of matter; he was pointless. 

Slowly he’s forgotten about it all together. Only night and day truly matter. Light and dark. When you get up and when you go to sleep. He’s been reduced to another sort of man. He is so small and yet so large in this world. Compared to a dangerous man and the zombies seeking his life he is miniscule but to the empty plains he is suddenly bigger than all of them. 

They run from a zombie hoard in the middle of the day and escape to the forest by the evening. The wind ebbs and flows. The sound is glorious. It doesn’t cut into his skin like it usually does. Today is warmer and he relishes the feeling of it tingling on his skin. To live and to feel alive are two different things. 

They forge their own strange trails until they hear the running water. The sound is a welcome one to their ears against the silence, exempt from their own speech and shoes treading the ground. 

“What is that?” Q asks, as if he can’t quite understand the sound even though there’s only one possible answer. 

“It’s water,” Wilbur says. He’s thirsty. He’s tired. His scalp aches. 

“A river? You think so?” He asks. 

They run as fast as their burning calves let them.

It sits glorious and secluded. Wilbur breathes and laughs and shouts and doesn’t care because there’s no one to hear. It’s serendipitous. 

Wilbur takes off his shirt and plunges into the water, water up to his thighs, and sits down. He closes his eyes and puts his head under, coming back up from the water only a few seconds later. Quackity steps in, more cautious than Wilbur, but soon loosens up when he realises the current isn’t strong enough to carry him away. More than that, it flows over his body like nostalgia. 

“Get in the water, Wil!” Tommy shouted, laughing and flailing his arms. He was shivering but smiling. 

“It’s gonna be so cold!” Wilbur’s young voice screamed back. 

“Just get in!”

Quackity walks over to him and Wilbur splashes him. For a moment Q stands still, hands up. 

“You got it in my eyes!” He yells playfully. 

Q splashes him back and sits down, throwing his beanie to the side onto the bank of the river. 

The first thing Wilbur does is lean his head back and let the water cleanse his scalp. It’s not brown or green like most other rivers he’s ever been to, but dark blue. He doesn’t fear what he cannot see through it. For once he doesn’t fear at all. 

He rubs his hands over his shoulders and neck, scrubbing his head so thoroughly that Q jokes he’s going to make himself bleed. The immersion is heavenly. 

“Should we camp here?” Q asks, eyes shut and head tipped back as he lets the current lift his hair. It flows like a river of onyx even against the darkness of the water.

Wilbur agrees in a breath. 

He looks at his arm. He hasn’t checked the wound since the brief instance by the fire and finds that the gash has decreased to a long white line across his skin. Scars come easy but do not leave like such. He lets his arm rest below the water as if it might heal him, wipe his scars clean.

He closes his eyes and the breeze seems to embrace him. A thousand different memories and lifetimes. He’s a child again, sitting on the side of the pool with his feet in the water eating watermelon and laughing with his brother, extending his arms out wide as the wind rattled through the trees in the summer evening, like ice on his bare skin. 

Remembering then and remembering now how good it feels to be clean. 

Chapter Text

“And in the beginning there was light.”

Wilbur wakes up the next morning and feels a strange sense of clarity, if only for the moment. 

He turns on his side and expects to see Quackity next to him but there is only an empty space where he had been sleeping. Immediately his body has been kicked into overdrive despite his lagging brain and he stands up, shoving the quilt to the side and standing up in a protective stance. 

Rushing from the tent, he tugs on a sweater and runs out barefoot, wincing against the breeze and searching for Q, thoughts racing through his mind. He cannot truly comprehend his thoughts but he understands them. That this cannot happen again. That he can’t take it again.

He looks through the trees for any familiarity, any wisp of hair in the corner of his vision or figure in the woods, but finds none. He squints and turns around, preparing to yell Quackity’s name. 

And there he is, in the river, olive skin golden in the light. 

Wilbur’s body untenses and he stops to look at Q, back turned towards him. He can only see the top half of him, his hair that goes down to his shoulders, his bare back. He looks like an angel. 

Neither he or the world can underestimate this moment, because to have a beautiful moment such as this one is not a reflection on the state of the world or whether it is good or bad, but because you are whole for minutes at a time and that seems to be good enough. At least you know the feeling. 

The sun for only a moment hovers over him. He wants to soak up the sunlight like a plant but he can only stand still until the clouds have covered it. 

He could say something, say goodmorning or yell his name so that Q would hear him, but he wants to stay in this moment. Seeing the beauty of things for just a single second. He thinks it might not even be the sun that makes it so wonderful. Quackity is his sun, he decides. And following behind him as always, Wilbur’s heart. 

Q threads his fingers through his own hair. 

Everything smells like sandalwood when he closes his eyes.

He’s lived his life in these horrible years missing things, wishing he hadn’t ever taken them for granted, never yearning for anything more than the things he’s already lost. 

But now he is gaining. He is gaining a person he loves and a person that loves him back. To love and to be loved. When there is nothing else, what do you have other than love? His heart hurts and aches and tightens in his chest but it heals. 

He has never been a resilient man and yet he is standing and feeling the force in his bones so directly that it’s impossible not to know he’s living. It used to be a curse, that buzz in his legs and arms and face. But now it’s a soreness that comes with a reward. He holds it in his hands because he knows he deserves one more gift. He’s had many and lost many and maybe it makes him greedy to ask for more but he does. Because at this point, how had he survived without it?

Being alive is being in the world however it may choose to greet you. Whether it beats you down or coddles you. 

Truthfully, he wouldn’t be able to describe this feeling if he tried. He can only define it as one thing and that is to keep going. To move on. To feel terrified or disconsolate or euphoric or numb. This must be what it’s like, he thinks, to be dead for so long and then rise from the dirt with a thought in mind. The first real breath and the first real tears in his eyes, every piece of dirt beneath his fingernails as he claws his way out of the grave. The bark of every tree. The eyes of the first person he sees.

He is alive again and feels every bit of it.

Wilbur and Quackity eat snack bread while they walk on the road. Quackity’s hands are full with two of the bags so Wilbur, off shift and carrying only one, holds out the bread every once in a while so Q can bite off a piece. It’s oddly domestic. 

He rolls up his heat halfway during their first mile. It’s getting warm. March always was in these places, and he has never been more thankful. Of course, the weather always seemed to skip spring when it was convenient and so they are most likely in for a heat wave like no other, but at least for now it’s pleasant. 

Quackity seems to read his mind. “How are you doing? Might have to take off my sweater and tie it around me when we stop for lunch.”

The word lunch surprises him but he nods. Lunch will most likely be beans and something else, but Quackity promised him they would eat the black beans today and so he looks forward to it in anticipation. 

“The sun is nice today. I saw it a couple times this morning.” They talk about it in a way that suggests it is rare, in a way his old self might laugh at, unable to believe it if someone had told him the best thing in the world would be the thing he saw everyday and never questioned. 

Q nods. “Me too.” He doesn’t mention bathing in the river and so he won’t either. Some moments are only meant to be remembered by one.

“In my head it started to look like those children’s drawings, just like a big yellow orb in the sky. Which it technically is, but it’s more beautiful when you see it in real life. In memories it fades.”

That’s how everything is. Fading. One day he won’t remember what his father looks like and it scares him every day. But there are things he cannot help and it is just as sure as his ageing and so he breathes in and out and accepts things he cannot change and thinks about the sun. 

“It was beautiful,” Q says. 

It was. It is. Because even if a year passes before they truly see it again, at least he will be able to remember it just enough to survive until the next good moment. 

“You know, you look beautiful today too, Q.”

His shoulders hunch up in embarrassment. He laughs. “Don’t be so flattering. My pants have holes.”

“Well, you know, it was in style once.”

“Is it still?”

“Maybe,” Wilbur says cheekily. “To me it is. And it’s not about the trousers.”

Q raises his eyebrows. “What’s it about then?”

“How beautiful you are.”

A fizzled laugh. Q raises his arm for only a second to elbow Wilbur softly in the side. “You’re more beautiful-er.”

Wilbur rubs his side as if to be in pain. “Conflicting emotions?”

Q snorts but doesn’t answer. 

The repetition of walking and stopping doesn’t feel as hopeless as usual, and when they finally stop to rest behind a house on the side of the road, he finds himself smiling. He lets out a satisfied breath as he sits down. 

“This feels like a good day. But it feels wrong to say, like I’ll be jinxing us,” He says. 

“Yeah,” Q replies, his expression lowering. 

“Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. I just think about Niki.”

“I do too,” Wilbur says. He knows Q doesn’t blame him, and Wilbur can’t possibly blame himself either when it truly comes down to it. All he hopes for is justice, and for someone to finally see her heart for what it was. He almost believes that no one in her entire life ever had. 

“I wonder what it would be like if she was still with us.” He doesn’t simply mean alive, as one might assume. He means that she would be travelling with them, laughing with them, eating with them and smiling even if it were just an act. 

He nods and subtly closes in the large gap between them. They walk close but not touching and they don’t need to.

Wilbur can only nod.

They walk and never stop to look behind them as if in some fear that they will turn to salt.

Wilbur reads to Quackity when they sit down to break. Q closes his eyes and leans back on the bark of the tree behind him. Wilbur reads slowly, stopping when he reaches a word he doesn’t understand, of which there are many. Most don’t require Q to give long explanations but he knows Quackity wouldn’t mind if it was the case. 

“If you want, I can just read for you. I don’t need to understand it, it’s just fun being able to pronounce things as if I know what I’m doing,” He laughed, but Q shook his head.

“No, it’s okay. That’s the only way you learn, by asking questions.”

Wilbur has gotten to the late bits of scene 1 in Romeo y Julieta and knows the vague happenings of the plot so far. Some words Quackity doesn’t know or can’t explain when he asks, but the sentence structure is what seems to trip him up. 

“What does… vaina mean?” Wilbur asks. “Like, vain? To be vain about something?”

Q furrows his eyebrows but doesn’t open his eyes. “What is it called, the thing you put a sword in?”

“A scabbard?” Wilbur offers. 

“I feel like there’s another word for that. That’s probably right.” When Wilbur begins reading again, Q snaps his fingers. “That’s the word I was thinking of. Sheath .” 

“Sheath,” He repeats. “ Lo que hago es apaciguar; torna tu espada a la vaina, o sírvete de ella para ayudarme a separar a esta gente .” 

“In english?” Q asks. 

“What I do… is appease? Torna.. ”

“To put back.”

“Put back your blade in its sheath, or… sírvete ”

“To serve something. Or use, I guess.”

“Or use it to help me separate these people?”

“Mhm,” Q says. “Good.”

“ ¡Qué! ¡ Desnudo el acero y hablas de paz! Odio esa palabra como odio al infierno, a todos los Montagües y a ti? ¡Defiéndete, cobarde! ” He reads. “ Desnudo el acero? ”

“Um,” Q opens his eyes. “I guess you could say ‘bare the steel’ but I don’t really understand it.”

“Bare the steel and talk of peace. I hate this word like I hate… hell? To all Montagues and you? Defend yourself… cobarde ?”

“Like, a coward.”

“Oh,” He says. “Defend yourself, coward.”

“Read it all together,” Q says, and closes his eyes again. 

“What, bear the steel and talk of peace! I hate this word like I hate hell, to all Montagues, and to you. Defend yourself, coward.”

“Now do the voices,” Q jokes. 

Wilbur puts on a faux accent and reads the next line. “ ¡Garrotes, picas, partesanas! ¡Arrimad, derribados! ¡A tierra con los Capuletos! ¡A tierra con los Montagües!”

Q snorts. “That was good, were you trying to go for hero or luchador?”

“Which sounds better?”

“Neither, I just thought I’d ask,” He says with a snicker in his voice. 

Wilbur sighs and turns the page. 

They leave their resting spot a few minutes later, grateful for the simple distraction but as usual, wishing it could last longer. 

For a brief moment upon standing, he looks for his walking stick. It seems to be instinct at this point, and he wonders if it’s possible he will always be looking for it. His fingers hover over nothing, only curling into a fist at the spot where it might normally be, next to the tree where he would always leave it. 

He is alive and being alive means the things you go through have and never will be worth it, but despite everything, he can learn to be a person again. To mold those pieces in his heart of an old civilization to final completion. 

Maybe it’s not a matter of being whole. He’s never been whole. Maybe it’s a matter of having one person and one heart and existing to exist and walking as far as you possibly can. 

“No me contengáis, déjame en libertad.”

They seem to make their own pathways as they travel on the side of the main road. The sun doesn’t beat down on them like it had been in the morning, and has retreated back into its black hole of a sky. 

Quackity hums a song and whispers the lyrics under his breath. Wilbur almost asks him what it means, but somehow, he imagines there are memories Quackity should be able to keep for himself. Nostalgia is a powerful thing. He feels it all around him, wherever he goes. In his mouth when he wakes up in the morning hungry or in his sore feet. 

He remembers more than he used to. It bothers him less, the more he thinks about it. Slowly he seems to enjoy these sudden memories that come back to him, even concerning the most simple things. Simple has not been a word he’s used in this new world and seems almost ancient. To remember something like this seems in itself like a cause for rejoicing. 

Picking up a dandelion from the ground, he shows it to Q, who blows it out and lets its pinprick sized seeds scatter when the wind takes them. 

“What did you wish for?” Tommy asked. He doesn’t remember many things from these years, when Wilbur was young and Tommy was even younger. Maybe only 6 years old, Tommy was at the time. He was wearing a white shirt with red-tipped sleeves. He’d gotten the shirt dirty but hadn’t cared to tell their father. 

“I’m not telling you ,” He said. 

He pouted. “Why not?”

“It’s a secret. Plus, it’s what I always wish for. So if you know this one then you’ll know all the past ones and the future ones.”

“Please,” He begged. “You can’t just not tell me, Wilbur.”

He denied again and again and then finally caved in. He stooped down to whisper into his brother’s ear. 

“I wished that Dad will let me have a pet fish.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” He said, and then cupped both of his hands to his brother’s ear. “What should I name it?”

“Tommy,” He whispered back. 

“Why?” Wilbur said at a normal volume.

“Ow! You just yelled in my ear, you idiot!”

“Dad doesn't let you say that.”

“But he lets you and he’s not here so I can.”

“Why would you name it Tommy? That’s your name and if I was talking to it then we’d have to wonder whether I was talking to the fish or you.”

“Because I’m cool,” He said, not acknowledging the second sentence. 

“You’re literally not.”

“Yes I am. And that fish will be so happy to be named Tommy because I’m the best human in the world so he’ll be the best fish in the world.”

The memory stops there even though he doesn’t want it to. He doesn’t remember what his father said when Tommy walked into the house with his favourite shirt muddied or whether they had been dropped off at their grandmother’s for the weekend. He can’t remember where they were when they found the dandelion in the tall grass, only that the green was stunning, even in Wilbur’s youthful gaze. 

It is hard to imagine that Wilbur has been all of these people, all of these growing things, sizing up slowly with each inch marked off on the sharpie ridden wall and solidifying with every boulder he climbed, every problem he faced. 

He’s not sure who he is now. He hopes the little boy is still there. He misses him. He hopes he is well. Maybe he is but only lives in the confines of his brain, in little flashes, like gaps of sunlight through car windows. Like his brother. He could live with that fact. 

He could live quite well.

They walk to a small patch of houses, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and decide to camp in the forest for the night. 

“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen one of them.”

“A human or a zombie?” Wilbur asks.

“Both.”

“I guess it’s good, right?”

Q nods. “Sometimes I wish there were still other people around and sometimes I don’t.”

Puddles from past rain are haphazardly dispersed in the ground. These trees are some of the greenest he’s seen in a long time, their leaves almost lime green. 

He observes them for a moment before catching up to Q walking ahead of him. 

It’s hardly nighttime, but they had made a decision only a couple days ago. Or Quackity had, and Wilbur only nodded tiredly. Most times the other was correct in his concerns and it seemed that he ought to accept it then rather than later. 

“You wake up at the crack of dawn and go to sleep late, Wilbur. You can’t be ‘used to it’.”

“Well, I never said it was healthy. But I have to do things that I don’t want to do. It’s what helps us get places, Q.”

“Wil. If you won’t do this for yourself, then do it for me. I’m dead.” A laugh at the end of his sentence, however, Wilbur could tell he was completely serious. 

He looked at his eyes, the eyes he always found himself looking into. They were beautiful where beauty did not exist. That day the eyebags beneath them were more pronounced than usual. 

He touched the bottom of Q’s hair while in thought. He finally looked up at him with a look that could only say ‘you’ve won’ and Q kissed him on the cheek and went to bed. 

They walk as the crow flies. 

Finally, standing out in the distance against the earthy tones, stands a lone house. Or a hut, to be more accurate. 

Walking towards it, Q furrows his eyebrows. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. How is a house here?”

“Do you want to go inside?” Wilbur whispers, even though there’s no real need. 

It’s like any of the other houses they’ve seen thus far, unravelling at the seams at a sluggish pace. 

“I don’t know,” Q says. 

“Do you think there could be someone living here?”

“I don’t know,” He said again, only looking at the house in its solitude. It’s been taken over by vines. If not for the prominent mould around the edges, Wilbur might say it has a sort of… twisted charm. 

They walk up to the house in a crouch, keeping their voices low. The doorknob is nearly hanging off of its lockset, and when Wilbur puts his hand on it, Q stops him. 

What? He mouths quickly.

Listen.

Wilbur presses his head close to the door and hears something from inside. The sound of running water or something akin to it. 

He takes the knife from his pocket. If he still had the single bullet in the pistol he would take it up instead, but now in its emptiness, it sits useless in his backpack. They’ve left their things in a bush nearby and only hold the essentials. 

He looks at Quackity, who is much more pale than before. He thinks he can almost see the veins in his cheeks. 

The lungs in his chest have ceased in taking in large breaths. He’s almost lightheaded. 

He blinks once and swallows. He looks at Quackity once and twists open the door, immediately standing up tall to see who might be living in the shack. 

The knife goes slack in his hand. 

A little girl stands next to a sink in the kitchen of the house, completely still. Her hair is in messy pigtails, and a beanie sits over her head. Her eyes are wide in shock. 

Wilbur breathes. He doesn’t look at Quackity but knows his expression must not be too far off from his own. 

The sound of water continues to echo through the house. 

The little girl stands next to the sink. The water is flowing. 

The water is never flowing. 

He exhales once again. The world exhales with him. 

Wilbur slides the switchblade back into his pocket. 

Before this, there were two halves of Wilbur’s life. The before and the after. But unbeknownst to him, there are four quarters of Wilbur’s life. 

This is the third. The quarter where the world begins again.

Tommy laughed. 

“What’s so funny, huh? You couldn’t see me having a family? Mr. Wife Haver Extraordinaire?”

He snorted. “Yeah right.” 

“What?” He asked, and then laughed with him. 

“No, no, nothing. I mean, you have taken care of me all this time, right? And I’ve been a right pain in the arse,” He says. “But seriously, yeah. You’d be a good father, Wil. Like Dad was.”

“You really think so?” He asked. 

He shrugged. “Well, don’t force me into a compliment. But yeah. You could do it.”

Wilbur let a genuine smile form over his smirk. “Thanks, Toms.”

They sat below the hardy oak tree and watched the grey clouds. Wilbur put a hand on Tommy’s shoulder and for once he didn’t cringe away. 

“This is a good night,” Tommy said. “To new beginnings!”

“New beginnings?”

“Well, we’ve got to start somewhere, right?”

“To new beginnings,” He said. 

And the world then had never seemed so kind and maybe it wouldn’t be, not like this. 

But for then it was.