for marina because she so kindly put this au and idea out there for me to latch onto lmao.
There is slight gore in this considering that this is a zombie au. there is also slight jack/oswald shipping, but it is negligible? you can totally vomit over the one line that i mention to ship them together, but that's up to you.
-start-
No! It's not what you're thinking! He probably tripped and fell on rocks is all! None of them even touched us! You're over thinking, Jack, just calm down! Were the thoughts of Jack as he looked at what was unmistakably a bite from a crawler on his best friends' leg. Oswald was looking at it too, although more calmer than Jack would've expected. They were in a motel just now, going over what supplies they had taken from the supermarket they were camped in not five hours ago before the zombies had stormed the building. Both had managed to get out without a hitch. Well, until this turned up it seems.
"D-D-D-D-Do you think-?" Jack stammered out, hoping against hope that this wasn't what it looked like and his friend was going to be perfectly fine. The blond looked up at his friend, trying to smile through the tears about to become free from his eyes. Oswald looked back, his face as stoic as ever, but Jack could see the fear in his eyes.
"Don't lie to yourself Jack. We both know what this is. You remember the twins." At the mention of the twins, Jack couldn't hold it any longer, crying and yelling as hard as he could, grasping onto Oswald's hand. He couldn't feel it, but Oswald gripped his hand just as hard as Jack did. "No one should go through that. Please Jack."
The man in question shook his head, hugging his friend and slamming him on the bed. "B-B-B-But we have to go find-!" Oswald pushed himself out of his friends' grip, slapping Jack across the face the second he could. Jack fell backwards, holding his cheek and crying.
"Get a hold of yourself! We both know what we're supposed to do when this happens, and it is not crying like a child!" Jack could only vaguely remember Oswald's habit about touching, but only after he tuned out whatever he heard. Oswald sighed when he realized this and put his pants back on. He stood from the bed, wavering a little from the lack of food and sat by his friend. He listened to the blonde crying until they tapered off, and spoke up.
"If you want, we can wait a couple days to see if this really is a bite." Jack gave no sign that he had heard, so Oswald cleared his throat and tried again. "This might not be a bite. And it doesn't look infected," yet he tried to say, but Jack was starting to listen, so he avoided it. "If we clean it up, maybe it'll start to heal." The blond slowly raised his head, looking at his friend with tear stained cheeks.
"R-Really?" he whispered, his voice soft and ragged. Oswald nodded and Jack's face broke into the biggest grin that he had ever seen. Without a word, Jack hugged Oswald as tight as he could and for once, Oswald did not protest.
—-
The days afterwards felt very long to Jack. He had forced Oswald to rest because he needed all the energy he could get and he had used the last of the medicine and bandages they had taken from the pharmacy next door to the supermarket and he had given Oswald all the food and water they had. He was taking no chances with this. If Oswald didn't make it… well, Jack didn't want to think about that.
It was three days later when Jack was changing Oswald's bandages that the brunette spoke up. "Does it smell funny to you?" he asked. Jack frowned and leaned forward to smell. After coming back up, he smiled.
"That's the anti-septic! What, did you expect it to smell like your dad?" Oswald would've reacted to the joke if he wasn't so sure about this. He couldn't see the wound anymore because Jack was in his way, but he could feel it. And what he felt wasn't right.
—-
Three days after that, Oswald was in the full throws of a fever. He never moved during his sleep, but when he woke up for five minutes at a time, he would always ask that Jack double check the wound for infection. Jack humored his friend, and would say "it's your body's way of fighting it, don't be scared of a fever. I'm surprised that you went this long without a fever anyway!" Oswald his shake his head, breathing as slow as he could to control his feelings.
"Don't lie to yourself like you lied to the twins. Please Jack. Let me die."
"NO!" Jack would yell, standing up with his face contorted in rage. "You're not turning into one of them and you're not going to die, do you hear me?!" Oswald would attempt to say something back, but he was getting weaker and he couldn't put a sentence together before falling asleep again.
—-
Two days after that, Oswald was himself for the final time. He couldn't feel anything in his limbs anymore, and he had to fight past a fog in his brain for him to say anything. "J-Jack," he called out, whispering as loud as he could. Jack looked at him, shivering as he finally saw his friend for what seemed like the first time.
"O-Os'…" he said, reverting to a nickname that he used once when they were very young. He went to sit on the bed to hold his friend's hand. It was cold as ice; as cold as the dead. Oswald strung his words together, hoping that they made sense through the fog in his brain.
"Kill me now… before I turn…" To his credit, Jack did not yell at him that he was wrong and that he was most certainly not turning. He held his friend's hand tighter and cried.
"H-How?" he asked, his mind too numb to think. Oswald seemed to have fallen back asleep to his eyes, but the brunette gave an answer a minute or so later.
"Shoot," he said simply, his eyes twitched as if to open, but he had no strength to do so. But the thought of taking the gun that Oswald had used to kill his dad to then kill him was unbearable to Jack and he quickly thought of another thing.
"I-I could d-d-d-drop you. The roof is high enough…" Oswald said nothing; he had fallen asleep again. With a loud cry, Jack went into a kind of thoughtless energy mode. He picked up Oswald from his bed, shuddering at the cold of the brunette's skin and carried him up the ladder on the back of the building to the rooftop, feeling Oswald's body twitching. As if he was starting to get hungry… said the thought in Jack's head, but he ignored it as best he could and walked to the edge.
The motel was only three stories high, but the ground around it was littered with rocks and sharp looking sticks. Jack wasn't scared of heights, but looking down, he felt something akin to vertigo course through him. He shuddered at that and looked at his friend in his arms, studying his face to remember him.
He didn't look like he was in pain anymore, not like he was during the fever that felt like ages ago. His hair was disheveled and greasy, so unlike the clean and kept appearance that he liked so well. He remembered teasing Oswald for that when they were in high school. Back when everything was happy, he and Oswald were just getting into each other and when the twins were born and-
Knowing that if he distracted himself for long enough that he wouldn't be able to do this, Jack wrenched his face away from his friend and dropped Oswald head first, all the better for his skull to break. He covered his ears, but he was not fast enough and heard the thud and splat that meant that Oswald was no more.
Walking slowly to the edge, he peered over and got a look at Oswald's foot. He looked over more and promptly vomited to his side, so that his friend wouldn't get sick on his either. It was… horrible to say the least. Jack couldn't get a good luck at his face, but a stick seemed to have worked its way through Oswald's eye socket to stick out the back. It had been stained a dark red from it's journey through Oswald and there were bits of goo on it as well. The blond didn't want to think of what that goop was and vomited again for a second time.
What felt like hours later, Jack looked up from his sick and vaguely registered the sound of zombies coming near. He guessed that they were attracted to the smell. Before he could think much more on that, Jack climbed down from the roof to go back to the room where Oswald had spent all of his time. The bed was still disheveled from where Oswald had slept and he could see the outline of his body on the bed. Averting his eyes from that too, he grabbed the two bags of supplies that were left and walked away from the room, away from the motel and away from his best friend in the entire world.
—-end—-
i may or may not want to continue this hehe. and i may or may not have ideas to go forward with. what i do know is the ending for this if this goes on so uh. yeah. it won't get any more light hearted than this folks.
i based the transform into a zombie thing from the walking dead video game? because i haven't seen the show and that's the only thing that i know of that actually showed something like that. also, i don't remember how duck transformed so oops.