This one is written for the "Ultimate OTP Competition" as well as the "Lyric Inspired Competition II" and the "School of Prompts" challenge. Enjoy!
save me, kill me
Prompt: Apocalyptic!AU, stoic
Pairing: Teddy/Victoire
"With shortness of breath, you explain the infinite - how rare and beautiful it is to even exist."
- "Saturn," by Sleeping at Last
Everything is gone.
Victoire knows that.
The world she knew, the people who loves, the life she had.
Gone.
They took it away from her.
She stares at the flames that burn up the last of her brother's body, and her gaze is hard and stone cold. She can almost feel it leaving her - the remaining bits of innocence, of kindness. Her humanity.
Gone.
They took it away from her.
When she thinks hard enough, she can almost remember what it was like before the Sickness broke out, before the world broke and became a living hell.
Smart, pretty. Top of her class. A cute boy, dozens of friends. She had a lot to be grateful for, only she wasn't. She took all of it for granted.
Now that girl - the one who loved and lived foolishly - is gone. She died the day she watched her mother and father get ripped to pieces by the ravenous Infected, the day her picture-perfect life collapsed along with the rest of the world.
But that's a good thing (if "good" even exists anymore, that is) because that girl wouldn't have had a chance in this time anyway. That girl was soft and kind and weak. Helpless. She trusted, and people trusted her.
She doesn't trust. Not anymore.
It's a sickening kind of funny, when she thinks about it. When the Sickness began to spread, people began to cluster, as they always do in a worldwide crisis. They banded together, the small pockets of survivors amongst the millions of dead and Infected. Self-appointed leaders would shout out assurances, would give hope to the hopeless. "We can defeat this! If we stick together and help each other, we can win."
Ha-fucking-ha. And to think she actually believed that.
Because, in the end, people are cowards. People are selfish. People will run away and leave their own kind to be torn apart.
Like they left her mother. And her father. And her sister.
And now, her brother.
She'll trust them, she decides, when they give her a reason to.
And then he comes along, with his naive optimism and his smile that only turns up at one end, as if half his life has been chopped away and he's doing his best to keep the other half from meeting the same fate. He sees her at camp one day, sitting on the ground and staring at the forest in front of her, frowning.
He plops down next to her, takes a drink out of a water bottle. "Why the long face?" he asks, and for a second Victoire thinks she must've misheard him.
"What?" Her voice is quieter than is used to be, but harder than it was before.
The boy smiles that half-lipped smile and replies, "You look upset." He says it like he's genuinely curious as to why she's not grinning or dancing or singing Hakuna Matata.
Victoire gazes at him, analyzing his face. He doesn't seem to be kidding. "Really?" she asks, because she honestly wants to know how a person could be so completely, utterly stupid.
The boy raises an eyebrow. "What?"
She's still staring at him, and now she's becoming a little angry. "Well, I'm pretty sure that everyone in the goddamn world is upset in at least some capacity." She pauses, then continues, "But if you'd like my reason, everyone I love is dead." Her voice is sharp and a little venomous, and yeah, she's probably being extremely rude, but she stopped caring about petty civilities a long time ago.
He simply looks at her, amber eyes unreadable. She fidgets; she doesn't like it when she can't tell what people are thinking.
When he speaks next, he doesn't even give her the obligatory "I'm sorry."
He just says, "Me too."
His name is Teddy Lupin, and for some insane reason that Victoire can't even fathom, he is incurably cheerful.
Millions of people are dead or Infected. All communication is down. We're running out of supplies to keep us alive. The world is probably ending as we know it, and this guy is saying we should all be fucking grateful.
It just doesn't make sense.
She asks him why, over and over, and each time she gets the same frustrating response. "At least we're still alive."
And she really doesn't get that, because what's the point of being alive if there's nothing to live for? She tells him this, and he just responds, "You'll get it, someday," like she's five years-old or something.
"Yeah," she almost says, "If there even is a someday."
Months pass, and as time goes on, she begins to get attached.
She's not stupid. She's knows it's a bad idea. In this world, if you start liking someone, they usually end up dead a short while later. She's seen it happen.
The Universe really does have a sick sense of humor.
But despite her better judgement, she sticks around.
She doesn't even really know why. Maybe it's his height - he's tall, imposing. Useful when it comes to intimidating. Or perhaps it's his skill with a firearm; she's never asked how, but he's a damn good shot.
Or maybe - just maybe - the reason she stays is the same reason she can't stand him - his ridiculous, unexplainable belief that life still has a purpose, even though everything around them is turning to dust.
She likes to think it's one of the first two.
But she knows the truth, and so does he.
She realizes she loves him when she shoots him in the chest.
It's a seemingly normal day - shitty food, shitty weather, and shitty people complaining about their shitty lives.
Miraculously, however, it gets even shittier.
They built a semi-strong wall around the camp when it started to gain more people. It's made of scrap metal, stone, and bricks, and out of the middle of nowhere, a hole gets blown in on the north end, and hordes of the Infected flood in.
Chaos ensues. People begin to run, pushing others aside as they scramble for an escape. Screams fill the air - some low and guttural, others high-pitched and blood-curdling. The Infected are everywhere; in the makeshift houses, in the food and water stations - wherever they can find people to either turn, eat, or tear.
Victoire is sitting near the outskirts, on the south side, when she hears it. She stands up, and her instinct kicks in.
Except this time it's not telling her to run, it's telling her to find him find him no matter what.
She listens to it, and takes off towards the bloodshed.
When she finds him, standing in the middle of the camp and blowing the heads off the Infected, she grabs his arms and screams, "Run, run!" in a tone that sounds an awful lot like survival - something she hasn't cared about in while.
He doesn't argue. Finding her hand, he takes the lead, running towards the back of the camp, weaving in and around panicked crowds of people.
"We need to get to the forest beyond the wall," he tells her, and she's about to respond when she trips and lands on the dirt, her hand leaving his as she falls. She's groaning, lifting herself up when Teddy lets out a shout. Head snapping up, a feeling of white-hot terror and dread washes over her when she sees one of the Infected latched onto his shoulder.
She doesn't think - she reacts. Leaping up, she picks Teddy's gun from the ground, points it at the head of the attacker, and pulls the trigger.
The gun kicks into her shoulder, hard, and she watches as the Infected boy - and that's what he is, a boy, because God he looks about twelve - slides off Teddy's back and hits the ground, where he lays completely still.
Throwing the gun down, she goes up to Teddy and puts her hands on both sides of his face. "Did he - are you-" she splutters, unable to form a coherent sentence. He understands, though, and nods. He touches his shoulder before showing her his hand.
It's covered in blood.
She stumbles backwards, head spinning. No no no no not him anyone but him.
"It'll work fast," he's says, "so you need to do it quick."
It takes her a long moment to realize what he's telling her - not asking her - to do. And then she's shaking her head, and the hand that's holding the gun feels terribly heavy. "No," she responds, and hearing the weakness in her tone, repeats more firmly, "No. I'm not going to kill -"
He walks up to her and grabs her hand, holding it tightly in his. "Victoire, it's the only way."
"No!" she shouts, and her voice has gone from strong and determined to hysteric, but she can't find it within herself to care. "It's not the only way, Teddy. There's a cure, there has to be, I can find something."
"There's no cure. Not for this."
That anger she felt on the first day of meeting him is back, stronger than ever. "I know there's something, there has to be something…" she trails off, squeezes her eyes shut for a brief moment, attempting to suppress the tears that are gathering. Damn it, Victoire, stop crying.
But the thing is, the world is ending and her life is shit and her only friend is more than likely about to die or worse, and she has a right to cry, damn it. So she opens her eyes and they're burning, but she lets them burn and continues, "You're always telling me how life is precious and beautiful and -"
"-and it is." He puts his hand on her cheek, trails it down to rest on her shoulder. "It's wonderful and rare and worth living. But this - it's not life." As if on cue, he groans deeply, taking his hand off her to rest on his knee.
Victoire puts a hand on the back of his neck, and before she knows it she's got both arms around him and she's holding him tight, eyes closed. His knees give out from under him, and she helps break the fall when he hits the ground.
Kneeling next to him, she gently cradles his head in her lap. He's breathing raggedly now, and his eyes are starting to glaze over. He tries to say something, but coughs and splutters instead, and a small stream of blood dribbles from his lips.
Her tears finally begin to break loose, spilling down her cheeks. "Damn it, Teddy," she whispers, her voice angry and scared and sad. She can't even finish, can't even speak because she doesn't know what she'll say, or ask.
Damn it, Teddy, why does this keep happening to me? Damn it, Teddy, you need to live.
Damn it, Teddy, I love you.
She lifts the gun, lays it at his chest, and leans forward to kiss him on the forehead.
She pulls the trigger.
She watches his body burn, like she watched her brother's.
And this time, her gaze is not stone cold, but determined.
Teddy Lupin, the man she hated and then loved. Who taught her that life is worth living, as long as it's life. Who gave her purpose.
Gone.
They took him away from her.
And they'll die for it.
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