A.N.: #ProtectGrizz
To anyone who came to this story because they received a New Story notification from me, I'd definitely recommend watching The Society, I think it was an amazing show and very thought-provoking, as in, 'If I was in that position, what would I do?'
So the last thing I watched before The Society was the final season of Game of Thrones: When I envision Kendall, she's portrayed by a freckled Sophie Turner.
Without a nod from Netflix for a second season (yet), I'm going to write this story as if there isn't one, and put my own spin on things, as in, Where are they? How long will they be there? Why are they there? If they are 'saved' does everything they did in New Ham have repercussions when they get home?
The characters I've created popped into my head while I was thinking how different personalities would embrace and even thrive in this situation; and how the likes of Harry are no longer indulged, and so they suffer from a lack of ability to adapt. I wish they had done a little more on how the social hierarchy of the high-school classes completely flips when the kids previously derided for their interests, or the fact they do chores - which, let's face it, is the biggest cause of contention amongst these overindulged kids - are now the more capable kids, who have skills they can contribute to their survival.
I can't believe that Will alone is the sole 'underprivileged' kid in their high-school class, or a kid in a less-than-ideal home-situation; or just not a one-percenter; or that Cassandra was the only one with real health concerns; or that Sam is the only kid who is out-and-proud.
A Shadow on the Wall
'Power resides where men believe it resides, no more and no less. It's a trick, a shadow on the wall' - George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
01
"-maybe it's just, I don't know, maybe they were evacuated, like Cassandra said."
"Without my grandmother's medication?" she blurted hysterically, rattling the neatly-organised little pill-box in her hand; she had been gripping it since she had arrived home to find her house empty. She clutched the medicine-organiser; and Maisie's doll.
She never went anywhere without Baby, not even to help her water the raised beds, or even to have a bath. Eight inches high with dreadlocked hair, naked and lazy-eyed, Baby went everywhere with her little niece.
"You tried calling her -?"
"I've tried calling everyone. Their phones just keep ringing."
"But, I mean - Jess wouldn't tell you if your hair was on fire; would your Aunt Beth even answer?"
"She would after the second dozen calls!"
"Okay, okay - well, look, our texts go through, right? We can call each other - maybe the others are in a reception dead-zone, you know, like an indoor stadium?"
She stared. "Why would they be in an indoor stadium?"
"I don't know - maybe they're evacuated and all their shit was confiscated due to contamination or something, maybe it is just the smell. Maybe it's worse than we thought, and it was something toxic and dangerous?"
She blinked, thinking quickly: "If our family's stuff was taken for safety reasons, they'd have set up quarantine and blockades if it really is that dangerous to be here. We wouldn't be allowed back in."
"Okay, yeah, I don't…they'd - they probably would do that if it was severe enough everyone had to drop everything and leave." He bit his lip, mind working behind those calm, clever dark eyes.
"There's over two hundred of us. Someone - someone's family would've gotten a message through to us," she said, her voice breaking. "A text, a voicemail, something. This isn't The Walking Dead; the apocalypse didn't happen while we slept on the bus!"
"Okay… C'mere…" He refused to let her descend into hysteria: He prised the doll and the medicine out of her hands, set them aside on top of the piano, and pulled her into his arms. For the first time since they got off the bus, finding their town eerily silent, she felt centred: He always had a way of making her feel calm.
His hugs were epic. And she had missed them.
She'd like to say she didn't know why Grizz's was the first number she dialled when her family wouldn't answer her calls: But of course, she did.
When the mess hit the fan - when their world slid out from beneath their feet, without them even noticing - she ran to him: To the love of her life.
Since she was six years old, Grizz had been the best part of her life. Inseparable. They understood each other…at least, she'd thought.
She'd never been disappointed in him before in her life.
He'd broken her heart.
And she knew why he'd done it: She wouldn't have wanted them both living his lie.
Didn't mean she hadn't been completely devastated - didn't mean she wasn't still utterly shattered.
And she remembered, as good as his hug felt; suddenly, inescapably, she remembered. It meant something different to him now, something different to what she felt; like she held the entire universe in her arms.
"I don't know where they are…" Grizz muttered into her shoulder, as she clung on, inhaling his scent, his warmth, his strength. The unflappable, effortless Gareth with his uncanny wisdom and unapologetic Grizzness. He squeezed her tight, the way he always did when he noticed she was on the edge: It happened more and more often as her niece kept growing and she counted every morning her grandmother woke a blessing - and another grain of sand in the hourglass of life. "I just know…we're together, okay. I'm here."
She bristled. And he felt it; and he didn't stop her when she fidgeted, extricated herself from his embrace - much as she wanted to tuck herself up there and never move.
Kendall sniffed, wiping her eyes, and said hollowly, "Yeah," as she stepped back from Grizz. Separation. It was necessary; it wasn't fair. She hadn't asked to know the secret; she hadn't asked for everything she thought she knew to be turned upside-down.
She hadn't asked to have her heart ripped out and stomped on as if she was nothing.
And she couldn't forgive him for making her feel like she was nothing - not when he was everything.
And the look on his face, when he saw her step back, shoving away tears, sniffing angrily - frustrated at crying in front of him, when she'd cried every night for months because of him - told her he knew he wasn't forgiven.
That he regretted hurting her - but it didn't change the fact that he had.
And that he'd still do it all over again if he had to.
He licked his lips, his mind whirring behind those intelligent dark eyes, and he said in that soft, earnest way he had, "I'm still here, you know... I didn't tell you that; I should have. You haven't lost me."
She pinned him with a cold look. "You were leaving everything behind when we graduated."
"Not you," he murmured, looking her right in the eye. Her eyes burned, and she pulled a face, disbelieving.
"Especially me," she said hoarsely, her throat burning, close. "Everyone; you wanted to sever all ties, you told me. Why should I be any different?"
"Because I love you."
He did it again. Earnest and honest: And breaking her heart all over again.
It wasn't fair for him to say things like that, not to her, not anymore.
"So, what, I - I - I'm the Mary to your Freddie?" she asked, tears dripping down her nose. She hastily wiped her eyes. His eyes glinted, his lip trembling toward a hesitant smile: They had watched Bohemian Rhapsody together.
And then he'd told her. He was gay; and he intended on coming out from college - never seeing any of his idiot jock friends ever again. To embrace the life he wanted, not the one he endured.
"I'm not a rock-god," he teased half-heartedly.
"You were to me," she confessed miserably, eyes on the floor, feeling the heaviness of grief on her shoulders and back, making her suddenly exhausted - or perhaps her misery over Grizz, redoubled, shoved in her face, simply compounded her anxiety over their impending graduation and the anguish of finding Grandma and Maisie gone, after a long and uncomfortable bus-ride.
Grizz's face fell slack, and he gazed at her, anguished. "You know, you mean the world to me."
"It really felt that way," she said dully, "when you were ripping my heart out."
"Hurting you is the last thing I ever wanted."
"Happened anyway, though, right?" she said hoarsely, tears burning her face. She was bitter: She knew it. She was angry and bitter about broken promises and the death of a life she had envisioned - a life he had led her to believe in - and devastated, and she'd give anything not to feel that way, not about him, not Grizz, not her Gareth, her best-friend and love of her life since the first week of kindergarten.
She hated that she hated him; she was desperate not to. But she was hurt.
And she was tired of hurting. Of everyone, she had counted on Grizz not to hurt her.
He'd betrayed her worse than all the others, worse than the bullies at school, worse than Courtney, worse than the parents she could barely remember.
Because he was extraordinary: And she couldn't imagine life without him.
Everything she'd thought they'd spent the last couple years building, he'd ripped from her in one simple, devastating declaration. I'm gay.
Freddie and Mary.
Grizz and Kendall.
Freddie/Farrokh - Grizz/Gareth: Two men, two personas they presented to the world to protect themselves.
Mary and Kendall. The two women they loved, and hurt - and who loved them the most.
Exhausted, she sank onto the best sofa beside her: He looked as miserable as she felt. And she realised, he wasn't happy, either: She wasn't the only one devastated.
"I miss you," Grizz said, softly and carefully, his eyes glinting as he gazed at her. She crumpled, as if taking a hit; she wiped her face, her lip trembling, and Grizz cautiously draped an arm around her shoulders, drawing her closer.
"I miss you, too…asshole," she whispered, and he gave her a tremulous smile, a shaky laugh tumbling from his lips, and he tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear so he could nuzzle close the way he used to, hugging her, calming her down through sheer proximity.
She gazed around the empty house, dark where she hadn't turned all the lights on, not wanting to wake her grandmother or niece. The blinds weren't drawn, sure sign Grandma hadn't been back to the house before nightfall; clothes were still in the washing-machine, damp and twisted - she'd never leave them, any more than she'd leave Baby or her medication.
Grandma and Maisie were gone: The town was silent, in an eerie way that made the fine hairs on her arms prickle up.
"It's you and me," Grizz half-whispered. "Whatever's going on, it's you and me… I never meant for you to think I was abandoning you." Tears slid hotly down her cheeks and she sniffed, working her jaw: Because that was what had hurt the most. That Grizz was leaving, and wouldn't look back: He was leaving her behind, and it didn't matter to him.
The doorbell rang.
She launched herself from the sofa so fast Grizz overbalanced, but she reached the front-door and flung it open, exclaiming, "Grandma?"
It wasn't.
"Just me," said Santiago softly, frowning in the shadows of the porch. She blinked, and even peered behind him, searching for her grandmother, then frowned.
"I thought you were heading over to the diner?" she asked, confused. When the buses had dropped them off by the gazebo downtown, Santiago had headed off to Jim's, a popular country restaurant downtown where he worked part-time around school: He would have missed ten days' worth of shifts because of their camping-trip. And Santiago needed the money.
"Place was empty," Santiago told her softly; he always spoke softly, a habit formed over a lifetime in awful group-homes and juvenile-detention facilities, not drawing attention to himself.
"The diner's twenty-four hour. No-one's there?" Kendall asked, allowing Santiago into the house. He always looked so out-of-place, uneasy, as if he daren't make himself comfortable - no matter how many times both her grandparents and even Maisie tried to put him at ease. He was welcome in their home: He wasn't used to that.
"No-one. It's dead," Santiago said softly, frowning. He had intense dark eyes and the prettiest eyelashes Kendall had ever seen, at odds with his severe buzz-cut and tattoos; in spite of appearances, he was soulful. Quiet, courteous and resilient: It was her privilege to know him - she just wished there was some way she could convince him of that. He pursed his lips thoughtfully, caught Grizz's eye across the room and gave the noncommittal, expressive 'guy-nod' before turning to Kendall with a pinched look. "Caius home?"
"He walked me," Kendall shrugged, and Santiago nodded. Caius' dad was a cop and worked nights; he wouldn't be home anyway.
"Has he heard from his dad?" Santiago asked - an odd question, as Santiago maintained a respectful distance from Caius and his father, because he'd dealt with cops all his life, and had no more trust in them than Kendall did in unwired bras to get the job done.
"No; but he wouldn't, not while Mr Jones is on shift," Kendall said: Usually Caius came over to do homework after school, and eat something - ever since his mother left, Grandma had set the example of the strong maternal figure in his life. Santiago pursed his lips together, biting them, and flitted a look at Kendall.
"You got your good flashlight?"
"Uh…yeah. Why?"
"Something you need to see," he said quietly, glancing over at Grizz again. Five minutes later, with her door-key tucked into her jeans pocket, she rode beside Grizz, who was balancing on the pegs of Santiago's BMX. She had her Grandpa's LED flashlight in the basket on the front of her bicycle.
Because Santiago wanted to show them something.
It was the people like Santiago - and Caius' dad - who contributed to the everyday running of the town - the gardeners, waitresses and mailmen, maintenance workers and security, the emergency-services - who tirelessly maintained New Ham while its more privileged residents slept, who noticed first that things…weren't as they should be.
It wasn't just their parents. It wasn't just Kendall's grandmother and niece; it wasn't just the foster-mother Santiago endured; it wasn't just Grizz's mom - it was everyone. Pre-dawn deliveries weren't being made to diners and cafés; scheduled maintenance wasn't being carried out; and the roads were dead. Even in West Ham, a sleepy, largely affluent town in suburban coastal Connecticut, had its reliable night-traffic: The worst calls Caius' dad ever had to respond to were mostly at night - not that he ever talked about them.
No-one who didn't regularly cycle through town at dawn would notice the quiet as something strange and unnatural: That there should have been the first wave of plush commuter cars leaving for Hartford and Manhattan, the cafés downtown already buzzing with life, and the few 24-hour restaurants, like Jim's Country Style Restaurant where Santiago worked, heaving with people just finishing a night-shift.
West Ham was silent.
And the early commuter trains to New York would never arrive. They cycled to the station, onto the platform unhindered, even on their bikes - and West Ham was the kind of place that regarded littering as a capital offence, let alone using bicycles or scooters in public places like the station. Santiago abandoned his bike and climbed down onto the tracks; Grizz helped her down.
"I was riding over, thought it looked too dark, you know?" Santiago said quietly, his voice eerily loud on the cool air. It was May: They were getting used to sticky, still evenings and uncomfortable nights followed by fresh, dewy mornings quickly chased away by muggy afternoons. The rainstorm earlier had been a fluke, but welcome to the likes of Kendall and Grizz, who had their gardens to think about - Grizz was heavily into his raised beds, and Kendall had turned a Scouts permaculture project into a passion.
But it felt cooler because of the rain; it had broken that miasma of heat that pressed on their lungs - and taken with it the smell.
She'd noticed it the minute she climbed off the bus; the smell was gone.
Kendall frowned, watching in the darkness, picking her way carefully along the train-tracks, and realised that Santiago was right; it did feel too dark, an unfamiliar darkness that seemed complete, and made the fine hairs on her arms prick up.
Once Santiago clicked on the flashlight, she wished he hadn't.
It illuminated their faces, glinting off the whites of Santiago's eyes, and she saw Grizz's lips part on a gasp as he saw what she had.
Trees.
Trees had grown over the tracks, warping the steel, roots digging deep into the earth, a canopy of lush leaves still steadily dripping from the storm. Old trees, not saplings, not newly-planted trees; their trunks were at least a foot in diameter. They were established…
And they had to go on for a good while; there was no break in the darkness suggesting the trees thinned out beyond.
Grizz turned to her.
"Blockade, you said."
"Pardon?"
"You said if the smell was so dangerous our families were evacuated, they'd have set up blockades."
"I meant like roadblocks, not - this is a forest!" Kendall blurted, taking the flashlight from Santiago to peer closer. And something strange happened, it felt like she was being drained - of everything. Everything but dread. It settled into the pit of her stomach and nested there, writhing and niggling, agitating her.
It wasn't just that their families were gone…
It was that they were…taken? Maybe.
She'd watched far too much Doctor Who, Walking Dead and Ghost Hunters to believe the world was exactly as they saw with their own eyes: She wasn't religious like Santiago, but then she hadn't endured what he had - but if they had stumbled into a pocket of reality that existed alongside but separate from their own world…she wouldn't immediately dismiss the idea.
Kendall read far too much Terry Pratchett not to want to believe in a more complicated, more hilarious universe than they thought they understood.
"Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin," Grizz muttered, and Kendall frowned at him.
"Are you speaking in tongues? That's all we need."
"It's not tongues, it's Hebrew… The writing on the wall," Grizz murmured, frowning at the woods.
"From the Book of Daniel?" Santiago asked. Grizz still frowned at the woods. Santiago glanced at Kendall when he didn't answer; eventually, Grizz turned to them, shrugging awkwardly.
"Before we got on the bus, I saw…writing on the wall. The writing on the wall. 'Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin'; someone had graffiti'd it on the side of the church," he said, looking unsettled. For laidback Grizz to be unnerved was something.
Grizz was a walking encyclopaedia of weirdness and could remember all kinds of random stuff to make absurd connections; his memory always staggered her - although he could never win a debate with her. Grizz's superpower was the ability to absorb anything he read. A consummate academic, Grizz would have studied the Bible, as a document of significant historical and religious interest. Kendall went to church for the community spirit, not the word of God: Grandpa had always said most people picked up their religion at the door on Sunday-morning, and she had been raised to live by Christian values regardless of how many times she went to church.
"What does it mean?" Kendall asked.
"Your days are numbered," Santiago muttered, staring at the old woods that had encroached on the railway over the last few hours, and a shiver stole over her. Of course; faithful Santiago never missed mass. "You've been weighed in the balance and found wanting."
"Someone wrote that on the wall? Weird."
"That's not the weird part," Grizz said ominously. "Earlier, at the church…when we were partying…it's gone. The writing on the wall, it had disappeared."
"As practical jokes go, it's pretty poor; who besides you would even know that it was Hebrew, let alone what it meant?" Kendall asked, but it didn't feel right to tease. Not with the woods encroaching on the railway; not with their families gone.
"It just feels weird."
"Freaking weird," Santiago agreed.
"Think anybody else knows about this?" Grizz asked, indicating the woods.
"There'd be a lot more people here getting hysterical if they knew," Kendall said: It was Grizz and Santiago's presence that kept her flinging herself over the edge, because her mind was going from zero to panicked in Olympian gold-medal time. "Though most people you know are passed-out drunk right now."
"Most likely," Grizz agreed; he had some dumbass friends. She'd tried to get to know Jason and Clark better, and discovered that they were pretty much exactly as they seemed. When it came to being deep and mysterious, they were the equivalent of kiddie-pools. They weren't particularly clever, or driven, or talented: They'd probably grow up to be CEOs, State prosecutors and Congressmen. And if she sounded cynical, well, she had only known and endured them her entire life. They'd probably end up marrying the girls who'd bullied her since seventh-grade as their starter-wives.
"Maybe this is all just a bad dream," she said hopefully, wincing. "Or the smell has put us into some weird linked coma that's feeding on our fears. I mean - the diner's closed; my grandma and Maisie are gone; and someone threw up ecclesiastical graffiti to warp your brain."
"What about the woods?" Grizz asked.
"I don't know…people in this town like to believe West Ham is the only place in the world that means anything; now we're trapped here…just when most of you were about to escape."
Not Kendall. Not with Grandma in her early Eighties; not with Maisie nearing her fifth birthday and Kendall the primary caregiver after Courtney ran off. Not when her aunts wanted nothing to do with Maisie - their attitude had always been that Maisie was Courtney's mistake. Kendall had made Maisie her responsibility, because it wasn't fair to Grandma to be a mother a third time, not at her time of life…
So Kendall was going to stay behind: She had applied to the local community-college to enrol in night-school, however long it took her to get her degree while she raised Maisie and worked part-time around her school hours. Because someone had to, and the thought of putting her into foster-care made her sick to her stomach… She'd fallen out with her aunt Beth in a big way over the declaration that they were going to put Maisie in care so Grandma could move to a retirement community after Kendall graduated. Kendall never wanted Maisie to think she was unwanted - because hard as it had been the last few years, hard as it was going to be going forward, Kendall wouldn't give Maisie back for the world.
All the shit Courtney had put them all through, Maisie was the only good thing she had ever done.
But that was Kendall's life. Her lot. She had made a choice, to put Grandma and Maisie first, because that was fair; and she was young, and able, and better than the rest of her family put together.
Everyone else, though, even Grizz - especially Grizz; they were counting down the days until graduation, until they could get out of West Ham and never look back, embrace the lives they wanted, not the ones their parents scheduled for them.
"Maybe we're still wasted," Grizz suggested hopefully.
"Not me," Kendall said, raising an eyebrow at him, and Santiago shook his head: He'd wanted to earn some more tips to tuck away in his debit account. And she hadn't been in the partying mood for ages. She sighed, and her breath plumed in the air. "Who do we tell about this?"
"No-one, now. This…can wait until the morning," Grizz said softly, staring at the trees.
"Let everyone live in ignorance a few more hours?" Kendall said, and Santiago nodded. "Sounds good to me. I'm not gonna be the one to tell people about this."
"The morning, then?" Grizz sighed heavily.
Santiago glanced over at Kendall. "Could I, uh…I don't think I can get back to Miranda's."
"Shoot!" Kendall gasped; of course, Santiago rode his bike alongside the train-tracks back to his foster-home. It wasn't the worst part of town; it was just the easiest way home. "You can stay - you can sleep if Grandpa's room, if you don't mind it? Both of you can stay…if you want…" She glanced at Grizz, who nodded after a second.
"Thanks," he said softly.
They turned their backs on the woods, reclaimed their bikes, and minutes later - without having to check the roads for cars, and only dodging a couple of drunk kids stumbling away from the gazebo half-dressed - she was tugging her pyjamas on, braiding her long hair, while Santiago set himself up in Grandpa's bedroom next-door, and Grizz stripped down to his black boxer-briefs and climbed into her double-bed, as he had a thousand times before, lifting the comforter for her to slide in after him.
After the woods, after finding their families gone, they settled in, wrapped around each other - for comfort; to hold on to one of the few precious things they had left.
Each other.
She didn't know what the woods meant: She didn't know what it meant that the smell had disappeared, along with their families.
Kendall just knew that they had each other. And right now, the past didn't matter. It didn't matter that Grizz had obliterated her heart: He was here.
In every way that mattered, Grizz was there for her; as she was for him.
It wasn't what she wanted: But it was what she got. And she always made the most of it.
A.N.: Please let me know what you think - your thoughts on the show, as well as the story!