Disclaimer: I don't own AMC's The Walking Dead or any of its characters, wishful thinking aside.
Authors Note #1: Because it has been a while since I have attempted to purposely ruin everyone's feelings, okay?
Warnings: *Contains: adult language, adult content, character death (as in plural, people), angst, season five spoilers, reference to the usual emotional trauma, angst, and unexpected bonding along the way. Now considered AU in terms of canon story line.
Forever (is a limited time offer)
Chapter Two
"I believe with a little tweakin' on the terminals in DC we can flip the script, take out every last dead one of them; fire with fire."
He told them things, as they clattered down the stairs to the sub-basement. Things he hadn't known how to tell them before. Things he hadn't known for sure until he'd examined the print-outs and equations strewn across bloody whiteboards and wind-swept conference rooms. Things he probably wasn't even supposed to know considering that he told them upfront, tripping over his words as he used someone else's key-card to unlock the door. He'd only been a technical advisor to the main team. A new hire, been on the job six months, tops.
He told them, trembling and over excited, that it'd been their fault.
Their own government.
They'd started all this.
It wasn't natural, how could it be?
It had been something the military had cooked up. Experimental viral warfare filed under the "just in case" and "in order to cure, you must first understand" mode of scientific reasoning. And just like you might expect, the worst case scenario had become their new reality.
He'd been at a conference. Something about disease inhibitors and some new protective platelet shielding, when Wildfire had claimed its first victim. Patient zero. Even Eugene's people didn't know who that was. No one did. If it'd even been a person in the first place.
The answer to that question was like trying to catch the wind. No one knew if patient zero had contracted it and turned, or if the virus had infected everyone quietly - city to city, state to state, country to country - only to explode out into the open when people died of unrelated causes. Spreading like its namesake as more and more people turned and killed others.
Where it started was anyone's best guess – Eugene's people had pinned it down to somewhere on the east coast, but even then that was reaching. It had travelled through the air, the water, everywhere.
Saturating.
Smothering.
Sick.
He told them how his people had gone underground, like protocol dictated. Remaining in contact with the CDC and military intermediaries as they approached the disease from the opposite angle. It had been a calculated move. Meant to hedge their bets and increase their chances of someone coming up with something as the world tore itself apart above them.
But there had been a problem with the power.
Something they hadn't been able to fix.
Something they'd needed him for.
Only he hadn't been there.
"I'm not sure exactly what happened here, but they truly messed up the connectors on the emergency generator. It's going to take me the better part of half a week to figure this out. Replace the shorted out cables, re-code the corrupted files. Phil should have known better than to mix up those wires. I told him before I left - hell, why Tasha even let him near her tool box is completely beyond me. She was my boss, you know. Crazy as all get out, never knew where anything was – the 'lose her head if it wasn't attached' sort of person - but a certifiable genius when it came to working on the bugs in a new system. She tried to call me, I mean, I think she did. I never got around to putting her number in my cell, but this was my system, I coded in the safe-guards – government counter terrorism measures and junk – I told her before I left that the specs were in her inbox. She just had to print them out and getting access to this generator would've been a piece of-"
Eugene talked until words failed, working it out for himself in real time.
He'd been distracted, green code flashing across the dusty screen of the laptop he'd pulled out of an emergency kit in main storage. Chattering on in a way they'd all come to recognize was more for the sake of filling the silence before cutting off in mid word.
The way something in the back of his eyes just broke when he stilled – mid-whirl – in his chair had been difficult to watch. The way he'd trailed off, ending his sentence with a hyphen rather than a period as his fingers stilled on the keys, the faint lines around his mouth twitching like a house of cards five seconds from falling.
The way Abraham's hand eventually came to rest on his shoulder only made it real.
Worse.
Eugene didn't say much of anything after that.
Not for days.
They all passed the time differently as the changing days flashed, day-glow red, across the wall of the control room. The clock was smalle than the one in the CDC, showing the date and time rather than a countdown. But strangely, even that was no less ominous.
Rick healed.
Tara slept.
Carl found a couple best sellers in the back of someone's desk.
Glenn slept.
Judith soaked up all her well-deserved attention with unfailing good grace, charming everyone who even so much as looked her way into carrying her about. Shushing her fussing as the low flicker of the emergency lights painted the underground facility in sickly burnt orange.
Maggie slept.
Daryl paced and made a nest in one of the supply closets. Hiding himself away whenever he figured he could get away with it, but always leaving room for two when she inevitably followed him back there.
Michonne skunked half of them in chess.
Sasha mourned.
Father Gabriel prayed.
Rosita and Abraham got in Eugene's way, hovering and over concerned, like a pair of ducks brooding over their last surviving chick. Only Eugene was too distracted to either notice or appreciate the mothering.
No one said much.
And when they did, it was muted – heavy.
Frankly, she was getting tired of the trend.
It seemed like all the silences these days had a weight to them.
Her soul didn't need the extra weight.
None of them did.
There had been something in his face they should have recognized - should have caught before it was too late as Eugene stared at the same computer readouts over and over, muttering darkly about radiation and specific target calculations. Eyes flick-flicking across tumbling binary code as the confident look dissolved, cycling through half a dozen different emotions – from determination, anger, disbelief and finally, acceptance - as the world, presumably, kept on turning above them.
"Trust me, I'm smarter than you," he whispered, pressing a hand against the glass, his grubby palm almost dwarfed by Abraham's clenched fist as the man beat on the glass – yelling. Rosita and Tara jockeyed for place behind him, trying to be heard above the din as mis-matched phrases of: "Eugene, what are you doing?!" and "we can find another way, there has to be-," floated through the thin recycled air.
They should have known when he'd explained what he was going to do that morning over MRE's of hot cereal and powdered eggs. As his hand had trembled every time he'd tried to pick up his cup of coffee, vibrating with nerves and misplaced righteousness – or so they'd thought.
He stuffed a handful of papers into her arms before he darted into the control room and locked the door, expression crippling and pale as Abraham yelled and threw his shoulder into the edge the second after the dead-bolt slid home.
"It isn't the power supply," Eugene murmured, pressing his head against the bulletproof glass, words muffled and heavy before the line of his shoulders firmed and he met their eyes through the dusty glass square. "Not really. You wouldn't understand. It's the main computer that was damaged. If I had the parts, maybe, a complete re-haul of the system. But even I can't make this work from scratch."
Rick, Daryl and Carl disappeared down a side hall, yelling about a tool kit and the furnace room. Something to take the hinges off.
But Eugene just shook his head.
"This is the only way, someone has to be here to press the switch. It can't be triggered remotely. But the trade-off is, that when I do it, when I release the compound, the juice it needs – the way the system was damaged - will trigger a total melt down. Toxic gas, vapors, the whole damn package. We only get one shot at this, but you can't be in here. Promise me you won't- don't try."
The sound of unsteady boot-soles retreating across smooth-brushed concrete was almost enough to drown out the rest. Like the way his voice cracked when he said goodbye, baritone and oddly pitched as tears welled up in the back of her eyes.
"This is the way it has to be. …Seems like a small price to pay, considering."
She didn't stay for the coughing.
For the thick black smoke he saved them from.
She didn't stay for the tears.
Or the flickering lights as Eugene flipped the switch and sent his solution into the air.
She didn't stay for any of it.
Instead, she went right to the nest.
To the smell of her and Daryl intermingled across the blankets and sheets and buried herself in them. Drowning it out, just this once, as the echoes of the other's grief did remarkably little to soften the bright-bulb sting of sterile whites and unforgiving concrete as the entire complex shuddered and groaned around them.
It was only later that she spread them out, all the papers Eugene had thrown at her.
Some of it she understood.
Most she didn't.
But it was enough.
She kept it close to her chest as a day passed, then two. Until the vents in the control room slowly sifted through the poisonous air – replacing it with the stale outside - and the deadbolt clicked open. Until Abraham was able to go in with a mask and put the thing that'd taken Eugene's place out of its misery.
They'd all lost too much.
Too many getting here.
There hadn't been any other choice but to believe.
Believe it would work.
Believe that it was over.
Believe they finally had a chance.
Her lip curled as she examined the print outs, watching out of the corner of her eye as Carl laughed, tickling Judith's soft little belly as the others looked on, indulgent and warm. Hell if she was going to take that hope from them until she absolutely had to. Until the equations scribbled across the page – ink smudged chicken-scratch Eugene probably never thought he'd need again – proved her wrong.
She didn't get involved when the others waited out the exact span of days Eugene had told them to before going topside. She wasn't there when they popped the hatch and peered out into the murky dawn.
She wasn't there for the silence.
The confusion.
For when they started questioning.
Why?
Why?
Why?
She hadn't been able to bear it.
Because what he hadn't told them was that the IVS had never sent the final formula. Just like Jenner had said, they'd been the closest to a cure, a solution, something they could use to get a leg up on the infection and set the world back to rights again. Out of everyone, they'd been the ones making the real breakthroughs.
Eugene's people had received every last scrap of data.
Everything but the one thing they'd actually needed.
Maybe they'd never gotten it.
Maybe they'd never sent it.
Or maybe France had lost power and gone up before they could figure it out for themselves.
The truth was, they'd probably never know.
All they did was that whoever had sent out the final transmission had typed out a single word. Something that was repeated, over and over, before cutting off in mid-transmission. Something that made her picture fire on fire and a man hunched over a computer, watching his hand turn to ash in front of him.
Jugement.
Jugement.
Jugement.
Jugeme-
He'd had to guess.
He'd guessed wrong.
A/N #2: Thank you for reading. Reviews and constructive critiquing are love! – There will be more to come, stay tuned!
Reference:
* Due to the computer system being damaged, Eugene's efforts to make the 'cure' delivery system work results in having to physically interact with the main computer system, however due to the damage sustained previous to their arrival, when activated, this system basically starts melting down (giving them only shot at delivering the cure and in the process, releases highly toxic vapors/gases which are fatal) Eugene knew this and sacrificed himself in an attempt to get this 'cure' out there. Side note: The problem with the high toxic vapor is real. It is why we have e-waste centers to deal with electronic waste in real life. Essentially it burns out your lungs and you die, so yeah, not exactly fun-town.
* IVS: Is the French equivalent of the American CDC. Full name: Institut De Veille Sanitaire
* "Jugement" – is the word "judgement" in French.
* Big thank you to gunslingerdixon for her tireless help in collecting the quotes I needed for this story. Seriously though, I message her at all hours with ridiculously long requests for quotes and she is like my own personal superwoman, no joke. Go check her out on tumblr!
