There was a sigh and the sound of a car door being closed before Rick heard the woman from earlier say, "I heard you the first time that you shouted for me, Christopher."
"I did not shout," the boy huffed good-naturedly. "I merely called out to you. As," he said over an indelicate snort, "you told me to do should I find anything of interest."
Another figure joined the boy- Christopher, the boy's name was, at the back of the car. Rick could barely make out the woman's features from his prone position, but what he could see was a riot of dark curls piled up into a messy bun and a peek of skin that reminded him of fresh cream.
"You hollered about there being an injured man in the car?" she drawled in a way that had a laugh bubbling into his throat.
"I was so not hollering."
"I could hear you from all the way down at the other end of the road, Meathead," a third voice, that belonging to a much younger sounding girl, called from somewhere near the front of the car. "So there."
"Shut up, Rose."
"Christopher…" his mother warned. "Don't tell your sister to shut up."
"And why can't I?"
It was spoken in that way of all brothers who were beleaguered by obnoxious siblings. Rick could well empathize with him, having a brother himself and knowing full well just how annoying they could be. Especially at this age, he mused.
"It is not polite to tell someone to shut up," came his mother's gentle rebuking. "That's why."
"Rose stuck her tongue out at me, though," Christopher protested. "Where was that polite?"
There was a sigh and then, "You're right. Rose? Don't stick your tongue out at your brother."
"But you stick your tongue out at Uncle Dick all the time," the girl, Rose, fussed. "And at Uncle Jason."
"And Uncle Tim," Christopher added with a grin that Rick saw stretched from ear to ear. "So, you aren't being very polite to them when you do it and should apologize to them for it."
"Yes, I should," there was just a speckle of humor in that satiny tone now, "but I won't since they deserve when I stick my tongue out at them." Then he heard her mutter something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like, "Lot less painful of me than smacking them winged idiots upside their hard heads is."
"Why is it okay that you stick your tongue out at them," Rose complained, "but I can't stick mine out at Christopher?"
"Because I'm your mother and say you may not stick your tongue out at him is why."
"That's totally not fair," both kids cried in unison. "Mom!"
"Tough."
Rick listened to the exchange, amused despite the precariousness of his situation. The resigned look on Christopher's face told him this was an argument that had been had many times before and all with the same parental outcome. As a parent, he understood her reasons for correcting them. Telling someone to shut up and sticking your tongue out at them was not exactly the most appropriate social behavior.
As a man who possessed... or had possessed, he amended with a grimace, a sibling, however, he sympathized with the pair. There are just some days where you don't feel like being nice or polite to your brother or sister. There were days, in fact, where he recalled wanting to do nothing more than beat the shit outta his brother just because Jeff had annoyed the hell out of him.
He must have made some sound because those green eyes, bright and full of life, flickered back to him. Rick found himself thinking again about Carl, and about how his eyes would twinkle with a slight hint of youthful mischief or awe.
Christopher's brow puckered as he stared at him, openly assessing, before he turned away to say to his mother, "There's a man lying in the backseat of the car. He's got a hand clamped to his chest. I think he's injured." He glanced back at Rick from over his shoulder. "Looks like he could be bleeding pretty bad."
Rick bit out a vehement curse and switched his gun to his other hand just in case the boy's mother proved to be a whole lot more dangerous than either her two kids or hellhound from hell were.
"In the car…?" he heard the woman murmur in a low, husky tone that caused his belly to curl unexpectedly with an all too familiar heat. "Christopher, are you even sure that the man is…" There was a thirty-second pause. "Alive?"
"Uh, he looked at me so, yeah?"
His cheeky response almost made him laugh. The kid had balls that much was for sure. Carl would never have sassed him as this boy just had his mother.
"Mind your tongue, Christopher." His snort was punctuated by a deep sigh from his mother. Rick almost felt sorry for her. The teenage years were going to be an exercise in patience from the looks of it. "How can you even be sure that he's not another of the infected that we've been encountering? There have been many of those. And they," she said in a tone that had Rick imagining honey dripping off a comb, "all looked at you when you tried to get their attention."
"I'm positive he is not one of the infected, Mom." Christopher rolled his eyes. "Geez, I am your son, remember? I mean..." A grin flashed across his face. "I did inherit more than just your temper and stubbornness."
"You need to stop listening to your uncles," his mother harrumphed. "Especially your uncle Tim."
"Why?"
"Because your uncle Tim is the one who took brooding and made it an entirely new form of private warfare."
"I thought that was uncle Jason?"
There was a tiny scoff. Then the little girl, Rose, said, "Uncle Jason's version of brooding is getting into physical fights with Uncle Dick and Grandpa Bruce that result in mom not speaking to any of them for days upon days."
"Where did you hear that from, Rose?"
"Uncle Dick."
The woman sighed before saying, "Yeah, well," in a way that promised hell for the man in question. "You need to ignore anything that your Uncle Richard says."
Rick swallowed back another laugh. Their family dynamics were… interesting to say the least. People like them can't be bad, he thought as he shifted into a semi-sitting position. People who clearly love and care about each other and about their absent family members can't be a threat.
He hissed as a bolt of pain streaked across his chest. Krypto, or as Rick dubbed him: The-Hellhound-Who-Wouldn't-Shut-Up, let out a bark that drew Christopher's attention back to him. The boys dark brows lowered over the bridge of his nose and his mouth thinned into a line that told Rick he was worse off than he had thought he was.
"Mom?" The boy nodded his head towards him. "The man in the car…?"
"Christopher…" His mother let out a soft sigh. "I know you want to help everyone, and believe me, baby, I adore your kind and generous heart. However, we can't help everybody we come across. We just don't have enough resources available to help all the people who need it."
"Not yet we don't," Rose chimed in. "But we will once we get to Grandpa Bruce's, right, Mom? He will have enough supplies and things to help those who need it. Won't he?"
"Sweetie, if there's anybody in this world who is prepared for an apocalypse, it is your Grandpa Bruce."
"We have to help this man, though," Christopher insisted in an emotionally charged voice. "Mom, we have to help him."
"Christopher," his mother said slowly; patiently, "why is it so important that we hel-"
"'Cause he's a cop, Mom."
…
Her son's announcement had the same effect as a bucket of ice water being dumped over her head. Raya Kean rocked back on the balls of her feet as the icy deluge poured over her, into her. There had been many local law enforcement agencies that had acted as the first responders when things initially started to go to hell. Many officers had done everything they could in order to help people with family members who were stricken by the fever that predated the rise of the dead.
Many had been out there on the front lines, helping people to evacuate to the CDC or make preparations for the incoming siege. Many cops went above and beyond their stations in order to make sure that people got away from the sheer overwhelming number of infected that were walking the streets.
And it was the cops, at the expense of their own lives, who got as many civilians as they could to safety before the law, as well as the world went all to hell. Cops, she realized as she stared into her son's pleading eyes, like her uncle Jim, Harvey Bullock and her own best friend and onetime Blüdhaven City Police Officer, Dick Grayson.
Christopher is right, she thought. We have to help this man. No matter who he is, he was once a police officer. We owe him for his dedication and time of service.
She would help the man, whether he was a badge-carrying officer of the law or not, simply because her son had asked her to. And I won't deny you this, she told him as she stared into his face. Conner's face, she thought as she cupped his cheek in her hand. You are beginning to look and act more like him every day.
"Mom?" There was a thick cord of concern in Christopher's voice, upon his face. "You okay?"
No, baby, she silently told him as she stroked his cheek with her thumb. I'm not okay. And I won't be okay until I get you and your sister somewhere safe.
"Mom?" Rose joined her brother. "Mom?"
Raya gave them both a reassuring smile as she stepped back. "I'm okay," she lied. "Just tired is all."
Neither of her children looked like they believed her.
"You said the man is a cop?" She approached the grime-and-gore-coated sedan and started to glance into the backseat but hesitated. She glanced again at Christopher, one eyebrow lifted. "You're sure he is a cop?"
"Uh, yuh," her son said in a near-perfect imitation of her own dry tone. "I wouldn't tell you he's a cop if I couldn't tell that he, yanno, actually is one."
Of all the things that her son had to inherit from her, her smart mouth didn't have to be one of them. Now I know how everyone I have ever sassed has felt…
"And you can tell he is a cop, how, exactly?"
"His badge kinda gives it away."
Raya flicked a look at her son that warned him about what the consequences would be if he continued with his cheekiness. A responding smirk, one that so thoroughly reminded her of his father, tilted one corner of his mouth. It was a reminder of the man who unknowingly fathered this boy.
He's getting to be more and more like Conner every day. She felt a twinge of that never-quite-gone grief but set it aside to handle the most pressing issue at hand.
"How do you know for sure that the man is a cop?" She folded her arms across her chest. "What makes you believe he's actually an officer of the law?"
"Uh, 'cause he's also wearing a King County Sheriff's uniform to go with that badge pinned to his chest?"
Raya harrumphed at that. "He could have stolen the uniform from a supply store or police station," she pointed out in a cool, crisp tone. "Or taken the clothing and the badge from a police officer that he killed."
"He looks like a cop, Mom," Christopher replied in a voice that clearly said he thought she was being dense. "I mean, it's pretty hard to fake looking like a cop."
Krypto heaved a sigh that echoed Raya's thoughts perfectly about that statement. "Christopher…" she said slowly. "Criminals pretend to be cops all the time."
"He's a cop, Mom," he gritted. "I'm sure of it."
"Looking like a cop is just not a good enough reason to explain why you think he is one, honey," she sighed. "I'm sorry."
"What more do you want?" he huffed now. "I mean, he looks like a cop to me. What other reason do you want me to give you?"
"Christopher," Raya stated now with as much patience as she could muster. "There is absolutely no way to identify a person as a-"
"…cop?" Her smarmy-mouthed son snorted at that. "Grandpa Jim looks like a cop even when he's in his pajamas."
She had to concede that he had a point there. James Gordon could be wearing swim trunks and a straw hat and manage to look like a cop. Still, just because the man could be a cop didn't make him someone that they could automatically trust. I learned all about how the cops can be the bad guys when I was eight and hunted by men from Uncle Jim's unit.
The memories of that long ago Christmas Eve still caused her to have nightmares all these years later. She didn't have to try and recall the hot, hungry eyes of Detective Branson as they followed her all around the squad room.
She only needed to close her eyes in order to see them.
Same as she didn't need to think hard in order to remember the night her father murdered her mother. It was a memory that frequently superseded itself over everything else on her mind.
A tumbling vase spilled, unbidden, across her visual field. The world faded away as she heard the crack of gunfire above the glass shattering upon the asphalt that turned into sparkling marble. A trickle of blood slowly surrounded one fragile bloom as the acrid stench of burnt gunpowder mixed with scorched flesh and fresh blood.
She heard a scream she did not recognize as her own, then there was another shot and her mother was falling, collapsing upon the small table in the middle of the entryway, upsetting the vase of roses - always red roses - so that they rained down upon her as she fell.
With everything she had left, her mother crawled towards the stairs, towards her inner sanctuary, a bloody trail in her wake the only evidence of the violence that had been perpetrated on that night.
Raya would live; all the rest of her life she would live with that image of her mother, bleeding and broken at the bottom of that grand staircase as the man who hurt her circled around her like a vulture just waiting to peck at her carcass.
"Mom? Mom, are you okay?"
No, baby, she told Christopher silently. No, I'm not okay. I have never been okay. I just have done a really good job at keeping all of my fears and pain and grief where you and your sister could never see them.
She didn't say any of that to her son, though. No, she just re-buried all of the dark things screaming obscenities inside her head and lifted eyes just a bit blurry to his worried ones.
"You don't know who you can trust in this world, Christopher," she told him in a voice she hardly recognized as her own. "You don't know who is a good person or a bad person or someone masquerading as one or the other. Remember, this isn't a good world, a nice world, a safe world. Not anymore. It's-"
"I know, Mom," Christopher interjected with a sigh. "This world is a cruel, cold, and dangerous place. You've told me this like gazillions of time already."
"Well," she said lightly, "consider this a gazillion and one time that I have told you this."
"Whatever," Christopher replied with a roll of his eyes. "God," he muttered as he sent a pained look at the man who was watching from inside the car. "You are such a mom at times, I swear."
"Only mom ya got, kiddo." Raya indicated for him to get down off the car. "Now, go and help your sister with loading the things we found into the Bronco, okay?"
"Fine," he huffed.
"Thank you," she said, her lips twitching at his aggravated tone. "I do so appreciate your cooperation in the matter."
"What would you do without me?" he joked.
She sent him an amused look. "Go away so I can find out."
"You wouldn't let me get more than five steps."
She reached out to stroke her fingers over his cheek. "Wouldn't even let you get that far, kiddo."
"See?" he teased. "You're such a mom."
"Get going," she ordered. "We still have a lot of road to cover tonight."
He flashed a grin at her that again reminded Raya of Conner. Seeing it caused her heart to turn over as a smidgen of that decade old pain and grief surfaced. She watched him jump down from the car and jog over to where his ten-year-old sister, Rose, was loading bags into the back of the Bronco she'd hot-wired when they'd been two counties over.
Krypto let out a yip, drawing her attention back to the problem currently facing her. With a sigh, she walked over to the back passenger side door and reached out to wipe at the dirty glass with her hand, not knowing what she'd find, but preparing herself for the absolute worst...
A/N: Hello, all! Hope the week has been good to you!
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