Summary: Dan muses amidst the rest of the left-behind.
Type: Captcha prompt fill - '17,000 queuing'
Rating/Warnings: K+.
Characters/Pairings: Dan, mentions of others.
only make us stronger
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Another early morning, another cold morning – breath freezes midair and frost rimes along the graceful arcs of electrical cables where they hang, heavy and tired and useless, between buildings.
It's Dan who squints up through the web of them, tracing the track of airplanes cutting through the predawn sky – bypassing them, all flights redirected to Logan and Newark and Buffalo – Dan who pulls his coat more tightly around himself, fighting off a chill that sits hard in the bones.
It's Nite Owl, though – what's left of the hero, inside the man who chose to give in – who feels righteously enraged that Adrian chose the early days of another unforgiving New York winter to pull off his plot. If killing half the city isn't bad enough – and it is, Veidt overshot as far as he's concerned, it's as bad as it needs to be and even that's a grotesque understatement – stranding the other half without electricity or heat or a source of regular meals in the middle of November is just gratuitously cruel.
The line wanders over the landscape, easily over four miles long, weaving in and out of city blocks like a tremendous suffocating snake – edging forward on its belly by inches at a time. It's November 28th, fourth Thursday of the month, but that means nothing special this year; these people will be lucky to walk away with enough food to keep them going until tomorrow, never mind anything to be thankful for. The city is now defined not by tradition or independence or personal accountability but by waiting, endless waiting, more time spent standing in food lines and clothing lines and kerosene lines and medicine lines than doing anything else.
Waiting.
Dan's waiting for all of this to start making sense, for an epiphany to come and show him how to live with the secrets he's chosen to keep.
Laurie is waiting for a chance to leave the city, to head west, to put the whole mess behind them, because this has never been and never will be her real home.
Adrian, he imagines, is simply waiting to see how it will all end.
The millions of dead, and the particular one he claims for his own, riding unrelentingly on his conscience – well, they aren't waiting for anything.
And the people left alive, these teeming masses camped out on street corners to hold their place in the line, children running in screaming circles to try to keep warm, pockets patted down for spare change or a match or a scrap of food that never turns up, are waiting to get their city back.
It's been reported that this line – just this one, in just this precinct – has been topping out at 17,000 for the last few days. That's a lot of hard rolls, a lot of pots of soup.
Dan shutters Nite Owl away again, back in the dark where dignity can't protest – rubs his hands together against the cold, and steps into position 17,001. His supplies ran out two days ago and for all the money he has there's nothing left to buy with it within city limits, and with half of lower downtown still covered in rubble, it's going to be another long and demanding day.
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(c) ricebol 2009