A/N: As a heads up, there's some slightly explicit content at the end of this one ^^ Sorry I'm taking longer to update these days, but I'm trying! As always, thanks for reading :)

For the first time since they'd left, Applegate had been awake – but he was far from himself. His eyes were incredibly bloodshot and although he was able to talk, he kept zoning in and out of conversation, like he wasn't able to focus on anything. He kept polarising between being calm and serene to snapping violently when offered steroids or morphine for his pains; along with telling Bennett that the soup he had made tasted like crankcase oil. He had argued and thrown it against the wall; swearing and babbling violently. Eventually, Coach, having the most medical knowledge (though barely any), had sedated him. They had moved him to a room by himself to rest up, head lolling and mouth drooling.

He needed a doctor. He needed major surgery. They had pills, yes – Coach had done more than his degree's worth (his own words) in identifying the useful ones. They had steroids, painkillers and adrenaline – but that was about it for the 'medicine cabinet's' worth.

Rochelle hadn't stopped drinking since they had gotten there. Nick thought by now that she would have been sick, but she kept managing to heap on more. She would take a shot, pause for a little while to rest and take another, her lightly slurred conversation completely quelled by Applegate's reawakening. Coach had gotten up to tell her to stop a couple of times, but after her constant refusal; he had left her, keeping a watchful eye.

Bennett, on the other hand, was disturbingly manic, considering the state of his friend. He had talked in an almost violent way for hours about the smoke on the horizon which he had seen earlier that day. Nick had nodded and been supportive in conversation, but in truth talking to the Corporal, awful as it might be to think it, unnerved and almost repulsed him. He had thought him at first fine; when he came back with the news, a bag of medicine and some supplies, cooking lunch while whistling. But when Bennett had encountered Applegate, the way he was, it had driven him into an absolute mess.

They all knew why he was so hopeful about the smoke. It was the hope that it was people trying to contact other survivors – people who had lived. If people had made it, then the likely conclusion to Bennett, not really knowing much better, would be that they had some 'support' in doing so – a nurse, or a man of medicine.

But the others knew it would be unlikely. The three of them had a feeling that he was in a state of denial – hoping to find someone capable of alleviating the unavoidable; or the blame failure would bring. After all, the time was getting closer. They all knew it, but none of them dared to suggest the unforgivable conclusion.

Rochelle swallowed another shot and got up; going into the other room without speaking. Nick watched her; slender legs wobbling gently. A creak of bedsprings and a glug of bottled booze followed as she fell onto the bed. He could hear her crying, quiet but unmistakeable as Coach sat slouched in the back of the room on a camping chair; still in the same position he had been for the three hours that had passed after he had sedated Applegate. There was a strength that Nick could see was leaving him, made obvious by the expression on his face.

Pallid, even for someone so dark-skinned, and lost.

If the young man was going to live, they were going to have to cut into him. Someone was going to have to perform meatball surgery with an eye blind with ignorance; if he was going to stand any chance, at all.

"I injected that kid," Coach said suddenly, when Bennett paused his frantic chatter, perhaps desperate as well to avoid such a discussion. "I injected that boy with somethin' that could have been anythin', with a needle was sterilised with nothin' but vodka and a lighter. I must be losin' my goddamned mind."

Nick's lips thinned.

"You did what you had to," Nick said, a little more flatly than he intended. "It was the right thing to do. Had he undergone any more stress, he'd have probably gotten worse. You've probably gone and bought him more time."

There was a moment of quiet, before Bennett raised enough courage to speak his mind. It was something he'd very rarely done; being a bottler by nature. Nick noted the slowness in his speech as he took his time choosing his words, ironically sounding more sane, hell, more human even, than he had done in hours.

"I've seen a lot of men die," said Bennett, his mask still damping his voice. "I've seen women die and children die. I felt it, as a respectful man does and it hurt me until I found a way to cope. I almost stopped thinking of them as people; just Whiskey Deltas. Infected. They attacked me and I killed them; quickly and efficiently, like I was trained to do with any hostiles."

He swallowed, his voice faltering a little.

"With Ben though, it's different. He's dying. It isn't quick, it isn't painless. H-he's... he's just... helpless."

He was sat hunched; fists either side of his mask, as if he was trying to strike out the madness. Even though it was a time for emergency rather than sitting still, Nick still didn't have the heart to tell him that.

"He's not though," Nick instead said, lying to save grace. "We're gonna find a way to help him –"

Bennett shook his head, cutting him off.

"But what's worse though," he continued, "unlike all those others whose faces I can't remember, I see his face. I see my superior, who commanded me in Iraq. I see the person who I went through high school with and then looked up to in military school. But the very worst thing of all? I see my friend... t-the... the person who was best man at my wedding."

He left it there; unable to speak any longer. Nick, not knowing what else to do but feeling a need to do something, crossed the room to where he was; crouched down and sat beside him. Bennett sniffed deeply with an uncouth wet slurp.

"I h-hate this mask," he stuttered miserably, running his fingers along the straps holding it to his face. "I hate it so much – and I'm probably going to have to wear it the rest of my fucking life. I'm tired of it, I'm so fucking tired of it."

He went to undo one of them, when Nick realised exactly how far he really was on the edge of completely cracking. Nick grasped his hand to stop him, holding him with difficulty as the Corporal fought against him. Coach got out of his seat; limping across the room. They held him down amidst cursing and cries; knowing full well that he would hate them now, but thank them later.

"Stop it now, boy," Coach yelled. He batted down Bennett's flailing arms and shook him. "Ain't your time yet. Isn't what your buddy in the other room would want you to do now, is it, or behave like? Kid, you have the potential to live a long time – when there's so many others that don't have that privilege. We all have it tough right now. Ain't no sense in makin' it worse for the rest of us, is there?"

"What do you know about things being hard, then?" Bennett yelled, as Nick shut his eyes. "Go, on!"

Coach met his eyes with a cold, solid glare. It made Nick uncomfortable, in how scary he looked. His intensity, in contrast to his usual nature, came across as more intimidating than Nick had seen a man in a good while. He rested a knuckle against his lips, trying to distance himself away from the two of them and thankful, for a change, that no hostility was aimed at him.

"Don't ask me that question," Coach replied, softly. "You don't want to know the answer. Trust me."

But Bennett persisted. As Coach lost patience, Nick sighed. He'd heard the story, having blurted out something similar round a campfire on the way up to Atlanta in the Jimmy Gibbs Jr. Coach hadn't hesitated to tell him then – perhaps because of how little he thought of him. It made Nick ill to think that even a guy like Coach, being nice and jolly to everyone, had nailed down his personality back then as a class one asshole so soon. What he'd told Nick had shut him up (and everyone else) that night. They had never spoken of it since, even when Nick tried to apologise the next day.

Truthfully, he didn't want to.

"I've had to give up my wife and daughter," Bennett yelled. "They're in a bunker somewhere – could be anywhere, anywhere at all in the country – and I'll probably never know where, because the army's pretty much dead. I'll never know whether they made it – is that hard enough for you, huh?"

Coach hesitated. The brick teetering on the edge of the beam was now toppling. As Nick watched it fall, Coach's voice booming around him, the first thing that popped into his mind was Slim.

"How dare you," Coach spat. "I know you're a mess, but I thought you were a bigger man than that. How dare you make out that you're worse off than anyone here? We have all given up and lost things durin' this goddamned so-called apocalypse, doin' what we had to do to live. At least your wife and daughter were alive when you last saw them, and you knew they were goin' to a safe place. I've seen mine die – and you know the scary thing? I'm pretty normal."

He didn't go into the kind of detail he'd told Nick. He left it at that with Bennett; leaving for another room and slamming the door on them both. Nick knew what had happened and he remembered the details lucidly. As Bennett shrunk into ashamed silence, Nick recalled what Coach had told him.

Otis Redding (Nick couldn't blame Coach for using a nickname) had never wanted to become a teacher by choice, or when he was younger, a parent. Coach, however, had told the three of them that his teaching, despite what others might say about it, had actually, in a sort of ironic way, been the inspiration for him to finally have children with his wife of over ten years. Marlene (his wife and the one and only love of his life) had nagged him about it ever since she was twenty-one (they were then both thirty-two), so when he had finally buckled, the changing point seeing one of his students coming out of his class fifteen pounds lighter than when he began seven months or so earlier, she didn't take him seriously.

"Otis," she groaned, after he'd told her about it in a way he thought had sounded not only sincere, but enthusiastic, "don't torment me, baby. You know how much I've wanted children. It's mean, teasin' a poor woman like that."

Coach had been hurt for a second until it occurred to him what she was actually thinking. When he clicked, he let out a hearty string of laughs and took his fair lady by the hand.

"Marl darlin'," he replied, grinning broad as sunshine, "I'll level with ya. Not only is this'eyre man bein' serious, he wants to get started right now, if you're up for the ride."

Her face had been the loveliest picture when she realised that he meant it. She had agreed then; then two years after that, then two years after that again. When Sam, Coach's youngest was born, Marlene was exhausted. She hadn't ruled out having any more kids, but she decided to take a break with Sam and give her body a rest. At forty three, the age she was when she died, she was bright and chipper as ever. They had been talking about having another quite seriously, right up to the week the infection hit.

Coach had three kids and carried a picture of them around in a makeshift wallet his eldest, Daisy, had made for him in shop class; with the Atlanta Falcons (his favourite football team) logo stamped on the corner. He had been so proud of her for making it and he treasured it so much, that he'd gone into his own burning house to get it when the end came. Even now, it still resided in his back pocket; empty except for that picture, one of him and his wife – and a few strips of Juicy Fruit, of course.

Even Nick had admitted when he saw the picture, without a sliver of dishonesty, how beautiful they were.

Daisy, Jason and Sam. Nick still remembered their names. They were imprinted heavily on his mind. Even though Nick had no children and had never planned on it, looking at those faces had really made him wonder about what could have been. In an obscure way, he felt almost jealous – not exactly to the point where he wanted to steal and replace them with changelings – but still a hollow longing that surprised him.

When the infection hit the city, the central area of Savannah where Coach lived with his family was (and still remained) for obvious reasons the worst struck; with new cases in the first few days reported in exponential numbers. The first to be evacuated, as was always the case, were the children, and Coach and his wife did not hesitate – still having full faith in CEDA, the police and the Army at the time (although really just anyone who they thought could help them) – to send their kids away with the others.

However, the rescue mission did not go according to plan. The panic of people, poor traffic coverage and the highly contagious nature of Green Flu meant that the roads out of the city were completely jammed; the choppers still not quite yet up to the stages of evacuation – still, naively but with good intent, being used to fly in the sick and wounded to the region's hospitals. In the next few days coming, the places of healing would burst over – the pus of the illness seeping into the stricken city, shrieking and biting – unable at all to be helped due to the vast numbers that had spread their sickness from patient to doctor. The buses carrying the children had been halted to the train stations for this reason, and they had had no other option but to risk walking; amidst reassurance from the soldiers and agents in their unknowingly useless spacesuits that they were heavily armed and that there was nothing at all to worry about.

Daisy had been on the phone to her father the entire trip. She had sat at the back of the bus with her brothers and had spoken quietly the entire time; afraid perhaps that her cell might be confiscated. Coach had spoken to her and so had her mother, as calm as they could muster in order to keep Daisy composed.

In reality, Coach's heart was pounding so hard in his chest that he was constantly swallowing; as if to keep it down. His wife's fingers had been trembling as she held the phone and listened to her daughter – the both of them wondering, fearing and doubting whether or not they had done the right thing in entrusting the lives of their children with total strangers. Armed strangers maybe; but still total strangers.

The walk had been cut short. Coach heard it all over the speakerphone; as did his wife. Shrieks and screaming, before the silence followed from the children; sirens and fighting the only sounds to be heard.

Not knowing what else to do; Coach and his wife had gone out without thinking, reasoning or any sort of preparation, fearing the absolute worst but, with that as a way of thinking, their parental urges never stronger. The two of them had travelled on foot to the edge of town where the evacuees had been headed; surviving the trip by some miracle.

What they found, Coach didn't ever say. He had fallen into silence after they asked him for a short while as if in a trance; snapping out of it and continuing almost as if it was nothing. Nick, not easily fazed but then completely mortified, couldn't help himself in reasoning that it had been so destructive to a man's cognition, that not only did Coach not want to recall it; but he physically couldn't. The surge inside him had been so huge that his brain had fought massively against it. Coach explained to them that after he had seen what he did; he had temporarily lost his memory as his way of coping – getting to grips by listening to the news and understanding what had happened due to the condition of his wife.

His wife, since then to her death, uttered not a word. She did not cry. She did not scream. She was nothing but silent; her lips permanently sliding over her grinding teeth. Coach didn't have to speak to her or see a doctor to know that she had gone mad.

Coach and Marlene had gone home together afterwards. He had stayed up most of the night; talking to her desperately. She still had not spoken; but instead, with a blank expression, had gone into the kitchen and started cooking. Coach had tried to help her, wishing he knew how to snap her out of it and being terrified that no matter what he tried, he could not; but she simply shrugged him off or shoved him away. He had left her alone, having no other choice and had gone to lay down; where he drained his energy by weeping.

When he had come to, he had smelled burning. His room had been filled with smoke. He had gone downstairs; to find the kitchen and dining room ablaze; the fire spreading rapidly. Already, before he saw Marlene, he knew what had happened.

He looked for her anyway.

In the living room, he found her. A small figure strewn roughly over the sofa as if thrown; her expression blank as it had been when he'd left her – but in a way that would never change, no matter what would ever happen. A bottle of pills had lain next to her hand that hung off the edge of the sofa; a crinkled up ball of paper a crude origami flower next to her cheek.

Coach had screamed. The acrid taste of the smoke however had strangled it – the sound much more like that of a wounded animal. He had proceeded to shake her; performing CPR in the full knowledge that he was too late.

She was gone.

Nick couldn't understand how Coach could function, at all. To him it would be like a cancer; eating away at him, growing until he buckled and gave in forever. The man amazed him and, after that, he couldn't help in feeling a little bit appalled in how self-obsessed he'd been. He still felt it now; but vicariously, through Bennett, who had sat there in a few moments of stunned quiet before beginning to mutter under his breath repeatedly:

"I didn't know... I didn't... I couldn't..."

Nick didn't feel like hearing his whining when he had drinking to do. He often drank alone, having had a case of mild alcoholism since his late teens. His Italian-American father had always been fairly liberal about drinking due to the lower age limit in Italy, so Nick had made many early friends in so-called 'delinquent' circles due to his ability to procure booze.

"Go check on Applegate," Nick said to him, not unkindly. "It'll take your mind off it. You can sort out your problems when Coach has calmed down."

Bennett hesitated for a moment, but Nick kept an insistent, dismissive look about him. He seemed to get the picture and left; bringing a heap of tablets and some water with him, just in case. Nick welcomed the quiet and poured himself out a shot of vodka; shaking out (fairly stupidly) a Valium tablet to accompany the booze.

He took it straight, the numbness overcoming him soon after taking his third shot.

He was drunk.

Not terribly drunk, but drunk enough to make a bad judgement call without caring. There was more going through his mind than usual and his legs were moving without him; taking him to the only room in the house with a person in it capable of solving his problems.

Without knocking, he pushed inside with no apology.

Rochelle didn't move immediately; perhaps due to how drunk she also was. Instead she sat up slowly, taking her time; like when one performs a poor walk of sobriety in front of the police. Nick sat beside her. She looked back at him reproachfully – not rejecting the advance, but somewhat confused.

Nick didn't want to talk. He had not come in here to talk; more to feel the presence of her – the person who calmed him more than anyone else right now. He knew she had her own problems, but he was unable to help it – and the fact that she seemed to be reciprocating the need for company thus far made him react, due to the alcohol, in a way he would never normally have dared.

Before she could speak, whether or not she was thinking about it or not, Nick touched her cheek; cupping her jaw gently with his hand. He didn't fully understand why, usually having at least slight control whilst under the influence, but he didn't feel nervous. She usually made him feel extremely self-conscious – even, although a secret, causing his ego to shrivel – but now, as their eyes met, that was no longer there.

She kissed him first.

He accepted it gladly; her willing warmth wonderful to him. It spread through all of him, the sensation between the two of them amplified; the intoxication forcing the nullification of everything else that might have been before. A focus formed between them; one that needed desperately to be sated.

His hand slid between her thighs.

A soft groan erupted from her as she accepted him; her hips arching gently to his touch and with that sound, he found satisfaction.

They did not speak through the act. He buried himself within her, giving and taking; knowing he ought to fear the reciprocations of the next day but not caring. She held on to him tightly; sometimes panting, other times hissing slightly – which made him fear he was hurting her. He slowed, thinking of breaking the unwritten pact between them, but when he did, she moved against him; willing him to keep going.

He didn't want this to be all about him. It ought to have shocked him as a thought, but it didn't. As the bliss heightened for him; he was afraid of it, afraid for her, afraid that all he was really doing was taking –

Suddenly, she let out a cry, which startled him.

It took a few seconds for Nick to register what had happened when she tensed beneath him, writhing helplessly as she gasped for air. His eyes lolled as he felt it; the heat of it slaking him and as she squeezed him, he fell into submission – finishing intensely with a yell of his own.

When it was over, the silence between them followed. They lay back to back; both of them thinking about what they had done and wondering what it really well and truly meant.

A certainty was with the both of them, however, to resolute their misted thinking; that was beginning to clear as the minutes passed.

They would never speak of it to anyone else. They would not speak of it tonight and when they arose in the morning, they would not discuss it either. They were going to do, the best they could, what most adults did until they came up with an idea that would either solve or overcomplicate their underlying, uncomfortable feelings.

Pretend, as always, that nothing had changed; when, in truth, everything had.