"Let's come back alive."
At what point did my standards drop so low? Elesis wonders, pushing herself up the flights of stairs with the others behind her. At the back of the group, there's quiet whispers, but she ignores them for the most part, pretending she can't hear them.
Ara squeezes her hand supportively, and she squeezes back in appreciation, offering a small smile. The stairwell is still dark, but Ara's eyes are still bright and her love still shines through them. "This isn't the end," she says softly. "We're all going to make it back, and we're gonna win, y'know?"
"I have faith in all of you," Elesis replies, but her thoughts are elsewhere.
Ciel's group is the first to break off, leaving in the direction of the closest shoe store. For good reason, too; Lu's snow boots are badly worn through, as much as she refuses to admit so. Even she's visibly on edge, even though she's probably the only one who doesn't understand how dire the situation is. She's bandaged her stiletto blade to her bad hand, allowing her to wield it even without having to curl her fingers.
Ara and Add separate from them a little bit later, heading back towards the place where they entered, or maybe even the food court. Ara offers Elesis a kind kiss on the cheek before she too disappears into the nothingness of the corridors. The voiceless patters of her feet and Add's speak volumes.
As soon as they're out of earshot, Elesis turns to Rose. "Well?" she asks, a grin on her face. "Ready to take out the trash?"
Rose rolls her eyes. "You're crazy. Let's go."
"Oh, you know it."
"And stay dead," Ara growls, yanking on the coat hanger with all her strength. With a stomach-curdling riiip, the zombie's head tears clean off, splattering blood across the tiles of the clothing store. "God. The nerve of these things," she spits. "I hope they rot in hell."
"They probably don't have nerves anymore," Add offers, probably not picking up on her anger, "but hey, do what you must to make them stay dead."
It's upsetting. She doesn't think she's jealous, per se, but it is a bit painful to see her girlfriend conspire with someone else and not speak a word of it to her. It's obvious that when Elesis woke up last night, she and Rose got up to some sort of planning - and Ciel probably knows a thing or two about it.
(She asked the poor guy about it. All he said was "they had a kindergartener with them", which, in retrospect, is even more terrifying.)
What kind of danger is Elesis getting into without her? Didn't they agree to be partners in crime, always watching each other's backs? Ara feels... hurt, at best, and betrayed, at worst.
After all, there's nothing quite like the sinking feeling of abandonment that scares you the most.
And it doesn't help at all that she's been de facto paired with Add for this mission. She really doesn't want to hurt his feelings or anything, but he's terribly unprepared for combat and inexperienced with his new killer ski poles. Sure, they're sturdy weapons, but watching him flash them against the zombies is just as painful to look at as his face.
She doesn't want to acknowledge the kiss(es), and neither does he. That's okay with her. They don't need to continue down that particular path. She has her girlfriend, and he has his dreams of going to Empyrean. They don't mash well together in that sense, and so Ara thinks it's okay to play pretend and forget this one time.
But it's not fair that the adrenaline took over, to her or to him, because she doesn't know if she wants to pursue something with him or keep the precious, precious closeness between her and Elesis. In the crossroads she's standing at, everything is covered in mist and her shoes are stuck in the mud. It sucks.
"You okay?" Add suddenly asks, and even though his voice is very quiet it jolts her out of her thoughts. "You've been kinda silent for a while."
She can't really help that the laugh that follows is almost forced, just because of how bitter it is. "My girlfriend is clearly up to something," she says, "and I don't know what. I'm supposed to be her second-in-command. I'm supposed to be protecting her. But she's locked me out. What am I supposed to do now?"
A tear runs down her cheek. She ignores it. She can play pretend with that, too.
"Hey. You're not alone in that." Add sighs, or rather he heaves. Ara doubts he can really breathe, with all this dust floating around. "I thought I was supposed to be the tech guy of this squad, but she sent Lu up to get the car instead. I could have hacked into the controls and saved her the trouble of getting hurt." He shakes his head. "But what's done is done."
"I guess." Ara glares at their surroundings. "Where are we?"
"Hmm? Oh, there's the pharmacy."
True to his word, the pharmacy where they first encountered the Behemoth is just around the corner. Glass shards line the floor at their feet; Ara steps over them gingerly, trying not to damage her new shoes. The storefront is a mess of broken glass and rotting drywall. They shuffle inside, weapons at the ready, and begin to pick their things.
It's a good thing Elesis got them new backpacks, too, because they'd never be able to bring all of the stuff they find in there back by hand. Ara packs her pockets full of bandages and antiseptic and all the medications for common ailments that she finds haven't passed their best by date, and then she gets to work on the food in the back. Filling her new water bottle is much easier than having to figure out a way to pack each plastic bottle individually into her backpack. She grabs a can of pickled button mushrooms, which hits the ground with a clunk when she misjudges her throw by an inch.
"You okay back there?" Add asks, and suddenly yells out. Ara rushes towards him immediately. He's in the aisle with the sanitary products, and she doesn't know it he'll be able to stand his own-
But then she relaxes when she sees the way he handles the ski poles. The zombie doesn't even stand a chance. He pins it to the ground by the stomach, and tears the thing in two with the pair of ski poles. "Jeez," Ara says, as he slices the thing's head off for good measure, "vicious, much?"
"I learned from the best," he replies. "How's your gathering going?"
"Better than expected."
They walk away from the pharmacy like kings, pockets dripping with treasures. "We just completed the quest," Add says, shouldering his backpack a little more. "Now all that's left is to slay the Behemoth again."
Ara's heart wrenches. "They're probably off doing that, right now," she says quietly. The precious few moments of clarity as she rummaged through the shelves of the pharmacy - or, at least what felt like moments of clarity - are lost once again to the terrifying thoughts of betrayal.
Add shakes his head. "Ara, I think you're beating yourself up a bit here," he says. "You're not Elesis."
"Wh-"
"Uh, I think I can rephrase that a bit better. You can't think the exact same things as her, every minute of the day. You have your own thoughts, and she has her own." He offers a beatific sile. "What if she's just as scared as you right now?"
"Elesis? Elesis Sieghart? Scared?" Ara snorts. "Not for the next few thousand years."
"Okay, but she's still got things to be afraid of, sometimes. The river," and both of them shudder here, "the river is something that scares her. She's kept that to herself because it puts on a front, right? She's the fearless leader, never afraid to dive into danger to keep her team alive. She's got a lot of hidden fears that she'll never tell us because of that.
"It's okay that you don't know what she's planning, and you're upset about it. That's fine. But what I'm trying to say is that given her exact track record, and given that she's never been good at opening up about these things, I think she might be trying to protect all of us from something." He shrugs, and then looks sheepish. "I probably sound like an asshole for saying that."
Ara winces. "Kinda, but it's the truth. It's Elesis. What should I expect? She'll shout her love to the world from the rooftops, but she won't even tell me about her deepest fears." She laughs, and the bitterness fades just as well as the joy. "Thanks for talking to me, Add. I really appreciate it."
It's at that exact moment, that from somewhere in the mall, someone screams.
Ara's blood goes cold.
"You're kinda distraught," Lu says observingly. "You wanna talk about it?"
This is a very new thing for Lu to say. It's also not something Ain ever thought Lu could be capable of asking him.
Maybe it's because they're stuck sitting together on a half-disintegrated couch while Ciel rummages in the "back of the store" for shoes in his size, but Ain has never felt so up close and personal with Lu. It's like the time Mother brought him to the zoo, and one of the zookeepers stuck out her hand and let a massive tarantula climb onto his shoulder.
Nonetheless, Ain feels a bit lost as Lu stares at him worriedly. He's got an old, ELIA-issued boot on his left foot and a brand new hiking boot on his right. Part of him doesn't want to change either boot. The issue of the zombies still eats away at the back of his mind.
He didn't want to admit it, but he has to, now that he's seen the kinds of things that have festered under the roof of the Altera Core. The zombies aren't human. It's as Rose once said, soon after she joined the team, after putting a bullet through the head of a zombie that stumbled into their shelter: you can't reason with zombies. They aren't people. She'd just wiped down her pistol after that, like it was no big deal to shoot and kill.
Ain understands why now. The Behemoth was just the beginning. The rippling mountains of flesh and skin and oddly placed bones are just proof. Who knows what else lurks beneath the surface? He left Nirvana with the skills to deal with people, not with mindless zombies.
Maybe because he understands that now, he can sympathize with Lu a little. She looks like she still awaits an answer. She's probably always waiting for an answer.
Does he really trust her with his weaknesses, though? He's untrained in the martial arts, and doesn't know nearly enough about handling weapons to face her and the skills she gained from whatever she did as a kid. He can barely even use the garden shears he and Ciel so painstakingly got; the one zombie they encountered, and he practically had to bash it over the head to get rid of it.
He sighs. "I'm finally starting to see just how lucky I was to get to you guys," he says, "when I left Nirvana."
Lu doesn't even move. "Please elaborate."
Ain flinches, but she doesn't react to that, either. "I left Nirvana thinking I could deal with the zombies like I dealt with people," he says. "You know, because my paramedic residency was in the poor part of Elder, I had to learn how to break up fights, how to get out of conflict with someone injured. I was expecting to deal with that when I came here. Not... whatever we're actually dealing with." He tries to put on a smile, but fails. "You remember that one time when Rose first joined us and she just shot the zombie that came into the shelter?"
"Oh yeah." Lu giggles a little; it's eerie in the echoes of the shoe store. "I think Ciel's eyes nearly fell out of his head because he was so surprised."
"She said something like you can't reason with zombies." The words come more easily, now that he's gotten them started. "I finally understand now, thanks to the Behemoth and the things we saw in the dark. It was far away, but it scared me, because I'm-" he heaves a breath. "I'm not ready to deal with that."
This time, Lu does look up. She studies him with a careful eye, like she's never seen a man so broken in her life. "You're scared," she announces, which is pretty accurate. "More accurately, you're scared of admitting you're scared."
Ain makes a face. "Thank you, Doctor Lu," he says, "please elaborate."
"You've got things to hide, I get it. Add's got a shitty dad that he hid from us for a month. Elesis has never said anything about why she's so afraid of rivers. Ciel won't tell me about his actual sister. Everyone's got something to hide. I get it." Lu gives him a wry smile. "That's where I come in.
"You guys don't know this, because I never say anything about it, but," Lu says, gaze trained on the ground, "when I was younger, I wasn't ever afforded any time to do anything I wanted. The only thing I liked was cheerleading, and even then, my parents made me do it competitively as soon as I started showing interest in it. I had to hide every interest I had." Her head flips up, bringing her hair along in a flounce of white. "There. I said it." It's accompanied by a grin. "I don't have things to hide anymore, because my overbearing parents are probably dead and you'd have to literally throw me off a cliff to see me be a cheerleader again."
"So you're good at figuring out what people are hiding because you had to hide things yourself," Ain sums up. "That's... a pretty unique skill. I'm sorry you had to learn how to do that in that way."
"It's alright." Lu seems apologetic. "We all learn things, one way or another. And I learned something about you, today."
"What?"
"That you're capable of growing beyond what you know." She slugs him in the shoulder; he squawks even though it's not particularly painful. "Oh, c'mon, I barely even touched you!"
"Please warn me before you do that!"
She sticks her tongue out at him.
Ciel emerges from the storage room at that exact moment. "... Did I walk into an alternate reality?" he mutters, crossing over to plop himself down beside Lu. "Since when were you two on talking terms?"
"Since Ain stopped being a dumbo and admitted to needing karate lessons," Lu says nonchalantly. Ain splutters and waves his hands, no, when did I even begin to mention karate, but Lu just pushes them down. "Lucky for you, I have a junior black belt in karate, or at least I did before I moved to Elrios."
"That doesn't necessarily qualify you to teach," Ciel says gently, before turning to Ain. "You got all the things you wanted?"
"Yeah." Thankfully, the walk-in clinic that they spotted on the map wasn't destroyed, raided or infected; he picked up some boxes of alcohol swab pads from there, among other things. "You have the food and water?"
Ciel nods. "Let's head back."
"Ooh, you can make something with the canned papaya for lunch," Lu suggests excitedly. "I bet Ara will like something salty and sweet!"
As Ain throws the other new boot on, he looks over his old ones. They've served him a long, long time, and besides, his duty to ELIA doesn't end with getting these guys to safety. "Lu, may I borrow your knife?" he asks. "Just for a second.
Together, they carve out the ELIA patches from his old boots. Lu punches holes in the sides, and they're able to thread the laces through the holes to affix them to the new boots. "That'll do it," Ain mumbles, tying his new laces smartly. "There."
"Looks good to me," Lu says, beaming. "Let's head back."
There's a rumble in the distance, and then a shrill scream and a gunshot. The three of them are instantly on edge. "Oh my god," Ain says, horrified, "that was Elesis."
"We need to find her," Ciel says, and they all grab their backpacks and run. The source of the sound is too far away, even with the ringing echoes. "I think it came from the subway elevator," Lu says breathlessly, bounding forwards as Dynamo mewls pitifully in her pocket. "We need to find her."
"The gunshot was probably Rose," Ain says, and then thinks again. "It had to be Rose. Elesis doesn't even have a firearm on her person."
"She has a pistol on her leg," Ciel says gravely. "I've never seen her use it."
They meet up with Ara and Add by the subway doors, where Add is prying open the hinges with his tools and bare fingers. "Hurry," Ara hisses.
"Alright, it's done." Add backs up and delivers a sound kick to the door - even Lu's eyes light up. The door topples over, and they all rush into the tiny corridor.
Elesis and Rose are standing in front of the elevator, just as tired and panting as the rest of them. Elesis is covered in zombie blood, and Rose has her guns pointed at the gaping maw that might have been the door to the elevator. There's festering black blood splattered all over the ground.
"Elesis Sieghart," Ara says dangerously, "you'd better have an explanation for this."
Their fearless leader, true to her nature, offers a bright grin.
"Uh, surprise?"
A/N: Elesis please stop being a sneaky mcsneakerson
will we find out what she did? tune in next time!
but honestly this is just an antithesis to Meltdown (II) thanks to the particular cast of POVs. i chugged the entire chapter out in about 1.5 hours thanks to a word sprint with friends. it was fun to get back into the swing of Ara and Ain, though I honestly haven't played around with Ain enough. perhaps we'll be seeing more of him in the future.
and finally, finally i can start getting into the friendship between Ain and Lu and Ciel. though, i must warn you, the peace won't last. it's me. the peace never lasts.
~Marg