This is for my reviewer who complained about the shorter chapters! (You're right, I do need to make 'em longer)
He doesn't talk a lot, her new companion. He also doesn't seem to do a lot of planning; not the kind she's used to. Hell, there've been times that she's caught him trying to leave the base without any weapon at all.
She's not sure why he's alive, and he wonders the same thing about her.
They spend the following few days just existing around each other. Finding scraps of food and basically recovering from her ordeal consumes Maka's entire life. It's odd how fast she finds her mind becoming sharper; less stressed, now that she's able to have regular human interaction.
Soul, conversely, wakes up early so he can go and hunt.
He usually returns in the late hours of the evening with something for them to eat. Maka can't count the days very well but if she had to guess, she would have said it was three days after Soul saved her life that it happened – he came back from wherever his excursions took him with a stressful sense of urgency and nothing to show for it.
The back door had slammed closed as he'd kicked it that way. "Maka," he had called, and somehow, she had just known. Something about his tone told her that it wasn't safe here for them anymore.
You couldn't stay anywhere forever. They followed you; they could smell human blood.
She hadn't even asked, she'd sighed and said "How long do we have?"
With a grimace, he shakes his head. "We gotta go, now."
They don't pack heavy, just a few cans of beans and some bottled water shoved in a backpack along with all their weaponry. She doesn't even get to say goodbye to the place before Soul's effectively bustled her still-injured ass into the back of a jeep he's apparently discovered, commandeered and hot-wired.
Sneaking out the back gives the perfect viewpoint of a hoarde of feral infected humans successfully beat their way through half an inch of glass with nothing but a baseball bat.
The apocalypse was terrifying, she realises- and not for the first time.
They're currently speeding their way down leafy suburban Denver in stony silence, driving past the overgrown roads; the dilapidated, empty houses. The bodies; both human and zombie. The abandoned cars that scatter all over the roads; a jigsaw of suffering and misery.
"I don't know where you're driving, but my place is way back that way," she cranes her neck to look through the rear-view mirror at the other end of the road. "And I liked it there."
Soul barely even reacts with his face but shakes his head in a firm manner.
"Well, where are we going now?"
"We're going to find somewhere else we can hang out for a few days. Maybe longer. Then we'll move on again."
"And what's the long-term aim?"
"For you? To recover enough from your injury so that me leaving you isn't a death sentence." He tells her bluntly, and she draws a sharp, surprised breath inward.
"Why don't you tell me what you really think?" she scowls as his open apathy and then wiggles her bandaged arm in the arm. "Anyway, I've dealt with worse than this scrape.."
"I don't doubt it. Unfortunately, my conscience doesn't really think that way." He shrugs, half-apology and half-statement of fact. As he says it, he eyes her bandaged arm from the corner of his vision and makes a quiet noise of discontent. "It's been a while since that's been changed."
Maka rolls her eyes. "I was first aid trained, before this crap."
"Really?" Soul asks, not budging his eyes from the road. "How come?" he asks tonelessly.
She decides to indulge herself by answering anyway, but only because she's bored and she has no idea how long the journey will be. "I told you, my father was a survivalist. He worked for some… some branch of the secret service, for a long time. I wasn't really allowed to know anything about it. It's how he met my mother."
"Huh," Soul replies, uninquisitive.
"What about your parents? What did they do?" she asks leaning on the window and turning to face her chauffeur.
"My father was a composer, and my mother was an opera singer."
"Wow!" she exclaims. "What a meet cute!" she finds herself gushing, a little uncharacteristically.
"A… a what?" he demands. "What is that?"
"You know. In a story where two people meet and fall in love. The way they first meet. It's a meet cute."
Soul chuckles a little at her clear nerdiness. "Jesus, you're a dork."
"Who hurt you?!" she wails and it's his turn to roll his eyes.
"Nobody. My parents weren't particularly in love, and they definitely weren't cute."
That put an end to that conversation abruptly. As the vast expanse of silence unfurls before them, Maka twiddles her thumbs and her eyes begin to follow along with the trees that sway in the autumn breeze.
It's a pleasant time of year, and all the leaves on the trees are turning brown and falling off. Colorado is cold year-round, but it didn't mean that they didn't have beautiful falls.
She ponders how lovely this all would be if it weren't for the implicit destruction, and the looming threat of death.
They drive for what feels like days but is probably more like an hour, and as soon as she begins to drift away into blissful sleep, Soul pulls up somewhere and the car comes to a shuddering stop in some god-forsaken grove, on a patch of wild grass.
"Okay, now I'm convinced that you're going to kill me." She half-smiles.
"You're still delirious," he tells her, and she laughs, not helping her case. "There's a lake here. It should be pretty clean."
She gets out of the car a little curiously and looks around her, following Soul as he wades through a few branches of willow and bush to reveal a small and rather blue-looking lake. It's like some sort of oasis in the desert; and Maka's eyes almost well up with tears just looking at the thing.
"I can… I can get in?"
"I came here before. I remembered it. It's uninfected." He grins at her face of ardent glee as her shirt, jeans, shoes and socks come off- not necessarily in that order.
Clad only in a white vest and some very boring black underwear, she all but leaps into the water, emerging a second later with bits of kelp dangling from her hair and a content sigh escaping her lips. "Oh, this is great."
Soul smirks at her. "Glad you're enjoying it. You're not going to enjoy this next part very much."
She frowns as he disappears from behind the hedgerow and rummages through his car for something for a few seconds, emerging again holding a small backpack, his gun now safely tucked into the back of his pants.
"What's that?" she points at the bag and he grimaces.
"You're gonna find out real soon."
He also strips out of his jeans and jacket without even a shade of embarrassment. When all your friends and family were dead, it was hard to feel such puny, stupid emotions like embarrassment. He carefully leaves his gun next to his clothes – in plain sight – and hauls the backpack into the water with him, out of it pulling a large bottle of vodka.
"Just my luck, first person I find in years and he's an alcoholic," she bristles.
He clenches his jaw and gives her a sideways look. "It's to disinfect your arm, smartass. And it's going to hurt."
She offers him her hand with a little trembling, and he takes it, carefully unwrapping his own handiwork on the cloth wrapped around her wound. "You gonna faint, nerd-face?"
"Pfft," she scowls. "Give me a little credit."
It is a pretty gruesome sight. She hadn't realised how deep the cut was, or how gnarly it looked. What really gets her, though, is how clean it's cut. It's like she's been sliced by a sharpened blade of some sort; not a weapon usually reserved for zombies.
"It looks better," he comments drily.
"Jesus, how bad did it look before?"
He laughs at this, but then he hands her a strip of cloth and asks her bite down on it as he pours and dabs the vodka into the gash.
Words can't describe.
She hears her own hoarse screaming into the cloth as tears of nothing but sheer pain blind her, the beating sting taking away her entire left side.
"Hey, good job, almost done," he tells her as he quickly rewraps her aching limb as she tries her very best not to moan and sob. After the layer of cloth, he wraps it in duct tape. "Waterproof." He says gruffly, after she looks inquisitively at him. "See, look. Done."
"Oh, God…" she swallows the pain as he hands her back her successfully dressed arm, biting down on her lip.
"Now… this," he hands her the rest of the bottle of vodka. It's the first shred of sympathy he's thrown her since they've known each other, and she's grateful.
Even more grateful, still, for the clear liquid which burns her throat but numbs the rest of her pain. "Ah," she breathes, after a heavy gulp which makes her grimace. "Thanks. You, uh. You want some?"
He smiles. "Thought you'd never ask," he takes the bottle from her and also swigs some back. She watches him afterwards – he doesn't have any sort of extraneous reaction to the poisonous liquid. He's used to this, she thinks. More so than her, anyway.
Not for the first time, she wonders what he's gone through to get here.
He reaches into his bag and finds himself a bar of soap. "Swiped this before we left. It's uh…" he sniffs with a little disapproval. "Lavender. Better than nothing?"
"Better than sweat."
"Better than dirt."
"Better than blood."
"Here, here," he holds up the soap and begins to scrub himself all over as Maka lowers herself down into the blissful lake, not even pausing for a second to realise how cold it is. Even Soul, she doesn't fail to notice, manages to let out a seemingly held sigh of contentment at the feeling of the water, and the soap, and the peacefulness of it all.
For the first time since he saved her life, she takes a good, hard look at him.
When you got over how jarring his more… prominent features were, he was a good-looking man. She guessed he was maybe a few years older than her… twenty-five, perhaps? The white hair and stubble admittedly threw her off, but he looked young.
He was muscular but very skinny, apocalypse skinny. It's a body type Maka possesses herself; the sort of body type you develop when you can only eat when it's safe, when your only options sometimes made it preferable just to skip a meal.
One could only take so much fried rat and out-of-date canned green beans.
He seems to notice the eyes on himself and shoots her an inquisitive look. "You okay?"
"Yeah," she smiles, biting her lip. Sometimes it was better not to tell people what you were thinking, she'd learned. It was almost awkward having to re-learn her social graces now that she had someone to socialise with. "My arm feels… better. I'm sure it'll be healed up soon."
"That's good," he nods, handing her the bar of soap, which she accepts with glee, scrubbing as much of herself all over as she can with only one workable arm. Flipping her head over to wash her hair, the soap slips out of her available hand and she swears, reaching down to pick it up from where it's plopped into the water before it sinks. "Uh…" she starts a little awkwardly. "You wouldn't mind… helping? It's just… I can't really do this properly…"
He blinks, surprised, but to his credit doesn't seem embarrassed. "Sure."
"Just my hair. Just… lather a bit on your hands and then-"
"I know how to wash hair, idiot." He scowls and takes the already thinning bar from her slippery hands. "Just bend over."
"I don't know your life, but I've never actually washed my hair with a bar of lavender soap in a lake in the middle of nowhere with one arm before?" she snaps, a little irritated at how blunt he can be.
To her surprise he raises his hands up defensively and laughs. "Okay, okay. Got your point. Lean over, here I'll do it," he instructs, and she does so, feeling just a little vindicated.
She notes that snapping at him makes him more polite, then. These things were always good to know.
There's something oddly enjoyable about having his hands scrub soap into her scalp. Perhaps it was the total lack of physical contact she'd experienced in the last year or so, but right now- she could die happy at his fingertips.
"Oh, that's good," she lets out a moan.
He laughs. "I don't know whether to feel weird that you're enjoying it this much."
"Just don't stop," she leans further into his hands. "Use your nails."
That makes him laugh. "Is that a normal thing? My girlfriend used to like head massages, too. Especially with nails," he pauses. "I always thought it was because she was a-" he stops and pauses, thinking about his next words.
"Because she was…?"
"…oh, she was just odd, that's all," he concludes, awkward skirting the topic.
"What was she like?" Maka asks.
"Oh, uh." He seems sheepish. "Don't worry about that."
It was admittedly hard to worry when his She notes that he doesn't want to talk about his ex-girlfriend, and idly finds herself wondering if they broke up or if something worse had happened to her.
Something zombie related.
