A/N: Um. I have no excuse for why I haven't updated in, oh, a year and four months. Or longer.
Nor is there any excuse for this fic. I didn't even reread the series, so several things in this fic may be off and/or missing all together, and I apologize for that. I just kind of wrote this on a whim. I was in the mood for apocolypse fic, and Avalon: Web of Magic was the first fandom to pop into my head to write for, so la, here it is.
Oh, yeah, and the girls are a lot older here. I'd say early twenties or so.
In general, though, please just keep an open mind while reading this. It's not your general vein of Avalon fic. In fact, it's pretty dark.
Disclaimer: Not mine and I make no profit. Obviously.
P.S. - sorry for the double submission. I had to figure out how to do a page break.
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seconds to live
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Right before the whole thing started, Kyle got two commemorative pins for being the top book-seller or something, and he offered one of them to Kara. One was a cross decorated with the American emblem, and the other one of those folded ribbon-types like the breast cancer awareness ones were, decorated the same way.
She knew Kyle wanted her to pick the ribbon, so she picked the cross.
American Christian, the pin said, winking at her from the hem of her school skirt.
There are days when she feels like it's the most oxymoronic thing she's ever heard.
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For a long time, it was just her and Kyle in the house. Most people thought it was tragic that the mayor and his wife were among the first to go; Kara wished they'd talk about all the other boys and girls suddenly orphaned, or the parents who were suddenly looking at empty rooms. But then people were dying off too fast for them to do stories on anybody, and television in general kind of pittered off.
It was sometime after she watched the BBC cameras roll on an abandoned desk and the time where she went to bed and curled her hand around her trig textbook that Kara decided they'd stayed long enough.
She and Kyle boarded up the windows and pad-locked the doors and barred away the kitchen because they couldn't bring themselves to throw out their mother's food and they knew that after a few weeks (months, years, eternity) it would all start to rot and it would be better if someone had some warning. That, and the kitchen had been the one room where any of them had ever felt particularly like a family.
They packed up the Lexus and Kara drove them to Ravenswood.
Lying in the backseat, Kyle pressed his hands to his mouth and coughed.
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It started at Ravenswood.
The d'flies were the first to notice as the warden coughed and shivered and sweated, until his eyes went wide and still and vomit trickled down the side of his mouth. Then the gardeners started dropping like flies and Emily begged all the animals to go through to Aldenmor where at least it would be safer, never knowing that it had originally begun there.
They never did find the exact culprit, but they did learn that Stonehill, Pennsylvania wasn't the only epicenter.
Never before had Kara truly realized how tied the fates of Earth and Aldenmor were, not until Lorren came tumbling through the portal with death in his eyes.
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They buried Kyle in the soft sand next to the river, using pieces of driftwood as a feeble sort of headstone. With him Emily buried a baseball she had found in the attic, Adriane something intricate and Native American she said was a rite of passage, and all the things he had brought with him from home (read: nothing). Kara was tempted to give him the cross pin with the American emblem, but after a selfish moment she kept it firmly pinned to her collar.
His last words had been, "I forgot mine."
The buried him right across the bank from Emily's infant son.
Kara never did get to see him alive.
After a few days, she forgot what his name was.
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There were times in her life -- albeit they were very rare -- when Kara wished she wasn't so special.
I mean, yeah, the part where she was the blazing star mage and the descendent of a fairy princess? That was cool.
But at that moment, when the Fairimentals told her she was immune to whatever was killing the familiars and the humans alike, and Emily and Adriane stared at her with something close to fury in their eyes, she would have sincerely switched places with anyone else in the world. She didn't want to be immune; she didn't want to be the fairy princess anymore. She was the one who had it all, and right now, she hated it more than anything.
She didn't want to be the last one alive.
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They moved from deserted village to deserted village, scrounging what wasn't spoiled and sleeping in beds that still smelled like rotting flesh. The silence and the hot air were suffocating, but still they shuttered the doors and fed the fire, in the hope that Emily would sweat it out, this disease that no one ever got up from once they fell.
Adriane did a lot of talking. Mostly about things she learned from camping trips, and things she thought she learned from camping trips that may or may not be true but thought were worth a try, because hey, if they were going to die anyway -- oops, sorry, Kara -- then it wasn't going to hurt them. She talked about Storm and wondered why Dreamer and Lyra and Lorelei hadn't come to them yet.
Kara figured she already knew the answer. It was dark in the back of Adriane's eyes.
The morning Emily stopped coughing, Kara finished the last few problems of her trig homework, and threw the whole thing into the fire. There was no use for either of them now.
Aldenmor burst into autumn with a dizzying array of color, like the world had just been saved, like everything and everyone weren't dying. Kara thought the trees looked beautiful, but not as beautiful as Emily did, dead, and all the colors could not compete with the way her hair shone as she was lowered, unprotesting, into the ground.
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"We can't live like this forever," Kara told Adriane, turning something small, hairy, and vaguely rodent-shaped over a spit. Adriane was wrinkling her nose at it. Kara was too busy trying to block its fuzzy-brained idea of death from her head.
"What, as two people instead of three, like we should be?" Adriane said, exactly as if she didn't care anymore but was arguing with Kara because she wouldn't be Adriane if she didn't.
The blazing star mage flinched. She touched the left side of her chest, where she was certain there was a big, gaping hole with the name Emily written all over it. Then she took a deep breath. She could do this. She hadn't gotten that cheerleader's scholarship to Pennsylvania State for nothing. "I meant like this, nomadic like. We need to find somewhere to stay, somewhere to call home, someplace we can defend easily and someplace Lyra and Dreamer and the unicorns and everybody can find us, because this will be over sometime, Adriane --"
"I think I'm pregnant," Adriane blurted.
Kara stopped talking.
Well. Okay then.
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Ravenswood was gone. With the dragonflies missing and Emily six feet under, there was no way for them to get back. Even if they wanted to.
Frankly, she didn't want to know what Earth was like now. It almost made her feel guilty; for all she knew, there were thousands of survivors still left, and by letting the gateway fall apart she was exposing them to the evil they weren't ready for. She was the blazing star mage; wasn't it her responsibility to make sure the world was saved?
They had stayed awake long into their first night in Aldenmor, her and Emily and Adriane and Lorren, mostly talking about things she didn't want to talk about. Famine, death, this disease, more famine and death and plague. Who was alive and who wasn't. The places that were safe and the thousands upon thousands that weren't. Who started the whole thing going.
Sometime during the point where Emily was stretching her long, freckled legs out by the water as if she was sunbathing and Kara was brushing her teeth (some habits just never die, even when the world's ending), Adriane pulled Lorren aside and asked him something, with her heart and her soul pouring out her eyes and her mouth so fierce and fast it was something like a slap to the face.
Kara didn't have to be a blazing mage to know what she was asking.
And she didn't have to be an old hand in the language of heartbreak to know what Lorren replied.
She could feel the mistwolves. Or, rather, the lack of them.
Empathy and hindsight were not among Kara's greatest strengths, but in retrospect, that was probably when her Elven boyfriend knocked up the warrior mage.
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It had been fifty-two days since Kara's father went into the kitchen for coffee and on the way dropped like a stone into her mother's lap, dead as a door nail.
It had been forty-five days since Emily called her up, screaming and crying about finding her husband and her son dead in their sleep, and she knew she and Kyle had to get to Ravenswood.
It had been twenty-eight days since they pressed the collars of their shirts to their noses and mouths and rolled Lorren's body into the ditch with half a million other carcasses of all purposes and identities, limbs splayed like a starfish and long, arcing ears stark against the ebony flesh of whatever lay beneath him. Kara had touched the choker of evergreen needles she wore around her neck -- the Elven version of a promise ring -- and tried to feel anything but numb.
It had been two days since a vagabond group of imps snuck up on Adriane while she was bathing and Kara had killed them all.
She had sobbed harder then than she had in her entire life, harder than she had for her father or her brother or the whole damn world, and Adriane lifted the tip of her finger to the unicorn jewel at the hollow of Kara's throat, half in fear, half in gratitude, and then just held her.
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The skin was firm and taut like stretched caramel across Adriane's stomach, and the way it strained against the hem of her jeans was the scariest damn thing Kara's ever seen.
She never asked for this kind of responsibility.
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They did eventually find a place, high in the mountains, where they can see everyone coming and no one can see them.
Adriane didn't tell her it used to be a griffin's nest.
They didn't talk much. Without Emily there to buffer them, they usually wound up saying incredibly stupid, hurtful things and spent the rest of the day wanting to kill each other. What little they did say was mostly bemoaning the lack of plumbing; eventually, Kara gave up, pressing her hands to the cave walls and creating some. She made them a bathtub and a kitchen sink and even a toilet, after some finessing.
"You're getting better at this," Adriane told her, with a smile that almost reached her eyes.
Kara wasn't sure if she was just talking about the magic.
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Zach wasn't dead.
She never told Adriane that.
The warrior mage twisted her wrist high above her head, throwing a web of glittering amber magic across the entrance of their home like a fisherman's net, solid and strong. She turned her torso, and in advertently, the setting sun threw a stark silhouette on her stomach, swelling with Lorren's child. Kara looked away, but her toes curl around the base of the spear she's currently sharpening.
It was the last message the d'flies ever gave her.
The dragons had sensed the end of the world (they had a bad habit of doing that) and Zach had gone to them, concerned by their agitation and they wouldn't tell him why. They disappeared into the mountains shortly thereafter, right before things got really bad.
Officially, he was missing. In this world, that was as good as dead.
When things go downhill, Kara promised herself that she will tell Adriane there is someone who will love her child, and she won't have to worry about Kara raising her baby alone. Sometimes, she caught herself hoping that Zach will just find them before she has to make that kind of decision.
She pretended that, in the meantime, she didn't hear Adriane howling the wolf song into the canyons, waiting for a reply that will never come.
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Toothbrush sticking out of her mouth, Kara spun around a frumpy, sleep-haired, morning-breathed Adriane and slid scrambled whatever-eggs onto her plate, laughing when the warrior mage's face turned green.
"Oh, come on! They're chaulk full of vitamins!" At least, Kara assumed they were -- who knew how different Aldenmor bird eggs were from the regular chicken variety.
"They're not going to be any help if I puke them all up!"
Kara almost choked on the toothpaste laughing again, and spit it out in the sink. She slid around the kitchen table to rest her hand on Adriane's belly. Against her palm, the baby kicked, a small ripple of flesh, completely surreal. Adriane looked down at her spawn and muttered something along the lines of "traitor".
Grinning, Kara removed her pin from bottom lining of her shirt, taking a moment to trace the way the American flag rolled over the arms of the cross, and let it rest on top of Adriane's belly. It stayed there.
Well, it did, until Adriane snatched it up at the perceived insult that she was fat and pitched it at Kara, who started laughing again.
She couldn't save the world.
She could barely save this.
But Kara? Kara Davies, acting selfless?
Well, she always was rather fond of oxymorons.
And behind her, Adriane swallowed a huge mouthful of eggs, so as to better smother her coughing.