So hi everyone. Thanks for the favorites and follows! Have a lovely day/night wherever you are! Warning: Story contains, boyxboy, heavy violence, death, dark themes, mentions of abuse, swearing and ratings may be turned up at a later time.
There was still a rustle in the leafs outside as a faint drizzle of the rain from the night made it's call out to nearby ears. The cool water sprinkled itself down the concrete, drizzling it's way through the broken shards of shattered glass. The blood which had been splattered across the floor and the walls of the previous night had washed away. The embers at the heart of the small fire which had faded towards the break of dawn still glowed hot in their small pit. A trail of wisp like smoke slowly rose, curling, trailing delicately before dissipating.
A few rays of sunlight were able to bleed through the gaps of the branches and across the delicate face of the sleeping blond boy who was curled up in an attempt to keep warm next to the dead fire. His soft pale face was covered still with dirt and grime, not being able to have gotten a true chance to rest or wash in a long while. But for as terrified as he had been, his body hadn't been able to keep it up. He had just been so tired, his body had just been so completely drained, he had no chance.
But even now in the sleep, there was something about him. His sharp jaw line, the way the morning light filtered over his pink tinged eyelids and the dark shadows which hung around his closed orbs. The poor fifteen year old looked as exhausted as he felt. So many years on the run. So many years having to try and escape from the hell which had possessed their world like a growing cancer.
His eyes flew open and the boy lurched forward, taking a sharp and pained breath.
So many years haunted by the nightmare of what once was.
Still now the blond could see it.
He could see the sight of fire licking up the side of his friend's face. Watching as the boy had been lifted off his feet by the sheer energy and power of the missile which had brought up the ground in an almighty heave around them. He remembered watching the flesh bubble and burn, blistering away agonizingly from his friend's face. The sickening crack of bones which roared out when the limp body of the third member of their group, smashed into the tree, burying themselves deeply on it while their skin still burnt away on their face.
Oh god Harry.
He was their friend and they had left him there to die. The three boys were all they had in one another. The only people left in the world they had any more were each other. They were all that could have been, what could have resembled a family for one another. But instead they had only abandoned one of their own and left him there to rot and die... or to a worse fate.
They should have at least taken his body! To bury him! He deserved that-
"Nightmares again huh?"
Raffi blinked his eyes clear of tears and sleep which had gathered in them, only to sharpen his gaze as he looked over at Michael with reprehension. It was no secret that he blamed Michael for leaving their friend behind. He often growled it in his saddest moments at the boy with a venom like no other. He had lost everything in their flee to London, never mind what came afterwards. They had been evacuated from their home town and moved down to the great city where everyone had thought it would be safe.
Look how well that had gone.
Raffi had sat there, praying, to any deity or god above that might have been listening, he prayed with all of his soul as he had watched the buildings collapsing and crushing down onto one another. The skyscrapers had blown in the wind like paper, screaming out in groans of protested metal tearing and the roar when the glass had shattered and rained down on those bellow. Had the giant shards not killed them, then when the building finally having given way, that itself had.
Raffi still remembered, the sight of blood churning up freshly through the leaking cracks of the buildings as he had run, run through street after street trying to find his friends. He just knew that above anything else had had to find them, some how he had to just find a way to get to them. He had to figure out a plan, something to save them, something to get them out of there!
But his plan had only ended up getting one of them killed.
He pulled his arms around his legs as he slowly sat up, rubbing his hand across his face to try and clear away the exhaustion but finding little aid in doing it. His body still ached and stung with cold from the night before. His legs felt like heavy lead and his head was bogged down with the murky thoughts which clouded him. "Don't ask questions that you already know the answers to." He stated quietly.
"You're never going to forgive me are you?"
Raffi raised his gaze to look up at the other boy.
Michael's eyes were heavy with bags and exhaustion. He looked a wreck. Raffi could tell the boy may have cried a bit in the night from the puffiness in Michael's eyes. The dark haired boy must have stayed awake on guard duty, letting the blond get some sleep. Michael had a faint tremble go through his toned body, but he still looked chained down with his own exhaustion and by the image that he normally radiated off himself. "But what you forget is you knew him, what? a year? Two at most? I had known him for far longer-"
"But-"
"But I didn't care for him the way you obviously did." Michael stated in his own rather harsh tone. "You just waited for him to be gone before you finally acknowledged how you felt." The olive toned boy narrowed his piercing gaze as his hands fumbled with an object he had found partially embedded into the concrete floor last night. Raffi however just rose to his feet quietly with an impassive face as Michael continued his onslaught of words. "It's a shame, if you may have told him while he was still alive, he may have gone to the afterlife actually believing he was loved, instead of always wondering if a coward he had eyes for ever actually looked back at him-"
Michael fell to the floor while Raffi cursed, holding his fist in pain and shaking it.
He glowered at the knocked out boy with eyes full of merciless anger and bitterness.
But even so... he knew the words were true.
He could try and hide behind as much anger as he wanted to, but he knew that just no matter how many excuses he would make, he would never be able to change the simple fact that it had been his fault. He had just been too much of a coward to ever try and deal with what it was that he had felt.
Now the boy was gone and he was left with the reality crushing him every day that he took a breath.
Raffi slowly rose pulling his arms around himself tightly as he wondered towards the rusty great iron doors where the cold sunlight was trying to stream through, but was still being restrained behind it's blanket of silver clouds up above. The holes in the old rusty metal where the Walkers had tried to bust through left a big enough space to see parts of the outside, but Raffi wanted to see it for himself.
It was deadly silent outside sparse for the faint drizzle of rain which kept falling down onto the roof of the warehouse and the canvas of trees. The sky was bleak but the light was desperately trying to break through. The trees still towered around him like an endless army of titans in the early light, the perfect cover for the monsters that mingled among them, but still it was in a way almost like that of a reprieve to be hidden among them too. To be in the meadow of wild grown flowers of red, white and other colours, it was such a different sight as to what the blond was used to anymore, it was such a difference from the collapsed cities to see a sight of nature, flowers and running rivers...But that's not what essentially drew Raffi's sight right away.
Around him were the corpses in the dozens. Laying in pieces, their bodies savagely ripped apart and having turned the soil beneath them a deep crimson. The nearby white roses were painted red with the blood of the dead. The air was not as sweet as it had been when he and Michael had been running on the previous day, but now only stank of decay and rot. Eventually he had to even pull his jacket around his face to try and deal with the stench as it was so overwhelming.
Raffi had never truly seen something like this... he had never seen a wave of walkers destroyed or ripped apart to this extent. Animals normally avoided them so it couldn't have been a bear. As he examined the corpses closer he decided that whatever had done this, had been trained to do so. The wounds to the slices open heads, the cut off arms, the slashed legs. They were all too neat. It was not savage enough to be like that of a bear.
But the strength behind the marks across the corpses... to slice so clean through flesh and bone like that? That took skilled practice.
The real surprise came to him though when he turned to gaze back at the doors he had nervously wondered through.
The metal was sheared and lashed like a tornado had shredded the outer layer.
That was the first bit of the surprise.
The second bit came when Raffi read the words which had been left on them. "Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Written in the blood of the now once more dead Walkers.
Raffi was still staring at the words with horror and staring around him at the littered field of corpses when Michael came outside and was growling under his breath rubbing his forehead. But even he too fell silent when he saw the mayhem and blood shed which had been left at their doorstep and around them. "What the hell does it mean?" Michael frowned.
"It's a poem, by Dylan Thomas in 1914." Raffi said gently, the words of the old poem coming to him as familiarly as they always did with old literature. "Do not go gentle into that good night, old age should burn and rave at close of day; rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, because their words had forked no lightning they do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, and learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light." The words were impeccably soft leaving Raffi's lips with a caress and care in each syllable.
"I still don't get it." Michael frowned, looking around at the massacre of the walkers around them, looking over to where the tree has smashed down on the side of the warehouse crushing three more corpses. He looked down even to the spiked point black arrow that had nearly taken his head off like the Walker that had managed to sneak up on them. The arrow was sleek with a hooked point, meaning if it managed to sink into flesh, it would anything but easy to pull it out.
"It means you're a bit out of your territory here. Now who the hell are you!"
"Easy Carl!"
Raffi frowned turning his gaze up slowly.
Stood at the edge of the clearing behind them were two men and a boy, maybe a year or so older than them? The boy and the man must have been father an son. Raffi's artistic eye could notice the subtle sharpness and both the man and the boy shared in their jaw, the way they both stood, even the same shade of dark brown hair, though the boy's toppled down nearly to his shoulders while the man kept his relatively short cut, though he looked like he could do with a shave.
The boy glared at both Michael and Raffi with a suspicious sapphire blue eye that glinted in the drizzle of the lingering storm light. The boy was tensed, looking between them as though he wanted nothing more at that moment but to beat a few answers out of them, but he seemed to be restraining himself for the sake of something, something Raffi couldn't quite figure out.
The boy a fresh set of bandages over his right eye making Raffi wonder just exactly what might have happened to him to solicit a wound like that? But other than that, the boy wore a warm aviator jacket, a tight button up plaid shirt and some jeans, though surprisingly to Raffi, the boy also wore a sheriff hat... what the heck was that all about?
"You're both a little young to be out here by yourself, let alone to finish of this many walkers." The boy's father said, signalling the other man to head around the warehouse to check it out to see if any more corpses were still lingering about. "My name's Rick. This is my son Carl, you two seem to be a bit lost don't you?"
"Can't be lost if you don't really have any place to go." Michael said calmly, turning his stone like gaze up to the older man, but anxiously taking note of the fact that the man was armed with a cold silver python pistol like his son.
"Where are your parents." Rick frowned, looking between them, waiting for an answer as both fell quiet and bit their lips unsure how to answer. "Are they dead." Rick asked, adding a degree of gentleness to his voice at seeing both boys downcast their eyes to the floor.
"No." Raffi said softly.
"So they're alive then-"
"I never said that, did I?" The blond stated, his voice almost coldly mechanical as he raise his gaze to glare at the man. His pain written across his face like a fresh wound.
"Ah." Rick nodded, turning his gaze down for a second before looking back between both boys. "I see... I'm sorry."
"Why. More people are dying most days now than ever. Why should it matter." Michael stated coldly. "We're stragglers. We keep alive by ourselves, we've done so for the last five years. This country was less infested than our home, we did what we had to do to escape-"
"But it seems that you needed a hand or two last night." Rick stated sternly, glancing over at his son who kept his gaze locked on the boys. "Two unarmed boys taking down this many Walkers? That doesn't just happen-"
"We're in the dark here as much as you are." Michael frowned, looking over Rick in his leather jacket and shirt.
The man towered above them with dominance and strength. He radiated his own type of quiet power with those dark eyes of his. Eyes which seemed to be laced with pain and loss. Even so, Michael knew exactly what he had said and why he had said it. He may not have had Raffi's keen perceptive senses, but he still glanced out the corner of his eye to the blond boy as Rick turned for a second with a long look at his son.
"We can't leave you out here by yourself." He stated quietly, pondering for a moment and weighing up the options in his head.
"But Pa! We can't! Resources are tight as it is! We have to look out for ourselves first-"
"What the hell has gotten into you this morning?" Rick frowned, watching his son with surprise. He had never seen his boy act like this, what could have gotten into him to make him like this?
"Do we know you or something?" Raffi frowned, eying up the boy with a frown. He knew that he had never met or seen this boy before, he had a distinctive skill for remembering faces, but for whatever reason, this boy seemed to have a distinct sharpness of dislike about Raffi and Michael, or at least an open distrust at any point.
"If it hadn't been for that... storm." Rick glanced over his shoulder with a pointed look as his son turned his gaze away, "then last night you both you would be joining your parents, or worse this morning... Besides we could be using a couple of more guards." Rick glanced down one last time, tensing his jaw as though he was about to make a decision he was really going to regret. "Carl... take them back to the town. Me and Daryl will be back soon, we'll see just exactly what it is that we can get out of this warehouse... But When I get back, I think we need to have a little chat."
Carl looked up for a long moment as his father before setting his jaw tight and nodded. "This way." He said coldly over to Michael and Raffi.
Only when they were five or so minutes away from the warehouse and had stayed in the pregnant pause of silence did Raffi quietly mutter, "so are you this welcoming with all other guys that you meet, or are we the exception."
"I don't know yet." Carl muttered, his eye warily locked on both of them. "But I'll be keeping an eye on you both."
Looks like you don't really have much of one to spare. Raffi thought to himself with a glare at the boy.
"If I find out either of you two are up to anything, or try to hurt anyone in our town? You will be out in the forest and Walker food before you even know what's hit you?"
Carl knew that he was coming across harsh but the fact was that he had just too much to protect at that time for everything to start going to hell for two boys... Charlie had never felt it in his need to keep anything from Carl before... so what was special enough about these two boys to make, sweet, caring Charlie want to leave them out here as Walker food? Who were these two boys... and just exactly who were they to Charlie?