No Way Out - Chapter 5

"Wait, what?" Marian does a double take, blinking while she pulls herself forward and turns to better face Fen. "What the hell do you mean 'or much of anything else'?"

"Exactly how it sounds. The oldest memory I have is from a few days before I came across your group." His mouth twists in on itself, and she doesn't miss the glance he throws her way before his head falls further forward, eyes locking onto his arms again. "I'm sorry. I should have mentioned this sooner."

"I mean, I won't lie, it would have been nice to know," Marian says while she reaches to rub at the back of her head, still reeling at this latest turn of events. "At least so that Anders could take a look at you and make sure you were ok."

"No," Fen says quickly, back snapping rigid and the word coming out sharp and harsh enough to make her jump. "No, I..." Sheepish now, embarrassed, and she can all but hear him scolding himself while he lifts the cleaner of his hands and drags it roughly through his hair. "What I meant to say is that I'm fine. Healthy. There's no need to involve the doctor."

"Call me crazy," she says tersely – as petty as it may be of her, that outburst of his stung, "but not being able to remember anything past last month doesn't exactly come off as being the picture of health to me."

"Perhaps not. But do you honestly think there's anything that he or anyone else could do about it given the circumstances?"

"Short of hitting you upside the head with a brick and hoping it knocks something loose? I guess not."

"Agreed," he says with a quirk of his lip, the line of his shoulders easing when he turns his head towards her. "I appreciate the concern, Hawke. But I'm fine."

She isn't sure what, but there's something – off about how he says it that makes Marian think he isn't as 'fine' as he insists. His eyes don't quite meet hers, staring off over her shoulder at the wall behind her rather than meeting her own, while his voice gives the tiniest hint of a waver when he speaks. She supposes she shouldn't jump to conclusions – it could be any number of things besides dishonesty, exhaustion being the most likely, and she can hardly blame him for it after the day they've both had. Or maybe his arm is hurting him more than he's letting on? In any case, she doesn't push the subject further. If whatever it is that's making him look so out of sorts were important and not just private, she trusts him enough by now to tell her. As for her morbid curiosity... well, she'll just have to learn to cope with it as always. It's better than inadvertently pissing him off and making their situation less pleasant than it already is.

"So what do you remember?" she asks instead, hoping the change in topic will cut the awkward silence that's started to grow between them short. "If you don't mind my asking or anything."

Fen's head twitches, his eyes clearing and flicking back to her face. "Before I met up with you and the others?" She answers with a nod, watching intently while his lips part and eyes narrow – more out of what she's glad to see looks like thought rather than annoyance. "Waking up. In some ridiculously clean room – white walls, white tile, hell, white everything – with no windows except for one in this massive metal door. I was in one of those stretcher beds, the kind with the wheels on the bottom." His brows are bunching again, head turned away to stare off into the room. "And... machines. Monitors? Enough of them to cover one of the walls. None of them were running, but I was... hooked up to a few of them, and there was some kind of an IV in my arm. It wasn't pleasant to take out."

"Hospital. It would explain the gown, anyway, and why you can't remember anything. You were probably there for whatever turned you into an amnesiac."

"... Probably."

Marian smirks, nudging her shoulder into his and says, teasingly: "I bet it was because you were being an idiot. Got yourself into a car accident on your motorcycle or something else equally stupid. You look like the kind of guy who'd think he was too cool to bother wearing a helmet."

He breathes a short snort of a laugh, the corners of his mouth twitching while his eyes cut back to her. "I appreciate your faith in my intelligence, Hawke."

"Just calling things like I see them. So what happened next?"

"I shouted for a while. I thought there might be someone, a doctor, a nurse nearby. But when no one came, I left," he says easily, as though the answer should be obvious. "The door was unlocked. It opened up into some sort of a medical lab – more monitors, charts, filing cabinets, someone's desk. What was left of them, anyway. The place had been torn apart, and there was blood. A lot of blood, and... other things."

"Talk about waking up in the middle of nightmare."

"It was an unsettling experience, yes," Fen's nose flares, his grin lost when his mouth twists into a crooked line. "I didn't hang around long. There was another door that led out into a hallway. More rooms like my own, all of them empty, some clean, some, well, not. I shouted more, asked if anyone could hear me. That was a mistake."

Marian doesn't have to ask. "Walkers."

"Yes."

Something hard clenches in her stomach, hands balling against her thighs tight enough to dig little crescent indents into the meat of her palm. Her imagination does her the less-than-courtesy of filling in the blanks of the story: Fen, bleary-eyed and disoriented shuffling down a hallway in the dark. No idea of where he is, who he is, thrown headfirst into what must have looked like a real life version of one of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. And then to stumble on that before he could so much as set his bearings... Christ, if she'd been the one in his place she probably would have had about enough time to piss herself before they tore her apart. Her own first run-in with a walker had been far from fun, but at least she'd had the benefit of all the news reports and emergency broadcasts, even if they had been infuriatingly vague.

"I found them in what I think was the lobby. Four of them," he says quietly, bangs falling into his eyes when he tilts his head forward to stare at his hands. "At least, I believe that's how many there were. I didn't bother doing a head count at the time. I thought they were like me at first. Other patients. Dressed in the same gowns as I was in any case. They were huddled together in the middle of the floor. I asked them who they were, what was going on – and that's when I saw the body."

"Shit, Fen," she says, voice unintentionally breathy.

"A security guard. He still had his taser in his hand. They were... eating him. And then they heard me, looked up, and started to fucking glow." His eyes close and he shakes his head, a long, shaky breath leaving through his nose. Her fingers twitch – she wants to reach out to him, put a hand on his arm, pat his shoulder, something. But by the time she starts to lift her hand away from her leg he's speaking again. "They came after me. I ran. Managed to find a broken window that went outside and threw myself through it. Didn't even bother to see how far off the ground I was. I got lucky. Ended up falling a good twelve feet but I landed in some bushes at the bottom. Then I just – kept running. Into the damned woods of all things."

"And then you found us out in the middle of nowhere a couple days later," Marian says with a nod. "Or did something else equally terrible happen in between?"

His head gives a quick jerk, his chin tilting down and to the side in the same direction as his eyes. "No," he says quickly, the hand with her bandanna attached lifting to cup at the back of his neck. "That's— that's everything."

"You sure?" she asks, leaning forward to try to catch his notice. This time she knows he's keeping something from her; between how tense he's gone and the way he's looking at anything but her, he may as well have hung a flashing neon sign around his neck that says 'I'M LYING'. "I get the feeling there's something else bo—"

Something pounds into the stockroom door. Hard. Marian jumps near out of her skin, her question cut short by a sharp intake of breath. Fen is on his feet and across the room by his bag a second later, the nine millimeter back in his hand when the same something hits the door again, this time hard enough to make the shelves piled against it screech against the tiles.

"Fuck." She's on her feet now too, tripping over them while she scrambles to join him and take hold of the abandoned shotgun. She stuffs her hand into her pocket, pulls out a handful of the pistol's bullets and shoves them into his palm, her pulse already kicked into high gear all over again. "FUCK."

"Time your shots," Fen says, sounding calmer than he has any right to in her most humble of opinions, the clip slid free, loaded and clicked back into place before she has time to blink. "There are four more shells in the front pocket of my bag if we need them. If they break through we'll have enough to hold them back until—"

"Marian!" The something – someone Marian realizes, and her heart gives a stuttered lurch in her chest – hits the door a third and then a fourth time. "Fenris! Are you in there?"

"Aveline!" What's left of the bullets in her hand scatter when they hit the floor, the gun tossed a bit more carelessly than is wise towards Fen's bag while she runs the six feet between her and the door.

"Oh thank God," Aveline says, her voice distorted through the wood and piles of meds, though she doesn't miss the heavy sigh of relief that follows. "I found the radio out front with all the blood and I thought – never mind. Is Fenris there with you? Are you both alright?"

"I'm here," Fen says, answering for himself as he stuffs the pistol into the waistband of his jeans. "We're both fine. Relatively speaking."

"Good, ok. Good." She gives another push against the door. "Now hurry up and unblock this damned thing. Isabela's distracting them as best she can but it won't last forever. There are still a few of them dawdling out on the street."

Fen is ten steps ahead of Aveline, his shoulder already braced and shoving against the closest set of shelves by the time she's finished speaking.

"Just a second!"

The rest goes by in a rush. Marian is at the other end a split second later, hands wrapped around the supports and pulling back against her heels. Between the both of them and her latest spike of adrenaline they have the four of them out of their way in record time, the last thrown helter-skelter into the others and toppling to the floor in a wave of even more displaced bottles and packages. Her head is still reeling when she makes it back to snatch up her backpack, the only coherent thought she's able to make any sense out of a constant, repeating string of thank FUCKING God!

Aveline all but tears the door off of its hinges and nearly takes Fen's arm with it, his hand snatched away from where he was about to open it himself a second before it slams into the opposite wall. She looks, when Marian turns and finds her looming in the doorway, like a woman possessed. Ginger hair frizzled and freckles standing out on a paler than average face, she can't help but think that if they were in any less of a hurry that she'd be halfway through some comment about her looking the perfect picture of a worried mother hen.

Instead she gives a wide-mouthed smile. "You have no idea how good it is to see you."

"Likewise," Aveline says, nodding first to her and then Fen. "Your mother's been a nervous wreck since you missed your check in – I'm pretty sure she'd have had my head if we came back without you."

"Well luckily it looks like we won't have to find out just yet, will we?"

Aveline snorts. "Luckily. Come on, I don't know about you two, but I want to get the hell out of here."

"Definitely," Fen says as he slings his duffle bag up onto his shoulder with his good arm.

They make it out through the front of the store easily enough, the room empty with the exception of the dead walkers from their earlier escape attempt. The street outside is clear for the most part as well, a few walkers scattered here and there but nowhere near close enough to have Marian worried just yet. It's quiet too, the only noise she can hear besides their feet against the pavement as they hurry down the road the sound of a car running a few streets down and—

"Jesus Christ!" She can't help it. She laughs. Long and loud and hard enough to make her lurch to a stop and curl over her knees. By the time she's finished there's tears in her eyes, her stomach hurts and Fen is looking at her like she's completely lost her marbles. Not that she gives a single shit about that at the moment, because damn it if this isn't exactly how she'd have guessed Isabela would have decided to draw the walkers off. "Is she – is she fucking blasting 'Push It' on her stereo?"

Aveline is laughing too now, covering her mouth with the back of her hand while the color starts to make its way back into her face. "She thought you'd appreciate that."

"Oh fuck. Remind me to kiss that girl when I see her next."

"If, er, you two are finished?" Fen says with a cocked brow, though Marian is happy to see he's smiling now too. Ecstatic, actually, and while she doesn't expect the excited little thrill that shoots through her at the sight of it, she doesn't bother questioning it.

"Ready whenever you are," she says when she straightens, fixing her grip of the shotgun as she moves to walk beside him. "What do you say, Fen? Can you stand my company for the walk home too?"

His grin grows, the green of his eyes bright while they make their way down the street. "I've enjoyed following you so far, Hawke."