Author's Note: Sooo, yeah. I can't stop my Warm Bodies shtick, so I'll just keep cranking out one-shots for this until the urge goes away. So they're stand alone chapters and they're not necessarily in order time-wise, just as a warning.
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Interim
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Julie sits outside the med tent in the dirt, still in her sodden sweater and jeans. Her knees are drawn up to her chest, not because she's cold because she is fragging freezing, but because she's scared to move. It feels like time has up and slowed down to a crawl. The roaring in her ears doesn't help, and neither does the silent wall of zombies surrounding the med tent where their unofficial leader/messiah is getting her father's bullet dug out of his chest.
Julie finds herself wanting to apologize. The humans don't have hospitals, they have dirty tents in the middle of a football stadium. They don't have doctors, they have trauma surgeons who never went to medical school. She doesn't tell R's family this though. It wouldn't help things at all.
The zombies stand shoulder to shoulder, several bodies deep, their unblinking grey eyes fixed on the tent like the combined forces of their will could somehow force a miracle to happen. Every now and then one or two of them will drop their stares down to where she sits huddled in the mud, and while Julie knows it isn't healthy way to think, she thinks she can discern disappointment in their timeless undead gazes.
She feels clammy, wet, alone, and miserable. If she loses R after everything else, Julie thinks that she might break apart like a glass asked to hold too much. It isn't just water soaking her shirt. Most of it is R's blood, his new hard won blood gained so soon but about to be lost forever. Julie is disgusted with herself. Some marvel she turned out to be- she couldn't even stop R from getting hurt, even though she tried so hard to keep him safe.
Keep you safe.
Those words rattle around in her brain like low, soft eulogies. I'm so sorry, she wants to say to him. She wants to scream it. The board isn't even between us, is it? You saved me more times than I could ever even hope to repay, and when it was finally my turn to step up to the plate, I couldn't deliver.
Julie chances a small movement, uncurling one cold pale hand to push aside the slash she had cut with her knife in the heavy green canvas of the med tent so she could spy on the progress the doctors were making.
Her gaze finds the rusted legs of a steel table. Blood is splashed under the table, staining the dirty plastic mat that served as a floor. There is a lot of blood. It seems like more than any person could afford to lose and still be alive to tell about it after. Julie swallows and closes her eyes for a brief moment before she forces herself to look up, up the rusted legs, past the bloodstained blue smocks of the surgeons and nurses, her father standing obstinately at the foot of the table with his arms crossed and wearing a frown, to R's body lying motionless on the table.
As she watches with hungry desperate eyes, Nora, decked out in scrubs and a surgical mask, hands a doctor a pair of small silver scissors. There is a snipping sound that cracks like a gunshot in Julie's ears, and suddenly the surgeon is stripping off his bloody gloves, dropping them in a hazmat bin, and turning to speak to Grigio who now drops the guise of Julie's father and puts on the mask of General like he's putting on a suit of armor.
That armor slides on much too easily. She forces herself to look at Nora, who is looking back at her with a white and strained face. Nora offers her a barely imperceptible shrug and a brave wobbly smile before she is called away by another surgeon.
R isn't moving and Julie can't look anymore.
She drops the tent fold she's holding and drops her face onto her knees and begins to rock back and forth, unable to force her grief back into the abyss inside of her.
Before she can really get into feeling sorry for herself though, sorry for everything, a hand falls heavily onto her shoulder. That hand smells like a dead cat behind a dumpster in July.
She looks up and M is crouching awkwardly in front of her, concern on his gray ugly face. He pushes at her shoulder, and while he is extremely bad at it, she is touched that he is trying to console her.
"It'll...be..o-kay," he manages, stumbling over his syllables like a toddler learning to walk over a floor strewn with legos.
Julie swipes a filthy sleeve across her equally filthy face and sniffles. "Thanks."
She stands and brushes as much of the goop off of her butt as she can, and tries not to notice how M's joints crackle and pop when he lurches to his feet. "I'm going to see how he is," she says, squaring her shoulders and putting on the bravest game face she can manage.
The dead are all looking at her like she's made of solid gold, spat out from the sun. Julie wants to shout at them, tell them that whatever R said about her isn't true, that she is a freaking MESS, that it took two soldiers and a nurse to haul her kicking and screaming out of the med tent and away from him. She bottles up her screams though, and does her best to do the same for her tears, though some manage to escape despite her best efforts.
M nods gravely. "We'll...be here."
Julie ducks into the tent and skirts the walls, and does her best to look small and not crazy. Kevin threatened to hog tie her when she kicked him the junk last time, it would suck if he saw her and made good on his threat.
The med tent is fairly empty. There is no sign of her father and the medical staff have all drifted off to other tasks elsewhere. R has been moved from that horrible table under a glaring white light to a dark cot in the corner.
A single soldier stands guard across the room from R's bed. She's lucky it isn't Kevin. Julie also counts it as a positive that his hand rests easily and unworried on the butt of his assault rifle, instead of on the trigger. He only rolls his eyes when she skulks into the room like a shabby wet ninja and approaches R's bed.
She is surprised to see R's newly golden eyes open and looking at her, and when he sees her looking at him, he offers a small smile.
"Hey." His voice is a croak, and she can't tell whether it's his vocal cords still learning their new freedoms, or because they had no sedatives to spare when they operated on him.
"Hey, yourself." She can only manage a whisper. Julie feels like she's in church or something, and at risk of disturbing the dead. Which is ridiculous, because R isn't dead, not anymore.
R tries to shrug, but winces, and then the swatch of white gauze encircling his chest and shoulder turns pink and then darkens to red. Julie looks around wildly for the doctor, but R catches her hand.
"It's okay. They said it would ooze for a bit, which is why I shouldn't move."
Julie feels awful, like she clubbed a puppy or accidentally stole an orphan's pudding. She pulls a chair over to his bed, conscious that the soldier behind her is watching the display curiously, like a biologist watching a pair of weird new beetles that might either mate or try to eat each other.
She decides that she is going to ignore him. She is too cold, too tired, and too strung out to care what he thinks. All she wants now is R. R almost died for crying out loud, and even with him lying there in clean bandages and pink skinned and breathing and very much alive, she still feels like if she blinks something else catastrophic will happen. So she sits there, knees pressed hard together, hunched over his warm hand sitting in her lap, like maybe she will fly into a million pieces if she makes any sudden movements. R worms his hand around so he can squeeze her fingers.
"We cut it close," Julie says, before he can open his mouth and say whatever comforting thing he had on his mind. "Too, too close. We are not doing this again."
"Too late," R says tugging on her hand, "We have to finish what we started. Don't worry, I'll keep you safe."
She actually does a fair impression of a zombie growl as she crawls into bed with him, carefully navigating his bandaged chest and shoulder so that she can tuck herself up against his other side. There is a lot of him to go around; R is frigging huge, all gangly limbs and scrawny joints. Julie decides that the first order of business when he finally gets out of the med tent will be to stuff him full of cheeseburgers and beer. She doesn't know where she will get them, but dammit it is going to happen.
She forgets all her plans and worries and fears though as she burrows into him, getting comfortable. R's body is warm now, almost hot, and she can't help the sleepy exhaustion seeping into her limbs when she slides her head onto his shoulder.
There is something on her mind, something she wants to tell him. It has been niggling at her for days, pushing at her while they dodged Boneys and bullets, even before that mind blowing kiss in the cistern.
"Hey R?" Her voice is small, muffled in his dirty red hoodie. They cut his shirt off of him to get the bullet out, but left his hoodie, and Julie can't bring herself to bridge the few inches of cloth between her cheek and his skin. So her head remains awkwardly balanced on his shoulder.
"Mmm?" He sounds half asleep.
"I-I need to tell you something." I love you.
She can feel him shift at the serious, almost desperate tone in her voice, and knows he's trying to look down at her. He can't, because her head is in the way and Julie doesn't move because she is afraid to look at him. If she looks at him she'll lose her nerve.
"R, I-" Julie swallows and takes a deep breath. The words are sticking in her throat like molasses. She is afraid of what saying them will mean, everyone she's ever said those words to has died horribly. She knows it's incredibly stupid, but if she's jinxed she doesn't want to lay it on R.
"Hey! You can't come in here!" The guard's shout cuts her off and Julie's words evaporate from her like ice under the sun.
M either doesn't hear the guard or doesn't care and comes crashing into the tent, brushing past the poor man with an energetic rasp, "Hi!"
Julie presses her flaming red face into R's neck and mutters a quiet "Dammit."
M shambles up to R's bedside, leaving the guard spluttering angrily behind him. He looks at Julie, or rather looks at her red tinged ears which is the only part of her visible besides her mop of blond hair. "You... didn't come ...back," he says by way explanation.
If Julie had been looking, she would have seen R shoot M a dirty look and mouth 'You have the worst timing ever.'
M heaves a loud theatrical sigh. "Fine. I can...see..I'm inter..rupting." His voice gets closer and much quieter, and Julie figures he must have bent down close to R.
"Don't..cut it so close...next time, kid," M says harshly, "I...m-mean it. I got...grey hairs over you."
Julie emerges from R's shoulder when she hears him grunt with pain, and immediately feels awful for squashing his good arm. R slowly and painfully raises his arm to clap M on the shoulder, who nods gravely and shuffles out of the door, tossing the annoyed guard another "Hi!" on the way out.
R's arm drops down to the mattress and lets loose a long, tired sigh. She can feel him glance down at her. "What were you going to say?" His voice is soft and rough, and she finds that she somewhat misses his stutter. It was cute.
"It was nothing." Her nerve has been so lost, it's probably at the bottom of the Mariana Trench by now. "I'll tell you later."
"Okay." He doesn't press her further, but the arm she has pinned underneath her slithers out to curl around her shoulders, rolling her snugly into him.
His hand cups the back of her head, fingers stroking through her hair. Suddenly it occurs to her that she hasn't really solid night's sleep since she walked out of the compound with the salvage team over a week ago. R's hand is drooping against her head and she realizes that she can't really complain: he probably has years of sleep to make up for, since zombies don't sleep, let alone dream.
She worms closer to him and sighs, cheek against skin and her forehead against his neck. His head rolls to rest against hers, and every time he breaths she can feel it on her hair.
She's not exactly happy, per se, it's deeper than that. Julie finally realizes what it is, as the feeling has been absent from her life for so long she has forgotten the feeling. It is alien to her, but delicious as well. It takes her a moment to even put a name to it, which says something for how long she has gone without it.
Ensconced in R's arms, she is content. Safe.
Fin
