notes: school has stolen my soul and i'm under contract for the next seven months. send help.
dedication: to all those over dramatic westerns i've been watching all afternoon. and also thefourteenthdarkone.
ps. amenah, basically: "marcy don't you dare drag cobra into this fucking mess he's fragile doN'T YOU DARE."
me: "is that a dare i hear?"
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(a zombie memoir, wherein Cobra sees the light, but not really, and discovers heads will roll when Angel is around—literally.)
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act v
pick on someone your own size, or bully the zombies instead of people you traitorous mongrel
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{i'm your dream girl, this is real love, don't you know what they say about me?}
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—
Angel has seen some shit.
Whether it be idiot football players almost exploding while on keggers, cheerleader initiations, her cousin's boyfriend's naked ass running from their house at two am, Black Friday sales at the mall, or Minerva without her morning double whip nonfat mocha latte—which is, by the way, is anything but pretty, that's for damn sure. However, none of it compares to the scene before her.
The world around her looks like some awful b-movie horror come to life. There's blood and body limbs strung everywhere, things are on fire, people are looting while simultaneously being caught and eaten alive by none other than the frickin reanimated dead, and she's already ruined the perfect manicure she just got yesterday. All in all, it either looks like a regular Saturday morning or the end of the world. Probably the end of the world, unless you lived in some freaky alternate universe where this was a thing.
In conclusion, everything pretty much fucking sucked, and she'd be damned if she didn't voice her opinions on the matter. Even though most of the time people referred to her doing such a thing as 'bitching.' So what? She deserved to bitch about the state of things every once in a while, especially now.
"You better be real fucking appreciative," she grinds out and slams a golf club into a zombie's head. It goes through the nasty thing's eye and she rips it back out. "I just got a manicure yesterday and that undead Wanna-Beyonce annihilated it."
Cobra grunts from somewhere behind her, and the girl rolls her eyes and smacks her gum obnoxiously. She knows it bothers him, and despite the deathly screams and overall undead moaning surrounding them, she also knows he can hear it.
"I want dinner at Olive Garden two times a week for this," Angel begins her list of demands. "And none of that 'Two for Twenty' shit unless I say so. You can't be stingy with me after this, you hear me Erik? I am pretty much the motherfucking Terminator right now, looking for your little girlfriend while defending both our lives from the damn walking dead. You cannot afford to be a fucking hardass penny-pincher or else I will let one of these undead bitches eat you instead."
She won't, actually, because he's her best friend and she loves him to death—wait, bad timing—but seriously. She also loves breadsticks and pasta. Honestly, she's going to shove some of those endless sticks of heaven into her purse next time she goes. There just isn't enough room in her stomach after eating a full meal, and that's a damn shame—but a damn shame that can and will be remedied. It's not like Erik can see her anyway.
Anyway, back to the situation at hand, aka the dooming point of humanity. She'd been at cheer practice early this morning to go over some new drills when it happened. Seriously, having to drag herself out of bed at seven on a Saturday morning and get her butt down to the football field just because she was vice captain of the cheer team was bad enough without the fucking apocalypse added on top of it.
It all happened very fast, now that she thinks back on it. She'd been looking over their routine and sipping on a bottle of blackberry tea when the first girl showed up to practice. Angel had looked up in annoyance, seeing as everyone was at least half an hour late, and squinted at Sue, ready to roast the junior girl. Except something was very off about her this morning. Her gold and Prussian blue uniform was torn—Angel almost started screeching right then and there, because wearing one of these prestigious uniforms was a fucking honor—and her posture was slack, movements sluggish.
"What the hell is wrong with you, Sue? Did you go to that party at Michael's last night and get completely wasted?"
She half expected Sue to make some sort of biting retort because Michael was a complete fuckboy that all the sensible girls tried to avoid, but no. Instead, the girl lifted her head and Angel watched in increasing disgust as it rolled back at an odd angle. Okay, what the fuck.
"Sue, hey. Are you okay?"
And that was precisely when the former cheerleader lunged for her vice-captain, teeth snapping and eyes bulging, veins oddly noticeable all the way up her face. They matched her hair. Angel shrieked bloody murder and scrambled away, choosing to take the high route and make her escape up the bleachers. The chase lasted for about ten minutes until Angel was finally able to take zombie Sue's head off with a lacrosse stick some guy had left behind after practice. Looks like her three years of fast pitch softball hadn't been for nothing, after all.
So that's how she was almost killed by one of her bitchy teammates, and also how she was first alerted to the fact that something had gone seriously wrong in the world. Her first thought after that had been Cobra, because what the hell could a blind kid do against like a million zombies trying to eat him? But the death of her co-cheerleader still nagged at the back of her mind.
Oh, well, she always thought Sue's blue bob was tacky anyway. And her outfit choices—Angel places a hand over her heart and wonders how any self-respecting person could wear what Sue had called clothes.
"She wasn't at home," Cobra mutters to himself, breaking Angel out of her thoughts. She brushes some tears from her eyes, even though he can't see, and rolls her eyes. "She was supposed to be at home."
Angel gingerly brushes some brain matter off her letterman and huffs. "We'll find her, you blind bastard. Just think. Where would she go? Isn't today her day off?"
"Yeah, but sometimes she takes other people's shifts. I just didn't think she was doing that today," Cobra intones. He sounds worried. Hm.
Possibly because the mild-mannered Love of His Life is lost somewhere in a city crawling with zombies? Most likely.
This is not how her senior year was supposed to go. She was on the fast track for the best university in Crocus, and now she doubts that education even matters. It's all about survival at this point, apparently. Ah well, screw the world and its undead problem. She's so over it.
A walker—except it's more like a speed walker, considering the way it's coming at her—missing most of its hair and chomping the air with its gross yellow teeth, makes a grab for her. She pulls the club back in the air and swings. "FOUR!"
Its head goes flying through the air and lands in an open garbage can. She fist pumps. "All right, hole in one!"
"Are you using a golf club? Where'd you even get that thing?"
Angel tosses her hair over her shoulder. "Stole it."
He looks at her, even without really looking at her. Y'know, because of the whole bind thing. He looks judgey. Well excuse her.
(Kianna's really changed him. Angel thinks it's for the better.)
"It was from a dead guy, Erik. Shut down your judging; we're not in divorce court. Dead guys have no use for golf clubs. It's not like he's gonna wake up and go shoot eighteen down at the course," Angel snipes. "Relax. Besides, I'm sure he wouldn't mind me using it to—oh, I don't know—keep us from ending up like him."
Cobra straightens the collar of his jacket and exhales deeply. "Now who's sounding judgey?"
Another zombie, this one missing an arm, makes a go for him. She snarls and takes its head off—though this action requires a bit of hacking. Gross.
"And fuck you in particular," Angel spits as she sidesteps the corpse and takes Cobra by the hand, leading him on towards Fairy Tail.
Maybe this is why people started drinking at a young age.
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(x)
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Levy regards their surroundings with a sour expression. "Maybe it wasn't such a bright idea to leave the house."
Romeo is busy shoving almost everything from the mini-mart's shelves into his backpack, which is surprisingly bottomless. Seriously, he's running one hand along the items and pushing them all into the backpack he's holding open in his other. Cans and packages clash together and make an awful racket as he stocks up. Levy is standing guard by the door of the corner stop gas station, despite the fact that the glass is shattered and it's nothing but frame.
After much consideration, they'd decided to venture out into the unknown—properly prepared, of course. Or as prepared as they could be, considering Levy had no sports equipment but a tennis raquet. They opted to detach one of the metal pipes from her water line after switching it off and use that instead.
So far the both of them had managed to steer clear of any zombies, which she was thankful for. Her street had considerably quieted down, probably since there hadn't been any more people to devour, and they had only come into contact with one or two in the forty-five minutes they'd been out, and only from a distance. She'd decided that they should probably get some supplies while they were about, too, hence the reason they were hurriedly trying to make a quick stop at the 7/11 a couple blocks down the street from her house.
Romeo edged around some mushroom soup. "Done with the non-perishables. Moving onto the Funyuns section."
"This feels weird," Levy wrings her hands. "We're stealing. Oh my gosh. We're criminals."
Her partner in possibly perpetual crime grunts and stuffs a few bags of Doritos and pretzels into his paper bag when the backpack fills up. "Do you prefer nacho cheese or cool ranch?"
"Nacho cheese. Cool ranch Doritos are a disgrace to humanity and I will take no part in that catastrophe when we've got our own problems going on right here, thank you very much," Levy answers, eyes flitting around the exterior of the building.
Romeo slowly puts the family size bag of cool ranch Doritos back. "Okay, moving on then. We're not stealing technically, we're stealing hypothetically."
"How so?"
He gazes longingly at the Mtn. Dew calling to him from the beverage section. "Well, it is the apocalypse, right? And there's no one manning the counter, right? So essentially, that means the merchandise is up for grabs—you know, first come, first serve. We'd pay if there was someone here to take our money, but there isn't. Think of it this way: you don't have to worry about tax or some gross attendant hitting on you. Also, we're not really stealing if there's no one here to steal from."
Probably because he's long-gone now.
"You just bagged a fortune's worth of Spaghetti-O's," Levy begins slowly, thinking that maybe Romeo Conbolt is one of those kids who either goes on to become a super successful genius, or a criminal mastermind, "and yet you're giving me a speech on capitalism during the actual dawn of the dead. Child, I worry about you sometimes."
Romeo grins at her even though she's not looking, and drags his paper bag back to the refrigerator section. "So, do you want Snapple or Powerade or what?"
Levy squints at something in the distance that seems to be getting closer, but it's moving faster than a walker. Another living person, maybe? "Snapple, please. I like their peach tea the best."
The younger boy works in silence for a few minutes, occasionally glancing up at the security screens. They're nothing but static and an occasional horizontal bar running up and down the screen. The only sounds in the station is the hum of the refrigerators and the odd noises various drinks make when they bump each other as the teenager loads them into his bag.
Suddenly Levy straightens up and grips her pipe tighter. "Romeo," she calls out, voice strained, "stay behind me."
"What?" the boy's head flies up as he drops a bottle of tea to the floor, and it shatters upon impact. "Levy—"
A deep and grainy voice cuts him off, and Levy's stance becomes visibly rigid. "Well, well, well. What do we have here?"
She knows that voice, knows these people. It's been a while, but not long enough. She clenches her jaw and swallows. What are they doing here? There's no way she can hold her own against all of them, but it doesn't mean she can't try.
"If it isn't Redfox's woman," the sleazebag known as Jose Porla grins, and it's predatory. "My, my. I haven't seen you around in…what? Nine months, a year? How's the old boy doing, anyway? Come to think of it, I'm surprised he's not with you. After all, he did leave Phantom Lord for you," he sneers the last part.
Levy frowns and her eyes dart back to Romeo, hidden away somewhere behind the shelves. "He didn't leave your gang for me," she tries to sound strong, "he left because you were awful to him, and he was tired of doing bad things."
The taller and broader one—who, to Romeo, resembles a brick wall—starts to wail. "Isn't it so sad? Black Steel left us for this girl, and now he isn't even here to protect her!"
Jose doesn't normally go with the hands-on approach, but this girl is the reason one of the best members of Phantom Lord defected, and no one is going to notice anything odd about a single girl dying in the apocalypse. He reaches out for her, grin sinister.
Levy responds by swinging the end of the pole into his stomach as hard as she can, sending him reeling. She twirls it back around and points it threateningly at Aria and Totomaru. The latter has remained quiet until now, but he cackles, taking a step forward.
"Oh hon hon, what's this?"
He throws a punch, but she's so short that it's not hard to dodge, and instead slides across the floor and knocks him off his feet. She never thought the day would come when she'd actually use the self-defense lessons that Erza and Gajeel had forced upon her, but now was as good a time as any to put them into practice.
Everything is going as well as it can until Aria snags her pole and lifts it high into the air, leaving her dangling as she hangs on. That's when things really start to look bleak. Jose grimaces at her and grinds his teeth. "You're a stubborn one, I'll give you th—"
"Levy, get out of the way!"
All eyes snap over to the previously unnoticed Romeo, who hurls a Molotov cocktail at the men. Levy drops to the ground and clears out just in time. She watches in amazement and horror as the three men take off screaming, trying to put out the fire and failing.
She slowly turns to Romeo, the former six-pack, a container of kerosene, and the opened lighter package next to him, gawking. He smiles sheepishly and shrugs. "I uh, I just really like chemistry?"
Evil mastermind it is, then.
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(x)
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Natsu adjusts the small child on his back and glances around. He's somewhat elated to find that he's incredibly close to Lucy's street, and that the area seems relatively untouched. Happy nuzzles closer into the collar of his jacket and the older boy hopes that the blonde is still inside her house. At least then he'd know that she's safe and hasn't been—
He vigorously shakes his head. Don't think like that, you moron. Lucy's fine. She's tough as balls, there's no way some fucking walker would be able to take her out.
The street is eerily silent, and he keeps glancing at his murky reflection in the canal as he walks. His eyes look heavy, like there's some sort of incredible weight there, and his mouth is drawn into a pensive line. What happened to him? Ten minutes ago he was prepared to be this ultimate zombie-slaying badass, and now all he could think about is his best friend out there somewhere. Or maybe just her in general.
He ponders over it for a few seconds as Happy stirs in his arms, and decides that he needs to find Lucy as soon as humanly possible. Then he could go on with being legendary and doing Great Things. Ugh, he needs some Captain Crunch like pronto.
All of a sudden, Happy begins to poke him frantically, and Natsu raises a brow. "What? What is it?"
The boy looks at him with wild but bright eyes and points to something moving next to a dumpster in the alley they're passing. Natsu tenses in preparation to go on the defense, but the rustling stops and something small and white pops its head up over a box. He blinks at Happy, who is beaming back at him and jabbing his pointer finger at the animal.
"A kitten?" Natsu laughs, relaxing. "You want to keep it, huh?"
Happy nods enthusiastically and continues gesturing wildly to the puff of fur and wary eyes. Natsu laughs a sigh, but shuffles over to the dumpster and the small thing eyeing them suspiciously. He scoops it up, with much verbal protest from the animal, and hands it back to the boy.
"Okay," he nods. "We can keep it, but you gotta take care of her, alright?"
Natsu smiles as the kid nods enthusiastically and holds the kitten carefully in his hands. She doesn't appear to like him very much, considering how much she squirms, and Natsu sets Happy down so they can make proper arrangements for their new friend.
Once she's properly tucked away in Happy's backpack with her little head sticking out, looking quite moody but content, the teenager stretches while his charge plays with a few toy cars that had apparently been stored in his overall pockets. Natsu figures they should check Lucy's place before they move on to Fairy Tail, but he's been carrying the five-year-old for a while now and needs a short break.
He's pulling a protein bar—something Gray left over at his house like two weeks ago or something—out of his backpack when he first picks up the rumbling. It grows louder every second and it headed straight for them.
"Happy," he calls out warily, "come on we need to—"
Natsu's cut off by the screech of tires and the sound of someone shouting at the top of their lungs. He squints, trying to focus on the ever-nearing screech because it sounds familiar. And then some black hunk of junk is slamming to a halt in front of them, and Natsu gently pushes Happy behind him, but keeps one of his hands on the boy's head, the other on his rifle.
"—THE HELL DID YOU EVER PASS DRIVER'S TRAINING, YOU CRAZY BASTARD."
He does know that voice.
The passenger door swings open to reveal a blanching Gray, who doesn't even notice Natsu. "This isn't the fucking Fast & Furious, snowplow edition, Gajeel. You could've killed us."
"Ice prick, staple-faced bastard," Natsu greets, his hand slipping from the gun slung around his shoulder in a half-assed wave.
Gray scowls in his general direction and Gajeel leans over his extremely rude passenger to send a wild grin to their friend. "Yo, hothead. Need a ride?"
tbc.
end notes: so i don't like cool ranch doritos, fight me. also, this turned out...not as humorous as i was going for? oops.