Hi! It's been ages since I've last written for this fandom, but this story has been a little worm in my head that I haven't been able to get out for quite some years now, so I thought I'd finally throw my hat back in. Please enjoy!

…

They'd been living on borrowed time. She knew it– she always had known it, but thinking about death and staring it right in the face were two different things entirely.

A cacophony of bullets rang out and she ducked her head with a cry. Away from the brick wall she hid behind, someone started screaming. In response, one of the assailants– one of the damned people with guns who had come out of nowhere, threw out some sort of taunt before firing off their weapon again. This is bad, she thought fervently. This is really, really bad.

Beside her, Papa gave her arm a tug. He was much calmer than her. She didn't know how the hell he was able to remain so stoic in the face of all of this mess. He'd been through it all before, he'd told her. When the asteroid first hit, things got real bad, real quick.

Distantly she heard a string of expletives, followed by a disgustingly wet sound, as though someone were bashing a piece of meat with a rock over and over. She clenched her eyes shut.

"Christine," Papa said. "We're gonna have to make a break for it. Alright?"

She stared at him like he was crazy. Make a break where? They were surrounded on pretty much all sides. They'd barely been traveling in the city for a week, and already they'd landed smack dab in the middle of a turf war. Had she not been scared for her life, she would have laughed at their luck. Or lack thereof.

"Directly across from where the wall ends here—" He paused to cough harshly. "There's a door at the end of the alley. We cut through that building."

The gunfire was concentrated significantly into the clearing before them, on the other side of the wall. This area had once been an open block of sorts, surrounded on three sides by old storefronts and buildings, only broken up by two small alleyways that curved behind the buildings like a river path on both sides of the block. They were stuck hiding in some type of alcove that partitioned the block itself from the alleyway, meant to hide the dumpsters away for when trash was to be picked up. Back when there was anyone to pick it up. It had been the closest cover available when the gunfire had started, and it was a dead end.

Christine turned her head to where the door he spoke of lay, long broken off its hinges. But there was a nicely rectangular gap cut into the stone of the building, and a broken glass light set directly above it.

She swallowed her fear and nodded. They couldn't stay in this alcove, after all. It was barely any shelter at all. How bulletproof even was brick? With every loud gunshot, she felt she was that much closer to receiving one right between her eyes.

"Are you ready?" Papa's voice was low. His eyes stared intently into hers.

She held her breath and nodded.

As soon as they stepped foot inside the doorway, Papa grabbed her wrist and pulled her into a sprint, all semblance of trying to sneak around abandoned. The yelling and noise still echoed around them– it must've spread even beyond the plaza— and they broke through the front door of the building and entered into a vacant street, Christine blindly following his lead. He knew this area much better than her, after all, he had lived here for decades before Bennu. They kept running, running, and they ducked into a smaller side street where the clamor seemed to grow more distant from where they stood.

"The map in your backpack," Papa wheezed, out of breath. "Grab it and tell me the name of the street the landmark that I told you about is on. I marked it with a st-"

They rounded the corner and came face to face with a man. He wore a camo jacket and a black cap, tugged low over his face. He had a semi-automatic in his hands. He was one of them.

Papa barely had enough time to shove her away and behind him before the man opened fire, the pops ringing out in quick succession against the air. She hit the ground hard, breaking her fall with her hands, feeling the sharp gravel bite into her skin. Papa flung himself at the man, wrestling for the gun. She shrank away as they grappled with one another, a blur of fabric and noise, until Papa gained enough energy to swing the butt of the rifle against their attacker's jaw with a resounding crack. The man let out a shrill yell, before stumbling back onto the concrete. His skull connected with the pavement with a sickening thud, and he did not move again.

Papa dropped to his knees.

"Papa?" she breathed, scrambling towards him. His hands clutched his chest, and she kneeled down before him, prying them away.

Oh, god.

Blood was everywhere, covering the pads of those worn hands that had rocked her to sleep as a child. It bloomed like a rose— no, two roses— against the fabric of the cable knit sweater that he so loved.

His breathing grew ragged. With a pained gasp, she helped him shift to lean his back against the wall behind him. His eyes momentarily fluttered shut.

"Papa," she said, her hands shaking as she quickly shucked her coat and cardigan, not even noticing the harsh bite of the wind as her bare arms were exposed to the cold air. "Papa, stay with me, okay? I need you to stay with me."

She pressed the cardigan to his wounds, vaguely remembering something about the grave importance of applying pressure to a gunshot wound. As she did it now, though, nothing seemed to change, and blood bubbled between her fingers as she pressed the fabric down against his chest. The bleeding wasn't stopping. Why wasn't the bleeding stopping?

"Christine," Papa groaned, hand laying over hers, squeezing it softly. "Christine… it's no use."

"Don't say that." She shook her head fervently and pressed down. Her hands were covered in red, her shirt stained, too. "Don't say that. Please don't say that. If the bleeding would just-"

"Christine!" He said sharply, jolting her into meeting his gaze. He turned his head towards where they had come from. She hadn't even noticed the sounds of the conflict growing louder. Closer. " You gotta go. Please."

"And leave you here?!" Her voice grew near-hysterical.

"If you die here too, when you have the chance to escape– god, Christine," he hissed and grabbed her hands tightly with his, pulling them away from the bloodied cardigan that she'd been hopelessly pressing against the wound. "I'll never be able to forgive myself. Please. Go."

"I…I…" At some point she'd started crying. An unsteady feeling began to rise in her chest, as though she weren't really here, as though this were just some really awful dream.

"Christine. Christine, please." His hands squeezed again.

Her voice came out like a whimper, weaker than she'd expected. "But how am I supposed to find the house? How am I supposed to keep going without you?"

His face was growing paler by the second. His breathing was harsh as his hands shifted to her cheek to pull her close enough to press his lips against her forehead.

"You're so, so smart," he said, his voice a whisper. "You'll figure it out. I know you will."

His chest lifted again with another shuddering inhale. Then he exhaled, slowly. And then there was nothing at all.

Christine pulled away to stare into his face, his hand limply falling away from her cheek. His eyes were vacant, sightless, staring off into a horizon that didn't exist. He was gone.

And Christine, for the first time in her life, was truly alone.

She wailed.

Her hands fisted in his sweater, tugging against him the way one would rouse someone fallen unconscious, as though if she shook him enough his eyes would focus on her again. A pit of inky blackness swallowed up her stomach, and that unsteady feeling in her chest began to break. She howled and begged and sobbed against him, and when she broke away long enough to look back into those empty eyes again she felt as though her entire world had shifted off-kilter, a planet thrown off its axis. She wasn't really here. This couldn't be real.

He was dead. Papa was dead.

The sound of yelling down the street had her nearly jumping from where she knelt. She scrambled to her feet, staring down the way they'd come with wide eyes as the sound of voices filtered closer.

It was through the pure, animalistic instinct to survive that she pulled the backpack from Papa's shoulders, clutching it in her hands as she stood, shaking, taking steps away from the mouth of the street where Papa lay dead. She couldn't bury him, there was no time, there was nowhere to bury him here, and she muffled a cry as she tripped over something soft on the ground– it was the man who had killed Papa, still laying on the pavement where he'd fallen. His dead eyes stared right at her.

Christine did the only thing she could think of. She ran.

…

The sun was settling down over the city landscape by the time that her exhaustion finally began to slow her down, the darkness of night finally come to bruise the sky. She found a building that looked like it wasn't about to cave in on itself, and she walked into one of the back bedrooms and barricaded the door shut. It was a barebones kind of space, box spring mattress pushed against the wall with dubious stains covering the tattered cover, wallpaper peeling away, all the belongings of value long looted and carried away. There wasn't even a lamp in the room anymore, though she wouldn't have been able to use it even if it had been working. It had been ages since the electric grid here worked, Papa had told her.

The silence in the room as soon as she found herself alone was deafening. She really did allow herself to cry, now, sobs that broke free and shook her entire body, dropping her backpack to the floor, relinquishing her grip on Papa's. Her shoulders ached. Her lungs ached. Her heart ached.

She leaned against the wall and slid to the floor and cried. She cried until her throat burned and nothing more could come out. And then she sat like that for what seemed like hours, knees tucked to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs, hands clenching one another as though trying to still their shaking.

By the time she felt anywhere near cognizant enough to think, it was very dark out. Around midnight, she would guess. And yet, the idea of trying to go to sleep made her feel more sickened than she'd ever been.

She wasn't even tired. She was more tired than she'd ever been. It was like a veil of exhaustion was draped over her head. But she still wasn't tired. When she turned her head slightly to the side, she could see her Papa's backpack, leaning against the foot of the bed. Outside, she was keenly aware of every sound, every whisper of the wind, every creak of the old house. There was a window above the bed, and the window blinds once meant to drape in front of it were twisted into an ugly web of plastic and string, as though someone had tried and failed to tie a lasso with it.

Eventually Christine pulled the backpacks over. She fished through hers until she found what she was looking for: a small clip on flashlight that she attached to her shirt. With him gone… she was going to have to figure out what to do with both of their belongings. The trip hadn't been planned to be incredibly long, so they hadn't stocked up on a ton besides food, seeing as they expected to have quite the haul coming back.

After they returned to her childhood home. The place Mama and Papa had originally thought that they were going to be able to settle down and raise a family in. Now, both of them were gone. There was no family left… not truly. Antoinette and Meg were close, and they'd been around ever since she was a child, her and Meg growing up as sisters practically, but nothing was the same as the connection between a child and her parents. Even as a little girl she had envied Meg for her relationship with her mother, but Papa had always been there to comfort her, then.

"She's watching down on us," he would say to her. "I promise. She's simply protecting us from afar."

Christine did not believe in protection from above. She did not believe in guardian angels. If they existed, her Papa wouldn't have been killed and she wouldn't have been left all alone.

She sniffled and wiped at her face. God. When she pulled her hand away, she realized with a shudder that she hadn't even washed her hands since leaving him there. Blood flaked off of her wrists as she turned her palm, and yet the red color it had stained on her skin wouldn't go away even as she scrubbed. She poured some water in a canteen onto her hands and she rubbed, rubbed at the flesh so hard she practically scrubbed it raw. Her palm burned from where she'd landed on her hands earlier, but she barely felt the pain. Rather her blood linger on her hands than his.

It felt like eons before she finally felt her arms clean from blood enough, and she turned off her flashlight so she simply wouldn't have to see the rest. Laying down on the bare wood, her mess of curls the only pillow against the solid ground, she stared up at the ceiling and thought that the cracks in the plaster almost looked like a face.

…

She woke up early the following morning, if it could be called "waking" at all. Her sleep had been light and tormented, with constant images of bloodied guns and men with dark faces always creeping at the edge of her vision. When she opened her eyes, for a second she thought that all of the events from the previous day had been nothing but a dream. But when she sat up she was all alone.

To keep herself from thinking, she immediately set to work emptying the contents of both her and Papa's backpacks. Once they– she– reached the house, she would have more to carry back, so she would have to condense down the contents of all that she was bringing with her. There was no way for her to carry both of their backpacks at once. For all of her exercise and work, she simply didn't have the strength. Her arms had strained from even just carrying his full backpack yesterday. She hadn't brought much in terms of clothes, and it was cold enough for her to layer up. She couldn't bear to leave behind one of his sweatshirts in particular, a tattered gray old thing from his alma mater. She folded it up gently and placed it at the bottom of her bag. There were a couple of her own shirts that she would have to leave behind for sake of space.

Besides that, she made sure to combine his food reserve, all the nuts and venison jerky that he'd packed. She flattened out the map that they'd brought with to guide them, little sharpie star that marked over their house glaring at her from the upper corner. His canteen, still half-full, settled beside the sweatshirt. And then she picked up the object that she'd been hesitant to look at.

Papa's gun sat in her hands, a smooth black Beretta M9, a heavy and leaden weight against her palms. It was loaded, she knew, with a cartridge of bullets in the chamber. He'd brought it with them for protection, though he had no idea what the level of danger in the city would be. Just in case, he'd told her. It was just in case.

Great help you were, she thought.

She slipped it into the waistband of her pants and repacked all that she was keeping. With leaving behind some of her clothes, she was a little more light on space. There wasn't much room left, and she'd probably have to find a bag somewhere to carry the excess that she could tie to her bag, but for now it was enough. Besides, she was sick of being stuck in this damn room. She'd been in one place for too long, and by all likelihood the people that had killed Papa were still around.

No, she needed to keep moving. On light feet she shifted the chair she'd propped underneath the door handle away, and began sneaking her way down the hallway. In the light of day she was able to see how far deteriorated the place was, roof open to the elements in certain places, the floorboards waterlogged and rotten. The room she'd stayed in was in miraculously better shape than the rest of the house.

Outside, the weather was a little better than it had been in previous days. It was still a far cry from the July days of old, when the weather was capable of lifting above 30 degrees and the sun wasn't covered by dust clouds. Nuclear winter, she'd remembered Papa calling it as a kid. Despite the fact that there was nothing nuclear about it. And was it even really still a 'winter' when it had been year-round for over a decade?

But the sun was slightly visible. The first sunrise that Papa would never witness. It felt so surreal to think about. The rays of light that landed on the pathway before her were rays of light that he would ever lay his eyes on. Somewhere out there, only miles away, he was likely still laying in that alleyway where he had died. A wave of nausea rose in her stomach, but she kept it down, she told herself. She had to keep moving.

And so that day commenced into another long one of making her way through the city as stealthily as possible. Fortunately there seemed to be less activity in this area, as she only occasionally heard voices (from which she made sure to hide herself every time) and never heard gunshots, which was as close to a blessing as she could ever get. At mid-day she paused to eat some food, a few slices of jerky and crumpled up crackers that she'd had left in her bag. She hadn't exactly felt hungry per se, hadn't really felt anything other than nausea, but her stomach had begun to growl, and so she'd consumed simply for the sake of quieting herself.

From there she continued on, pushing past the downtown brick stone townhomes as the landscape began to spread out a little bit, the road and yards widening as she drew further from the center of town. There were more stores out here, the occasional supermarket or bank speckled against the side of the road. She passed a gas station with all the windows smashed out, overturned cars littered on the pavement where the right turn into where the parking lot would have once been. She had her map unfolded out before her, doing her best to follow along with the lines on the paper. Was this road she was on the same avenue that he had mentioned? The title on the map was small and hard to see, and intact street signs were few and far between.

As the day began to slip into late afternoon, one of the buildings at a corner caught her eye, with smooth white paneling on the walls, the roof curving out in a large, triangle-shaped overhang that shaded the sidewalk before it. The windows were all boarded up. It was a theater.

At some point, she figured, the place must've been quite the beauty. Even now, with its crumbling exterior and stained paneling, overgrown plants and weeds breaking up through the uneven concrete and broken stairs, the place looked elegant. A once-loved building long left to time.

Had Papa ever been here? She knew he played in theaters around the city frequently when he was young, as part of the orchestra he was in. Had he once stood at the bend of the sidewalk here and stared up at the very same building?

She should keep moving, she knew that, but the sky was growing darker sooner than she had expected, and the surrounding area was quiet, untouched. She hadn't come across any other people that day, so she assumed that this part of town was largely left alone by those awful people with guns. Besides, she would've checked the time, but Papa had always been the one with the watch… and she hadn't thought to take it from him after he'd died.

When Christine tugged on the door, it was locked and unyielding. As she rounded the corner of the building, however, looking at the windows, she noted that one had all the glass smashed out, and there, at the bottom, the wood was broken away just enough for her to squeeze in through. The ragged edges of the board tugged at her hair and clothes for a second as she bent to crawl through, but then she was in.

For how much time that had passed since the place would've last been used… it was in surprisingly good condition. The foyer she had entered into was spacious, with a high ceiling reaching up at least two floors, a decadent crystal chandelier dangling from above. The floor looked like marble almost, and showed little wear. The place was dusty, more than anything, and a little dark from all the windows being covered, but it almost felt like it was a building directly transported from her childhood, in the time before Bennu when everything was still normal.

Christine moved past the emptied desk that must have served as the ticket reception at one point, drifting towards the large, gold-flaked doors that sat towards the back of the entrance hall, flanked on either side by large, curving staircases. AUDITORIUM was displayed in bright, bold letters in the space between the two doors, as well as some sort of picture frame. When she flicked on her flashlight, she could see that inside of it was a poster for a production of some musical she'd never heard of. Il… Muto, she was able to barely make out.

The doors were unmoving when she tried them, but behind the reception desk she could spy a little door that was marked as 'employees only.' She'd been around enough theaters as a little kid to know that there had to be a second staff entrance from there. The labeled door was stiff when she first turned the knob, as though something had been shoved behind it as a barrier, but when she pushed against it with all her might, whatever it was gave way with a groaning noise. And then she was in.

The staff hallway was a lot less remarkable than the foyer, with cheap paneled ceiling and what seemed to be artificial wood on the floor, and all the little lightbulbs that had once lined the side of the hallway were caked in a thick layer of dust. There was a small circular window up high that provided a little bit of light into the space, too small for anyone to possibly crawl through, but what really drew her attention was the mirror at the very end of the hall, at least a foot taller than herself, with gold floral brimming around its edges. The glass was shattered, and a chair lay overturned nearby, flecks of glass surrounding it, as though someone had lobbed it at the mirror with all their strength. The glass crunched underfoot as she turned at the door beside it. It, too, was labeled 'auditorium.'

She passed through the doorway and into the space. And oh… it was elegant. Beautiful. The red carpet underneath was vibrant, the massive ceiling-to-floor drapes that lay at the edges of the massive stage, where the curtains were pulled down and obscuring the view of the backstage from where she stood in the audience rows. As she tilted her head up, she saw that there were at least three different balconies reaching above her. This place must've been able to house hundreds of people at once. How phenomenal it would have been to experience all that, she thought. She was desperate to reach the stage, to stare out at the sea of seats and imagine, even just for a second, what it must have been like.

Before she could come anywhere close, however, a cold voice stopped her in her tracks, freezing her to where she stood.

"I do not," it hissed, smoother and deeper than she would have ever thought possible, "Believe you are supposed to be here."