Chapter Text
Chapter 1
the good die young but so did this
I hope hopeless changes over time
SEATTLE DAY 3
++
The storm bashes against the roof of the aquarium like fists on a door when they see Alice, bloody and still, guarding the entrance to the atrium in perpetuity.
“Is that…?”
“Stay behind me.”
The walk down the hall and through the sterile back room is miles long, longer than St. Mary’s, longer than the trek to Jackson and back. It stretches out in front of Abby like an endless expanse of sky, open and daunting. She is nothing but a soldier taking stock– smelling the blood in the air, hearing the noiseless interior that echoes with nothing but the rain, tasting her shame and despair on her tongue. With her eyes she sees the room exactly as they left it, bloody cloth and surgical tools still laid out across the metal tabletops. She grips the broken pipe in her hand and wishes for her pack.
And then its blood pooling outside the door that leads to the atrium, the copper tinge in the air like stale coins on her tongue. The painted crab mural holds its arms up in praise, beckoning her forward and through to gaze at what her revenge has cost her.
(Because she’s known since this morning, when Tommy Miller had his rifle across her throat and the memory of Manny’s one-eyed dead stare was freshly imprinted in her skull, that this was about revenge.
She carried the knowledge for hours, across the water to Seraphite Island to save a boy from his mother, holding him back as he tried to grieve over Yara’s corpse. She carried it while escaping the burning island with a war waging all around her, her own bullets finding those she used to see daily at the stadium. She carried it while rowing all the way back to the aquarium. She left him alive, and he came for her.
Later, after the rainwater sting has left her skin, the crab will remind her of the murals of the Prophet, her face serene and arms up, opening towards all.)
Pushing through the gap and opening the door, Abby’s stomach lurches at the river of blood that follows a sad trail to Mel’s very still body. The bulge in her violet hoodie seems on full display; not enough of a reason to stop whoever did this. They knew, they saw, and still her blood is congealing on the soles of Abby’s boots. Her stomach roils in protest.
And– Owen.
He is laid out unnervingly similar to how her father was— arms almost against his sides, legs straight, eyes to the ceiling and she wonders for the briefest of moments if this was all planned and staged from the very beginning: an elaborate, cruel cosmic joke being played on her. The first day in years she hasn’t woken up with nightmares about her father must be replaced by nightmares of her first –current, ongoing? – love. Owen’s halo of blood spreads farther than her father’s did, water from rain and sea and Seattle creating a cocktail on the glass that she knows is different from the blood in that operating room but all she can think is: Salt Lake Salt Lake Salt Lake.
She can’t help but remember the last time she was in this position: entering a room and finding that her whole life had been upended and fallen out from underneath her.
Last time, Abby had Owen there to hold her back, to keep her from seeing what no one should ever bear witness to. She had him to hold her as she wailed, as the Firefly soldiers discussed over her father’s dead body, as if her whole world hadn’t just collapsed. She had him to guide her from the operating room and coax her through a panic attack in a nearby office, rubbing her arms so feverishly she swears that it burned. He held her shaking body that day and nearly every day after for years, a comfort she gave up to chase a smuggler across a few states.
Now, well.
She no longer has any of that.
What’s left?
She collapses onto the floor and vomits nothing but stinging bile, not having had any substantial meal in the past several days. Tears leak from her eyes as her stomach clenches. She hears her sobs echoing and she briefly wonders if she’s being loud because all she can hear is her own blood rushing through her ears like a torrent. She brings the heel of her palm down on the ground repeatedly — hoping it or her hand cracks first, she isn’t sure — and curses herself for allowing the smuggler’s brother to live, cursing herself for the hell she brought to their front door.
I want what you want, Abby. But not at any cost.
This is the cost.
“Abby…” Lev’s voice is calm as he approaches her, slowly, like she’s a feral animal needing to be put down before she bites anyone else. He holds a damp, colorful sheet of paper in his grip.
As she studies it – her own name circled excessively, the names of her friends crossed off like the answers to a crossword puzzle she once found a book of – a familiar feeling begins to stir in the pit of her stomach. The rage that fueled her after Salt Lake, the fire that drove her to hone her body into a killing machine awakens like a beast in her belly. She feels the steam crawl through the dragon’s nostrils, the swirling, scorching, consuming burn of revenge lighting every synapse in her brain until all she sees in front of her eyes is the color of blood.
This, she knows.
+
One theater.
Two more corpses laid at her feet.
Three others she came within inches of slaughtering.
Four shallow breaths she takes before standing over the girl from Jackson.
“Don’t ever let me see you again.”
+
Abby trudges through the steadily pouring rain, back to the aquarium. The hunting knife is still clenched tightly in her fist. She is still bleeding from her arms, from her cheek, from the stab wound in her thigh, so many other places she can’t even bring herself to catalogue. She can feel where they will all turn to scars, believes that she could already run her fingers across them and find them stark white and raised. Soundlessly, she marches on toward another battle, another fight, another burden.
Too soon, they reach the aquarium. Abby dreads what she knows is there, what she knows she still has to do. The memory of blood mixing with saltwater and mixing with rainwater, the way Owen’s eyes were open in confusion and fear. He had no idea.
She had no idea.
+
Abby brings Lev to Owen’s makeshift loft, up the curving staircase, the vast and open atirum mocking her in its emptiness, bearing down on her like stones in her pockets. The suspended whale’s huge mouth opened in a mocking grin above her, laughing at her misery.
She opens the door with the ring of keys Owen had given her just hours ago. As she steps through the doorway she’s greeted by his familiar smell, clinging to every surface. Abby directs Lev to the bed, who has mercifully stayed solemnly silent since the theater. She’s grateful for it.
He unslings his bow and quiver and gingerly sets them on the ground. He blinks around the room quickly, his hands hanging low at his sides, fingers twitching. He seems to need no direction, scarcely meeting her eyes as he sits down on the bed and turns over toward the open windows, his back to her. Her black leather jacket swallows him up and gleams with rainwater like beached seaweed. Her eyes stick on the WLF patch on the right sleeve, and it screams at her.
She feels the past hour –the past two hours, the past ten hours, the past day, the past three days, and how the fuck has it only been three days— crawling up her throat like vomit. She brings her arms up around herself and winces sharply when her fingers brush the gash across her bicep. She glances down at it and grinds her teeth against the pain that is starting to make itself known. She can’t even begin to catalogue all her injuries, or anything that’s happened.
Abby looks up the same time that Lev rolls his head back towards her. “Are you going to be okay?” he asks gently. She looks at the deep scars across his face, the jagged uplift where he must have flinched at the knife. A kid, with his face mutilated. His sister’s blood still all over his hands.
“Yeah,” she says and her mouth is gravel, sand-choked and raw. “Try to get some rest.”
She doesn’t wait to hear his reply.
+
The first thing Abby does is find a shovel.
The second thing she does is dig two graves.
The rain is still falling in sheets, blinding her, pouring down her face and shoulders. Her socks are soaked inside her boots, blisters rubbing her ankles raw inside. The wet fabric of her shirt clings to her skin like a barnacle and the rain washes away the blood smeared across her body – her own or others, she does not know.
Abby checked on Lev once more before exiting the aquarium to the burial site. His breaths were even, and she had sagged in relief. She did not want him to be a part of what she had to do – after all, Yara’s body didn’t get the privilege of a final resting place.
She digs as relentlessly as the rain pours, persistent in her goal. She knows the power of motive, she’s lived and breathed it, allowed it into her bed and slept with it every night. She does not tire, and she does not cry. Her muscles burn with the exertion, but she will not stop. Her bad shoulder screaming in discomfort, the fire tingling across her back aching so deeply she’s afraid she will not be able to lift the shovel for the next dig. But she does. And she does again.
+
When she’s finished digging, the only thing left to do is to find the first body: Alice.
The ominously lit hallway stretches in front of her, Alice’s blood is drying in the stale air. Abby kneels next to the body, tears springing to her eyes before she can stop them. She bites down on her tongue hard enough to draw blood to keep them behind her eyes where they belong. She curls her fingers into a sparse patch of unbloodied fur, gripping tighter than she would if there was still a heartbeat inside. (She isn’t sure if she means her own or the dog’s.)
Abby presses her lips together as she lifts the carcass, the weight folding comfortably over her shoulder. Abby’s fingers are still tangled in the fur, her mind is tangled in the day’s memories – Yara playing fetch with Alice, throwing her favorite toy back and forth like it was something she wasn’t allowed to do. She swallows thickly, pressing down the memory-vomit.
She walks Alice outside and gently lays her to rest inside one of the open graves.
The wide, gaping maw begs her to crawl inside, too.
+
The next ones, she knows, will be much harder.
The same hallway stretches in front of her again, blood turning a soft pink as it mixes with the rainwater tracked in. The door hangs open from their earlier discovery, blue light spilling out towards her, beckoning her towards the horrors on the other side.
The sharp copper smell stings her nose and knowing what she will see doesn’t make it any easier for her eyes and her mind to adjust to the brutality. The gash across her cheek stings.
She approaches Mel first, crouching down next to her. Abby figures she will need more time, more experience, more of anything else before she goes to Owen. Mel’s eyes are open in a different way from Owen’s, hers are thin with acceptance, like her body merely powered down and is in dormancy, not void of life altogether. It doesn’t seem like she suffered, it doesn’t seem like it took her very long to die at all, and for that, Abby supposes she should be grateful.
Gingerly, Abby rests an open palm over Mel’s swollen belly. She pushes against the firmness slightly, something she’s seen Mel do to “wake up” the baby. It’s only been a few hours, she understands the very bare basics of surgery enough that she could – she could–
The absence of movement under her palm tells her immediately that there is no redemption, no saving. The fire rushes back up through her body, the fire that fueled her upon laying eyes on that fucking map, her own name circled among a minefield of her friend’s names. She feels the consuming wave of grief as it crashes over her. She balls her fist up against the cool concrete floor, a puddle of diluted blood stretching all around her.
She thinks of her knife pressed into the pregnant girl’s throat at the theater. The first girl, the girl from Jackson, broken and bloodied on the ground and sputtering up at her. So different from how Abby remembered her from Wyoming— so different from the feral creature on that mansion’s floor, held down by two of her friends, who promised: I’ll fucking kill you.
As Abby stares down at Mel, her palm still splayed open across her swollen belly, she wishes she would’ve plunged the knife into the pregnant girl's neck. She wishes she could’ve heard the girl from Jackon’s screams again.
(Please, don’t do this.)
The plea crawled out of the first girl’s lips like blood from a split hog. The audacity, Abby thought, that she would request anything of her.
She’s pregnant.
Abby’s gut roils in protest at what she knows comes next. Her teeth clenched, face scrunched up, blood pouring from her wounds and rainwater dripping off her braid. She knew what would have happened if she’d cut, knew how the blood would have released from the artery like it had been trying to escape the whole time. The girl from Jackson would scream, and promise death the same way she did in that basement.
Good.
And then, Lev, pulling her back from the brink. Lev, demonstrating by doing. The same way he showed her across the suspended bridges up in the Seattle skyline. His steady gaze watching her, haloed by the red exit sign. In his eyes she saw the reflection of herself, her knife poised to kill with the efficiency that she had been steeped in for years. She already had two bodies taken down in this building alone, what were two – three – more when the vengeance tasted so sweet on her tongue?
But in his eyes, she saw the ghost of herself, the panicked, confused child who had everything ripped away from them. She saw both of them trying to escape a burning island, his only family left in the world left in the flames and doomed to go down with the charred remains.
Her name left his lips like a warning, like a breath of disbelief, and melted into her taut muscles like a balm. She remembered the freedom of waking without a nightmare for the first time in years, the lightness she felt only earlier that morning. Before Manny, Yara, Mel– and Owen. Before she knew how deeply this ran, how much of herself she had left open for vulnerability after Jackson. Before she understood that it had cost her absolutely everything. Before, before, before.
You want what I want, right?
She lets the memories crash over her like waves in the surf, lets them batter her and leave her bloody. What’s a little more blood, anyways?
Abby moves her arms gingerly around Mel’s shoulders and under her knees, lifting her the same way she lifted Yara only yesterday. Mel’s limp head and dead weight sit heavily within her grasp, and the ghost of Yara’s head rests against the bone of her shoulder. She feels both of them, their disappointed ghosts with their warring opinions of her.
You’re a piece of shit, Abby.
You’re a good person.
Abby holds her breath the whole way back outside, the downpour still ravaging and filling the graves with ankle-deep water. A glance tells her that Alice is already half-submerged. Gently, she lays Mel down next to the open pit.
She grabs the shovel again in her calloused hands and begins to bury Alice, Mel keeping silent vigil next to them.
+
Abby goes back for Owen with more urgency, in a rush to finish this gruesome task and to prevent her haphazard graves from flooding.
She steps into the atrium this time with more ease, not paying mind to the puddles of blood and water against the concrete. She doesn’t see the spot where Mel’s body just laid. She doesn’t see the pipe she dropped when she found them. She doesn’t see her dried vomit. All she sees is Owen and his wide, fearful eyes.
Abby nearly isn’t strong enough. Nearly.
She is very close to collapse by the time she kneels next to him, running the back of her fingers – her bloodied, bruised, and split knuckles– along the patchy stubble along his jaw. Her wounds begin to sting again, the stab wound in her thigh sends a hissing pain up and down her leg as she crouches on the hard concrete. The gash in her cheek weeps blood as her face twists and she strains to hold in a sob. The lump in her throat is choking her, robbing her of breath, suffocating her in its insistence.
Abby braces herself and begins the work of lifting a full-grown dead man. With considerable effort, she pulls him upwards enough to pick up over her shoulder. It’s rougher than he deserves and without ceremony, and the dam inside her almost threatens to break again at the guilt she feels at the brash way she needs to treat him, if only to see this goddamned task through.
She feels the cut on her arms begin to bleed anew as her muscles groan after days of minimal rest and multiple adrenal dumps. She looks forward to resting after this, hopes she won’t wake with nightmares, but she knows better than to be hopeful. Hope isn’t for girls with dead fathers, even if they avenge his death. Hope doesn’t belong to girls with dead friends all because of her, all because of what she did–
Maybe we stopped looking for the light.
Abby is nearly knocked sideways by the memory of Owen’s voice flitting through her mind. She stumbles under his heavy weight into the cold wall, the paint shrill against her skin. She chokes out a sob, chest opening and warmth flooding her eyes. She closes her eyes and breathes steadily through her nose, her panting breaths echoing the same fearful rasps from the Seraphite’s bridges. This time, she doesn’t have Lev talking her through it, she doesn’t have Owen to hold her back. She doesn’t have anyone.
She can’t break, not yet. She is almost done.
+
The hard packed mud rises in two oblong mounds. It felt right to lay Owen and Mel to rest together; them and their baby, a happy little family. Abby read once about mausoleums and tombs for the dead, and wishes she could immortalize them in a way that wasn’t debris and dirt and rainfall. Abby sits on the soft ground, elbows on knees, head hung low between her shoulders. Waiting for the guillotine to fall, again. (It already has.)
The grief spills from her in waves, in sobs and screams that rival the thunder overhead. She waits —only for Lev’s sake — for the clouds to be backlit with purple streaks of lightning and times her screams to the roll of the thunder and the rage of the storm. The violence of the rain mirrors her, understands her, it begs her to jump into the ocean and never surface. It makes its home under her skin and burrows deep. She feels the claws digging in, the fire of hatred burning, burning, burning inside her. It’s familiar and aching and it takes whatever it wants from her, bleeding her dry until she is only a husk in the rain.
Her mind keeps drifting back to the theater – when it isn’t drenched in memories of Owen or her father– the path of destruction is easy to walk in hindsight.
The girl from Jackson had pointed to herself. I’m the reason there’s no cure.
Abby remembers her confusion, the furrow between her brows as her mind tried to rapidly catch up and fit together the sequence of events. She had been hunting Joel’s brother, Tommy – no doubt in her mind that he was the one who caused the destruction at the aquarium and everywhere else. She thought — hoped — he’d drowned, and when the mistakes and vengeance of her past came back for her in the bloodiest way possible, she thought: him. Who else but his brother; both of them together before the outbreak. It’s a rare thing for blood families to last this far into the apocalypse and Abby thought, logically, he had to be the closest family Joel had.
And then she was in the theater, her quarry on the ground underfoot, the barrel of her pistol pointed at him. The girl burst through the door and Abby was relieved to drown herself in the soldier she lost so much to be. She slipped the familiar armor on like her leather jacket, slipping into the ease of command the way she slipped on her boots. She yelled, her voice harsh and grating to her own ears. She kicked Tommy Miller, felt the way his ribs splintered against the toe of her boot.
She worried about Lev’s reaction behind her, wondering if he’d finally be able to see that she had always been the wolf wearing sheepskin. She snarled like a wolf, spittle gathering around her canines that were poised for the kill, salivating at the thought of the sweet release of life beneath her fingertips. She knew what would come next not because she knew at any point what she would do next, but because she had held so many people down the barrel of a gun in her short life it had begun to lose its tinge of guilt. It had begun to feel like routine, like normalcy. She was ready for the fight, ready for only two of them to make it out of that theater, and god dammit if she wasn’t going down and leaving Lev alone without a fight. The scent of the kill was all around her and she would sink her teeth in and shred with everything she had.
(She saw Joel’s smashed-in skull on the floor at her boots, blood smeared in bold streaks across the concrete floor from the rubber of her soles. The memory fueled her bloodlust. The vengeance she felt for the first time since Salt Lake, and she used it like gasoline used a match.
It’s the first time the memory didn’t follow with a churning in her gut, a salivating in her mouth indicative of vomit clawing its way up her throat. It’s the first time the shame didn’t swallow her whole and leave her alone in the sea, waves crashing over her, legs kicking uselessly in the swell.)
She used the memory to push herself, used it to exact her vengeance again. She built her body into a machine for this very reason. She knows what it is to sacrifice everything for the things she wants, she knows what it is to go without in pursuit of blood.
Abby lifts her face to the rain, letting it seep into the weeping slash on her cheek.
She tried. She tried so fucking hard.
She tried to be better.
(And she was punished for it.)
In the end, she was no better. Not the bigger person, not the more righteous or more justified. She was just stronger. The machine won out. The wolf had already ripped the throats out of so many, what was one more? She savored the blood on her lips and didn’t flinch at the metal aftertaste.
(No, she was punished because she punished. Because she threw her life away the moment she stepped through that hospital door in Salt Lake, the moment Owen’s arms held her back from the tragedy she’d already seen. Every death afterward was laid at her doorstep, and she deserved every drop of blood on her hands.)
The red light spilled against Lev’s back as he’d said her name, steady, like a prayer. She thought he looked like all those murals of the Seraphite’s prophet that she used to curse. His eyes pleaded with her, wide open and begging and hopeful in their youthfulness. Abby didn’t know how he still had the capacity to hope after losing Yara, god knows she didn’t possess the same kind of hope after losing her dad.
You’re my people.
It felt clear then, the fire inside her drenched by a cool sweep of morning rainfall, soft and persistent. The kind of carving rain that beats against the stones and leaves impressions. She exhaled and pushed the second girl off of her in a near-dead heap, breathing deep and steady through her nose, the hunting knife still clutched in her hands, absolution blooming in her chest like a gunshot wound.
She looked up to Lev and found his soft but steady eyes. Her people, her people, her people.
Her people. Pulling her back from the edge.
The least she could do was be who he needed her to be.
+
“Who were those other people at the theater?” Lev asks her the next morning, eyeing her from his spot on Owen’s bed, her leather WLF jacket shed on the ground like a snakeskin.
Abby winces against the question as well as the needle and thread she pulls tightly away from her right arm. The stitches are almost done, dried blood and fluid crusting in the corners. She started the slow and painful task of tending to her wounds sometime in the early morning hours, after her burials. She’d checked Owen’s sailboat and found that he had actually gotten it fixed, tanks of fuel scavenged from who knows where littering the makeshift dock. She scoured the rest of the aquarium for supplies, finding haphazardly gathered med kits and a stray pistol from Owen or Mel. Some meager food rations and Lev’s stuffed shark. It would have to be enough.
Abby pushes the needle into her arm again and sucks in a harsh breath. She glances up at Lev once, his dark gaze bouncing between her eyes and her stitching.
She contemplates not telling him, sparing him the ugliness of what she did and who she’s lost. He doesn’t need any more brutality. She knows how easily the lie could slip through her lips.
(She’s also terrified that if his pure soul catches wind of all of her atrocities, he might decide she’s not worth following. Abby decided sometime within the past thirty-six hours that cannot happen.)
She decides he doesn’t deserve her lies, the same way she doesn’t deserve his truth, nor his loyalty. Her memory is clouded with the sight of him hunched over in their small paddleboat, the only home he’s ever known up in flames behind him. The biting chill against her bare arms as she laid her jacket over his shaking shoulders, not even caring as goosebumps raked her skin.
Abby has only ever used her body as a weapon. She’s good at it– was the best at it, until a few days ago. The soldier part is an easy one to play, and it suited her. She would be lying if she said the power wasn’t comfortable, lying if she said it wasn’t the same sort of bulletproof armor she wore on old Seraphite killing sprees. Molded to her chest, securely strapped around her sides and back, the guise of security over her shoulders like a blanket. Power was security was safety was control.
It suited her to have order and structure, routine and steady meals. It felt like she was being nurtured in some fucked up way: she had a a roof over her head, a bed to sleep in, food in her belly, friends surrounding her. She had a reason to slam cafeteria burritos and deadlift and spar with Manny every free hour in the afternoon. She was driven by the fantasies in her mind of killing Joel, using it as a fuel until she burned up everything else.
(Joel, get up.)
She carved herself like one whittles wood into sculptures, shaving pieces off until there was nothing left of whatever was before. No evidence that anyone else ever existed before this version of her: the snarling, bloody, messy, fucking out of control version— torturing an old man for so long his yells started to sound like white noise in her ears and she couldn’t even believe that this bleeding, defecating animal was the same man who mowed down her father and so many others and —
She doesn’t know her life without a goalpost in front of her, some hurdle to pass or revenge to seek. She doesn’t know what to do with herself, with this body and this soul and this heart she’s built for revenge — for vengeance and disgrace and disgust. How do you take a body made from grief and anger, built from the ashes of everyone she’s lost, and mold it into someone who loves again? Someone who protects and defends?
Abby has no idea.
But, for him, she will figure it out.
She opens her mouth to speak, needle and thread abandoned and hanging from her arm like a gruesome marionette. She figures the first step to becoming someone worthy of his trust is honesty.
So, she tells him what she can, what she knows. That she and her (dead) family and (dead) friends were Fireflies, that the girl she left choking on her own blood on the floor of the theater was the reason her entire world collapsed in on itself. That Joel thought her life so much more important than the cure for humanity. And that she lost herself trying to restore her equilibrium, trying to bring her dad back, bring the Fireflies back, whatever. She tells him about Wyoming in broad strokes, tells him that she killed the smuggler and left his brother and the girl alive, and that they both came for her. She doesn’t try to justify it, nor does she try to hide her regret and disgust. Just– tells this child her most shameful secret, shines a flashlight over all of her dark places and wears a big sign that says: I’m obviously unstable, you should stick with me.
He listens to her thoughtfully and is silent for several long moments afterward, seeming to soak in her every word like a sponge. She feels bare. He looks up from the smooth floor and meets her gaze evenly. “I think you two sound very similar.”
Abby recoils, tongue sharp behind her teeth but she reigns herself in and reminds herself an assessment is not fact and she is nothing like that fucking wraith that mowed down half of Seattle in pursuit of revenge. She rearranges her face into a look she hopes passes for impartial. She forces a shrug and resumes the abandoned stitches on her bicep, if only to have something to do with her hands so he won’t see them shake.
“I don’t think so, kid.”
++