Chapter Text
Instinct tells Connor to duck out of sight at the sound of any approaching vehicle. Cars, drones, aircraft. He doesn’t trust them to be real.
Doesn’t trust them to be safe.
He hears his name called through the dark of night. Amanda. Alex. Sometimes even the tiny, plaintive cry of Cole. They are fake. Mimicry trying to draw him out of hiding. Connor stays put, grits his teeth against the sounds and ignores his name.
The first person he sees in days isn’t one. He’d been picking over the burnt out shell of a greenhouse, looking at the rows of destroyed plants and irrigation, touching the black soil and hoping to find some signs of life there.
“Hello, there. Can you help me?”
The voice catches Connor off guard. He freezes, half crouched under a broken trellis and doesn’t let himself hope he’s out of sight. Letting the soil and decaying roots fall between his fingers, he reaches for the inch wide iron pipe beside him. Old irrigation line, rusted one end, but still solid and heavy, about two and a half feet long.
Servicable.
Hopefully enough.
Standing slowly, Connor turns to face the voice. A man stands there, ratty clothes, unwashed scraggly blonde hair shot with grey, dirt under his finger nails and smeared across his face. There’s something shiny in the corner of his lips, grease, or fat. Signs of food. Connor’s stomach twists with hunger. He can almost smell the hint of cooked meat on the man’s breath as he steps closer, one hand outstretched placatingly.
“I’m looking for my family.” The man says, voice raspy with disuse. “My wife. Two children.”
He blinks at Connor, licks the corner of his mouth and instinct tells Connor not to trust him.
He brings the pipe up and around before the man can step closer again. It cracks into the side of his head with a sickening sound, snapping the man’s head to the side with the impact. For a moment Connor sees only red on the pipe as he pulls it away, panic twisting where hunger had been. The unwashed blond hair slips to cover one ear, red smeared across the skin and snow white hair beneath. Then blue trickles from the man's nose.
Blue stains the corner of his mouth.
A mimic.
Fake.
Relief, righteousness and anger give Connor the strength to hit him again, and again. Bringing the pipe down against his skull long after the mimic had collapsed to the ground and stopped twitching. Long after the unwashed blond hair and dirt stained skin is no longer recognisable.
He wipes blue blood off of the pipe onto the mimic’s dirty clothes.
He leaves the burnt down remains of the greenhouse and keeps going. Between the rows of fruit trees in the orchard over the road a plume of smoke rises. Distantly Connor can hear the scrape and flap of a loose sheet of metal; a broken shelter, perhaps. He doesn’t go and look. He knows what he will find.
A man.
His wife.
Two children.
Ignoring the fruit hanging from the trees, Connor keeps walking. There is no telling what other dangers lurk in the shadows.
///
The cries for help come when the sun slips beneath the horizon. Connor ignores them. He can hear the voice of people he used to know. Amanda. Alex. Cole. Hank.
He misses them. All of them. He knows they are dead. He has to believe they are, and that they aren’t out there searching for him when he gave up looking for them.
He knows that Alex is dead. He saw his body. He knows Amanda is dead. He still sees her some days, following him from a distance, the blood staining the front of her dress dark blue instead of red.
He hadn’t been able to kill her. Staring at the face of someone he knew had been too much for him at that moment.
He knows now that Amanda is gone, and the mimic who still haunts him was the one to kill her.
It feels like failure now, that he hadn’t been able to avenge her death.
He hears the man from earlier.
“I’m looking for my family.”
“Two children. My wife.”
“Connor, don’t run. You’ll slip on the ice and fall.”
There is no ice, and Connor is sitting still, the pipe and his backpack clutched against his chest, feet braced against the opposite wall to keep himself upright in the cramped space. A bell tower, a spire, in a weatherboard church. The irony of him seeking sanctuary in a church now, after the world has ended, when he’d been brought up to believe in science does not escape him.
He watches out the narrow window below the bell as the full moon plays shadows across the overgrown garden alongside the church. Grass and brambling roses starting to climb over abandoned vehicles. The shadows inside the vehicles are too deep to know if their occupants are still strapped in with seatbelts.
“Connor? Connor, come back!”
“Two children. My wife. Two children. My family.”
He remembers the grease in the corner of the mimic’s mouth.
The smell of blood, fat and burnt flesh still lingers in his nose. His stomach twists, hunger not knowing the difference between a meal and an atrocity.
It’s not a meal, he tells himself. A family. A man. His wife. Two children.
“Why the fuck are you leaving? What are you trying to prove? Connor, knowing why isn’t going to fix anything. The world’s fucked.”
He bites back the response he never said to Hank when he had the chance. He can’t remember how long ago.
“Connor, don’t run. You’ll slip on the ice and fall.”
He squeezes his eyes shut, but it doesn’t block out the sounds of the people he used to know calling out to him in the night.
“We are scientists, Connor. We cannot sit around and leave the world to fall apart without at least trying to document it. Come along now. Heed me.”
The empty church yard tells him they aren’t actually out there.
“Connor? Connor, come back!”
It is a punishment, he realises, in this world, to have had people he cared about.
///
Most cities are gone.
Detroit is a black smudge of rubble on the banks of the river. Borders offered no protection, and last time there had been any kind of international news, they’d heard that Windsor had mostly been destroyed too.
Connor avoids towns for the most part. Isolated houses on the outskirts are safe, streets with houses on either side are not. He sees people moving about the towns, as if going about their everyday life. No one acts as though the world is the same as it was before the mimics arrived, except for the mimics.
He watches them sometimes, from a distance. It had been Amanda’s idea, to catalogue the behaviour, to try and figure out what their goals were. Their initial notes were lost when Amanda and Alex were attacked. He can’t help but think that the notes might be the reason the mimic wearing Amanda’s face still follows him.
They want to know what else he knows.
He won’t let them.
He keeps moving. Skirting towns, avoiding people, ducking away from approaching vehicles. He hears gunfire sometimes, the skies light up some nights with distant burning. There had been fighter jets in the early days, clashing in the sky above with the intruding forces of the mimics. Downed aircraft—both human made and those belonging to the mimics—dot the landscape.
The fighter jets aren’t as bad as the passenger aeroplanes.
There are too many bodies.
Birds circle over the carnage and warn Connor to stay clear. It happens in the towns too. Scavengers and nature reclaiming what has been abandoned.
Connor avoids it.
He’s seen enough death.
///
He wonders if he should leave the greater Michigan area.
It doesn’t feel like there is anything left for him. Amanda is dead. Alex is dead. Enough time has passed since he last saw Hank and Cole, he can only believe that they are dead.
He doesn’t see anyone truly living anymore.
A pack of feral dogs drive him into the edge of a town, he loses the iron pipe somewhere between his desperate scramble over a listing fence and launching himself onto the slumping, decaying porch of a house. He doesn’t notice it is gone until he is half way up the pitched tiled roof, fingertips near bloody from trying to cling to the surface. Tiles slide beneath his feet, crashing onto the ground below. The dogs bark and growl, scrabbling at the fence until it gives away with a splintering of wood.
He loses track of time, fear hammers his heart in his throat, hunger and terror cause his whole body to ache with nausea. The barking and growling recedes sometime while he clings to the roof gable and tries to find the energy to pull himself up to a stable location.
His arms ache.
His fingers cramp.
He manages to find purchase against the outcrop over a window. Tiles holding well enough to keep him upright, but he can’t fight the constant fear that he’ll slip and fall. At this height, there is little chance that he would land without hurting himself.
A broken ankle. A sprained wrist. A dislocated knee.
Or worse.
Any kind of injury would be a death sentence. Even a cut or a graze could turn septic fast. He ran out of antiseptic wipes a long time ago. Fresh water is even hard to come by. His growing thirst reminds him of that with every passing moment on the sun baked tiles of the roof.
He knows he should get down. Climb back down the way he came as carefully as he can, and disappear back into the outskirts of town while the dogs are distracted.
Except he can’t.
Below him, on top of the fence that the pack of dogs had trampled, Amanda stands staring up at him, her face blank, nearly serene, as though she is calmly waiting for him to come down to discuss the weather.
The blue stains on the front of her dress remind him that it isn’t the Amanda he used to know. It isn’t the strict, detached, but kind woman who had raised him and his brother. It isn’t the intelligent scientist who had pushed him to pursue his own career in kind.
It isn’t his mother and mentor who he had followed into the ruins of the world he once knew to study the invading mimics to try and see what their purpose was, why they had come to Earth and what they wanted from humanity.
“We are scientists, Connor. We cannot sit around and leave the world to fall apart without at least trying to document it.”
It isn’t Amanda.
Amanda is dead.
And yet she stands and stares at him. Waiting.
“Come along now. Heed me.”
The sun beats down on him, the tiles bake beneath him, the heat coming at him from all sides. His neck burns. His mouth so dry his tongue feels swollen.
Somewhere in the distance of the town he hears the wild, anguished scream of an animal in pain.
It could be one of the dogs. It could be any number of other animals that still roam the land. It could even be human.
For a moment Amanda looks away from him, breaking the trance, and Connor knows that he can’t stay there. The longer he stays, the weaker he will get from dehydration and starvation.
He has to go before more mimics find him and he is hemmed in.
Tiles slip, his fingertips start bleeding before he manages to climb over the apex of the roof and start down the other side. The steep pitch of the roof plateaus onto the built in garage; it is a much safer drop. Connor wobbles around the edge, scouting the ground below for any signs that Amanda’s mimic had followed him around the house, but the area is clear. He knows it won’t last long. She’ll follow him soon enough.
She always does.
“Heed me.”
The impact onto the ground jars his knees and hips, but Connor doesn’t pause to recalibrate himself, slipping fast over the fence into the next yard. It’s empty, overgrown garden plants tangled together with lawn long gone to seed. It’s dry and brittle as Connor wades through it, skirting the edge of the green swimming pool stepping through a broken panel of the next fence.
Moving further into the town is dangerous, it goes against every rule that Amanda had given him. It is foolish to enter a town without a plan. To go beyond the first row of houses. He’s hungry though, thirsty, his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth, the insides of his cheeks feel flaky like brittle paper. To turn and go back into the wilderness outside of town now would be just as dangerous.
He treks through five backyards, crosses a road and continues through another two yards, hopping diagonally over a fence onto the other half of the block. The houses are all quiet, dark, starting to fall down from the lack of use and no maintenance. Some are stripped; the contents of the houses strewn across the back yards, rummaged through and torn apart by the elements, animals, humans and mimics alike. The smell of decomposition is overpowering in some yards.
He ignores the gutted houses, knowing there is little left inside of use. The further into the town he ventures, the more intact the houses look.
Almost lived in.
As though the occupants had simply left only days before, not even drawing the curtains as they exited the front door.
He sees more signs of life in this part of town. Swept porches, mown lawns, outdoor furniture with clean cushions.
Connor avoids those houses, veering away from them, keeping low and quiet until he finds houses somewhere between the two. Closed up, not ransacked, but not lived in. Slumbing gutters and grimy windows, boarded up doors.
The air inside the house smells musty, closed up and slightly damp. He can’t see blood or smell decomposition, which is a welcome relief from houses he had passed earlier.
The taps don’t work, the water shut off a long time ago, but he finds water in the cistern above the toilet. Stagnant, stale, calcium scale floating on the top of the water, evaporated well below the float mechanism. Green algae grows
Connor doesn’t care. There’s a glass in the bathroom cabinet—he wipes the dust out with the sleeve of his shirt and dips it into the water. It tastes brackish, musty like the air in the house. It makes him gag, but he manages to swallow it. Too much, too fast, his sternum aches with the pressure of it, as though swallowing liquid made it set into a hard shape part of the way down his esophagus.
Coughing, Connor turns, retching into the bathroom sink, splattering watery bile across the porcelain until his stomach and throat ache. Until there is nothing left in him.
He drinks more, forcing himself to swallow it to replace what he just lost.
The dangers of dehydration are too great.
The dangers of dysentery are also great, a voice in the back of his head warns him. It sounds a lot like Amanda. The real one, not the one who calls out to him in the night.
The creak of timber warns Connor that he’s not alone.
It’s a small sound. A quiet step and the groan of old wood out on the porch. He closed the window he came through behind him, most of the way, leaving a crack large enough to fit his fingers under so he could open it again quickly on the way out. He hadn’t touched the door. It is still boarded up.
He stands in the bathroom, the glass still in his hand, his stomach roiling and protesting, but he can’t let himself throw up again now. Not when someone will hear him.
There’s another creak below, another dull footstep. Two sets, he thinks he hears, one heavier and one lighter. Relief and fear twist together that it isn’t Amanda still following him.
Fear because he doesn’t like the unknown.
He remembers the mimic in the greenhouse, the lopsided scalp staining his hair red underneath.
“My wife. Two children.”
He remembers the mimics before him too. The mutilated corpses of people ripped apart by them. The damage and destruction that he, Alex and Amanda had seen, documented, the notes he’d written on mimic behaviour, on human behaviour as resources became more scarce.
Since losing Alex and Amanda, he has tried to avoid everyone. He’d followed Amanda’s rules, avoided towns. Avoided getting himself trapped, and now he has failed to heed both warnings.
Every creak of the porch below him tells him that he has failed.
The pipe is gone. Dropped by his own carelessness.
Standing still, he takes stock of the bathroom. A small window, overlooking the eaves of the floor below. Shower curtain, grimy from disuse, the curtain rail holding it. It wouldn’t be strong enough for more than a few hits, and he can’t see any silent way of getting it down without causing too much noise. He turns, further, scanning the rest of the room. A pair of scissors, the blades tarnished and dull, sits on a shelf inside the cabinet. Razors, aftershave, deodorant, shampoo; nothing else of use in the cabinet or on top of the bathroom sink.
The toilet cistern lid catches his eye; heavy and porcelain. It had been a job to get it off.
The door handle below rattles. Voices muffled by layers of timber, hard to distinguish. One deep, masculine. It itches familiarity in the back of Connor’s mind, but he is sure that it is just his imagination playing tricks on him.
He waits for the next sound, footsteps moving along the porch, away from the front door. As soon as he hears the wood creak, he moves, grabbing the scissors from the cabinet, pushing them up the sleeve of his jacket before gripping the cistern lid and hefting it off of the floor. He freezes again, waiting, holding his breath, trying to hear beyond the thump of his pulse.
He hears the window slide open below him.
The bathroom had been the first place he’d come to in search of water. It’s the first place anyone will likely look for first aid supplies and the like.
He waits for the next creak, the thump of boots inside the house and steps quietly across the room, stepping onto the edge of the bathtub to reduce the chance of making the floor creak. He pauses there, balanced, the cistern lid clutched to his chest with one arm, the other braced against the window frame.
Another noise and he leans against the window frame, one foot braced on the windowsill and lever the window open. He can hear voices more clearly now, a hushed, but unhurried conversation between two people. Deep, masculine and higher, younger. A child?
Connor doesn’t know how long it has been since he’s seen a child. A month? Six?
He misses Cole.
He misses Hank.
“Connor? Connor, come back!”
He doesn’t want to think about them, because he knows they aren't alive anymore. The chance of that is too low. He can’t hope.
Below, the voices and footsteps move towards the kitchen, cupboards open and close, he can hear them rummaging around in the contents. Searching for food. Searching for his food.
The surge of anger that washes through him makes his movements too jerky when he opens the window. The wooden frame screeches as it slides up. Connor freezes, the window only halfway open, holding his breath, willing his heart to stop beating long enough to determine if the intruder downstairs had heard him. Their voices continue quietly beneath him.
Shifting his weight he steps onto the windowframe, the tendons in his groin pulling, an ache like tight wires dragging across his bones at the movement. The irony of not keeping up with his yoga regimen in the apocalypse is not lost on him.
Fitting out through the small bathroom window tests his flexibility and strategic planning. Quietly maneuvering both the porcelain cistern lid and his pack silently out onto the porch roof, trying not to lose them to gravity on the downward pitch. Contorting his body he follows his possessions, closing the window behind him, he hefts both back up as silently as he can.
Outside, he can no longer hear the voice downstairs.
The blue blood from the mimic in the greenhouse still stains the sleeves of his jacket. He doesn’t want to have to confront another mimic, let alone two.
He’s not sure he could defend himself against one that looked like a child.
Creeping along the roofline, Connor scouts for a route out of there. He knows that Amanda will be somewhere back the way he came. People in the house below him. Unknown filling the rest of the town.
Bracing himself against the next window frame, Connor watches and listens. He waits. The stairs inside the house creak. Boots tread upstairs. He can’t hear them talking anymore. A door opens and Connor moves again, ducking past the window he is next to. Over the tiled surface of the roofline to the trellis he had spotted before.
It creaks and groans as he climbs down it, the dry sticks of a long dead plant snap and crackle beneath his feet and hands. Dropping to the ground, Connor scans the backyard, swings, dog kennel, an empty swimming pool, trampled and wilted garden beds. A gate sits in the side fence, hinges rusty and corroded, but Connor is sure he has enough of a head start now on the people inside the house that he can get through the gate and away before they can get downstairs and out of the house after him.
Half way across the yard the latch on the gate lifts, the hinges squeak, timbers creak. Connor freezes. There’s nowhere to go. He’s out in the open. The only cover is back into the house behind him. He can see the open window from the corner of his eye.
The gate pushes open. Connor adjusts his pack onto both shoulders and hefts the cistern lid, holding it up in preparation to swing. One hit and he can run out the gate past them. It is all he needs. Enough to stun whoever is on the other side of the gate.
The figure that steps through the gate puts Connor on edge. Tall, skinny, almost gaunt. Dark shadows hang beneath their eyes. Dark eyes. Dark hair. It makes Connor think of Alex. He knows it isn’t Alex, but it makes him pause, the cistern lid slipping in his lax grip, the weight of it pulling his arms down.
The head tilts towards him, blue stains the creases of the man’s forehead. He smiles, black teeth and cracked lips. “My house. Welcome. To. My home.”
Alex steps closer, a swinging, listing movement, foot dragging over dry grass. A broken ankle.
Another limping step. Bones grate together. There’s blue stains on the shoe.
It’s not Alex.
It’s not.
Connor knows it, but he can’t make himself move. He’s tired. Loneliness brings paralysis. It would be so easy to just let it happen. Whatever it is.
“Welcome. To. My house.” Alex reaches towards Connor. Past him. Pointing towards the house. Gesturing Connor back inside. Inviting him in. It is not their house. It is not the house they grew up in with Amanda. It is not even the house they were born into.
It is the house he’d picked to search for supplies. It feels fitting that it will be the house that he will die in.
It feels fitting that it is Alex who kills him. After Connor had not been able to save him.
Amanda should be here too. It doesn’t feel right that he never waited for her to catch up with him.
“Welcome.”
The hand settles on his shoulder. Fingers caress the side of his neck, skin cold and clammy.
Connor closes his eyes. There’s tears on his cheeks. They cling to his eyelashes and ache in the back of his throat.
“My home.”
Hot breath against his face. He can hear the rattle and rasp. The scent of blood and decomposition. The fingers curl against the back of his neck, pressing lines of fire into his sunburnt skin.
“Don’t cry, Connor. Boys don’t cry, remember.” Alex tells him, wiping the tears off Connor’s cheeks. “You want to be a boy, right?”
“I don’t want to be alone.” Connor whispers. Voice cracking with disuse.
Fingernails dig into his skin. Pulling him closer. Breath hot and loud against his ear, stubbled cheek rubbing against his skin. Another hand grips his arm, holds his hand, trying to pry his fingers free of the cistern lid.
Lips and teeth scrape Connor’s cheek, dry tongue licks at the tears. Alex hums, discordant, rasping, “You. Will be. My. New home.”
“Dad!”
The shout comes from somewhere behind Connor, the high pitched panic of a child.
He hears Cole crying in his mind, the incomprehensible wails of a toddler, scared, tired, sad.
Connor jerks back, wrenching his hand free of Alex’s, maintaining his grip on the cistern lid as he pushes his brother away from him.
The mimic snarls, inhuman, angry. Stumbling back on its broken ankle, toppling to the ground.
It isn’t Alex.
There’s shouting behind him. The mimic howls in front of him, trying to drag itself back upright, clawing at dirt and dry grass, trying to get to Connor. “Home! Home! You. Are.”
The words break off into a discordant howl as the heavy porcelain cistern lid connects with the arm stretched out towards him. There’s a crack. Of porcelain. Of bone. Connor doesn’t know. The impact jars his arms, hands numb. He holds onto the cistern lid, raises it up and brings it down again. Again. Again. Until the arm is no longer reaching towards him. No longer shielding the mimic's face.
He feels each blow reverberate up his arms. The porcelain slick beneath his fingers, blue coating the surface, staining his hands, covering the dark eyed face and soaking into the dark hair. It’s not Alex, but Connor’s chest feels like it is ripping open with each strike. Bones crunch, the howling peters out to a whimper.
A gurgle.
His own breathing tears through his lungs, clawing at his throat, his whole body numb and aching.
The porcelain breaks. Snaps. Crumbles in his hands and falls to the dirt and dry grass.
“Connor!”
It’s not not–Alex calling him.
“Connor. Stop! It’s over. It’s dead.”
He presses his hands over his ears, tacky with blue blood, smearing against the side of his head, fingers tangling into his hair. Pulse echoing in his ears, trapped against the palms of his hands. It nearly drowns out the sounds. The voices of the dead calling to him. His own sobbing, gasping breaths. He’s not crying.
“Connor!”
Something grabs him, vice grip on his shoulder. Jerking away, Connor throws his elbow back. He connects with something, a grunt and the grip on his shoulder slips. Throwing himself forward, Connor searches frantically for a weapon, grabbing up the scissors that had slipped from his sleeve earlier, as he somersaults. His pack connects with the back of his head, scraping across sunburn and jarring his neck and leaving his head spinning when he scrambles back to his feet.
He sees red.
He sees Hank.
Except he can’t see Hank. Hank is dead, like everyone else is dead.
If Hank is dead, it means—
But he sees red.
There is red blood clinging to Hank’s moustache, slicking over his lips and dripping into his beard. It’s on his hand, held against his nose to try and stem the bleeding.
“Hank?” The name croaks out of Connor, a name he hasn’t dared speak aloud in days? Weeks? Years?
Blood stained teeth flash at him in a grimacing smile. “Hey, kid.”
The shard of porcelain drops from Connor’s fingers. He feels numb. Shaken. Shaking. There’s a stagger in his steps as he approaches, a tremble in his hand as he raises his hand to press it against Hank’s cheek. Warm. There’s a scratch of his beard against his palm and fingers. Blood on his thumb smears red over the blue stains already there.
“You’re real?” It doesn’t make sense. He left Hank miles away, with other people, as safe as anyone could be. “But you’re dead?”
Hank’s head shakes against his hand, his own hand closing over Connor’s. Warm. Solid. Holding him in place. His other hand grips Connor’s arm, as though he is scared that he’ll slip away. “Fuck. I’m not. I promise you, kid, I’m very fucking much alive. I’m here.”
Connor grips his shoulder, solid and strong. There. Pulling himself closer he watches Hank’s face, looks for signs, a stain of blue, a loose scalp, skin that doesn’t quite fit. Red blood instead of blue, drips from his nose, already starting to swell and bruise from the impact of Connor’s elbow. He’s real, Connor tells himself. He wants to believe it.
“Fucking hell, Con, I thought I’d never see—”
Surging up onto his toes, Connor licks at the blood in Hank’s beard, metal and salt burst across his tongue, reassuringly human, perfectly Hank. His tongue catches the edge of Hank’s bottom lip, soft and damp, not chapped like his own. He presses them together. Chapped lips against bloody. The contact stings. He forgets, in the moment, that they never did this before. Except Hank isn’t pulling away. His arm wraps tight around Connor’s waist, pulling him up, closer, hand gripping the side of his face as he kisses him back.
Hard.
Teeth, lips and tongues press together, blood and saliva and stale breath.
There’s a sound, and Connor jerks away, gripping Hank’s jacket and trying to push him around behind him, but Hank doesn’t budge, solid as a wall, his arms still wrapped around Connor. Too scared to let go of him for even a moment.
“Dad?”
It’s the voice from before, the child in the house. Connor blinks at him. Ten, maybe, tall, awkward, not yet looking in proportion. Sandy blond hair, darker at the roots, matted waves over freckles and blue eyes.
Blue, exactly like Hank’s.
“It’s okay, Cole.” Hank shifts, still holding Connor with one arm, but reaching out to his son with the other. The boy jumps down from the porch, taking his father’s hand but lingering away from them, eyes narrowed at Connor. “You remember Connor, don’t you?”
Slowly, Cole nods, brow scrunched with confusion. “He left before I was three.”
“How?” Stumbling over the word, over the reality facing him, evidence stacked and waiting for analysis, Connor falters. “How long have I been gone?”
Pity paints Hank’s face. Pity and sadness so deep that Connor has to look away from it. “Seven years, kid. I thought we’d never see you again.”
“Seven?” It doesn’t feel like seven years. Connor doesn’t know how long it feels like. A year, two maybe, he thought is all it might have been. How long have Amanda and Alex been dead? He doesn’t know. It makes him dizzy. It makes him stagger back, Hank’s hands trying to grasp at him, to hold him up as he hinges at the waist and throws up the meager amount of water he drank before.
Hands rub at his back, strokes his hair back from his forehead as he helps him stand up straight again. Arms wrap back around him, holding him close. The burning in Connor’s throat turns to a tightness, emotions closing over his ability to breathe.
It can’t have been seven years.
There’s tears on his face again. They soak into Hank’s shirt.
“It’s okay, kid, it’s okay. I got you now.” The rumble of reassurance echoes through Hank’s chest over and over, steady and repetitive like his heart beat.
He doesn’t know how long they stand like that. Connor doesn’t trust his own concept of time anymore. He lost days. Months and years went missing. It ends when he feels Hank start to guide him forward, coaxing him to walk. Cole tucks in against his dad’s other side.
There’s a vehicle out on the street. Connor stumbles at the sight of it. It’s been so long since he has seen a working vehicle that hasn’t been occupied by the mimics. Cole breaks away as they get close, scouting around the vehicle, dropping to his hands and knees to peer under the car with a practiced routine. A system, routine, something to keep them safe.
Amanda had insisted on one, but in the end it hadn’t saved her and Alex.
Hank guides him into the backseat of the vehicle, helping Connor shrug out of his pack, dumping it in the footwell. Poking and prodding until he’s inside the vehicle. The door shuts, silence descending over the cab of the vehicle. It’s nearly deafening. The seat under him is leather, coated in a fine layer of dust from disuse. It wipes off on his hands, slings to his skin and clothing, just adding to the general grime covering him.
Then the silence is broken as the front doors open and Hank and Cole get in, nearly synchronised in their movements. Son a copy of his father.
It hurts. He has missed seven years of Hank and Cole’s lives. He’s missed everything.
He presses his fingers to his lips. He can still taste blood. He missed seven years of whatever that kiss might have been.
He doesn’t know what it means. If Hank had just been indulging him. Letting him take until he was no longer panicked. A distraction?
Is this all a trick? Another ploy to lure him in.
He is already lured though. Already caught on the hook, sat in the back seat of Hank’s vehicle. His rule had always been to avoid vehicles. The noise. The movement. The speed. Patrols. Surveillance drones. They can’t be trusted.
The vehicle jolts as the boot lid is slammed shut.
The front doors open. Hank and Cole clamber in. They both twist in their seats to look back at Connor.
There’s still red blood on Hank’s face, clinging to his beard and moustache. It’s more ragged than Connor remembers. Scruffier. Greyer.
Red.
Red is good. Connor reminds himself. Red is safe.
“It’s okay, kid.” Hank reaches back, squeezes Connor’s shoulder
It’s not a trap.
Hank turns back, grips the steering wheel. The ignition turns over, engine rumbling to life. Connor isn’t sure how he didn’t notice it before. How long had Hank and Cole been in the town before they found him?
How close was he to missing them entirely?
The sound of an engine has sparked fear in him for so long, he can feel it grabbing in his chest as the vehicle starts to move. His knuckles go white around the armrest on the door. The latch is only inches away. He thinks about throwing himself out of the vehicle and running.
He doesn’t want to.
He does.
He pulls his hands free to try and avoid the temptation. His fingers curl, fingernails digging into the palms of his hands. The pain grounds him. He focuses on the other bright points of discomfort. Sunburn, the wear and tear of muscles, ligaments and tendons. Every ache feels more present now that he has stopped moving.
The world moves around him despite him being stationary. The motion of the vehicle, bumping slowly over long disused streets, weaving around detritus and broken down vehicles, makes Connor feel queasy.
He stares at his hands to stop seeing the world moving past without him. Blue blood clings to his skin, staining around and under his nails, darkened by dirt and grime. He rubs at the stains, but they persist. He doesn’t know whose blood it is anymore. The man from the greenhouse with his lopsided scalp and family burning in the field. The man who wasn’t Alex in the gateway welcoming Connor home. The countless before them, faces blurred together. He can hear their voices, still calling to him in his memories. Was it Amanda’s? Hank’s?
The rearview mirror gives him glimpses of Hank’s face. The blood is still red. He’s real.
Relief fills Connor, as temporary as it may be.
“Where are we going?” Connor hears himself ask, shifting his gaze back to the window. They have cleared the town now, overgrown fields, burnt down barns, a small herd of wild eyed cattle that run off at the sound of the approaching engine, kicking and bucking as they charge through broken fences.
“Home,” Hank replies, as though it explains everything.
“You. Will be. My. New home.”
Gritting his teeth against the echo of words, the memories of breath, teeth and tongue that had scraped against his face.
He likes the sound of going home with Hank.
He remembers the small two bedroom rental that Hank had been living in during his separation. He remembers nights spent sitting too close on the couch while Hank watched television and Connor tried not to fall apart from the proximity. He remembers staying over some nights, drinking just enough to have the excuse not to leave. The sleep rumpled mornings stealing glances of Hank through the steam coming off his coffee. He remembers wanting. Wanting more. Wanting Hank. Wanting every day to be like that. Wanting it to stay the same forever.
The moments would break. He’d return home to Amanda’s house and the reality of his world that Hank was not his. That he was not Hank’s.
Then the invasion happened and he realised that no matter how many years, how much he’d tried to be his own person, his loyalties still lay with Amanda and his brother, before all else.
But now Amanda and Alex are gone, and somehow Hank is here and Connor doesn’t know what to make of the world anymore.