death coming up the hill.

[littlemissfutility]

Her first, shallow breath in is filled with dirt--that's what wakes her, coughing out and out to try to expel the irritation in her lungs. The realization of the darkness comes next, as she blinks and shifts, her eyes gritty. Everything's pressing in on her, trying to fill in the spaces in her nose and mouth and she can't breathe, everything tastes like mud, and--

Oh, God--oh, God, oh, God, oh, God, ohgodohgodohgodohgod--

She kicks and punches, scrabbles what she hopes without words is up, her lungs burning, halfway certain that she's going to die like this, trapped under too much dirt packed over her. The earth is heavy, she doesn't know where she's going, and her head is pounding with the effort of moving without air to fuel her.

A hand is the first thing to make it to the surface. It takes her a moment to recognize the sensation, warm sunshine without more soil blocking it, but when she does, she reacts like a cornered dog. Scratching up, reaching, doing everything she can to get to that place where the ground stops.

Beth spits filth when her head breaks the surface. Air fills her lungs, then disappears again in more racking coughs. She's a mess of dirt and tears and (after that long stretch of hacking) puke, unable to do anything except try to get everything that doesn't belong in her out.

Comments

[disheveling]

There was a time where "you seem okay so far" would have pricked him like an insult. It would have made him crank the dial on the charm, show her his dimples, and prove to her how much better than okay he is. At one time, he could have flirted her right out of her clothes and into bed. Now, okay is probably one of the nicer things he's been called. One cheek dimples in response, a half smile that, for once, has no ulterior motive.

"Don't say I didn't warn you." Reaching behind his back, his fingers find the hilt of the hunting knife tucked into the back of his pants, which he pulls free.

One time, Monty did this and the person he was offering the weapon to thought he was attacking. He ended up with his back against a wall and another sharper knife held to his throat. He's learned better since, and he moves slower in order not to alarm her.

"You'll probably be handier with this than I am," he says.

[littlemissfutility]

She takes the smile as an agreement, confirmed by the way he warns her a second time. It's a good start--or would be, if he didn't start pulling a knife on her.

For a moment, her breath stops. She's reaching for her own knife, finding nothing at her hip--they took it, duh--and dimly, she realizes that he's offering the handle of the weapon to her. Forcing herself to relax, Beth reaches for it, taking it from Monty.

"I'm okay." With knives, she means, but maybe the reassurance is a good idea in general. Without someplace safe to keep the blade (God, she misses her sheath), she tucks it carefully in the back of her jeans, the same way he had it. So. Weapon, gotten. They need food, water, and shelter for the night. And then they need a plan. Beth glances around the trees, but they don't offer any answers. It was kind of Rick to bury her out of the shadow of that damned hospital, but the upshot is that she has no idea where she is. So she looks up toward the sun, shading her eyes. "Do you know what time it is? We gotta figure out what direction to go."

[disheveling]

And just like that, he has a companion again. Before Beth, it was a brother and sister pair -- Helena and Dante. Dante fell early to a hoard, which was unsurprising as it was tragic. The only time he caught Helena crying over it was late one night when they both thought the other was asleep on opposite sides of the campfire.

It was another few months before Helena died too. People around Monty drop like flies, and somehow, he always manages to make it out of trouble by a hair. Maybe Beth will be stronger. Maybe she won't be one that dies too.

Without a working watch, it's hard to judge the time, but Monty squints up at the sky too and considers how long he's been traveling today.

"About midday," he guesses. "I passed a stream about a mile back that way."

He's gesturing in the direction he came from, glancing at her apologetically. "No offense, love, but you certainly look like you've clawed your way out of the ground. Might be nice to clean up a little."

[littlemissfutility]

Midday seems right. The sun's so high that she can't figure out east and west--so they can't start traveling. And even if they could...where would they go? Rick and the others could be anywhere out there; it's not like they had reason to leave a note. In case this is a ruse, we're going to see what Florida has to offer.

So bathing's as good an idea as any. At least she can be clean, maybe wash the taste of mud and acid out of her mouth. She nods, more decisive than she feels, and makes a sound of agreement. "This dirt itches."

(Even at her filthiest, it didn't make her want to scratch at her arms. She's not sure if it's because it's dry(ish) dirt, or because the knowledge that it's her grave clinging to her that makes it so much worse.)

Beth starts off the way Monty points, trusting that he'll follow her. He's given her his knife, which seems like greater proof than anything that he's in this for the long haul. "Do you have much food?" she asks, because that's going to be the next most important thing, after water.

[disheveling]

Monty does follow, so comfortable and trusting it's a miracle he hasn't gotten himself chopped up in a million pieces by now. He's very good at talking himself out of situations, and he's gotten very lucky in meeting mostly kind people. One of these days, his luck is going to run out, and everything is going to catch up to him at once, and he's probably going to deserve it.

Until then, he'll just follow the next friendly person and hope she has a lot of luck, too.

"Not a stitch," he says, sounding falsely chipper. "There were blackberry bushes along the stream, though. I probably didn't eat all of them?"

The truth is, Monty is immensely grateful that the modern world doesn't have a lot to offer in the way of mirrors, because he's never been more dismayed with his own appearance in his life. His hair is flat and dull, and while he's always been slender, lack of food leaves him uncomfortably skinny. Everything he wears seems to hang off him awkwardly, and he's had to take up a belt to keep his jeans on his hips. Suffice to say it's not a good look on him.

He speeds up a bit to fall into step beside her, keeping a safe distance in case his next question makes her want to hit him. "I'm sorry, but I can't not ask — how did you get buried alive?"

[littlemissfutility]

Blackberry bushes? That's not enough to feed either of them, especially if they're going to be hiking. Beth bites down on the worry trying spring up from her gut--she never got a chance to learn enough about tracking to really hunt, and she doubts Monty has any skill there. Pointing it out, though, might just make Monty worry. (How has he gotten this far without any food? She almost can't believe it.)

Maybe after I get cleaned up, we can go downstream and try and catch fish. If it's a fishing kind of stream. Or there might be crawfish in there under the rocks, if they can manage to catch any without getting pinched.

Her thoughts get derailed as he speaks again; for a moment, all she can do is stare at him in shock, her whole body tensing up. He didn't really just ask that, did he? It's not like he's stupid, from what she can tell--he has to already know the answer. There's something about his words that makes them sound insincere, enough so that she wonders if he's asking to hurt her, some kind of revenge for making him answer the three questions. This might be how he felt when he gave her that look.

He answered her, though. So Beth forces the words through her lips, trying not to give in to the pressure heating up in her cheeks and the corners of her eyes. They already went through the crying thing once; if she falls into it again, it'll be without him looking at her like he's waiting for a good story. "They thought I was dead."

[disheveling]

It's unsurprising that it's a sore topic, given that he just watched her crawl out of her grave. There's a reason he's still out of arm's reach. (He's not stupid — he knows better than to give a girl a knife and then ask her an insensitive question while standing right next to her. He spent a lot of time saying shitty stuff to his sister then failing to outrun her.) Maybe it's a tiny bit satisfying after she uprooted him with her previous questions, but he finds he feels more guilty than anything else.

How annoying it is, that the zombie apocalypse brought along with it an ever-growing conscience. He can only ignore morality so long when so much of his days are filled with tough decisions and death.

It's not that he doesn't believe her — he has no reason not to believe her, really. It's just that it doesn't make sense. He wishes Felicity were here, because she was always able to make more sense of this stuff than he can. He swears, had they made it somewhere with the right facilities, she could have solved this whole crisis single-handedly.

"The dead reanimate unless you kill the brain," Monty says, quoting word for word what Felicity had said in the past. "We're not really in a place where people can think we're dead, are we?"

He hopes he doesn't sound insincere or condescending, because it's honestly not his goal. He wants to understand, because it's not every day you pull a girl out of her grave.

[littlemissfutility]

He has a good point, and Beth doesn't know how to answer it in words. The thought of saying all of it, what little she's figured out in the last half-hour, is worse than just about anything else she could talk about right then. There's a long silence while she stomps toward the stream--she can hear it, just beyond sight, where she's hoping she can hold her breath underwater until the idea of Monty's question doesn't make her want to give up on everything.

But he's going to want an answer, and hell, she kind of does, too. And it's not like she gets what's going on here; maybe he can figure it out for them. Beth doubts it'd be any comfort to know why she's not dead, but it's not like there's any comfort in not knowing.

So eventually, the stream close enough that she could refuse and run for it, dive in fully clothed and refuse to answer, she stops. (She'd ruin her boots if she did that.) Turning toward Monty, she reaches for him. "Give me your hand."

[disheveling]

The silence is long enough that Monty doesn't think he's going to receive an answer. Which is annoying, seeing as he answered her insensitive questions, but it's not like they owe each other anything. They're traveling together, and Monty's definitely going to be leaning on her to survive. But she doesn't owe him answers or an explanation, and he doesn't owe her any, either.

They've reached the stream now, and even though Monty took advantage of it when he came across it the first time, he's itching to strip off his clothes and dive back in. He hasn't felt truly clean in several, several months, but any shower or dip in the water is better than nothing.

He's about to pass her, content to jump in immediately, but stops short when she reaches for him. His brows arch mildly, but he's surprisingly obedient when he offers her his hand. Hopefully she's not about to break his fingers in some violent retaliation.

[littlemissfutility]

God, that'd be disgusting. Beth isn't about to do anything that randomly cruel--she despises that kind of thinking too much for it even to occur to her. Mostly, she's just glad he's not arguing or demanding to know why, because that just brings her back to explanations she's sure she can't get through without crying.

Once she has his hand, she pulls it over to her, and if that means he's going to have to take a step forward, risk coming a little closer, that's that. With a precision she doesn't want to own, she draws his fingertips up underneath her jaw until she's sure they must be brushing against the scar. A puckered circle, decidedly similar in size to a bullet, the exact location she was touching when the second round of barfing started. He can figure it out, right? He has to have fired a gun before.

Maybe. Just to get the point across, she mutters back an echo of what he'd said a few moments ago. "They thought it was killed."

[disheveling]

She takes his hand, which isn't surprising, but he isn't prepared for the way she tugs him closer. His step is messy, clumsy against the uneven ground, but he's too distracted by the way she pulls his hand beneath her chin to notice. Her skin is streaked with dry mud and dirt, and when he stands closer to her, he can smell that she's been packed beneath the earth. But all of that is secondary to the scar beneath her chin. A bullet wound. He's never seen a healed one before, but he doesn't need to. He knows what it is when his fingers graze it.

Monty can't help the way he recoils. His hand slips from her's as it draws back to his chest, body moving half a step with it. Somebody shot her. Somebody shot her through the head and buried her, and then he watched her claw her way out of the ground.

"Why aren't you--" He struggles with the rest of the sentence, unable to put the right words together when his mind is racing. Maybe this means Percy is alive. Maybe this means he didn't kill his own sister. Maybe he's not really all alone in this desolate, piece-of-shit world after all. "How are you alive?"

[littlemissfutility]

"I don't know." It's burning her up inside--she's supposed to be dead, and yet she's still here, lost and alone with a boy who looks at her with eyes that see someone else in her stead. That's what happening, isn't it? He's seeing everyone he's lost, my sister and my best friend, and asking why she's the one standing there in front of him.

She'd be doing the same, in his place. Would be, if she could afford to let herself. Why is she the one who kept living? When her mother could be alive, or her father, or Shawn. Lori could be alive to be Judith's mother. Judith could be alive, a happy, smiley baby instead of a casualty she's sure the prison took. A scientist who could actually solve the sickness and save the world.

And instead, it's her. It's been a long time since she last felt so insignificant.

"If I knew, I'd tell you," she adds, after a stricken, painful silence. It isn't enough, but at least it's basically true, and it's all she has to offer him. They'd better keep going, find those blackberry bushes of his and hope they won't starve to death out here.

[disheveling]

Could Percy be looking for him right now? Could Felicity? They're both buried in Virginia, though opposite sides of the state. Felicity had told him to burn her body, but he couldn't bring himself to literally set his sister on fire, no matter how many times he threatened to do so in their years together. He'd give anything to hear her call him a baby or a coward for not doing it.

Maybe he can. He's got to get back to Virginia somehow. He'll tear the whole damn state apart to find them. If they're alive. If this isn't a fluke. If Beth isn't some modern miracle whose blood they'd have to harvest for some kind of cure.

Fuck. He spent too much time hanging around Dante and Helena.

She doesn't know any more than he does. But he'd like to keep her around, just in case, so they can stumble around this situation together. At the very least, he'll stand a better chance at getting back to Virgina with someone at his side. For now, he'll keep his endless questions to himself, if only because they're insensitive and likely to just upset her instead of retrieve answers. Thankfully, he's rather good at the slow-burn, charm-them-til-they're-talking sort of thing.

"Okay," he says, taking another step back, his shoulders easing down from their tense state. "Since we're certainly not going to solve anything by standing here, let's just keep going and focus on not dying tonight.

He pauses, teeth dragging over his bottom lip, unable to help the next words that tumble out of his mouth unbidden: "Well — dying a second time, in your case."

[littlemissfutility]

Beth stiffens, her shoulders hunching slightly, at the word dying--worse still, when he keeps talking. He's upset, she thinks, he's saying it to hurt you, though she doesn't know that for sure. What she has to go on is that horrible way he'd asked how she's alive, when they both know he really means why. Why her, when friends and family of them both have suffered and died for nothing? Why does she get to come back without rot and a ruined brain, when her own brother was transformed into a monster? Bringing up dying again feels like a slap in the face, and she can't help but assume it's supposed to.

"Yeah," she mutters shortly, not looking at him, and stalks down the shore a few yards. She needs a minute, or maybe twenty, without somebody being an asshole about the fact that she's here; her skin's prickling with dirt and anger and a loneliness too large to name. The water is clearer than she'd expected, and deeper, and both those things are a relief. Less chance of leeches, better chance of feeling clean by the end of this.

Pulling off her cardigan, she lays it on a tuft of grass, followed by her boots and socks--and then she pauses. Wearing her jeans into the water is a recipe for being a different kind of itchy and uncomfortable for the rest of the night. But stripping down in front of Monty, even just to her underwear, feels like an impossible task.

"Turn around," she calls to him, the demand brittle-edged. The reason has to be obvious enough, right? If he makes her explain why, after everything else he's said, she might just leave him here.

[disheveling]

That was definitely a poor choose of words. Two steps forward and one step back, and Monty always manages to land his foot right in his mouth one way or another. It's only gotten worse since the world went to shit. Communication skills tend to get a bit rusty when most of the population is a moaning, shambling mess. He opens his mouth to apologize, but ends up closing it a second later, lips pressing into a fine line.

She doesn't seem like the right-hook type. But neither did his sister, until she was fourteen and socked him in the nose for reading her diary. Sometimes the best thing to do when he's already got his foot in his mouth is to just swallow and shut up.

He hadn't realized he was watching her until she calls to him, and he snaps back to attention. He wishes this were summer camp and he were sneaking off to the lake to skinny dip with the girls two cabins down, but instead it's the zombie apocalypse and his new companion values modesty, of all things.

"Right," he says, turning away from her as he begins to ditch his own clothes. It'd be nice if they could stumble upon a mall, because Monty would give anything to trade his grotty threads for something fresh. He'd settle for Abercrombie at this point. Once down to his underwear, he splashes into the creek directly behind her without hesitation.

[littlemissfutility]

The water's cold, making her skin rumple up into goosebumps on her arms, but as soon as she gets in, she can see the dirt coming off. The creek bottom is sandy, some flat rocks to speak of, and she's careful not to get her toes under any of them. Crawfish might be under there, or God knows what else, and she's not risking it.

Even after she's up to her bra in water, she keeps turned away from the shore, pointedly ignoring even the possibility of Monty seeing her. It's bad enough that she can't do this alone, but it'd be worse if she watched him stripping and splashing around and maybe watching her back. The idea of anyone's eyes on her, running down the thin, straight lines of her figure, makes her throat taste like bile.

Instead, she pretends she's alone, pulling the elastic band from her hair and curling up into a little ball so she can fit herself under the surface of the water. It helps with getting the dirt out of her filthy hair, not to mention the crusty bits of what she's worried are blood or worse. More importantly, she can't hear anything under the water. As long as her breath can hold her, she's alone.

It takes forever to feel clean again. Her fingers are pruny by the time she's ready to walk back to the shoreline. Which means looking around for Monty and saying, "Turn around again."

[disheveling]

The water is chilly, but the sun shines in patches through the trees and Monty chooses to stay right where the light envelopes him. The closest he'll ever get to a warm bath again, which isn't close at all since the water is still cold enough to raise bumps on his skin. Once upon a time, he bathed in a jacuzzi tub, and now he's chest deep in a sandy creek.

It's impossible for him not to glance at her once or twice, his gaze lingering on the sharp lines of her back. Food scarcity has them all uncomfortably bony, but her angles are sharp like being underground sucked the life out of her. It's a long time before Beth decides to climb out of the water, and Monty has taken to floating on his back in the meantime. He hears her voice through the water lapping at his ears, and he gives quite the inelegant splash as he rights himself and turns away from her again, digging his toes into the sand.

"I just feel like modesty is a lost concept after the world has gone to shit," he says, as if they'd been holding a conversation the whole time. "Might as well Adam and Eve it at this point, it's not like--"

He stops abruptly when something passes over his foot. He doesn't even have the chance to glance down before he's pinched. Though he's pretty sure it would hurt less if someone took a nutcracker to his big toe. He lets out an unbidden shout, trying to scramble backwards through the water, shaking his foot frantically beneath the surface. It's more like he's dragging himself through cement, with all the good it does.

"Bloody fucking hell, it's got me, get it off, get it off--"

He's reaching for her without looking, trying to reach beneath the water to rip the crawfish off. For a moment, he forgets that she's not Felicity, but a stranger.