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

[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.