The world around them had gone mad a long time ago, back when time was still cyclical and tracked by the pale specters of sun and moon and not by the exhaustion of men, but it was only in that moment with Jaq that Roark finally felt like a creature tailored exclusively for that world. So many wasted days spent in a doomed attempt to circumvent the insanity when it was as inescapable as the silt in the air they breathed, as the violence that hunched coiled to spring around every corner. They should be dead, but against all the odds Roark had endlessly calculated, here they were: alive beneath a layer of ash in a dead world.
His laughter was deep and belting, and not because anything was particularly funny — he found nothing funny — but because his body had to release something and he hadn't cried in years. The impossible woman at his side soon joined in. He thought he had never heard a more beautiful sound.
They tapered off eventually. Roark's laughter died as easily as his smiles, or any other tendency towards likability — but as Jaq's wound itself down and their eyes met he found himself reaching for her. Not to hold, because he could never bring himself to hold her in the daylight. But his broad, lined hand found the curve of her ash-stained face, and his thumb stroked a clean swatch across her temple under the pretense of clearing the filth away. It lingered there, hovering where the barrel of his gun had kissed her skin. How could she be so delicate? She appeared tenfold lying here beside him, scars or no scars. And in his panic, he had almost snuffed her out. He hadn't seen the light at the end of the tunnel until it was almost too late.
Maybe his examination of her now had brought him in too close. Roark pulled away without a word and rose, surveying their surroundings, leaving Jaq to stand on her own. "We can't stay here." The obvious. "Let's go."
He might have felt the pang of remorse as they started back down the road. Their safe haven had just been another Hell after all. They were at the mercy of the world again, but there was no going back now. Even if they had nowhere to go, Jaq had been right about one thing — they were alive. And that was enough for a man like Roark.
Or at least, it had been. The man cast a sidelong look at the woman who trekked along doggedly beside him. He could see even now where his hand had found her skin and banished the ash caked along her hairline. Only last night they had had clean clothes and running water, and now they were back to square one.
He should apologize, maybe, or explain, but the truth of the matter was he had no desire to revisit that moment in the bathroom. And something about Jaq's response then, the willingness that had cloaked the deep existential unwillingness, told him she had understood. He hated it: that silent understanding. It was an undercurrent to their relationship that never failed to jolt him, again and again, with the veracity of another unwelcome reemergence. Roark could barely handle being communicative in the normal ways without this strange subconscious thread tethering him to a woman that would probably be the death of him.
Days passed this way. They trudged along the never-ending road — falling down often from exhaustion, though there was always an extra pair of hands to help the other rise again — they burned through their rations as sparingly as they could, Roark insuring that most originated from his own pack, so that if something should happen... eventually, he began to carry Jaq's, when she let him, just to lighten the woman's burden some. At night, they slept in each other's arms, never more than a hair's breadth between them. It was just another of those unspoken understandings, banished by the light of day. He tried not to think about it too much.
There were miles between them and the house when they next heard a sound that was enough to violently eject them from the road. Roark motioned to a totaled car by the side of the highway and the two sprinted, Roark doing his best to wipe away any evidence of their passage, but it wasn't enough. With a curse, he joined Jaq behind their makeshift bunker, pistol drawn, as the asthmatic sputter of an engine signaled the approach of a still-living car. A truck, as it turned out — he could see through the grime-encrusted window of their hiding place that the bed was piled high with more junk than he had ever expected to have survived those initial blasts so many months ago.
The truck ground to a halt with a jangle of pots and pans, the bald tires spinning almost ineffectually in the sludge from the road, and Roark's heart dropped into his stomach. The driver had noticed their tracks, and their sudden removal from the path had evidently caused him to stop. An extremely hairy man swung himself down from the cab and scanned the roadside; thankfully, the street was littered with more cars than just their own. He looked feral, wilder than Roark and Jaq put together.
"I know you're out there!" the man called hoarsely; it had been so long already since their triumphant escape that Roark didn't recognize the strange catch in the other's voice as being that of laughter, gay and alien. "I'm unarmed! And it's just us two, meetin' like brothers, like we would in the old days. Why don't you come out and meet your brother?"
Roark cast a wary glance at Jaq. Now more than ever he was glad he had gotten them both into the habit of walking single file; the man thought he was addressing only one party. They could sit and wait it out, but the stranger didn't look like he was in any post-apocalyptic hurry to be anywhere. Better to meet the threat head-on than wait to be flushed out.
"Stay put," Roark growled, hoping Jaq wouldn't protest. "Don't let him know you're here." He rose laboriously from concealment and sidestepped into plain view, gun trained on the driver. One bullet in the chamber, but the stranger had no way of knowing. Anyway, one would be enough.
The men conversed quietly, out of earshot of Jaq. Roark never lowered his gun, and the stranger didn't appear to mind the terms of their discourse. Eventually, both men returned to their vehicles.
"We've met before," Roark informed her. "He's done business with the group I used to travel with. They call him the Trader." He didn't go so far as to say he trusted the man, but the implication was there — if trust was a thing Roark was capable of. His next words cast this sentiment into further doubt. "I don't trust him, but he squeezes out a living based on his reputation — without it, he's a dead man. He's offered to take us to the next checkpoint he set up."
With Hughes. Just the thought of the other man's mobile little regime set Roark's teeth on edge. But there was safety in numbers, and Jaq deserved safety. If anything happened to him — and something would, eventually — they needed a contingency plan.
Roark gave her a once-over, and appeared as satisfied as he could be with what he found: filthy face and hair, shapeless clothing. There was nothing to be done about her legs, or the fact that she was a woman.
"I told him you were my daughter," he said bluntly. Maybe the word still carried weight with some people. Maybe, with the age difference, they could convincingly pull it off — although Roark suddenly seemed uncomfortable, like he was afraid he might have offended her.
Against all the odds, against probability, statistics and all other old world mechanisms that held no meaning now, they had managed to escape death once more. If she had been a religious person, Jaq would’ve surely thought that there was some higher power on their side, keeping them from falling into death’s embrace time and time again. If there was a god, they were cruel and heartless for allowing the world to die so slowly in this endless apocalypse; but, then again, why had Roark wandered into her grocery store out of all the others that had been in the city? Lying in the ash, laughing until she cried with Roark at her side, she was grateful; grateful that he had stumbled upon her, that he had taken her with him, and that they had managed to escape death’s clutches this morning. They had escaped, they were alive, and that was enough for the time being.
She leaned into the touch, her heart still pounding in her chest, breathing heavy from the exertion and momentary madness. And then it was over, and they were back to the usual routine that they had fallen into.
The first time Roark tried to carry her pack, after a brief stop for a sip of water and splitting a little bit of food, Jaq had slapped his hands away before picking it up and slinging the backpack onto her shoulders. The stubbornness that had suited her so well in her profession turned into a relentless determination not to be a burden. She could carry her own weight; she could keep up and not slow Roark down. After a few days of trailing behind Roark’s gruelling pace, she tripped and fell down into the ash. They took a short break, and when he helped her up, Jaq allowed Roark to carry her pack without a single word of discord. Her pride had been wounded, but Roark never complained whenever she couldn’t carry the backpack anymore.
Days passed by without any real meaning. Time wasn’t something that was important in this new hell that had descended upon the earth. During the daylight they walked; Jaq followed behind Roark, helping each other continue on with a helping hand whenever it was needed. When darkness fell and they strayed from the road to set up camp for the night, after having a small ration of their food and a sip of water, they came together for warmth and comfort that was only acceptable when no one could see.
They were trudging through the ash on the side of a former highway when they encountered the sounds of a vehicle again. Ducking to hide behind the car Roark had pointed to, her eyes were wide with fear as they heard the engine cut. Their tracks had been spotted, and as the door screeched open, Jaq closed her eyes tightly, wishing that whoever it was would just go away. Hearing a man’s voice, Jaq’s fears flooded the forefront of her mind. Strange men couldn’t be trusted; her heart was racing in her chest as she fought the urge to flee when the strange man called out to them to come out of hiding.
Jaq nodded as Roark told her to stay put and silent, but she latched onto his forearm as he began to turn away, gun drawn.
“Be careful,” Jaq whispered, mouthing the words more than speaking them, before letting him go.
The minutes the two men spent discussing terms felt like hours, as Jaq kneeled in the ash hiding from view. She couldn’t hear more than incoherent muffled murmurings, listening intently for any change in tone, listening for any signs that the parley could be going in a dangerous direction, for anything that meant Roark could be in trouble.
She pursed her lips when Roark said he didn’t trust him; she didn’t trust the Trader on principle, but now she was even more wary of the fellow.
They had never talked about where they were going. Just having someone to share the days with had been enough for her. Loneliness had been eating her up inside, and while they may not have communicated in the most conventional way, it brought some hope back into her life. But while there was usually safety in numbers, that meant they would be surrounded by people, and she had learned it was safer to hide away from crowds while living in her grocery store. The idea of being surrounded by a large group of people was one that made her heart jump up into her throat, her mouth running dry.
Saying she was his daughter was probably a smart move, if there was any honor left in people these days. And it would give her a viable excuse to hold his hand. She trusted Roark; it was everyone else she was afraid of. Standing up, she grabbed his hand and held it tightly.
“Let’s go, then.”
The ride to the checkpoint was long, and uncomfortable at best. Conversation was short and jilted whenever the Trader tried to get either of them to open up. Jaq tried to hide behind the curtain of her hair, sitting as close to Roark as possible, but she could still feel the Trader’s eyes on her, leering at her hungrily between navigating through the dead vehicles lining the roads here and there. She had even tucked her face into Roark’s shoulder at one point, trying to hide from the Trader’s eyes, and his wretched stink.
When they reached the checkpoint, and Roark slid out of the truck, the Trader latched onto her forearm and kept her from leaving the cab.
“Brother, I gotta proposition for you,” the Trader called out to Roark, as Jaq struggled against him, pushing away at him with her free hand.
“Let go of me! Leave me alone!” Jaq cried, continuing to struggle until she was slapped across the face, beating her into submission. She had been hit before; experience kicked in as she bit her lip to keep it from trembling. Struggling only made things worse.
“You learn your place girl; us men are talking business,” the Trader hissed at Jaq with an angry frown, as she shrunk away from the man as much as possible with the Trader still having a good grip on her wrist. There would be bruises marring her skin before the day was through.
“Now, you’ve got yourself a pretty girl here. How about I trade you for her, hmm? I can keep her safer than out there, decently fed and cared for. And I’d pay you a good price for this one too; you’d be a lot better off than the rest of these folks out here. What’dya say?”
Jaq’s hand slipped into his—as if it had been there all along, every step of his way, before he had even met her. Roark didn’t look at her, but filed his memory of the sensation away for later. Right now, he only had eyes for the man who called himself Trader.
Like most surviving men of this world, he looked half an animal. His mind seemed intact—enough for Roark to know he was clever—and that cleverness made him more dangerous than most. Still, the Trader abided by a code he accorded to his lifestyle, and Roark knew the man was thriving where others fell dead in the imprints of his tire treads. He had found his true calling, something that must have eluded him in a time of civilization. Here and now, the Trader was a self-styled king—or at least a fool dressed as one while the court was empty. His hair was rampantly overgrown, his beard brambles; he kept bobbles in both, and more than a few rodent bones.
“My daughter,” Roark introduced them back out on the road. He didn’t volunteer anything else, but the Trader took anyway, drinking his fill of Jaq’s slender figure half-eclipsed by Roark’s own. Roark had expected a leer, but seeing the sudden sheen in the Trader’s eyes, he realized abruptly this had been a mistake. He should have kept them hidden, or made a run for it.
Now he had to wait and see just how big a fucking mistake it was.
The Trader kept to his pretenses. “Beautiful! Simply beautiful! You are a credit to your father, young lady.” He made a grab for her available hand to raise it to his lips, but Roark yanked her out of reach. He didn’t care if his reaction disturbed the charade.
And he didn’t like the man’s emphasis on father. He realized his lie probably hadn’t been believed. Not that it mattered, Roark thought, as he helped Jaq up into the cab ahead of him. There was little enough of her to lift. Hadn’t his hands just roamed the woman the other night as he soothed her to sleep? Now, standing below her, he could see how bone-thin she was. Inviting the Trader into their party had been a mistake, but feeling how painfully thin Jaq was becoming reminded him how he had made it in the first place.
He wasn’t out of control of their situation. Not yet.
They drove. It wasn’t long before their driver wore Roark’s patience thin by sneaking looks at Jaq. “Eyes on the road!” He hadn’t expected to hear himself to snap at the Trader. His unpleasant disposition had threatened his survival in a group more often than it had sustained it, and now was looking to be no exception.
“Why? You see anybody else out here?” The Trader chuckled uproariously and took Roark’s warning in stride, then lapsed into a horrible, lung-rattling cough that seemed to shake something essential loose inside him. “Whoops! Incoming!” He recovered the next moment and veered toward an abandoned car in the lane opposite. His eyes flickered to take in Jaq’s expression; clearly, he had done it to get some sort of reaction out of her. Roark was seized with the irrational urge to reach over and draw the curtain of the girl’s hair completely over her face. Don’t look at her. The angry thought was so monstrous it seemed to take up all the air in the cab that the Trader wasn’t taking up himself.
They hadn’t traveled more than a mile before Roark added to his ever-growing list of regrets his decision to seat Jaq in the middle. It had been the most convenient due to her size, but he would be lying if he claimed to not have calculated it would put their new friend in a good mood. The Trader seemed happy to keep the conversation going by himself. He kept casting little looks Jaq’s way, trying to bait her into conversation. “Good girl you got there,” he said once. “Trained to keep her mouth shut, huh, brother? Too much talk can get you killed out here.”
The man wasn’t wrong.
When they arrived at the checkpoint, Roark snatched his bag and got out. He turned, and Jaq’s fearful expression made his heart stop. When the Trader called a proposition, Roark’s eyes closed slowly.
It would haunt him until the day he died that he let her take that beating. He heard the savage crack of the Trader’s open hand across her face, and her consequent silence in the aftermath. His eyes were open by then, and they were both awaiting his response.
"Step down out of the cab and we'll talk," Roark said.
He met them around the side of the truck. He watched the Trader haul Jaq down after him, licking his shredded lips, eyes darting madly about. It looked like the man couldn’t believe his good luck, but the flicker of distrust they had kept alive between them seemed to feed on renewed suspicion. “You’re a man who listens to reason, brother!” the Trader was all but vomiting the sickly-sweet words from his mouth. “You know I’ll take good care of her! A pretty piece like this? She’ll be my queen!” he said around the side of Jaq’s head where her fresh bruise was already crowning her.
Roark stepped to them, not to forcefully free Jaq from the Trader's grasp, but as if assessing horseflesh at an end-of-the-world county auction. “She’ll be hard to part with,” he said.
“But not without her price,” the Trader suggested. “A fair price, mind.”
“Are you already trying to undercut your offer?” Roark watched the other man squirm. “You need to step back, because I think you’re missing the whole picture.”
Without removing his hand from Jaq’s arm the Trader shuffled a step backward, nearer to Roark, to try and soft-pedal whatever expensive qualities the girl’s seller thought he perceived from that angle. “Can’t say I like that she’s already broken in. She’s still a looker, I’ll grant you—”
Roark emptied their last bullet point-blank into the Trader’s skull.
Her cheek throbbed, the swelling and bruising quickly taking their garish place on the pristine canvas that was her face. She couldn’t remember how long it had been since she had last been subjected to such treatment at the hands of a man who thought he could own her. Many had tried, but none had fully broken her spirit, despite their best efforts. Somehow she had always been able to maintain that flicker of light, that will to survive and help others instead of harming them. For some reason, Roark fanned that flicker into flames, instead of snuffing it out. They didn’t say it with words, but the way he cared for her, the way she cared for him, it was something that was rarer than that bottle of wine they had shared - it was something to be treasured, cherished. Even if it didn’t make sense to do so in this horrific new world. In this world caring for someone could get you killed. Most stayed alone. But maybe finding that one person was even more precious now that the earth had gone to hell in a hand basket. It was that much harder to find a trustworthy partner these days, with no bars, no apps to swipe right on, no parks to run into someone while taking your dog out on a run. Against all the odds, they had found each other, and with each passing day in his company she was starting to bloom, and so had he.
It was because of that unspoken connection that Jaq merely raised an eyebrow in question when Roark told the Trader to step out of the truck so they could discuss the terms of her sale. She trusted Roark, but she was deeply uncomfortable with the situation at hand. She was sure that he had come up with some kind of plan to get them out of this somehow, so Jaq didn’t struggle when she was physically yanked out of the truck after her captor as her protector walked along the outside of the truck to meet them.
When Roark stepped closer to her, she attempted to go to him, and was dragged back to the Trader’s side. Her steadfast companion looked her up and down, seemingly appraising what she was worth as he played along, continuing a ruse. There was confusion, but no distrust lingering in her eyes. She trusted him to get them out of this, somehow.
She sneered with disgust as the Trader commented on the state of her, her heart rate rising as she fought back the tide of traumatic memories that were threatening to flood her mind. She tried to take some shaky long breaths, keeping her eyes strictly on Roark, as they had done in the house days previous. This situation was already fraught, they both couldn’t afford her to be swept out into the sea of compartmentalized traumas right now, as hard as it was to remain rooted in the present.
...And then it was over.
She flinched as the gun went off, blood spattering onto her face where the Trader had struck her as the bullet pierced his skull and drove into his brain. Her ears were ringing from the sound. The man’s hand fell from her wrist as his fresh corpse collapsed to the ground. The Trader was dead.
She needed not to cry, she needed to hold onto whatever precious water was in her body, but a sob and a few tears escaped despite her best efforts. She had never been that close to someone who was killed before. She had seen dead bodies in various states of decay through the new world, but she had never been this close before, had never seen the light leave someone’s eyes as they passed. It was [i]awful[/i]. She felt like she was going to be sick, but fortunately enough, there was nothing in her stomach to dispel.
It had only been seconds since the gun went off, but it felt like time had slowed down. She felt sluggish as she reached toward Roark, and as he reached for her. Wrapped up safe in his arms, she felt like she could breathe again for the first time since the second the Trader had grabbed her wrist. Yet again he had saved her, at his own expense. His last bullet was gone now, because of her, because he had to save her when she couldn’t save herself, because she wasn’t brave enough to even try anymore. Maybe she should’ve tried harder, fought back more, struggled instead of standing meekly as far away from the Trader as her arm would allow. She was still just a shadow of her former self. The Jaq from before the bombs fell would have fought back. Maybe it didn’t matter though, maybe it all would’ve ended up the same, except with more pain and suffering. Maybe she should just be grateful for Roark, and the fact that they were both still alive and breathing, with only a bruised cheekbone between the two of them. A bruise would heal, but a bullet wound wouldn’t.
They stood there in the ash, just holding each other in relieved silence, alive, as blood and brain matter slowly seeped from the Trader’s fatal wound.
Roark, to his credit, held her as long as she needed, without complaint despite the sun still being above the horizon. After what she hoped was only a few minutes, Jaq pulled back to look at him.
“We should see if he has anything useful - he won’t be needing it anymore.”
Roark's thoughts weren't as full of holes in that moment as the Trader's. It could be argued he had just emptied their last real defense into the skull of a man who wasn't worth the gun smoke still trailing from his temple.
But Roark wouldn't argue it.
The wall came down before the other man's body hit the ground. Roark's arm fell limp at his side; the expression he had held throughout the encounter remained, but the color of his eyes had sharpened. Maybe that was how Jaq had known all along to trust him. Maybe she had seen through the ruse he had made no real effort to mount. The Trader's greed had blinded him to the truth — or maybe Roark had come off as a man capable of anything, even selling his own flesh and blood. The Trader had believed their story readily enough.
Maybe their survival really had hinged on a spent bullet. In the aftermath, Roark couldn't say for certain what instinct had driven him to dispatch the man so coldly. He had never liked the Trader. There was no universe where he would have withstood the other man's mistreatment of Jaq. He hadn't seen red, nor had he gone blind with rage — but something had moved him to this, and it wasn't logic. Logic was knowing that at any moment of his choosing he could have overpowered this man. The violence could have been averted, and their last bullet spared. There was bound to be worse in store for them down the road.
He let the gun slip from his fingers and drop, muffled, into a bed of ash. It was forgotten the next instant. Jaq was a blur of motion, and his arms were free to receive her; catch her; hold her. She looked like a warrior of this new world with half her face painted red and the other half bruised to hell. Roark's arms tightened around her. He could feel it when her fragile ribs compressed, but he didn't relent.
Jaq…
Her name hovered on the tip of his tongue. He wanted to pause a moment, to process what had happened beyond a hug at the end of the world. And that was unlike him. But they didn't have the time, and he had taught her too well.
"Check the cab," he said, mainly because he wanted her to get away from the body. "But stay in sight."
He watched her make her way back toward the overburdened truck, then dropped down into a crouch beside the Trader. It didn't disgust him to pick over a body, he was mostly numb to it by now, but the fresher a corpse the easier the work tended to be. And Roark knew with this particular body it would be easy work.
Or so he thought. The Trader had various knives and sharpened implements hidden about his person, all of them dulled. Roark wondered if the man had kept them that way on purpose, to make anything he turned them on suffer all the more, or if he had simply been too stupid to sharpen them himself. Perhaps as the knives dulled he had continued to acquire new ones. Perhaps, like his weapons, the man's edge was slipping, and they were further evidence of a mind gone astray.
Whatever the psychosis, none of the knives were of any use to him. Roark tossed them aside. Next he excavated an angular bulge in the man's left pocket, discovering a flare gun and three unused cartridges. A dangerous item to have considering it would only draw trouble to your location, but Roark pocketed it anyway. He dug into another one of the man's hidden inner linings and froze. Fibrous strands wound around his fingers, and it was with quiet dread that he recognized the texture before he pulled it out into the open.
Locks of hair, all different colors, were woven together in a sort of fetish. No. A trophy. The Trader had kept the hair from every woman he… what? Sold? Personally brutalized and worse?
Roark shoved the terrible item back inside the dead man's pocket and rose. The realization that it had been missing a particular shade of brunette disturbed him to his core. He tried to shove the thought down as well.
Jaq was still examining something in the cab. The back of her head, the sight of her dark hair, triggered the thought again, and had him turning quickly away. He decided to investigate the odd shapes lumped beneath the tarp in the bed of the truck. He moved around the backside of the vehicle, unhooked one of the bungee cords, and pulled the covering aside.
A black cloud of flies rose up from what lay beneath.
The stench of his discovery was soul-upheaving. Any thought he had entertained of taking the Trader's truck, of the safety and shelter the man's reputation could have provided them out on the road, flew from his mind. Roark let the tarp fall and stood back. He was still as a statue when Jaq rejoined him.
"Let's go." He tried to keep his voice steady, but there was a tremor in it, like the first fissure in a larger fault about to break open. "There will be others following his tracks."
It felt like the whole world could've heard the gunshot Roark had fired into the Trader's brain. How long had it been since she had heard something as loud? It felt like it had been ages, a whole other lifetime. The sound was still ringing in her ears.
As much as the shot had saved her, it could also bring danger, making others vaguely aware of their whereabouts. That meant there wasn't time for them to linger here, as much as she wanted to just stay standing there in Roark's embrace as long as possible. It would only be a few more hours until nightfall – she could hold it together until then. She had to, there just wasn’t any other choice. Not if she wanted to use the gift of safety that Roark had given her with killing the Trader wisely at least. Time was passing with every second they stood there, time that others could be using to come after the sound of the gun.
“Okay.” Jaq responded when Roark told her to go check the cab of the truck. Taking one more second to indulge in leaning back into his embrace, Jaq tightened her arms around him for one last squeeze before stepping away, pretending the pressure of his arms could force the trauma away back into a far corner of her mind. They weren’t safely tucked away in a house. They were out in the open, and needed to get away.
Avoiding looking down at the corpse of her would-be captor, Jaq made her way back to the truck the Trader had possessed. She had to be quick, but thorough in her search.
Jaq searched between the cushions of the seats, pulling up a tiny push knife in a leather holster from the crease between the driver’s seat and where she had sat. Looking it over, she tucked it safely into the outer side of her right boot. Now hopefully she wouldn’t be caught helpless again. Roark kept saving her, over and over, something she was grateful for beyond what words could ever hope to express, but it would be good to hopefully be able to help protect herself too if necessary - or, more likely, when necessary. Not many people would expect a tiny knife hiding in her boot. She could pretend to trip, and grab it, and go on the offensive.
Nothing else was stashed between the seats aside from various food wrappers. Moving on, Jaq put her backpack up on the seats, and checked underneath. There was not much more tucked under than more trash, discarded empty containers that had once held food or empty bottles of water and alcohol, unfortunately. The truck was just as filthy as the man had been, clearly.
Opening the glove box, she hadn’t expected to find much else more than garbage or papers, but instead she found gold – bullets. A box of them. Unable to believe her luck, Jaq reached out with shaky hands and picked them up, opening the lid of the box. It was mostly full. She didn’t know much about guns, but she knew that now she just had to hope that they were the right ones for the gun that Roark had.
Cradling the box in her hands as if it were the most precious thing in the world, she couldn’t help the small smile that turned up the corners of her lips as she turned to meet Roark after he finished checking the back of the truck, getting ready to go and tossing her backpack on her shoulders before closing the truck’s door.
“…are these the right ones?” Jaq asked hesitantly, holding out the box for Roark to inspect. Maybe their luck was turning around after all. Maybe something horrible happened so they would be able to have something good. The Trader was clearly not a great person with how he had treated her, but now if the bullets were the right type they would be able to protect themselves even more in the future. And, with the Trader’s demise, he wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone else either.
She had to try and find something good out of the awful things that happened, had to try and find a glimmer of light to hold onto through the darkness. They had each other, she had a new way to defend herself, and hopefully she was just able to replenish the invaluable bullet that Roark had used saving her. Maybe for once with finding these bullets she would be able to actually contribute to their partnership, instead of always feeling like she was burdening him, slowing him down. Her own mind was a cruel place to be, but she hoped Roark didn’t feel that way about her too. And she couldn’t escape from or trample down the butterflies fluttering in her chest as she waited for his answer.
Roark was faintly stunned to feel bile burning in the back of his throat. How long had it been since he tasted battery acid, or had the urge to vomit? He thought he had moved beyond that impulse years ago.
But he knew the real answer. It had been only yesterday, when they escaped from that monstrous house. Not a house at all, but a veneer, a façade, a facsimile, and a trap, all rolled into one. It had been only moments ago, when he found that clot of hair. This world still had the ability to disarrange him after all.
Would he feel these things, were he alone? Or did traveling with Jaq lend a new, awful context to it all? He didn't see the world through her eyes, but he saw too well how it might enact its horrors upon her were it given half the chance. And its horrors seemed continually innovative and inexhaustible. He hadn't seen it all, no matter how much he tried to convince himself he had.
It really was as if Hell had opened and spilled all its devils and tortures upon the earth. And Roark thought, with a sick knowing, that his wife—his ex-wife—Fionna? Maybe she would have love this new world, where every nightmare seemed Biblical in scale. Would she have looked out the ash-blasted windows of their home, as its timbers rotted and foundations crumbled around them, and felt confirmed in her beliefs? Maybe in some perverse way it would have been liberating. Maybe then there would have been no room for doubt, and she wouldn't have made that ultimate choice. She had been raised Catholic—they had met in college, and she had set most of her religious upbringing aside for the majority of their marriage. It had regrown like a cancer previously cut away, metastasizing as the news only got worse, as the wars overseas came home, as every headline of the day began to parrot apocalyptic prophecy in a way that Roark had been unable to reason her away from.
Your choice would be to make me a murderer!
Had he really said that once, in another life? At the start of this new one? That had been the primary fear of the man who had been a university librarian; the man who had made himself a murderer a hundred times over since? His wife had taken her own bullet like an eucharist.
Appalling thought after appalling thought slammed into his brain, and Roark realized the walls had come crashing down. Whether it was Jaq who had delivered the first blow or had brought them down herself, his fortifications had slipped. Maybe the Trader and his wares, his nightmare market, had been the final straw. If there was ever a Devil, the man he had just left in the stained dirt, the only splash of color now, had been a fair contender. Hell is empty and all the devils are here. Was that Shakespeare? He couldn't remember anymore. The throne is empty and Hell has a vacancy. If Hell was here, and Fionna believed she had gone to Hell, did that mean Fionna was here?
Insanity was one wrong thought away. Closer than it had ever been before. He could reach for it, if he wanted. One more peak beneath the tarp and he might complete the transition. Maybe there would be relief in it. Maybe that was why everyone they met was insane. This was Wonderland (that wasn't Shakespeare, that was Lewis Carroll), a world where logic and morality were topsy-turvy and only the mad could thrive.
It was Jaq who dragged him back with a question, with a gift offered. Roark's eyes, the pupils devouring their iris, fell to her hand as she gave him something to refocus on.
"Yeah. They're right." His hand closed over the box, and might have easily lifted it free, but he didn't take the bullets from her. He merely sustained the moment of contact. Maybe it was an excuse. Maybe he was too weak a man to reach out by the light of day. Bullets were fine, and needed, and a precious rare resource, and Jaq had just delivered them both to future safety in a way he never could, and she didn't seem to realize.
But then they weren't really good for anything, one without the other. The bullet or the gun. He wound up selecting only one, the lead poison pill, leaving the rest with her. Stupid. Not just stupid, suicidal. The bullet or the gun, the bullet and the gun. But Jaq would be his holster. If he was going to murder, she would have to be the one to sanction it. Otherwise he feared who he was without her.
Roark drew her away from the back of the truck. He hoped she trusted him enough not to insist on a look herself. He could carry the nightmares alone this time. "Let's go." It was the thing he said to her most. He would have been a broken record if all the vinyl hadn't melted away and the world's turntables incinerated on the spot.
Ash began to fall, as it so often did from the shattered sky, gathering in drifts and smearing the landscape like a blue-black bruise. The Trader's corpse would be covered before long. Roark doubted anyone would pursue them on the dead man's behalf. Others would ransack the truck, coming up empty of anything useful for their survival (he and Jaq had seen to that). Maybe they would find the horror in the truck bed and vomit up a precious rare meal, and be worse off for what the two were leaving behind. Maybe others would pull back the tarp and exult.
Roark kept on their march like an automaton, but soon he was gripping his forehead, pinching his brows together savagely, as they walked. A floodgate had opened within him, and suddenly he couldn't keep every awful thought from entering his head and baying for attention. "Read to me. From that book of yours. Or tell me a story." He didn't intend to order or command, but there was a desperate quality to the way he spoke that made it seem like an alarming imperative. Unbeknownst to them both, he also didn't know which way he was going anymore. Forward. He could do that for them, at least.
