[fic + art]: if we turned our reactors to the sun, part ii
Title: If We Turned Our Reactors to the Sun
Author: knowmydark
Artist: neomeruru
Team: Angst.
Prompt: Innocence.
Word count: 1,973 (this part).
Rating: M.
Warnings: None.
Summary: Post-apocalyptic!AU. Eames doesn’t remember how it happened - he was seven at the time - but how things happen never really matter anyway. Endings are what matter. (Inspired by The Road)
Part II
Most of the useful things have already been stripped. The cutlery gone. The blankets gone. The mattresses too large to shift, but someone has slashed them up, scattered the foam everywhere in a blind rage.
The carpet in the main bedroom is dirty but intact. Eames considers it, thinks he’ll pry it up in the morning.
“Running out of water,” Arthur says.
“Have you checked mine? I think I’ve got a little left. You can have it, I had heaps earlier.”
There’s a pause, and then Arthur says, “I hate it when you do that.”
Eames is still thinking about the carpet. “What?”
“I hate it when you act like - ” Arthur makes a vague gesture with his hand, the good one, brow furrowed in concentration. Eames turns and looks at him expectantly, but just like that, something in Arthur’s face snaps closed. “Never mind.”
“Better eat before we run out of light,” Eames says.
Arthur falls asleep an hour later in the pitch dark, his breath low and steady against the side of Eames’ shoulder. It’s quiet, and Eames has his rifle pressed close beside his thigh. They are both wrapped in several layers of clothing but Eames can still sense the warmth at Arthur’s core, a tiny pinpoint in the dark like a fluttering light. He can still remember the way that Arthur is lying - on his good side, coat askew, mask butting up against the mattress, barely a ruler’s length from Eames’ leg - but in the darkness, without any moonlight or stars, just the knowledge of closeness isn’t enough. Eames strokes a hand over the crown of Arthur’s hair and his fingers tremble a little, helplessly.
--
In the morning, Eames wakes to a familiar crick in his neck and Arthur’s arm around his waist.
The air outside tastes stale through the filter of the gas mask. The house they are in has a good view of the street corner and the store wedged there, shingles loose, shivering apart already. Eames only hesitates for a moment - he’ll kill you; he doesn’t have to know - before throwing a leg carefully out of the window, climbing onto the garage roof alongside.
It’s cold, and his fingers jam up stiffly. He shakes them out. Sneaks a guilty look back inside, but Arthur is still curled up on the carpet, none the wiser.
Sometimes Eames wonders if Arthur actually knows. There are things to be done before each raid, dangerous things, and if Arthur ever catches Eames at them there’ll be a fistfight for sure. Arthur fights like they all fight nowadays - fierce and spitting and without any finesse, like cornered animals.
As a child, Eames had been one for fighting. His sister had been too, always a graze on her knee and twigs in her hair, and Eames reflects that it was perhaps because she was so good at fighting that he never really thought to shield her from anything. He still remembers her the night before she died - small and shivering, curled up underneath a window with a tattered old copy of Wind in the Willows, trying to read, sounding out each word slowly like their father had taught them by candlelight before he’d gone away.
Eames looks out at the view across the street and tongues the empty spot beside his left molar.
“What are you doing?” Arthur asks, sleepily, from the window behind him.
A plume of dust is curling its way slowly down the pavement. Everything is muted, the sky, the rooftops of other houses, the fissures in the pavement filled with ash already. Eames stares at the house opposite with its curling veranda and tries to remember what it used to look like. A world with sound, still, and colours, and breath. The smell of potted roses. The earth, cool and damp under Eames’ fingers, the grass with its green taste, the heavy drone of bees.
“Nothing,” Eames says, overwhelmed. Suddenly he realises that it’s the truth.
--
An hour later and Eames is halfway down the stairs when Arthur says, “I am not staying here,” and just like that the old argument’s started again.
Eames is rolling the sleeves of his coat up. There’s a gash on his left forearm that’s just scabbing over, his fault for leaping a wire fence too haphazardly. Arthur is meant to pass him his rifle at this point but Arthur doesn’t. Keeps it behind his back for making a point with.
“I can shoot,” Arthur says. “I can. Straight, even. And it’s stupid for me to watch your back from up here, I can’t see anything, as soon as you go through the door of that place I can’t help you.”
“We talked about this,” Eames points out.
“No, you talked about it,” Arthur says. He’s on a higher step and Eames has to crane his neck up to see his face. “Last time, and the time before, and the time before. But not this time, Eames. I’m going with you.”
“You’ll get shot. Again.”
“I’d rather get shot again than stay here and watch you get shot.”
Eames can feel something tighten at the corner of his mouth, a slight panic. For once he’s glad that he’s wearing a mask - glad that Arthur won’t be able to see it.
“Arthur, I can’t raid and look after you at the same time - ”
“You raid, and I’ll look after myself,” Arthur says, like it’s meant to be easy.
“Don’t be stupid,” Eames says. “You can’t even keep a rifle steady. Look at you, you look like you’re about to fall over. I’m not letting you go anywhere.”
“I don’t need your permission,” Arthur snaps. “I’m tired of you telling me that I can’t do anything because of my arm, making me feel useless all the time, because there are things I can do without using it but you won’t listen. You just keep using it as an excuse. I’m - I’m not a kid, alright, I want to do my share. You don’t have to keep on babying me.”
“I’m not babying you,” Eames says, a tad harsher than he means. “It’s just that you’d be a whole lot less work if you didn’t have bullet wounds for me to take care of.”
Arthur freezes up, joints locking in his arm and his jaw, shutting off.
“You’re staying right here,” Eames says. “I mean it.”
He snatches back his rifle and shoulders it roughly. Cups a hand over the butt where the wood is still warm, needing a reminder, always, searching for it.
--
The scavengers have already been through the place, and even when Eames hunts under the shelves, in the corners, dead spiders curled up and dangling from their webs, there is nothing. In the back of the shop someone has kicked in a locked door and there are bullet casings around the doorway, great dark splashes on the wall, and a single human shoe by an empty crate. It isn’t by far the worst that Eames has seen but somewhere deep inside him he hadn’t expected it, not in here, in the store where he had once clung to his mother’s fingers and lived, however briefly. Something cold in his chest knots tighter, makes it difficult for him to breathe for a moment.
The month after he’d first run into Arthur - the tiny dark speck trekking across a hillside, so far away that to Eames’ eyes he’d almost looked like an ant - they’d made their first fire on a patch of dirt between two boulders. Arthur, easing himself down onto the earth, hawk-like. They hadn’t trusted each other at that point and Eames had woken each morning expecting a bullet between his shoulder-blades.
“Have you thought about what’ll happen when everything runs out?” Arthur had said.
Eames dusted bark off his gloves and squinted through the smoke. “We raid.”
“Where?”
“I know places.”
Arthur made a dry, disbelieving noise, pulling his legs up closer to his body. He was thinner back then, as prickly and closed-off as barbed wire. “And what are we going to do when those places run out?”
“We go elsewhere,” Eames said. “We’ll find something.”
“Sure,” Arthur said, giving him a wary look. “But what if - ”
“I’ve gotten us through a month,” Eames pointed out. He picked up a stick and poked it into the flames; a log collapsed, showering sparks onto Eames’ boots, and all through it he could feel Arthur’s eyes on him. “I’ll get us through the rest of it, alright? You just concentrate on not getting yourself shot or something.”
“I’m not going to get myself shot,” Arthur snapped, but some of the tension had bled out of his shoulders.
Eames hadn’t really let himself think about it - what happens when everything runs out; what is going to happen to all of us - but the next morning he’d woken to Arthur kicking snow over the dying fire, breath white and smoggy, and for the first time since they’d met Eames had felt glad that he wasn’t in all of this alone.
You’re not going to lose him, he tells himself now, staring at the dry tracks of blood on the floor. He unclenches his fingers one by one. Breathes out. Things aren’t always going to be like this. You’re going to make it.
He goes through the entire store one more time, and then he heads back.
Arthur is standing next to the window when Eames comes through the doorway, rifle knocking briefly on the frame. Eames’ boots crunch a little on concrete - Arthur has taken the carpet up, rolled it into a corner and tied it with a scrap of cloth.
“I found water,” Arthur says shortly. “A few houses over. Rainwater tank.”
Eames sets the rifle on the mattress. “How much?”
“Enough for a week. More, if we want to stay. We can’t carry it all.”
“So you want to stay,” Eames says.
Arthur’s shoulders form a single tense line against the light from outside. “No. It’s not safe here.”
“It’s not safe anywhere,” Eames says, and when Arthur doesn’t answer, he grabs his canteen from where Arthur’s set it down on the floor. “Not here, not - we can’t keep moving like this forever.”
“We’ve done it all this time,” Arthur bites back. “We can keep doing it.”
Eames looks over at him. There are many things they can keep on doing, running, hiding, forgetting, and Eames thinks about the two of them, worn down like the earth in the years to come. Blood in the back of a convenience store, inherently nameless. Something rises up into the back of his throat and for a moment, Eames allows himself to be afraid.
“There are things that we can change,” he says finally. “Not all things. But some.”
“There is nothing we can change if you don’t trust me,” Arthur says.
“It’s not that - ” Eames starts, but doesn’t know how to finish it. He struggles for a second, fumbling for the right words, loses them. “It isn’t that. That isn’t the reason why, it’s just - ”
“I know you’re just trying to protect me,” says Arthur. “But you keep forgetting that you need protecting too.”
Eames looks down, unscrewing the cap of the canteen to give himself a reason not to answer.
“Please,” Arthur says. “Eames, look at me.”
The shock of heat digs right into Eames’ belly when Arthur slips a palm over the top of Eames’ hand. Arthur’s nails are dirty and a few are broken and outside the ash sifts downward, never-ending, dusting the street with pearlescent grey. There will be wolves out there, somewhere inside the city, and children wearing coats that belong to dead men.
In the light every one of Arthur’s lashes stand out, the only beautiful thing in the world for miles.
--
The End.
--
A/N: A huge thank-you to the darling neomeruru - who put up with my general disorganisation and inability to uphold Gchat schedules /o\ Thank-you, bb, your work is astounding and I absolutely loved working with you. ♥
Author: knowmydark
Artist: neomeruru
Team: Angst.
Prompt: Innocence.
Word count: 1,973 (this part).
Rating: M.
Warnings: None.
Summary: Post-apocalyptic!AU. Eames doesn’t remember how it happened - he was seven at the time - but how things happen never really matter anyway. Endings are what matter. (Inspired by The Road)
Part II
Most of the useful things have already been stripped. The cutlery gone. The blankets gone. The mattresses too large to shift, but someone has slashed them up, scattered the foam everywhere in a blind rage.
The carpet in the main bedroom is dirty but intact. Eames considers it, thinks he’ll pry it up in the morning.
“Running out of water,” Arthur says.
“Have you checked mine? I think I’ve got a little left. You can have it, I had heaps earlier.”
There’s a pause, and then Arthur says, “I hate it when you do that.”
Eames is still thinking about the carpet. “What?”
“I hate it when you act like - ” Arthur makes a vague gesture with his hand, the good one, brow furrowed in concentration. Eames turns and looks at him expectantly, but just like that, something in Arthur’s face snaps closed. “Never mind.”
“Better eat before we run out of light,” Eames says.
Arthur falls asleep an hour later in the pitch dark, his breath low and steady against the side of Eames’ shoulder. It’s quiet, and Eames has his rifle pressed close beside his thigh. They are both wrapped in several layers of clothing but Eames can still sense the warmth at Arthur’s core, a tiny pinpoint in the dark like a fluttering light. He can still remember the way that Arthur is lying - on his good side, coat askew, mask butting up against the mattress, barely a ruler’s length from Eames’ leg - but in the darkness, without any moonlight or stars, just the knowledge of closeness isn’t enough. Eames strokes a hand over the crown of Arthur’s hair and his fingers tremble a little, helplessly.
--
In the morning, Eames wakes to a familiar crick in his neck and Arthur’s arm around his waist.
The air outside tastes stale through the filter of the gas mask. The house they are in has a good view of the street corner and the store wedged there, shingles loose, shivering apart already. Eames only hesitates for a moment - he’ll kill you; he doesn’t have to know - before throwing a leg carefully out of the window, climbing onto the garage roof alongside.
It’s cold, and his fingers jam up stiffly. He shakes them out. Sneaks a guilty look back inside, but Arthur is still curled up on the carpet, none the wiser.
Sometimes Eames wonders if Arthur actually knows. There are things to be done before each raid, dangerous things, and if Arthur ever catches Eames at them there’ll be a fistfight for sure. Arthur fights like they all fight nowadays - fierce and spitting and without any finesse, like cornered animals.
As a child, Eames had been one for fighting. His sister had been too, always a graze on her knee and twigs in her hair, and Eames reflects that it was perhaps because she was so good at fighting that he never really thought to shield her from anything. He still remembers her the night before she died - small and shivering, curled up underneath a window with a tattered old copy of Wind in the Willows, trying to read, sounding out each word slowly like their father had taught them by candlelight before he’d gone away.
Eames looks out at the view across the street and tongues the empty spot beside his left molar.
“What are you doing?” Arthur asks, sleepily, from the window behind him.
A plume of dust is curling its way slowly down the pavement. Everything is muted, the sky, the rooftops of other houses, the fissures in the pavement filled with ash already. Eames stares at the house opposite with its curling veranda and tries to remember what it used to look like. A world with sound, still, and colours, and breath. The smell of potted roses. The earth, cool and damp under Eames’ fingers, the grass with its green taste, the heavy drone of bees.
“Nothing,” Eames says, overwhelmed. Suddenly he realises that it’s the truth.
--
An hour later and Eames is halfway down the stairs when Arthur says, “I am not staying here,” and just like that the old argument’s started again.
Eames is rolling the sleeves of his coat up. There’s a gash on his left forearm that’s just scabbing over, his fault for leaping a wire fence too haphazardly. Arthur is meant to pass him his rifle at this point but Arthur doesn’t. Keeps it behind his back for making a point with.
“I can shoot,” Arthur says. “I can. Straight, even. And it’s stupid for me to watch your back from up here, I can’t see anything, as soon as you go through the door of that place I can’t help you.”
“We talked about this,” Eames points out.
“No, you talked about it,” Arthur says. He’s on a higher step and Eames has to crane his neck up to see his face. “Last time, and the time before, and the time before. But not this time, Eames. I’m going with you.”
“You’ll get shot. Again.”
“I’d rather get shot again than stay here and watch you get shot.”
Eames can feel something tighten at the corner of his mouth, a slight panic. For once he’s glad that he’s wearing a mask - glad that Arthur won’t be able to see it.
“Arthur, I can’t raid and look after you at the same time - ”
“You raid, and I’ll look after myself,” Arthur says, like it’s meant to be easy.
“Don’t be stupid,” Eames says. “You can’t even keep a rifle steady. Look at you, you look like you’re about to fall over. I’m not letting you go anywhere.”
“I don’t need your permission,” Arthur snaps. “I’m tired of you telling me that I can’t do anything because of my arm, making me feel useless all the time, because there are things I can do without using it but you won’t listen. You just keep using it as an excuse. I’m - I’m not a kid, alright, I want to do my share. You don’t have to keep on babying me.”
“I’m not babying you,” Eames says, a tad harsher than he means. “It’s just that you’d be a whole lot less work if you didn’t have bullet wounds for me to take care of.”
Arthur freezes up, joints locking in his arm and his jaw, shutting off.
“You’re staying right here,” Eames says. “I mean it.”
He snatches back his rifle and shoulders it roughly. Cups a hand over the butt where the wood is still warm, needing a reminder, always, searching for it.
--
The scavengers have already been through the place, and even when Eames hunts under the shelves, in the corners, dead spiders curled up and dangling from their webs, there is nothing. In the back of the shop someone has kicked in a locked door and there are bullet casings around the doorway, great dark splashes on the wall, and a single human shoe by an empty crate. It isn’t by far the worst that Eames has seen but somewhere deep inside him he hadn’t expected it, not in here, in the store where he had once clung to his mother’s fingers and lived, however briefly. Something cold in his chest knots tighter, makes it difficult for him to breathe for a moment.
The month after he’d first run into Arthur - the tiny dark speck trekking across a hillside, so far away that to Eames’ eyes he’d almost looked like an ant - they’d made their first fire on a patch of dirt between two boulders. Arthur, easing himself down onto the earth, hawk-like. They hadn’t trusted each other at that point and Eames had woken each morning expecting a bullet between his shoulder-blades.
“Have you thought about what’ll happen when everything runs out?” Arthur had said.
Eames dusted bark off his gloves and squinted through the smoke. “We raid.”
“Where?”
“I know places.”
Arthur made a dry, disbelieving noise, pulling his legs up closer to his body. He was thinner back then, as prickly and closed-off as barbed wire. “And what are we going to do when those places run out?”
“We go elsewhere,” Eames said. “We’ll find something.”
“Sure,” Arthur said, giving him a wary look. “But what if - ”
“I’ve gotten us through a month,” Eames pointed out. He picked up a stick and poked it into the flames; a log collapsed, showering sparks onto Eames’ boots, and all through it he could feel Arthur’s eyes on him. “I’ll get us through the rest of it, alright? You just concentrate on not getting yourself shot or something.”
“I’m not going to get myself shot,” Arthur snapped, but some of the tension had bled out of his shoulders.
Eames hadn’t really let himself think about it - what happens when everything runs out; what is going to happen to all of us - but the next morning he’d woken to Arthur kicking snow over the dying fire, breath white and smoggy, and for the first time since they’d met Eames had felt glad that he wasn’t in all of this alone.
You’re not going to lose him, he tells himself now, staring at the dry tracks of blood on the floor. He unclenches his fingers one by one. Breathes out. Things aren’t always going to be like this. You’re going to make it.
He goes through the entire store one more time, and then he heads back.
Arthur is standing next to the window when Eames comes through the doorway, rifle knocking briefly on the frame. Eames’ boots crunch a little on concrete - Arthur has taken the carpet up, rolled it into a corner and tied it with a scrap of cloth.
“I found water,” Arthur says shortly. “A few houses over. Rainwater tank.”
Eames sets the rifle on the mattress. “How much?”
“Enough for a week. More, if we want to stay. We can’t carry it all.”
“So you want to stay,” Eames says.
Arthur’s shoulders form a single tense line against the light from outside. “No. It’s not safe here.”
“It’s not safe anywhere,” Eames says, and when Arthur doesn’t answer, he grabs his canteen from where Arthur’s set it down on the floor. “Not here, not - we can’t keep moving like this forever.”
“We’ve done it all this time,” Arthur bites back. “We can keep doing it.”
Eames looks over at him. There are many things they can keep on doing, running, hiding, forgetting, and Eames thinks about the two of them, worn down like the earth in the years to come. Blood in the back of a convenience store, inherently nameless. Something rises up into the back of his throat and for a moment, Eames allows himself to be afraid.
“There are things that we can change,” he says finally. “Not all things. But some.”
“There is nothing we can change if you don’t trust me,” Arthur says.
“It’s not that - ” Eames starts, but doesn’t know how to finish it. He struggles for a second, fumbling for the right words, loses them. “It isn’t that. That isn’t the reason why, it’s just - ”
“I know you’re just trying to protect me,” says Arthur. “But you keep forgetting that you need protecting too.”
Eames looks down, unscrewing the cap of the canteen to give himself a reason not to answer.
“Please,” Arthur says. “Eames, look at me.”
The shock of heat digs right into Eames’ belly when Arthur slips a palm over the top of Eames’ hand. Arthur’s nails are dirty and a few are broken and outside the ash sifts downward, never-ending, dusting the street with pearlescent grey. There will be wolves out there, somewhere inside the city, and children wearing coats that belong to dead men.
In the light every one of Arthur’s lashes stand out, the only beautiful thing in the world for miles.
--
The End.
--
A/N: A huge thank-you to the darling neomeruru - who put up with my general disorganisation and inability to uphold Gchat schedules /o\ Thank-you, bb, your work is astounding and I absolutely loved working with you. ♥