Fic | Teddy Altman At The End Of The World
Title: Teddy Altman At The End of The World
Author: attilatehbun
Fandom: Young Avengers/Falling Skies
Rating: R
Pairing/Characters: Teddy Altman/Billy Kaplan, Kate Bishop, Eli Bradley, Tommy Shepherd
Word Count: <10,000
Contains: Mind Control, Violence, Post-Apocalyptic World, Guns, Blood
Summary: Maybe things weren't always so clear, Before, but Teddy thought he understood the world enough, understood who he was in it. These days, the road blurs the routine of search, scrounge, fight, hide, survive into a different kind of world with a new kind of people living it, and Teddy has to learn the type of person it's making him if he's ever going to find a way to fit.
A/N: Falling Skies AU. Knowledge of the show isn't necessary as it can be read as an alien invasion au. THO I HIGHLY RECOMMEND CHECKING OUT THE SHOW. Big huge ups to wifey Mici and partner in alien crime Meeya for audiencing/soundboarding/being generally awesome about all my whining.
::
"I never saw this many stars, Before," Billy says. "I wasn't even sure there were this many stars, Before."
He's lying on the hood of one of their vehicles, a beat up old pickup truck that looks like it had been a piece of shit headed for the scrap heap even Before the attack. Now, its rust islands are starting to become rust continents and its cab stinks with the sweat of too many long drives with too many bodies crammed in without even the sickly fat smell of fast food to layer over it. But it runs, and when it doesn't run it can actually be fixed, which makes it a clattery, smoke belching slice of freedom, these days.
Billy's booted feet rest on the bumper, and even stretched full length over the hood his head only just starts to touch the base of the windshield. It's a warm enough night that he's taken off his jacket for once - though not his rifle, never his rifle - and it's balled up under his head as he stares at the sky. His hands rest lightly on his stomach, fingers stark against his dirty leather gloves. His stomach is flat under his t shirt, and his shirt pulls across it, and Teddy does his best not to stare. Instead he lies back, mimicking Billy's posture. His spikes press into his back, his neck, pull against the butt of his own gun. He's getting used to it; once the spikes digging in would have sent a wash of shame and fear over him (can't lie back, not normal, not normal, never normal again) that would have sent him pulling back, sitting stiff. As it is, now, he just adjusts the gun slung across his shoulders and pushes through it. That's terrible too, but at least it's in a different way.
"Such a city boy," he says, letting himself smile and tease instead of having one more existential crisis.
"Oh, like you weren't, Williamsburg," Billy says, turning his head slightly.
"Never said I wasn't, UES," Teddy says. "However, I was a Boy Scout."
Billy looks back up. "I wasn't even a Cub Scout. Mom didn't agree with their policies, which, fair enough. She was also of the opinion of, and I quote, 'A para-military organization is not an appropriate developmental influence.'" He laughs, and it is definitely bitter. "Not much of choice anymore."
"Yeah," Teddy says. He's looking at Billy's second gun, strapped into a shoulder holster and always close to hand, even hidden under Billy's jacket. Teddy still hasn't been allowed a second gun. He got the first because, like it or not, he's useful in undeniable ways. But the scaly patches down his spine mean that one gun is as far as that trust goes.
Teddy turns his head back to the sky. "I used to see stars like this all the time on camping trips with the scouts. Used to make me feel really insignificant. Really small." He covers his eyes with a hand. "Which is cliche as hell, but it's not like it's not true. Now, I don't know. Knowing what's up there, what's come from up there, I don't know whether that makes me feel more important or so much less."
Billy shrugs. Teddy can just feel the movement where their shoulders are almost touching.
"I was such a huge nerd," Billy says finally. "Scifi, comic books, up all night at computer games, you name it. I used to think about what I'd be like, if I was in those stories. If those stories happened in real life. Billy Kaplan at the end of the world." He gestures expansively, one handed. Non-gun hand. "Looking up now that it is the end of the world, at the stars those aliens came from, the only thing it makes me feel is, this? This is how it's going to play? This is who I'm going to be?"
Teddy can't look at him. There's too much layered in and around that, and it all feels a little too true out here, under the sky. "I don't think I buy that you didn't picture badass zombie hunter Billy Kaplan. Maybe not skitter hunter, I'll grant you," he says, "but some kind of alien. Isn't that sort of the point?" Teddy certainly had, awkward, leaning towards chubby Teddy Altman, with his comics and his movies and his hopes that maybe puberty might someday give him some height and rid him of some rolls, just enough that maybe one day some guy might look twice at him. Puberty had given him the height and skitter tech had given him the muscles to outweigh the pudge, but it's still not what he expected. These days he finds himself missing his belly.
Billy laughs, and it's sarcastic, because it's always sarcastic with him, but it's genuine too. "First dead, more like," he says, "when I was being realistic I mean. When I say nerd I mean nerd, like, the whole package. Scrawny, pasty, constantly getting punched. All that was missing was the glasses."
Teddy has spent a not insignificant portion of his free time looking at Billy since being de-harnessed. (When he's not being honest with himself, he blames it on the skitter-vision. Sharper eyes, he can't help it.) Billy's still skinny - none of them really get enough food, despite the scouts' best efforts - but weeks upon months of patrols and skitter ambushes have given him a sort of ranginess, and Teddy can't find a sign of pasty under the layers of caked on dirt and (hopefully) other people's blood. He has a hard time picturing a version of Billy under someone else's fist.
"I just never pictured myself here, not really," Billy's saying. "Like what kind of survival skills do I even have? Before, they mainly consisted of trying to schedule my life to avoid the jackass jocks that wanted to punch my face in. And I still usually managed to put myself directly in their way, more often than not. I was not so great at the whole 'life choice' thing," Teddy laughs and Billy flashes him a quick smile with the corner of his mouth, "and somehow it's me here, and it was my ex who&emdash;"
"I'm sorry," Teddy says when Billy doesn't continue. Sometimes it feels pointless to keep saying things like that, when they've all of them lost so many people, but not now, not here.
Billy sits up, staring out in to the distance. "I mean, we were over long before the invasion, so it's not like," Billy says, looking back at Teddy then quickly away. "But we stayed friends. And if anything, when the ships first came and our high school was bombed, I'm the one of the two of us who normally would have done something colossally stupid and gotten himself stuck. But I got out, and he...didn't."
"He?" Teddy blurts before he can stop himself. He can't help it, his heart's pounding, blood rushing in his ears.
"Yeah," Billy says, turning towards Teddy more deliberately now, eyebrows coming together. "Problem with that?" The picture he paints is tough and defiant, threatening without reaching for his weapons, but his voice catches in the middle like maybe he's not that used to saying it out loud.
Teddy knows he's flushing and is grateful for the dark that keeps it hidden. "No, no," he says, "no, I- I'm-" He looks away from Billy's face, back up at the sky. "Me too," he says quietly.
"Oh." But it sounds like there's a smile coming after it in Billy's voice. Then he abruptly flops back down on to the hood of the truck, all awkward sprawling limbs, and for a moment Teddy sees the boy he must used to have been. Their knees touch at the end of the hood.
They're way out on the edges of the makeshift camp, and though there's the hustle and bustle of people making do behind them, it's quiet and seems very far away. For right now, it almost doesn't seem too hard for Teddy to pretend it's not there at all, to ignore the pressure of the spikes in his back and to think its just the two of them in a different world. To pretend that he has a chance at something he's always wanted. To pretend that he's almost normal.
The almost lasts until the stars start to fade. Billy sits up and stretches before unwadding his jacket and throwing it on.
"C'mon," he says, "we should get back. Get to the mess tent before people start queuing. I've got patrol in a little while and Kate'll be getting antsy." He doesn't look at Teddy as he speaks, gesturing out into the distance as he hops off the truck.
"You know, I came down here once. School trip in eighth grade." Billy shoves his hands into his jacket pockets as Teddy slides down the hood. "It feels like a million years ago. I just remember being so excited about being away from parents for a whole weekend that I barely even paid attention."
Teddy laughs and comes up alongside him, squinting out at the monument on the horizon. "You know, I think I took that exact same trip in eighth grade. Small world, huh?"
Billy looks over at him then. "Getting smaller all the time."
"The thing I mainly remember," Teddy says, "is sitting in the back of the tour bus and cracking jokes about that thing."
"Washington's giant penis?" Billy says, smirking.
Teddy looks over at it, the rubble at the base from where the top hundred or so feet were sheared off by an alien space ship, and leans in close to Billy's ear. "Now? Washington's massive erectile disfunction."
When Billy erupts into surprised snorts of laughter and socks him in the arm, then, then, for that second, he doesn't have to pretend.
::
Teddy's on the way out of the mess tent when the whispers start. They're a near constant, more notable for when they're not there than when they are. Teddy's skitter boosted hearing means that most of them aren't really whispers, but that never seems to deter anyone. There's maybe a hundred of people in their little group, but only two de-harnessed kids still carrying spikes. It's an easy us/them equation.
There had been more kids, eleven in all in the group with Teddy, parasitic larva-like pieces of alien biotech embedded over the spines of every one. Harnessed. The skitters liked that, liked sorting the harnessed kids together into units, almost like nests, with one skitter over them. Maybe it made them easier to move around, to control, to organize their labor. The kids in Teddy's nest had ranged from nine to seventeen, and all of them had been rescued. All of them had had those alien spines severed, de-harnessed, and Teddy still doesn't know how Doc managed it, except that maybe Doc is some kind of wizard. But after that first week, that first week when Teddy was so grateful to be around people again, to eat real human food and use real human speech and to not be puppeted into doing terrible things that he didn't think about what being de-harnessed would really mean, after that, Teddy started to notice things. Things like how the majority of the group stared at them. How the younger kids, the kids who had been harnessed for less time, started to lose the spikes on their backs left from the harnesses' needles. How Teddy's spikes didn't fade, or Coral's, or Tommy's.
Not long after that, Coral disappeared, faded away herself. One morning they broke camp and she'd been accounted for; that night when they'd stopped she was just gone. Teddy doesn't know whether she ran back to the skitters, if she ran to try and find her family, or if she just ran to get away. She had been a sweet girl, but her eyes were more haunted than a fifteen year old's should be and Teddy gets why she'd run. There are times he feels like it himself.
But Teddy doesn't run, and neither does Tommy, and Teddy knows it's for the same reason.
"Teddy! Over here!" Billy calls. He's sitting cross-legged on a large outcrop of granite with Tommy, spooning down bowls of oatmeal and canned peaches, so Teddy takes his own bowl of oatmeal over to join them.
"I was wondering where you were," Billy says. "Usually you're up earlier than this."
"I was, I just," didn't feel like dealing with all the staring at peak time, "felt like taking a walk first thing."
Tommy meets Teddy's eye then, looking like he knows exactly what Teddy didn't say.
Tommy. Tommy is the reason Teddy was rescued. Tommy is Billy's twin, identical except for the color of their hair, and Tommy is the reason Billy fought so hard to get permission to take his team into a skitter camp. It was pure luck for Teddy that he was in Tommy's nest; without that bit of providence he'd still be strapped in.
Now they're the only two kids with spikes. 'Porcupines' is what some of the others call them - the least clever name tossed around, so of course it's the one that's caught on. It should create a sense of solidarity between them, and it does. So does the way they sleep the least, the way they get point on dangerous missions not just because of their skitter given abilities but because some consider them expendable, the way sometimes Teddy looks at Tommy and feels the same I don't belong here reflected back from his eyes. The way they both understand more about the skitters - even if they don't clearly remember it - than any of the people they're fighting alongside could ever. The way they're both making a choice to stay.
But it also creates a wall between them. Being part of what amounts to an alien hive mind with someone else opens you up in way that makes it hard to look at them when you're no longer connected. They experienced the same pain, which is hard enough to feel bounce back, but they also shared the same other feeling, the one Teddy hasn't managed to decode because it's so much worse. It's the feeling that makes Teddy look at Tommy and feel family, but it's so wrapped up in skitters and tech that he doesn't know whether to throw himself into it or stay as far away as he can.
They're connected in a way that neither of them asked for, and that alone makes Teddy want to push away and find where he is.
(He also thinks that Tommy suspects Teddy's feelings for Billy, which means on top of everything else he has 'protective sibling' to worry about.)
"Teddy, have you heard anything I've been saying?" Billy says.
Teddy shakes the thoughts away and shovels some oatmeal into his mouth. "Uh, sorry," he says, mouth full, "I kind of zoned out."
"Doofus," Billy says and raps his spoon against Teddy's knee.
"Ugh, I hate oatmeal," Tommy says, tossing his empty bowl aside. He scrubs a hand down his face in a way that is creepily identical to the gesture Billy makes when he's fed up, thumb and middle finger over their eyebrows and down to their jaws. It's a twin thing, one of dozens of ways Teddy's noticed that they unconsciously mimic each other. He suddenly wonders if they had one of those weird twin languages that only they understood when they were kids.
(Teddy and Tommy now mirror each other sometimes too. Reactions, gestures, movements on missions in sync in a way that can't be taught. He wishes it was something as normal as twinning.)
"I'm just glad to have a full meal for once," Billy says. "And the peaches help. I guess Jess and Luke must have had a successful scout last night."
"Wish I'd gotten to go with them," Tommy says.
"Well you're going with me this afternoon instead, so deal. Which reminds me," Billy says, pointing at Teddy with his spoon, "I've been instructed to tell you that if you opt out of scouting with us, Eli is primed and ready to kick your ass at Scrabble again."
"Oh jesus no, I am not letting him get me again," Teddy says. "Losing fifteen straight games is my limit. I know I was the last sap to catch on to him, but I'm on to him now."
Tommy laughs at the sheer pants wetting terror Teddy is sure he's radiating.
"No, seriously," Teddy continues, "last time he beat me so bad I saw through time. How is he so scary good?"
"Kate and I have a bet on whether it was the dictionary or the encyclopedia that he used to read for fun," Billy says. "I've got two chocolate bars on dictionary."
"I'm pretty sure it's just Grandma Faith," Tommy says and shrugs when they stare blankly at him. "What? You think she wasn't teaching him how to eviscerate people with a well placed 'adz' when he was five? She's the only one around here who can still beat him. The rest of us are just target practice until he can take her down."
"Who's going down?" Kate says, sneaking up and squeezing between Billy and Tommy.
"We're just discussing Eli's Scrabble campaign," Teddy says.
"Oh," she says, stealing a peach from Teddy's bowl and popping into her mouth. "encyclopedia, I'm telling you."
When Kate and Billy devolve into good-natured bickering over which of them is more likely right, offering up 'evidence' and 'proof', Teddy finds it surprisingly easy to laugh as he finishes his oatmeal. Especially when Eli comes up wondering why they're having a frantic spoon fight and yelling the exact same thing about vocabulary as if they're saying different things. All this does is get their spoons turned on him and he scowls and tries to pretend that he's above joining in.
Tommy looks over and finds Teddy's eyes. When Teddy catches the wave of family coming off Tommy, this time he doesn't shy away from it. This time it's not coming from tech.
::
So Eli has this Scrabble set. It's an old travel set, zipped up in a battered nylon case and stashed in the bottom of Eli's knapsack. Teddy doesn't think it came from Before, he's pretty sure Eli snagged it somewhere along the long road, but Eli cares for it like it is a relic of Before. He carries it everywhere, and when a few tiles went missing during a scrambled evac, Teddy caught him taking his hunting knife and a Sharpie to a strip of green wood to make new ones.
Of course, now everyone dreads seeing Eli come at them with that battered case in hand. His grids look more like a really complex Boggle board than any normal Scrabble player's grid and he seems utterly unaware that he outmatches nearly everyone in camp twice over. But everyone respects why he carries it.
Because he's not the only one. A lot of the people carry things like Eli's Scrabble set, small tokens or activities to give them a taste of what normal life used to be like. The lucky ones get to carry these things in addition to personal mementoes, photographs, keychains, stuffed animals. For some, it's all they have.
Kate ties knots. She tries to show Teddy a couple of times, teach him what she's doing, but he can never follow the quickness of her hands and his knots always fall apart with one feeble tug, if they even get that far. Occasionally her knots are for a purpose - she'll get called over by the career military types to demonstrate a knot even they don't know, or to tie a particularly important load down into the bed of a truck - but mostly she does it just for herself. She carries around a length of rope and ties and unties endless knots before she goes to sleep. The particularly nice ones she cuts off and gives to Cassie, the fourteen year old girl that helps Doc out in the retrofitted blood drive truck that's become their 'hospital'. Cassie takes them and strings them into necklaces or pins them to the front of her coat and always smiles the widest when someone compliments them.
Billy now, Billy does card tricks. It's rare for Teddy to find him without a deck of cards in his hand (short of when his hands are otherwise busy sleeping, eating, firing a rifle at a skitter). A deck bulges out his back pocket where a wallet would have been in a different life whenever he's not actively using it.
The third time Billy 'makes' Teddy sit and watch him run through hours of Gemini Twins, or The Sun, or The Lost Kings or Cutting The Aces or Shot Away or The Wizard Takes A Holiday, he confesses why for him it's cards.
"When I was a kid," Billy says, shuffling, "I really wanted to be a magician."
Teddy stares at him. "Wow, you really are the nerdiest person I have ever met. And I say this as a nerd."
"Oh shut up. I was influenced! Siegfried and Roy had tigers! Tigers are cool," Billy says.
"You realize citing Siegfried and Roy is not helping your case, right?" Teddy says.
Billy scowls, really really dramatically, and Teddy can't help but laugh at the way his eyebrows flair up at the sides, like comical angry eyebrows. He catches the corners of Billy's mouth flickering against a snort of his own and it just makes Teddy laugh harder.
"Hey, I'm trying to tell a story here, can you cool it?" Billy says before the smile finally breaks free and he cuts his eyes away from Teddy's.
"Okay, okay, sorry," Teddy says, taking a card from the fan Billy's offering. "So you wanted to be a magician..."
"So I wanted to be a magician," Billy says, "and my parents bought me a magic set for my seventh birthday. Tommy got a chemistry set, even though he asked for a rabbit, which, looking back on it now, must be the genesis for his excitement at making things go boom." He pauses, his eyebrows scrunching in again as the realization hits. Then he shakes his head. "Anyway, so they got me the magic set, but I had like, zero patience to actually practice the tricks, so after a week I was mostly just running around with the fake mustache taped to my face going like this." He lifts his hands up, still holding the deck against his palm in one hand, and wiggles his fingers. "Oooooo."
"Ooooh," Teddy says and waggles his fingers back.
"Now of course, I've got nothing but time," Billy says, putting the deck back in its box, "and forcing the patience. It...helps."
He's quiet for what feels like a long time, and when Teddy lightly bumps his knee, Billy flashes him a tight smile.
Teddy coughs and looks away. "So, did Tommy ever get his rabbit?"
That gets him a real smile and even half a laugh.
"You know, he did actually," Billy says. He passes Teddy his handgun with a look like if you accidentally actually fire this, I will find a way to kill you, even from beyond the grave, and holds the deck up to his forehead.
"He got it like a month later," he continues as Teddy mimes shooting the deck. "After he mixed a bunch of the unnamed 'child-friendly' chemicals in Dad's best sauté pan and completely ruined it. Mom justified it by saying taking care of an animal would teach him how to be responsible for himself and others, but we all knew it was just because Dad didn't want to lose any more pots."
He opens the box and pulls out Teddy's card, One-Eyed Jack himself, newly perforated with a neat bullet hole in the center.
"Like magic," Teddy says with unfeigned delight, as he does every time he watches Billy perform any trick.
Billy smiles a little wistfully, but doesn't look away from Teddy's grin. "Just like."
::
(Teddy doesn't have any pictures. He doesn't have anything from his life Before, he was taken too quickly after the invasion to make sure he had something. He doesn't even have his grief anymore. His mother was killed in front of his eyes, trying to keep the skitters away from him, and right after they took her from him the skitters put a harness on his back and took his ability to mourn her too.
Instead, Teddy keeps a journal. It's not something he used to do, just one more thing about him that's been changed.
Not long after Teddy was rescued, a scouting party broke into a high school to see if there were supplies in the cafeteria that were worth salvaging. Teddy was along for the trip, skitter detector extraordinaire, and he and Tommy had split off to see if there was anything else useful around. When Teddy saw the stack of blue books in one of the teachers' offices he knew that he needed them. He'd always hated the sight of them and their promise of exams and grades, but now they seemed to promise something else. So Teddy took them.
They don't add much weight, tied up in a piece of twine begged off of Kate and tucked under his one pair of extra pants, and Teddy writes in them whenever he can. In the small hours when only he and the lookouts are awake, whenever he can't stand to be in camp even one more second, when he's not driving but riding stretched out in the bed of a pickup with Billy or Kate or Eli nodding off next to him. He writes whatever he can think to write about the days that blur together, about what he can remember, about what he can't.
He keeps the record.)
::
Teddy can run further faster than he ever could before. Further and faster than everyone else in camp. He can jump higher than the kids who used to start for their high school basketball teams, and when he really focuses he can actually scale the outside of buildings. He thinks he could probably scale a shear wall if he really tried, but that scares him badly and he hasn't made an attempt.
He's done the other things though. When the skitters stuck that thing on his back, that harness, it didn't just take away his control over himself, it took away the Teddy that couldn't lift a stuck jeep out of the mud. When the harness was removed, he got his mind back, or at least one almost the same, but it left the jeep lifting thing.
Teddy always wanted super powers. Everybody does, it's pointless to deny it, and a few of the younger kids - the really little ones too young to know better - used follow him around asking him questions and wistfully wishing that they could see the birds in trees 200 yards away. He didn't know how to tell them that he would give almost anything to give these powers back, how the powers come with their parents snatching them away from him with fear and hatred in their eyes.
He can't give the powers back. They're a part of the new person he's going to have to be, and eventually he's going to have to figure out how to negotiate that, unless of course a mech blows him up first. Until either one of those things happen, he's stuck where he is. Outside, one step removed, even from himself.
But he does have the powers, which are at least useful. Teddy gets pulled for missions reasonably often, and he's glad to have the chance to help. It's easy to use what the skitters did to him to protect the people he's got. It's easy to use the advanced sight they gave him to shoot them before they can kill the other people on his team. It's easy to use the strength and endurance they gave him to do deep recon and give the heavy ordinance fighters enough warning that they can take out the giant robotic heavys before the mechs can get close enough to threaten camp. He can climb a tree for lookout or run a message or stay awake for sentry duty or kill a skitter up close and personal with nothing more than a knife if someone's in trouble. He can run the risks other people can't.
But he never feel quite like he's on the team. He's not officially a fighter, only when he's asked, and even then that's usually by Billy and his little band of scouts. Teddy still only has the one gun. When it's not Billy or Kate with him, Teddy knows the other fighters half expect him to turn his gun on them.
::
The skitter column is about a quarter of a mile off, as best Teddy can figure, and they look like they're moving away. They're still too close for Teddy's comfort, even going the opposite direction, and it sends shivers down his- Teddy would say spine, but that's just not true anymore. Shivers down his harness, shivers in his harness, shivers of longing that terrify him even more than the skitters and their freaky spider legs.
He gives the squad of alien fighters one more look, one more confirmation that the camp isn't in their sights, before starting the climb down from his vantage point at the top of a high pine. He could just jump all the way down, he knows he would barely even feel the jolt in his legs, but climbing from branch to branch still feels like the kid he used to be, camping with his mom. Right now, he needs that against the prickling in his spikes.
Billy pulls his bike up alongside Teddy as he's dropping down from the last branch, dust puffing up under his boots.
"You got patrol?" Teddy says, pointing at Billy's bike and gear with his chin as he brushes the pine needles and sap from his hands.
"Nah, Kate's going with Jess this morning," Billy says. "I actually wanted to talk to you about something. You busy?"
Teddy is rarely busy. He was only up a tree scouting for skitters because he likes to know where they are at all times. Unless he's been assigned to a mission, he usually just roams around, trying to see if there are any odd jobs that need doing. He knows he makes most of the civilians in charge of the regular camp duties uncomfortable, but he tries anyway. Most people aren't like Billy. Most people don't like reminders like Teddy or Tommy around.
"I've got nothing but time," he says, because doing whatever it is Billy wants is always going to be better than maybe possibly hefting crates on to trucks to make ready for their next bug out.
"Lucky you," Billy says and grins. He tilts his head behind him. "Hop on."
Teddy slides on to the bike behind Billy, reminding himself not to clutch Billy's waist too tight when Billy revs up and drives off. They drive until they reach a wide meadow circled by a decent cover of trees. There are plenty of places to go to ground should more skitters than they can handle appear, which Teddy kind of hates is where his mind automatically goes these days.
Teddy climbs off the bike as soon as Billy stops. His whole body is vibrating from the motor of the bike and he's tingling everywhere he was pressed up against Billy's back. He has to remember to take a breath.
"You didn't bring me out here to kill me and dispose of the body did you?" Teddy says, smiling until he can will his full body flush back down.
Billy swings off the bike and leans back against it, crossing his arms. "Altman, you will never see me coming," he deadpans. Then he laughs. "Hear me though, that's a different story. Tripping over your own feet when you've got this much gear can make a hell of a clatter. But actually, I was thinking you should join the scout team for real. Like, officially."
Teddy ducks his head and rubs the back of his neck, fingers scraping the spikes. That Billy believes in him feels amazing, it really does, but he knows it's not enough. "Billy, I'm not sure that the others...you know," he says, waving his hand helplessly.
"Fuck the others," Billy says, standing up straight. "You're with us, Teddy, not the skitters. It doesn't matter what they think."
"Actually, it kind of does matter," Teddy says.
"Look, I think Cap would be open to it," Billy says. "You've more than proven yourself, even when you really shouldn't have to. And I'll vouch for you, and that, and so will Eli and Kate."
Teddy's heart swells.
"If you don't want to do it, that's one thing," Billy says. "But I think you do, and I think you're already good at it, and I want- I think anyone would be lucky to have you watching their back. Seriously, fuck the rest of the group."
Teddy can't not smile at that. He knows it's way more complicated than what Billy's saying, actually belonging to a group is never as simple as flipping them off, but that's just Billy's way about everything. Maybe one day Teddy might start believing it himself.
"Alright, alright," he says, still grinning. "We can take it to Cap, see what she says." He looks around. "But why did we come all the way out here for this? This isn't a conversation the really requires extreme privacy."
Teddy's heart beats a little faster as Billy steps closer to him. "Nah," Billy says, "we came out here because, if you're going to be a scout," he grins and gestures at the bike, "first you have to learn how to ride."
Teddy has never once pictured himself as a motorcycle rider. His mental image of motorcycles is still gigantic fucking Harleys, the kind rejected by their mini militia for being too loud, too gas-guzzling. The off-roaders they do use hardly look like motorcycles in comparison, but as Teddy still doesn't own an entirely inappropriate amount of leather, maybe that's right. Maybe that's how it should be.
The off-roaders are a valuable commodity though. They're easily the most important vehicles in camp, essential on all but the most heavy of missions, the only thing that allows them to find nearly the amount of supplies that they need. They don't have many, and in camp only a few people know how to ride the ones they do. Teddy realizes then how much more Billy is offering him here than simply becoming an official member of the team.
"Billy, I," Teddy starts, then shakes his head. "Okay," he says, smiling as he throws his leg over the saddle, "but if I break it, it's on you."
Billy leans over and adjusts Teddy's hands on the handlebars. "Oh please," he says, "I would totally throw you to the wolves."
Teddy just grins and kicks the bike into motion.
::
There's so much in terminology.
Sometimes Teddy gets stuck on it, times when he needs to step back, to distance himself, to think about the reality of the apocalypse like it's one more lesson in class. He can use it to track how time as it passes, the day 'watch your six' becomes a phrase relevant to his life instead of line grunted by square jawed action heroes in Saturday afternoon movies, the day he knows the difference between an M16 and an AK beyond just the stat screen in video games. How Before words like motorcycle stop meaning fun and start meaning life.
Before. Everyone says it, everyone says it with the capital letter, Before. Teddy thinks it with the capital letter. Before. Meaning the time before the attack, before the aliens came and destroyed the military, before they obliterated the cities, before they took the kids and killed the parents. The time with electricity and nine-to-fives, with pizza and hospitals and taking your dog to the dog park on a Sunday afternoon and getting shoved to the floor by the biggest asshole in your class Monday morning. Before. It carries the weight of a historical term, like B.C.E. or A.D. or any other short easy way of saying something significant happened here. All those other terms are meaningless these days. There's just Before.
Teddy has his own sub term. Lowercase before, after Before but before he was rescued. His time with the skitters, hazy and not fully distinct, when his mind wasn't really his own because a larva-looking piece of alien technology had embedded needles into his spine (accepted terminology: harness) and turned the part of Teddy that was Teddy off.
There hadn't been any terminology then, the skitters didn't seem to use it. Not with the other kids like Teddy, the ones with parasitic harnesses taking them over. The kids didn't have any words, any framework to lay the experience over and force it to become understandable. Teddy hadn't even had a word for the enormous bug-like aliens until he'd woken up with the militia. Different people in camp call them different things, cooties, spiders, green meanies, but skitters is the word that sticks. The word that spreads.
But when Teddy was with them, in his own personal before, there hadn't been any of that. Just instincts and compulsions, feelings of Above, Obey, Protect.
Ours.
::
It was supposed to be a standard mission. Or at least, as standard as anything could be in days when giant bug aliens emerged from rubble that used to be cities. There weren't supposed to be any but the expected problems.
They pull fuel scouting partly due to luck and partly due to Tommy looking at Billy and Billy saying Let's get the hell out of dodge as if it wasn't Tommy's need. That's one more need Teddy and Tommy share far too often and Teddy jumps at the invitation.
They load the bed of one of the pickups with the fuel barrels, take as many gas cans as can fit on the bikes, and head out to find a gas station. Teddy's two whole Driver's Ed classes (plus the fact that he still overbalances on a bike one time out of three) entitle him to truck duty with Kate riding shotgun, actual gun pointed out the window, with Billy, Eli, Tommy, and Jess on bikes as escort. Tommy yells something about cushy seats and soft asses as they pull out, and Kate flips him off while Teddy laughs. Teddy feels good, and when Kate flashes him a smirk and another gesture, like he's in on it, he feels even better
That good feeling lasts as they push forward, with no signs of skitters as they fan out over the back streets. It seems like providence, or a damn good spot of luck when they find a gas station early on, out at the outskirts of Small Town, America, version 17.2. The station seems largely untouched, the structure mostly intact and the pumps still standing, so Eli waves in the truck after doing a quick perimeter check. Once they're installed, Eli, Tommy, and Jess peel off to see if they can find another station or any other supplies, because, as Eli says, "It's always good to be prepared."
Billy snorts at their retreating backs. "Eli was definitely a Boy Scout."
"Oh, no question," Teddy says.
"Actually," Kate says from her lookout post on top of the truck, "he quit the scouts over 'ideological differences' when he was eight."
That sends Billy into such paroxysms of laughter that Kate actually has to flick a piece of gravel at his head before he can get himself under control and get to filling the drums with diesel.
Teddy unloads all the cans and picks a gasoline pump, thankful to not have to siphon from yet another overturned car. He points at the gas station's sign, the part that reads "Diesel: $4.28/gal", and pokes Billy in the back.
"Sir, I'm afraid you're going to have one hell of a bill," he says. "The management requires some indication that you will be able to pay."
"Hey man, you know I'm good for it," Billy says.
"Just put it on my tab," Kate says, tossing an AmEx down.
"Why do you even still have that?" Teddy says and Kate just shrugs. Strange the habits that they can't quite shake.
Billy picks up the card anyway and dutifully swipes it through the pump before prying the lid off the first drum, and the air explodes.
Kate is flung free of the truck but must find her feet quickly because Teddy hears the report of her rifle cutting through the ringing in his ears almost immediately. He can't see where Billy is, can't see much of anything at all, flat on his back with haze swirling in and out of his vision. He feels something trickling down the side of his face and thinks absurdly, I hope that's not gas, we can't afford to waste any.
The air explodes again, this time with mech fire. Teddy tries to get to his feet, tries to find Billy and Kate, tries to get to cover, but everything seems way too loud. None of his limbs feel connected to his body and when he tries to move just his head, the sudden wave of nausea keeps him down. He tries to yell, but has no breath. He can feel skitters everywhere.
Suddenly a skitter is over him, intruding on the one line of sight he has. Teddy tries to find his voice again, but all that comes out is a croak. The skitter stares at him for a moment, mandibles clicking, then it wraps one of its long fingered feet around his chest and lifts him up. When Teddy is lifted high enough, he sees the figure that was waiting behind the skitter. Until now, the only thing anyone has ever seen has been skitters, and even though his memory of being harnessed is hazy, he's pretty sure he's never seen an alien like this, not even in the skitter camps. It looks like someone took a fish and stretched it out, giving it arms and legs in the process. Something about its long face scares Teddy worse than any skitter.
Someone screams, "Teddy!", Teddy can't tell who but it jolts him enough to struggle against the skitter's grip. He can feel the new alien prying at the edges of his mind and he tries to reach for his gun, but before he can get his arms to respond the coldness of the alien's mind digs into his.
Everything goes black.
::
The first thing Teddy notices when he comes to is how cold the floor is. Concrete, and almost icily cold. Teddy rolls over slowly, wincing at the stab of pain in his head. His arms are tied behind him; he pulls his wrists against the binding but whatever the ropes are made of is too tough for him to break through.
The gas station must have been a trap. Left intact as bait for the desperate. Maybe they tripped some alarm, sent some sign. Or maybe there was a well hidden scout, just waiting for someone to go for the cheese.
It doesn't matter now. He takes stock of himself. Aside from his throbbing head, he seems to be in one piece. He's alive, which seems odd, and he's thinking for himself, which seems odder. If he was captured, it must have been to bring him back into formation, so why isn't he already harnessed? He awkwardly draws himself up to his knees to take stock of his surroundings. There's a lot of machinery around (an auto body shop?) but no other people. Or skitters. He can feel the skitters coming, no doubt drawn by his sudden return to consciousness, but for the moment he's alone.
Billy and Kate aren't here. Teddy tries not to get his hopes up. Just because they're not here doesn't mean they got away, they could be d-
Teddy's heart clenches painfully and he shakes the thought away. Thinking like that won't help him any; the fact that they aren't here means they probably aren't getting harnessed, and that thought will have to be enough.
That's when the skitters come in, through the only door Teddy can see and swarming down from the rafters. There's not a lot of them, but there are enough to make Teddy rethink trying to fight his way out, unarmed with his hands bound. They circle around him, and Teddy hates the part of himself that wants to give in, the part of him that remembers the one that cared for his little nest and sent something that felt like love through the harness. That one was killed when Billy and the others rescued him and Tommy, and Teddy isn't sad about that, but surrounded by skitters like he is now, no people to anchor him, the part of him that isn't strictly human anymore aches for that feeling of Ours.
The skitters part to allow in another one. Teddy assumes it's this group's leader until he sees the fish-alien alongside it. Then he sees what is in the skitter's hands and he doesn't care about anything else at all, just getting away from this place as quickly as he can.
It's a harness.
They were always planning to re-harness him, he just woke up before they could do it, and he has to get away. He almost makes it to his feet before two of the skitters reach out and grab his arms, just enough to keep him on his knees. He laughs once, the sound echoing from the high ceilings. That he was rescued one time was nothing short of a miracle, he can't hope for it now. This harnessing will probably be for good, until he doesn't remember ever being free of it. He can only hope that the camp moves on before the skitters can learn about it from his brain.
But they're still not harnessing him. Instead all the skitters are pulling away and moving towards the exit. No, not all, the one with the harness stays, as does the new alien. The rest swarm out, clearly distressed, and Teddy realizes he can hear short bursts of gunfire, getting more sustained now as more skitters push out to meet it.
He doesn't know who it is, if it's one of the others or if some random person stumbled across the location and decided to go on a skitter hunt. It doesn't matter. It doesn't seem like the skitters can puppet him without the harness - why would they bind his hands? - and his only chance to run for it is now.
He fights against the bindings again, harder than before, letting the adrenaline spike hit and feed his strength. The gunfire sounds closer and he thinks he hears voices calling out. He almost, almost, pulls one hand free.
The skitter with the harness lunges forward and uses its free hand to shove Teddy's head down. One of its feet grabs his wrists and squeezes hard enough to make him shout as the bones in his wrist grind together.
There's a pause in the shooting, brief but distinct, and the footsteps get even quicker. Teddy can feel the skitter bringing the harness closer; the spikes in his back are tingling like they want to be reconnected. It would be an incredibly annoying itch if it wasn't also so terrifying. Teddy doesn't want that to be the last thing he's aware of as a human.
There's a burst of gunfire, closer and louder than all the rest, and the harness clatters to the floor. It's followed by the heavy weight of the skitter's dead body. Teddy can't help but look; two, right between the eyes.
Teddy drags his head up. Someone might have saved him, but now they're both in it. The lack of movement from the fish alien scares him more than anything. Call it instinct, or half-remembered dreams, but he doesn't think fighting their way out is going to work.
He redoubles his struggles against the bindings around his wrists when he sees Billy standing there, alone, rifle gone, with only his handgun to point at the alien behind him. It's still no use.
"Billy you have to go," he yells, voice cracking. He can't. He thought there was nothing worse than being re-harnessed, but not this. He'll stay, he'll do what the alien wants, he'll let himself get harnessed again, but not this. He can't let someone else get themselves killed for him. Billy.
"I'm not letting them take you," Billy says. His voice stays firm, though his eyes are red. From the smoke and haze and grime.
"Just go, it's not worth it, please", Teddy tries again.
Teddy feels the alien move behind him and Billy fires immediately. He misses, either on purpose or because the alien is just too damn fast, Teddy can't be sure, but it doesn't matter. Billy's mouth twitches and Teddy hears him start to say, It's worth ev- before the cold trickle of the aliens's mind runs up Teddy's spine and into his brain.
It's just as bad as it ever was. No, worse, because he was freed once and now there's more of him left to watch it happen. More of him that remembers. More of him that screams.
Of course, it doesn't matter how he feels or how much he rebels. It happens. The alien's mind slides into and over his, pulls along every nerve in his body. Teddy feels his head lift up and hears his voice say the words,
"Hello, Billy Kaplan."
Teddy watches as confusion rolls over Billy's face, watches how he recoils. He knows that none of Billy's group have seen this before, harnessed kids like puppets turning familiar voices into things to fear. He himself didn't even remember that the skitters could do this until the alien took back his mind, memories pushed aside by tech. Teddy reaches out to Billy, but doesn't.
Billy's eyes jump to Teddy then back to the alien. His gun comes up all that much higher. "Let him go."
Teddy's mouth opens and the words come out,
"This one belongs to us, Billy Kaplan. We require his return."
Billy's face contorts. "He is not yours," he says. "Release him, or I swear I will kill you."
The alien tilts Teddy's head.
"You may try,"
Teddy's voice says,
"I could destroy both of you right here, you and the others you came with. But it does not have to be that way. Leave this one, and I will let you go back to playing at rebellion."
Teddy can feel more skitters coming, creeping around the outskirts of the building. He says, He's stalling, get out. But he doesn't.
"Like hell," Billy says. "I haven't seen one of your kind before, and I don't have many bullets left, but I'm betting I can find some of your soft parts before I run out."
"Why do you keep fighting, Billy Kaplan?"
Teddy's voice says.
"Because that's what we do. And that's what we will always do, when it comes to the people we," his eyes flick to Teddy, "when it comes to one of our own."
"Interesting,"
Teddy's voice says.
"Even when I could kill him with a mere thought. This seems foolish, though in keeping with your species' behavior so far. Maybe I should not kill you."
Teddy wants to say something, anything, any kind of warning to make Billy go, but he doesn't. Instead he starts to cough, then he starts to choke as the alien's mind squeezes his throat closed. Dimly he hears Billy fire, and the pressure on his airway tightens unbearably for a split second before easing as the alien's mind slips away from his. There's the sound of footsteps, but he's too busy collapsing forward and gasping for air to discern whose they are. Concrete chips dig into his forehead.
Billy's boots always clomp, that's a constant, despite how many times Kate or Eli or Jess lecture him about stealth he persists in wearing boots two sizes too large. Teddy used to assume it was just out of the necessity of lack of supplies, but it's gone on so long that Teddy doesn't have much hope that it's anything other than an unfortunate personality quirk. Either way, the clomping is what lets him know that Billy's the one still standing, still running across the bombed out floor and skidding to his knees in front of Teddy.
Billy helps Teddy back upright to kneeling, then his hands are everywhere. They fly all over Teddy, down his arms, up across his shoulders, over his thighs, his knees, up through the blood smeared down the side of his face, which makes Teddy wince. He's still fighting to get his breath back.
"Jesus, Teddy, are you okay, where does it, what can I?" Billy says, hands still rushing, moving back over places already confirmed to be in one piece.
"You're-" Teddy coughs, then draws in a shuddery breath. "You're so stupid Billy, why didn't you go."
Billy lets out a strangled laugh and leans his forehead against Teddy's. "You're so stupid. I wasn't going to let it take you."
"And you almost got yourself killed." Teddy presses his forehead a little harder against Billy's, grateful for the permission.
Billy closes his eyes. "Hey, we're still here aren't we." It's not a question.
"By the skin of our teeth. I'm beginning to see what you were saying about 'bad life choices'," Teddy says and smiles when Billy does.
Billy's hands have almost stopped moving. They're at least doing more resting on Teddy's shoulders than pressing all over to check for injuries. Teddy closes his eyes and lets himself rest like that, just for a second. He sighs and Billy tenses like he's about to says something, and the small movement has the ache in Teddy's shoulders making itself known.
"Hey, Billy," he says, "do you think you could-"
He doesn't get any further than that, because Billy's hands are suddenly back on Teddy's face, this time not searchingly frantic or gingerly tracing Teddy's wound but firm and sure on his jaw. Because Billy is suddenly kissing him.
It's kind of rushed and messy, and Billy pulls back after only a second, eyes searching everywhere but Teddy's face.
Teddy's heart is racing, he can barely think.
"Billy," he says slowly, without pulling away, "can you cut my hands free? Because I really need to kiss you back and this is making that really difficult."
"Oh, right, yeah, uh," Billy says, shaky, but a smile starts climbing his face as he reaches for his boot knife.
He doesn't move any more than that, doesn't stand or move away from Teddy, almost like he can't. Instead, he reaches both arms around Teddy, feels for his wrists and the straps binding them, and slices through them with a quick, efficient stroke. Teddy brings his arms around, ache relieved, and his hands instinctively go to Billy's jacket. He couldn't stop them if he wanted to and he doesn't, he wants to clutch at the edges of Billy's jacket, pull, press his knuckles to Billy's waist, and he does. Billy presses in closer and Teddy starts to smile back.
"Better," Teddy says quietly. Billy makes a small noise that's not really a word.
Teddy lets go of Billy's jacket to slide his hands inside and then they're kissing again, deeper and more sure. They both reek to the high heavens of gasoline and smoke and sweat and Teddy is acutely aware of the fact that he hasn't brushed his teeth in months, but he doesn't care. He doesn't care about his spikes or the ache in his knees from the floor or the fact that there are almost definitely more skitters bearing down on them right now. He doesn't care that it's anything but normal, he has it.
When they break for air, Teddy leans into Billy a little bit more, fingers resting over his spine. He breathes out a laugh. "This is not exactly how I was expecting our first kiss to go," he says.
It's Billy's turn to laugh. "You were expecting our first kiss?"
Teddy nuzzles his bloody cheek against Billy's. "Well, I was hoping."
Billy kisses him again, short but with no hesitation. "Note to self: near death situations are not romancing opportunities."
"Hey, we're both still here aren't we?" Teddy says.
"And I'm the one that gets accused of poor life planning," Billy scoffs.
"Well, if the shoe fits," says an altogether different voice. "Which, by the way, yours still don't."
They both turn their heads to see Kate, not quite running but certainly not taking her time. Eli backs in behind her, gun pointed at their six. Kate has Billy's rifle and tosses it to him quickly, then when she sees that Teddy's hands aren't bound she tosses Teddy her backup weapon without a second thought.
And Teddy knows that there is nothing, no false stolen sense of belonging any alien tech could force on him that could ever compare to this right here. He knows that this is what he'll always fight for.
"Alright guys," Eli says, "we've got mechs incoming. Tommy and Jess are out guarding the truck but they can't hold them off alone and I'd prefer to get out of here before either of them gets it into their heads to try. Where's the pile of porpoise hork?"
"Porpoise hork?" Teddy asks Kate as Billy helps him to his feet.
Kate shrugs. "That alien looked like a half digested fish stuffed into a latex human suit. It works," she says as Billy tells Eli, "I got in a couple of shots before it could k- before it got away, but unless they keep their brains in their arms it's probably going to make it."
Eli nods. "Right. We gotta get this intel to Cap. New, probably worse aliens? She's gotta know." He turns to Teddy. "Can you move?"
"If it means getting out of here," Teddy says. Billy slides an arm around his back to support Teddy's arm over his shoulders. Teddy doesn't strictly need it, but it helps all the same.
From outside there's a rattle of gunfire, then Tommy whoops.
"Skitters," Kate says, readying her gun.
"Suppose we better get out there," Billy says. "Before Tommy blows us all up."
"Can't let him have all the fun," Eli says.
Teddy cocks his gun. A year ago he was reading comic books about zombies and fantasizing about his own post-apocalyptic derring-do. The reality turned out to be aliens, not zombies, and instead of a man-with-plan badass, on his bad days Teddy feels more than half alien himself. But Billy's grinning at him and he's got people who trust him to have their backs, people who couldn't give a rats's ass about alien tech or the things other people say - people who know he's one of them no matter what - and even with the specter of doom hanging over all their heads, he'll take it. He's still here.
Teddy Altman at the end of the world.
::fin::
Author: attilatehbun
Fandom: Young Avengers/Falling Skies
Rating: R
Pairing/Characters: Teddy Altman/Billy Kaplan, Kate Bishop, Eli Bradley, Tommy Shepherd
Word Count: <10,000
Contains: Mind Control, Violence, Post-Apocalyptic World, Guns, Blood
Summary: Maybe things weren't always so clear, Before, but Teddy thought he understood the world enough, understood who he was in it. These days, the road blurs the routine of search, scrounge, fight, hide, survive into a different kind of world with a new kind of people living it, and Teddy has to learn the type of person it's making him if he's ever going to find a way to fit.
A/N: Falling Skies AU. Knowledge of the show isn't necessary as it can be read as an alien invasion au. THO I HIGHLY RECOMMEND CHECKING OUT THE SHOW. Big huge ups to wifey Mici and partner in alien crime Meeya for audiencing/soundboarding/being generally awesome about all my whining.
::
"I never saw this many stars, Before," Billy says. "I wasn't even sure there were this many stars, Before."
He's lying on the hood of one of their vehicles, a beat up old pickup truck that looks like it had been a piece of shit headed for the scrap heap even Before the attack. Now, its rust islands are starting to become rust continents and its cab stinks with the sweat of too many long drives with too many bodies crammed in without even the sickly fat smell of fast food to layer over it. But it runs, and when it doesn't run it can actually be fixed, which makes it a clattery, smoke belching slice of freedom, these days.
Billy's booted feet rest on the bumper, and even stretched full length over the hood his head only just starts to touch the base of the windshield. It's a warm enough night that he's taken off his jacket for once - though not his rifle, never his rifle - and it's balled up under his head as he stares at the sky. His hands rest lightly on his stomach, fingers stark against his dirty leather gloves. His stomach is flat under his t shirt, and his shirt pulls across it, and Teddy does his best not to stare. Instead he lies back, mimicking Billy's posture. His spikes press into his back, his neck, pull against the butt of his own gun. He's getting used to it; once the spikes digging in would have sent a wash of shame and fear over him (can't lie back, not normal, not normal, never normal again) that would have sent him pulling back, sitting stiff. As it is, now, he just adjusts the gun slung across his shoulders and pushes through it. That's terrible too, but at least it's in a different way.
"Such a city boy," he says, letting himself smile and tease instead of having one more existential crisis.
"Oh, like you weren't, Williamsburg," Billy says, turning his head slightly.
"Never said I wasn't, UES," Teddy says. "However, I was a Boy Scout."
Billy looks back up. "I wasn't even a Cub Scout. Mom didn't agree with their policies, which, fair enough. She was also of the opinion of, and I quote, 'A para-military organization is not an appropriate developmental influence.'" He laughs, and it is definitely bitter. "Not much of choice anymore."
"Yeah," Teddy says. He's looking at Billy's second gun, strapped into a shoulder holster and always close to hand, even hidden under Billy's jacket. Teddy still hasn't been allowed a second gun. He got the first because, like it or not, he's useful in undeniable ways. But the scaly patches down his spine mean that one gun is as far as that trust goes.
Teddy turns his head back to the sky. "I used to see stars like this all the time on camping trips with the scouts. Used to make me feel really insignificant. Really small." He covers his eyes with a hand. "Which is cliche as hell, but it's not like it's not true. Now, I don't know. Knowing what's up there, what's come from up there, I don't know whether that makes me feel more important or so much less."
Billy shrugs. Teddy can just feel the movement where their shoulders are almost touching.
"I was such a huge nerd," Billy says finally. "Scifi, comic books, up all night at computer games, you name it. I used to think about what I'd be like, if I was in those stories. If those stories happened in real life. Billy Kaplan at the end of the world." He gestures expansively, one handed. Non-gun hand. "Looking up now that it is the end of the world, at the stars those aliens came from, the only thing it makes me feel is, this? This is how it's going to play? This is who I'm going to be?"
Teddy can't look at him. There's too much layered in and around that, and it all feels a little too true out here, under the sky. "I don't think I buy that you didn't picture badass zombie hunter Billy Kaplan. Maybe not skitter hunter, I'll grant you," he says, "but some kind of alien. Isn't that sort of the point?" Teddy certainly had, awkward, leaning towards chubby Teddy Altman, with his comics and his movies and his hopes that maybe puberty might someday give him some height and rid him of some rolls, just enough that maybe one day some guy might look twice at him. Puberty had given him the height and skitter tech had given him the muscles to outweigh the pudge, but it's still not what he expected. These days he finds himself missing his belly.
Billy laughs, and it's sarcastic, because it's always sarcastic with him, but it's genuine too. "First dead, more like," he says, "when I was being realistic I mean. When I say nerd I mean nerd, like, the whole package. Scrawny, pasty, constantly getting punched. All that was missing was the glasses."
Teddy has spent a not insignificant portion of his free time looking at Billy since being de-harnessed. (When he's not being honest with himself, he blames it on the skitter-vision. Sharper eyes, he can't help it.) Billy's still skinny - none of them really get enough food, despite the scouts' best efforts - but weeks upon months of patrols and skitter ambushes have given him a sort of ranginess, and Teddy can't find a sign of pasty under the layers of caked on dirt and (hopefully) other people's blood. He has a hard time picturing a version of Billy under someone else's fist.
"I just never pictured myself here, not really," Billy's saying. "Like what kind of survival skills do I even have? Before, they mainly consisted of trying to schedule my life to avoid the jackass jocks that wanted to punch my face in. And I still usually managed to put myself directly in their way, more often than not. I was not so great at the whole 'life choice' thing," Teddy laughs and Billy flashes him a quick smile with the corner of his mouth, "and somehow it's me here, and it was my ex who&emdash;"
"I'm sorry," Teddy says when Billy doesn't continue. Sometimes it feels pointless to keep saying things like that, when they've all of them lost so many people, but not now, not here.
Billy sits up, staring out in to the distance. "I mean, we were over long before the invasion, so it's not like," Billy says, looking back at Teddy then quickly away. "But we stayed friends. And if anything, when the ships first came and our high school was bombed, I'm the one of the two of us who normally would have done something colossally stupid and gotten himself stuck. But I got out, and he...didn't."
"He?" Teddy blurts before he can stop himself. He can't help it, his heart's pounding, blood rushing in his ears.
"Yeah," Billy says, turning towards Teddy more deliberately now, eyebrows coming together. "Problem with that?" The picture he paints is tough and defiant, threatening without reaching for his weapons, but his voice catches in the middle like maybe he's not that used to saying it out loud.
Teddy knows he's flushing and is grateful for the dark that keeps it hidden. "No, no," he says, "no, I- I'm-" He looks away from Billy's face, back up at the sky. "Me too," he says quietly.
"Oh." But it sounds like there's a smile coming after it in Billy's voice. Then he abruptly flops back down on to the hood of the truck, all awkward sprawling limbs, and for a moment Teddy sees the boy he must used to have been. Their knees touch at the end of the hood.
They're way out on the edges of the makeshift camp, and though there's the hustle and bustle of people making do behind them, it's quiet and seems very far away. For right now, it almost doesn't seem too hard for Teddy to pretend it's not there at all, to ignore the pressure of the spikes in his back and to think its just the two of them in a different world. To pretend that he has a chance at something he's always wanted. To pretend that he's almost normal.
The almost lasts until the stars start to fade. Billy sits up and stretches before unwadding his jacket and throwing it on.
"C'mon," he says, "we should get back. Get to the mess tent before people start queuing. I've got patrol in a little while and Kate'll be getting antsy." He doesn't look at Teddy as he speaks, gesturing out into the distance as he hops off the truck.
"You know, I came down here once. School trip in eighth grade." Billy shoves his hands into his jacket pockets as Teddy slides down the hood. "It feels like a million years ago. I just remember being so excited about being away from parents for a whole weekend that I barely even paid attention."
Teddy laughs and comes up alongside him, squinting out at the monument on the horizon. "You know, I think I took that exact same trip in eighth grade. Small world, huh?"
Billy looks over at him then. "Getting smaller all the time."
"The thing I mainly remember," Teddy says, "is sitting in the back of the tour bus and cracking jokes about that thing."
"Washington's giant penis?" Billy says, smirking.
Teddy looks over at it, the rubble at the base from where the top hundred or so feet were sheared off by an alien space ship, and leans in close to Billy's ear. "Now? Washington's massive erectile disfunction."
When Billy erupts into surprised snorts of laughter and socks him in the arm, then, then, for that second, he doesn't have to pretend.
::
Teddy's on the way out of the mess tent when the whispers start. They're a near constant, more notable for when they're not there than when they are. Teddy's skitter boosted hearing means that most of them aren't really whispers, but that never seems to deter anyone. There's maybe a hundred of people in their little group, but only two de-harnessed kids still carrying spikes. It's an easy us/them equation.
There had been more kids, eleven in all in the group with Teddy, parasitic larva-like pieces of alien biotech embedded over the spines of every one. Harnessed. The skitters liked that, liked sorting the harnessed kids together into units, almost like nests, with one skitter over them. Maybe it made them easier to move around, to control, to organize their labor. The kids in Teddy's nest had ranged from nine to seventeen, and all of them had been rescued. All of them had had those alien spines severed, de-harnessed, and Teddy still doesn't know how Doc managed it, except that maybe Doc is some kind of wizard. But after that first week, that first week when Teddy was so grateful to be around people again, to eat real human food and use real human speech and to not be puppeted into doing terrible things that he didn't think about what being de-harnessed would really mean, after that, Teddy started to notice things. Things like how the majority of the group stared at them. How the younger kids, the kids who had been harnessed for less time, started to lose the spikes on their backs left from the harnesses' needles. How Teddy's spikes didn't fade, or Coral's, or Tommy's.
Not long after that, Coral disappeared, faded away herself. One morning they broke camp and she'd been accounted for; that night when they'd stopped she was just gone. Teddy doesn't know whether she ran back to the skitters, if she ran to try and find her family, or if she just ran to get away. She had been a sweet girl, but her eyes were more haunted than a fifteen year old's should be and Teddy gets why she'd run. There are times he feels like it himself.
But Teddy doesn't run, and neither does Tommy, and Teddy knows it's for the same reason.
"Teddy! Over here!" Billy calls. He's sitting cross-legged on a large outcrop of granite with Tommy, spooning down bowls of oatmeal and canned peaches, so Teddy takes his own bowl of oatmeal over to join them.
"I was wondering where you were," Billy says. "Usually you're up earlier than this."
"I was, I just," didn't feel like dealing with all the staring at peak time, "felt like taking a walk first thing."
Tommy meets Teddy's eye then, looking like he knows exactly what Teddy didn't say.
Tommy. Tommy is the reason Teddy was rescued. Tommy is Billy's twin, identical except for the color of their hair, and Tommy is the reason Billy fought so hard to get permission to take his team into a skitter camp. It was pure luck for Teddy that he was in Tommy's nest; without that bit of providence he'd still be strapped in.
Now they're the only two kids with spikes. 'Porcupines' is what some of the others call them - the least clever name tossed around, so of course it's the one that's caught on. It should create a sense of solidarity between them, and it does. So does the way they sleep the least, the way they get point on dangerous missions not just because of their skitter given abilities but because some consider them expendable, the way sometimes Teddy looks at Tommy and feels the same I don't belong here reflected back from his eyes. The way they both understand more about the skitters - even if they don't clearly remember it - than any of the people they're fighting alongside could ever. The way they're both making a choice to stay.
But it also creates a wall between them. Being part of what amounts to an alien hive mind with someone else opens you up in way that makes it hard to look at them when you're no longer connected. They experienced the same pain, which is hard enough to feel bounce back, but they also shared the same other feeling, the one Teddy hasn't managed to decode because it's so much worse. It's the feeling that makes Teddy look at Tommy and feel family, but it's so wrapped up in skitters and tech that he doesn't know whether to throw himself into it or stay as far away as he can.
They're connected in a way that neither of them asked for, and that alone makes Teddy want to push away and find where he is.
(He also thinks that Tommy suspects Teddy's feelings for Billy, which means on top of everything else he has 'protective sibling' to worry about.)
"Teddy, have you heard anything I've been saying?" Billy says.
Teddy shakes the thoughts away and shovels some oatmeal into his mouth. "Uh, sorry," he says, mouth full, "I kind of zoned out."
"Doofus," Billy says and raps his spoon against Teddy's knee.
"Ugh, I hate oatmeal," Tommy says, tossing his empty bowl aside. He scrubs a hand down his face in a way that is creepily identical to the gesture Billy makes when he's fed up, thumb and middle finger over their eyebrows and down to their jaws. It's a twin thing, one of dozens of ways Teddy's noticed that they unconsciously mimic each other. He suddenly wonders if they had one of those weird twin languages that only they understood when they were kids.
(Teddy and Tommy now mirror each other sometimes too. Reactions, gestures, movements on missions in sync in a way that can't be taught. He wishes it was something as normal as twinning.)
"I'm just glad to have a full meal for once," Billy says. "And the peaches help. I guess Jess and Luke must have had a successful scout last night."
"Wish I'd gotten to go with them," Tommy says.
"Well you're going with me this afternoon instead, so deal. Which reminds me," Billy says, pointing at Teddy with his spoon, "I've been instructed to tell you that if you opt out of scouting with us, Eli is primed and ready to kick your ass at Scrabble again."
"Oh jesus no, I am not letting him get me again," Teddy says. "Losing fifteen straight games is my limit. I know I was the last sap to catch on to him, but I'm on to him now."
Tommy laughs at the sheer pants wetting terror Teddy is sure he's radiating.
"No, seriously," Teddy continues, "last time he beat me so bad I saw through time. How is he so scary good?"
"Kate and I have a bet on whether it was the dictionary or the encyclopedia that he used to read for fun," Billy says. "I've got two chocolate bars on dictionary."
"I'm pretty sure it's just Grandma Faith," Tommy says and shrugs when they stare blankly at him. "What? You think she wasn't teaching him how to eviscerate people with a well placed 'adz' when he was five? She's the only one around here who can still beat him. The rest of us are just target practice until he can take her down."
"Who's going down?" Kate says, sneaking up and squeezing between Billy and Tommy.
"We're just discussing Eli's Scrabble campaign," Teddy says.
"Oh," she says, stealing a peach from Teddy's bowl and popping into her mouth. "encyclopedia, I'm telling you."
When Kate and Billy devolve into good-natured bickering over which of them is more likely right, offering up 'evidence' and 'proof', Teddy finds it surprisingly easy to laugh as he finishes his oatmeal. Especially when Eli comes up wondering why they're having a frantic spoon fight and yelling the exact same thing about vocabulary as if they're saying different things. All this does is get their spoons turned on him and he scowls and tries to pretend that he's above joining in.
Tommy looks over and finds Teddy's eyes. When Teddy catches the wave of family coming off Tommy, this time he doesn't shy away from it. This time it's not coming from tech.
::
So Eli has this Scrabble set. It's an old travel set, zipped up in a battered nylon case and stashed in the bottom of Eli's knapsack. Teddy doesn't think it came from Before, he's pretty sure Eli snagged it somewhere along the long road, but Eli cares for it like it is a relic of Before. He carries it everywhere, and when a few tiles went missing during a scrambled evac, Teddy caught him taking his hunting knife and a Sharpie to a strip of green wood to make new ones.
Of course, now everyone dreads seeing Eli come at them with that battered case in hand. His grids look more like a really complex Boggle board than any normal Scrabble player's grid and he seems utterly unaware that he outmatches nearly everyone in camp twice over. But everyone respects why he carries it.
Because he's not the only one. A lot of the people carry things like Eli's Scrabble set, small tokens or activities to give them a taste of what normal life used to be like. The lucky ones get to carry these things in addition to personal mementoes, photographs, keychains, stuffed animals. For some, it's all they have.
Kate ties knots. She tries to show Teddy a couple of times, teach him what she's doing, but he can never follow the quickness of her hands and his knots always fall apart with one feeble tug, if they even get that far. Occasionally her knots are for a purpose - she'll get called over by the career military types to demonstrate a knot even they don't know, or to tie a particularly important load down into the bed of a truck - but mostly she does it just for herself. She carries around a length of rope and ties and unties endless knots before she goes to sleep. The particularly nice ones she cuts off and gives to Cassie, the fourteen year old girl that helps Doc out in the retrofitted blood drive truck that's become their 'hospital'. Cassie takes them and strings them into necklaces or pins them to the front of her coat and always smiles the widest when someone compliments them.
Billy now, Billy does card tricks. It's rare for Teddy to find him without a deck of cards in his hand (short of when his hands are otherwise busy sleeping, eating, firing a rifle at a skitter). A deck bulges out his back pocket where a wallet would have been in a different life whenever he's not actively using it.
The third time Billy 'makes' Teddy sit and watch him run through hours of Gemini Twins, or The Sun, or The Lost Kings or Cutting The Aces or Shot Away or The Wizard Takes A Holiday, he confesses why for him it's cards.
"When I was a kid," Billy says, shuffling, "I really wanted to be a magician."
Teddy stares at him. "Wow, you really are the nerdiest person I have ever met. And I say this as a nerd."
"Oh shut up. I was influenced! Siegfried and Roy had tigers! Tigers are cool," Billy says.
"You realize citing Siegfried and Roy is not helping your case, right?" Teddy says.
Billy scowls, really really dramatically, and Teddy can't help but laugh at the way his eyebrows flair up at the sides, like comical angry eyebrows. He catches the corners of Billy's mouth flickering against a snort of his own and it just makes Teddy laugh harder.
"Hey, I'm trying to tell a story here, can you cool it?" Billy says before the smile finally breaks free and he cuts his eyes away from Teddy's.
"Okay, okay, sorry," Teddy says, taking a card from the fan Billy's offering. "So you wanted to be a magician..."
"So I wanted to be a magician," Billy says, "and my parents bought me a magic set for my seventh birthday. Tommy got a chemistry set, even though he asked for a rabbit, which, looking back on it now, must be the genesis for his excitement at making things go boom." He pauses, his eyebrows scrunching in again as the realization hits. Then he shakes his head. "Anyway, so they got me the magic set, but I had like, zero patience to actually practice the tricks, so after a week I was mostly just running around with the fake mustache taped to my face going like this." He lifts his hands up, still holding the deck against his palm in one hand, and wiggles his fingers. "Oooooo."
"Ooooh," Teddy says and waggles his fingers back.
"Now of course, I've got nothing but time," Billy says, putting the deck back in its box, "and forcing the patience. It...helps."
He's quiet for what feels like a long time, and when Teddy lightly bumps his knee, Billy flashes him a tight smile.
Teddy coughs and looks away. "So, did Tommy ever get his rabbit?"
That gets him a real smile and even half a laugh.
"You know, he did actually," Billy says. He passes Teddy his handgun with a look like if you accidentally actually fire this, I will find a way to kill you, even from beyond the grave, and holds the deck up to his forehead.
"He got it like a month later," he continues as Teddy mimes shooting the deck. "After he mixed a bunch of the unnamed 'child-friendly' chemicals in Dad's best sauté pan and completely ruined it. Mom justified it by saying taking care of an animal would teach him how to be responsible for himself and others, but we all knew it was just because Dad didn't want to lose any more pots."
He opens the box and pulls out Teddy's card, One-Eyed Jack himself, newly perforated with a neat bullet hole in the center.
"Like magic," Teddy says with unfeigned delight, as he does every time he watches Billy perform any trick.
Billy smiles a little wistfully, but doesn't look away from Teddy's grin. "Just like."
::
(Teddy doesn't have any pictures. He doesn't have anything from his life Before, he was taken too quickly after the invasion to make sure he had something. He doesn't even have his grief anymore. His mother was killed in front of his eyes, trying to keep the skitters away from him, and right after they took her from him the skitters put a harness on his back and took his ability to mourn her too.
Instead, Teddy keeps a journal. It's not something he used to do, just one more thing about him that's been changed.
Not long after Teddy was rescued, a scouting party broke into a high school to see if there were supplies in the cafeteria that were worth salvaging. Teddy was along for the trip, skitter detector extraordinaire, and he and Tommy had split off to see if there was anything else useful around. When Teddy saw the stack of blue books in one of the teachers' offices he knew that he needed them. He'd always hated the sight of them and their promise of exams and grades, but now they seemed to promise something else. So Teddy took them.
They don't add much weight, tied up in a piece of twine begged off of Kate and tucked under his one pair of extra pants, and Teddy writes in them whenever he can. In the small hours when only he and the lookouts are awake, whenever he can't stand to be in camp even one more second, when he's not driving but riding stretched out in the bed of a pickup with Billy or Kate or Eli nodding off next to him. He writes whatever he can think to write about the days that blur together, about what he can remember, about what he can't.
He keeps the record.)
::
Teddy can run further faster than he ever could before. Further and faster than everyone else in camp. He can jump higher than the kids who used to start for their high school basketball teams, and when he really focuses he can actually scale the outside of buildings. He thinks he could probably scale a shear wall if he really tried, but that scares him badly and he hasn't made an attempt.
He's done the other things though. When the skitters stuck that thing on his back, that harness, it didn't just take away his control over himself, it took away the Teddy that couldn't lift a stuck jeep out of the mud. When the harness was removed, he got his mind back, or at least one almost the same, but it left the jeep lifting thing.
Teddy always wanted super powers. Everybody does, it's pointless to deny it, and a few of the younger kids - the really little ones too young to know better - used follow him around asking him questions and wistfully wishing that they could see the birds in trees 200 yards away. He didn't know how to tell them that he would give almost anything to give these powers back, how the powers come with their parents snatching them away from him with fear and hatred in their eyes.
He can't give the powers back. They're a part of the new person he's going to have to be, and eventually he's going to have to figure out how to negotiate that, unless of course a mech blows him up first. Until either one of those things happen, he's stuck where he is. Outside, one step removed, even from himself.
But he does have the powers, which are at least useful. Teddy gets pulled for missions reasonably often, and he's glad to have the chance to help. It's easy to use what the skitters did to him to protect the people he's got. It's easy to use the advanced sight they gave him to shoot them before they can kill the other people on his team. It's easy to use the strength and endurance they gave him to do deep recon and give the heavy ordinance fighters enough warning that they can take out the giant robotic heavys before the mechs can get close enough to threaten camp. He can climb a tree for lookout or run a message or stay awake for sentry duty or kill a skitter up close and personal with nothing more than a knife if someone's in trouble. He can run the risks other people can't.
But he never feel quite like he's on the team. He's not officially a fighter, only when he's asked, and even then that's usually by Billy and his little band of scouts. Teddy still only has the one gun. When it's not Billy or Kate with him, Teddy knows the other fighters half expect him to turn his gun on them.
::
The skitter column is about a quarter of a mile off, as best Teddy can figure, and they look like they're moving away. They're still too close for Teddy's comfort, even going the opposite direction, and it sends shivers down his- Teddy would say spine, but that's just not true anymore. Shivers down his harness, shivers in his harness, shivers of longing that terrify him even more than the skitters and their freaky spider legs.
He gives the squad of alien fighters one more look, one more confirmation that the camp isn't in their sights, before starting the climb down from his vantage point at the top of a high pine. He could just jump all the way down, he knows he would barely even feel the jolt in his legs, but climbing from branch to branch still feels like the kid he used to be, camping with his mom. Right now, he needs that against the prickling in his spikes.
Billy pulls his bike up alongside Teddy as he's dropping down from the last branch, dust puffing up under his boots.
"You got patrol?" Teddy says, pointing at Billy's bike and gear with his chin as he brushes the pine needles and sap from his hands.
"Nah, Kate's going with Jess this morning," Billy says. "I actually wanted to talk to you about something. You busy?"
Teddy is rarely busy. He was only up a tree scouting for skitters because he likes to know where they are at all times. Unless he's been assigned to a mission, he usually just roams around, trying to see if there are any odd jobs that need doing. He knows he makes most of the civilians in charge of the regular camp duties uncomfortable, but he tries anyway. Most people aren't like Billy. Most people don't like reminders like Teddy or Tommy around.
"I've got nothing but time," he says, because doing whatever it is Billy wants is always going to be better than maybe possibly hefting crates on to trucks to make ready for their next bug out.
"Lucky you," Billy says and grins. He tilts his head behind him. "Hop on."
Teddy slides on to the bike behind Billy, reminding himself not to clutch Billy's waist too tight when Billy revs up and drives off. They drive until they reach a wide meadow circled by a decent cover of trees. There are plenty of places to go to ground should more skitters than they can handle appear, which Teddy kind of hates is where his mind automatically goes these days.
Teddy climbs off the bike as soon as Billy stops. His whole body is vibrating from the motor of the bike and he's tingling everywhere he was pressed up against Billy's back. He has to remember to take a breath.
"You didn't bring me out here to kill me and dispose of the body did you?" Teddy says, smiling until he can will his full body flush back down.
Billy swings off the bike and leans back against it, crossing his arms. "Altman, you will never see me coming," he deadpans. Then he laughs. "Hear me though, that's a different story. Tripping over your own feet when you've got this much gear can make a hell of a clatter. But actually, I was thinking you should join the scout team for real. Like, officially."
Teddy ducks his head and rubs the back of his neck, fingers scraping the spikes. That Billy believes in him feels amazing, it really does, but he knows it's not enough. "Billy, I'm not sure that the others...you know," he says, waving his hand helplessly.
"Fuck the others," Billy says, standing up straight. "You're with us, Teddy, not the skitters. It doesn't matter what they think."
"Actually, it kind of does matter," Teddy says.
"Look, I think Cap would be open to it," Billy says. "You've more than proven yourself, even when you really shouldn't have to. And I'll vouch for you, and that, and so will Eli and Kate."
Teddy's heart swells.
"If you don't want to do it, that's one thing," Billy says. "But I think you do, and I think you're already good at it, and I want- I think anyone would be lucky to have you watching their back. Seriously, fuck the rest of the group."
Teddy can't not smile at that. He knows it's way more complicated than what Billy's saying, actually belonging to a group is never as simple as flipping them off, but that's just Billy's way about everything. Maybe one day Teddy might start believing it himself.
"Alright, alright," he says, still grinning. "We can take it to Cap, see what she says." He looks around. "But why did we come all the way out here for this? This isn't a conversation the really requires extreme privacy."
Teddy's heart beats a little faster as Billy steps closer to him. "Nah," Billy says, "we came out here because, if you're going to be a scout," he grins and gestures at the bike, "first you have to learn how to ride."
Teddy has never once pictured himself as a motorcycle rider. His mental image of motorcycles is still gigantic fucking Harleys, the kind rejected by their mini militia for being too loud, too gas-guzzling. The off-roaders they do use hardly look like motorcycles in comparison, but as Teddy still doesn't own an entirely inappropriate amount of leather, maybe that's right. Maybe that's how it should be.
The off-roaders are a valuable commodity though. They're easily the most important vehicles in camp, essential on all but the most heavy of missions, the only thing that allows them to find nearly the amount of supplies that they need. They don't have many, and in camp only a few people know how to ride the ones they do. Teddy realizes then how much more Billy is offering him here than simply becoming an official member of the team.
"Billy, I," Teddy starts, then shakes his head. "Okay," he says, smiling as he throws his leg over the saddle, "but if I break it, it's on you."
Billy leans over and adjusts Teddy's hands on the handlebars. "Oh please," he says, "I would totally throw you to the wolves."
Teddy just grins and kicks the bike into motion.
::
There's so much in terminology.
Sometimes Teddy gets stuck on it, times when he needs to step back, to distance himself, to think about the reality of the apocalypse like it's one more lesson in class. He can use it to track how time as it passes, the day 'watch your six' becomes a phrase relevant to his life instead of line grunted by square jawed action heroes in Saturday afternoon movies, the day he knows the difference between an M16 and an AK beyond just the stat screen in video games. How Before words like motorcycle stop meaning fun and start meaning life.
Before. Everyone says it, everyone says it with the capital letter, Before. Teddy thinks it with the capital letter. Before. Meaning the time before the attack, before the aliens came and destroyed the military, before they obliterated the cities, before they took the kids and killed the parents. The time with electricity and nine-to-fives, with pizza and hospitals and taking your dog to the dog park on a Sunday afternoon and getting shoved to the floor by the biggest asshole in your class Monday morning. Before. It carries the weight of a historical term, like B.C.E. or A.D. or any other short easy way of saying something significant happened here. All those other terms are meaningless these days. There's just Before.
Teddy has his own sub term. Lowercase before, after Before but before he was rescued. His time with the skitters, hazy and not fully distinct, when his mind wasn't really his own because a larva-looking piece of alien technology had embedded needles into his spine (accepted terminology: harness) and turned the part of Teddy that was Teddy off.
There hadn't been any terminology then, the skitters didn't seem to use it. Not with the other kids like Teddy, the ones with parasitic harnesses taking them over. The kids didn't have any words, any framework to lay the experience over and force it to become understandable. Teddy hadn't even had a word for the enormous bug-like aliens until he'd woken up with the militia. Different people in camp call them different things, cooties, spiders, green meanies, but skitters is the word that sticks. The word that spreads.
But when Teddy was with them, in his own personal before, there hadn't been any of that. Just instincts and compulsions, feelings of Above, Obey, Protect.
Ours.
::
It was supposed to be a standard mission. Or at least, as standard as anything could be in days when giant bug aliens emerged from rubble that used to be cities. There weren't supposed to be any but the expected problems.
They pull fuel scouting partly due to luck and partly due to Tommy looking at Billy and Billy saying Let's get the hell out of dodge as if it wasn't Tommy's need. That's one more need Teddy and Tommy share far too often and Teddy jumps at the invitation.
They load the bed of one of the pickups with the fuel barrels, take as many gas cans as can fit on the bikes, and head out to find a gas station. Teddy's two whole Driver's Ed classes (plus the fact that he still overbalances on a bike one time out of three) entitle him to truck duty with Kate riding shotgun, actual gun pointed out the window, with Billy, Eli, Tommy, and Jess on bikes as escort. Tommy yells something about cushy seats and soft asses as they pull out, and Kate flips him off while Teddy laughs. Teddy feels good, and when Kate flashes him a smirk and another gesture, like he's in on it, he feels even better
That good feeling lasts as they push forward, with no signs of skitters as they fan out over the back streets. It seems like providence, or a damn good spot of luck when they find a gas station early on, out at the outskirts of Small Town, America, version 17.2. The station seems largely untouched, the structure mostly intact and the pumps still standing, so Eli waves in the truck after doing a quick perimeter check. Once they're installed, Eli, Tommy, and Jess peel off to see if they can find another station or any other supplies, because, as Eli says, "It's always good to be prepared."
Billy snorts at their retreating backs. "Eli was definitely a Boy Scout."
"Oh, no question," Teddy says.
"Actually," Kate says from her lookout post on top of the truck, "he quit the scouts over 'ideological differences' when he was eight."
That sends Billy into such paroxysms of laughter that Kate actually has to flick a piece of gravel at his head before he can get himself under control and get to filling the drums with diesel.
Teddy unloads all the cans and picks a gasoline pump, thankful to not have to siphon from yet another overturned car. He points at the gas station's sign, the part that reads "Diesel: $4.28/gal", and pokes Billy in the back.
"Sir, I'm afraid you're going to have one hell of a bill," he says. "The management requires some indication that you will be able to pay."
"Hey man, you know I'm good for it," Billy says.
"Just put it on my tab," Kate says, tossing an AmEx down.
"Why do you even still have that?" Teddy says and Kate just shrugs. Strange the habits that they can't quite shake.
Billy picks up the card anyway and dutifully swipes it through the pump before prying the lid off the first drum, and the air explodes.
Kate is flung free of the truck but must find her feet quickly because Teddy hears the report of her rifle cutting through the ringing in his ears almost immediately. He can't see where Billy is, can't see much of anything at all, flat on his back with haze swirling in and out of his vision. He feels something trickling down the side of his face and thinks absurdly, I hope that's not gas, we can't afford to waste any.
The air explodes again, this time with mech fire. Teddy tries to get to his feet, tries to find Billy and Kate, tries to get to cover, but everything seems way too loud. None of his limbs feel connected to his body and when he tries to move just his head, the sudden wave of nausea keeps him down. He tries to yell, but has no breath. He can feel skitters everywhere.
Suddenly a skitter is over him, intruding on the one line of sight he has. Teddy tries to find his voice again, but all that comes out is a croak. The skitter stares at him for a moment, mandibles clicking, then it wraps one of its long fingered feet around his chest and lifts him up. When Teddy is lifted high enough, he sees the figure that was waiting behind the skitter. Until now, the only thing anyone has ever seen has been skitters, and even though his memory of being harnessed is hazy, he's pretty sure he's never seen an alien like this, not even in the skitter camps. It looks like someone took a fish and stretched it out, giving it arms and legs in the process. Something about its long face scares Teddy worse than any skitter.
Someone screams, "Teddy!", Teddy can't tell who but it jolts him enough to struggle against the skitter's grip. He can feel the new alien prying at the edges of his mind and he tries to reach for his gun, but before he can get his arms to respond the coldness of the alien's mind digs into his.
Everything goes black.
::
The first thing Teddy notices when he comes to is how cold the floor is. Concrete, and almost icily cold. Teddy rolls over slowly, wincing at the stab of pain in his head. His arms are tied behind him; he pulls his wrists against the binding but whatever the ropes are made of is too tough for him to break through.
The gas station must have been a trap. Left intact as bait for the desperate. Maybe they tripped some alarm, sent some sign. Or maybe there was a well hidden scout, just waiting for someone to go for the cheese.
It doesn't matter now. He takes stock of himself. Aside from his throbbing head, he seems to be in one piece. He's alive, which seems odd, and he's thinking for himself, which seems odder. If he was captured, it must have been to bring him back into formation, so why isn't he already harnessed? He awkwardly draws himself up to his knees to take stock of his surroundings. There's a lot of machinery around (an auto body shop?) but no other people. Or skitters. He can feel the skitters coming, no doubt drawn by his sudden return to consciousness, but for the moment he's alone.
Billy and Kate aren't here. Teddy tries not to get his hopes up. Just because they're not here doesn't mean they got away, they could be d-
Teddy's heart clenches painfully and he shakes the thought away. Thinking like that won't help him any; the fact that they aren't here means they probably aren't getting harnessed, and that thought will have to be enough.
That's when the skitters come in, through the only door Teddy can see and swarming down from the rafters. There's not a lot of them, but there are enough to make Teddy rethink trying to fight his way out, unarmed with his hands bound. They circle around him, and Teddy hates the part of himself that wants to give in, the part of him that remembers the one that cared for his little nest and sent something that felt like love through the harness. That one was killed when Billy and the others rescued him and Tommy, and Teddy isn't sad about that, but surrounded by skitters like he is now, no people to anchor him, the part of him that isn't strictly human anymore aches for that feeling of Ours.
The skitters part to allow in another one. Teddy assumes it's this group's leader until he sees the fish-alien alongside it. Then he sees what is in the skitter's hands and he doesn't care about anything else at all, just getting away from this place as quickly as he can.
It's a harness.
They were always planning to re-harness him, he just woke up before they could do it, and he has to get away. He almost makes it to his feet before two of the skitters reach out and grab his arms, just enough to keep him on his knees. He laughs once, the sound echoing from the high ceilings. That he was rescued one time was nothing short of a miracle, he can't hope for it now. This harnessing will probably be for good, until he doesn't remember ever being free of it. He can only hope that the camp moves on before the skitters can learn about it from his brain.
But they're still not harnessing him. Instead all the skitters are pulling away and moving towards the exit. No, not all, the one with the harness stays, as does the new alien. The rest swarm out, clearly distressed, and Teddy realizes he can hear short bursts of gunfire, getting more sustained now as more skitters push out to meet it.
He doesn't know who it is, if it's one of the others or if some random person stumbled across the location and decided to go on a skitter hunt. It doesn't matter. It doesn't seem like the skitters can puppet him without the harness - why would they bind his hands? - and his only chance to run for it is now.
He fights against the bindings again, harder than before, letting the adrenaline spike hit and feed his strength. The gunfire sounds closer and he thinks he hears voices calling out. He almost, almost, pulls one hand free.
The skitter with the harness lunges forward and uses its free hand to shove Teddy's head down. One of its feet grabs his wrists and squeezes hard enough to make him shout as the bones in his wrist grind together.
There's a pause in the shooting, brief but distinct, and the footsteps get even quicker. Teddy can feel the skitter bringing the harness closer; the spikes in his back are tingling like they want to be reconnected. It would be an incredibly annoying itch if it wasn't also so terrifying. Teddy doesn't want that to be the last thing he's aware of as a human.
There's a burst of gunfire, closer and louder than all the rest, and the harness clatters to the floor. It's followed by the heavy weight of the skitter's dead body. Teddy can't help but look; two, right between the eyes.
Teddy drags his head up. Someone might have saved him, but now they're both in it. The lack of movement from the fish alien scares him more than anything. Call it instinct, or half-remembered dreams, but he doesn't think fighting their way out is going to work.
He redoubles his struggles against the bindings around his wrists when he sees Billy standing there, alone, rifle gone, with only his handgun to point at the alien behind him. It's still no use.
"Billy you have to go," he yells, voice cracking. He can't. He thought there was nothing worse than being re-harnessed, but not this. He'll stay, he'll do what the alien wants, he'll let himself get harnessed again, but not this. He can't let someone else get themselves killed for him. Billy.
"I'm not letting them take you," Billy says. His voice stays firm, though his eyes are red. From the smoke and haze and grime.
"Just go, it's not worth it, please", Teddy tries again.
Teddy feels the alien move behind him and Billy fires immediately. He misses, either on purpose or because the alien is just too damn fast, Teddy can't be sure, but it doesn't matter. Billy's mouth twitches and Teddy hears him start to say, It's worth ev- before the cold trickle of the aliens's mind runs up Teddy's spine and into his brain.
It's just as bad as it ever was. No, worse, because he was freed once and now there's more of him left to watch it happen. More of him that remembers. More of him that screams.
Of course, it doesn't matter how he feels or how much he rebels. It happens. The alien's mind slides into and over his, pulls along every nerve in his body. Teddy feels his head lift up and hears his voice say the words,
"Hello, Billy Kaplan."
Teddy watches as confusion rolls over Billy's face, watches how he recoils. He knows that none of Billy's group have seen this before, harnessed kids like puppets turning familiar voices into things to fear. He himself didn't even remember that the skitters could do this until the alien took back his mind, memories pushed aside by tech. Teddy reaches out to Billy, but doesn't.
Billy's eyes jump to Teddy then back to the alien. His gun comes up all that much higher. "Let him go."
Teddy's mouth opens and the words come out,
"This one belongs to us, Billy Kaplan. We require his return."
Billy's face contorts. "He is not yours," he says. "Release him, or I swear I will kill you."
The alien tilts Teddy's head.
"You may try,"
Teddy's voice says,
"I could destroy both of you right here, you and the others you came with. But it does not have to be that way. Leave this one, and I will let you go back to playing at rebellion."
Teddy can feel more skitters coming, creeping around the outskirts of the building. He says, He's stalling, get out. But he doesn't.
"Like hell," Billy says. "I haven't seen one of your kind before, and I don't have many bullets left, but I'm betting I can find some of your soft parts before I run out."
"Why do you keep fighting, Billy Kaplan?"
Teddy's voice says.
"Because that's what we do. And that's what we will always do, when it comes to the people we," his eyes flick to Teddy, "when it comes to one of our own."
"Interesting,"
Teddy's voice says.
"Even when I could kill him with a mere thought. This seems foolish, though in keeping with your species' behavior so far. Maybe I should not kill you."
Teddy wants to say something, anything, any kind of warning to make Billy go, but he doesn't. Instead he starts to cough, then he starts to choke as the alien's mind squeezes his throat closed. Dimly he hears Billy fire, and the pressure on his airway tightens unbearably for a split second before easing as the alien's mind slips away from his. There's the sound of footsteps, but he's too busy collapsing forward and gasping for air to discern whose they are. Concrete chips dig into his forehead.
Billy's boots always clomp, that's a constant, despite how many times Kate or Eli or Jess lecture him about stealth he persists in wearing boots two sizes too large. Teddy used to assume it was just out of the necessity of lack of supplies, but it's gone on so long that Teddy doesn't have much hope that it's anything other than an unfortunate personality quirk. Either way, the clomping is what lets him know that Billy's the one still standing, still running across the bombed out floor and skidding to his knees in front of Teddy.
Billy helps Teddy back upright to kneeling, then his hands are everywhere. They fly all over Teddy, down his arms, up across his shoulders, over his thighs, his knees, up through the blood smeared down the side of his face, which makes Teddy wince. He's still fighting to get his breath back.
"Jesus, Teddy, are you okay, where does it, what can I?" Billy says, hands still rushing, moving back over places already confirmed to be in one piece.
"You're-" Teddy coughs, then draws in a shuddery breath. "You're so stupid Billy, why didn't you go."
Billy lets out a strangled laugh and leans his forehead against Teddy's. "You're so stupid. I wasn't going to let it take you."
"And you almost got yourself killed." Teddy presses his forehead a little harder against Billy's, grateful for the permission.
Billy closes his eyes. "Hey, we're still here aren't we." It's not a question.
"By the skin of our teeth. I'm beginning to see what you were saying about 'bad life choices'," Teddy says and smiles when Billy does.
Billy's hands have almost stopped moving. They're at least doing more resting on Teddy's shoulders than pressing all over to check for injuries. Teddy closes his eyes and lets himself rest like that, just for a second. He sighs and Billy tenses like he's about to says something, and the small movement has the ache in Teddy's shoulders making itself known.
"Hey, Billy," he says, "do you think you could-"
He doesn't get any further than that, because Billy's hands are suddenly back on Teddy's face, this time not searchingly frantic or gingerly tracing Teddy's wound but firm and sure on his jaw. Because Billy is suddenly kissing him.
It's kind of rushed and messy, and Billy pulls back after only a second, eyes searching everywhere but Teddy's face.
Teddy's heart is racing, he can barely think.
"Billy," he says slowly, without pulling away, "can you cut my hands free? Because I really need to kiss you back and this is making that really difficult."
"Oh, right, yeah, uh," Billy says, shaky, but a smile starts climbing his face as he reaches for his boot knife.
He doesn't move any more than that, doesn't stand or move away from Teddy, almost like he can't. Instead, he reaches both arms around Teddy, feels for his wrists and the straps binding them, and slices through them with a quick, efficient stroke. Teddy brings his arms around, ache relieved, and his hands instinctively go to Billy's jacket. He couldn't stop them if he wanted to and he doesn't, he wants to clutch at the edges of Billy's jacket, pull, press his knuckles to Billy's waist, and he does. Billy presses in closer and Teddy starts to smile back.
"Better," Teddy says quietly. Billy makes a small noise that's not really a word.
Teddy lets go of Billy's jacket to slide his hands inside and then they're kissing again, deeper and more sure. They both reek to the high heavens of gasoline and smoke and sweat and Teddy is acutely aware of the fact that he hasn't brushed his teeth in months, but he doesn't care. He doesn't care about his spikes or the ache in his knees from the floor or the fact that there are almost definitely more skitters bearing down on them right now. He doesn't care that it's anything but normal, he has it.
When they break for air, Teddy leans into Billy a little bit more, fingers resting over his spine. He breathes out a laugh. "This is not exactly how I was expecting our first kiss to go," he says.
It's Billy's turn to laugh. "You were expecting our first kiss?"
Teddy nuzzles his bloody cheek against Billy's. "Well, I was hoping."
Billy kisses him again, short but with no hesitation. "Note to self: near death situations are not romancing opportunities."
"Hey, we're both still here aren't we?" Teddy says.
"And I'm the one that gets accused of poor life planning," Billy scoffs.
"Well, if the shoe fits," says an altogether different voice. "Which, by the way, yours still don't."
They both turn their heads to see Kate, not quite running but certainly not taking her time. Eli backs in behind her, gun pointed at their six. Kate has Billy's rifle and tosses it to him quickly, then when she sees that Teddy's hands aren't bound she tosses Teddy her backup weapon without a second thought.
And Teddy knows that there is nothing, no false stolen sense of belonging any alien tech could force on him that could ever compare to this right here. He knows that this is what he'll always fight for.
"Alright guys," Eli says, "we've got mechs incoming. Tommy and Jess are out guarding the truck but they can't hold them off alone and I'd prefer to get out of here before either of them gets it into their heads to try. Where's the pile of porpoise hork?"
"Porpoise hork?" Teddy asks Kate as Billy helps him to his feet.
Kate shrugs. "That alien looked like a half digested fish stuffed into a latex human suit. It works," she says as Billy tells Eli, "I got in a couple of shots before it could k- before it got away, but unless they keep their brains in their arms it's probably going to make it."
Eli nods. "Right. We gotta get this intel to Cap. New, probably worse aliens? She's gotta know." He turns to Teddy. "Can you move?"
"If it means getting out of here," Teddy says. Billy slides an arm around his back to support Teddy's arm over his shoulders. Teddy doesn't strictly need it, but it helps all the same.
From outside there's a rattle of gunfire, then Tommy whoops.
"Skitters," Kate says, readying her gun.
"Suppose we better get out there," Billy says. "Before Tommy blows us all up."
"Can't let him have all the fun," Eli says.
Teddy cocks his gun. A year ago he was reading comic books about zombies and fantasizing about his own post-apocalyptic derring-do. The reality turned out to be aliens, not zombies, and instead of a man-with-plan badass, on his bad days Teddy feels more than half alien himself. But Billy's grinning at him and he's got people who trust him to have their backs, people who couldn't give a rats's ass about alien tech or the things other people say - people who know he's one of them no matter what - and even with the specter of doom hanging over all their heads, he'll take it. He's still here.
Teddy Altman at the end of the world.
::fin::