ZOMBIE COPS: SECOND 24 HOURS

[capemods]

WHO: Everyone!
WHERE: All over the City
WHEN: 10PM on Fri 10/30 to 10PM on Sat 10/31
SUMMARY: The second day of the zombie cop invasion

Continue logging your epic zombie fighting/hiding from adventures here! Start/join a thread and tag yourself in!

Comments

CLOSED//Reaction to Death

[unnamed_nothing]

The worst part, he thought numbly, had not been waking up to find his best friend sick from what appeared to be a rapidly-infecting bite wound. Nor had it been the few hours he'd spent desperately trying to reverse the effects with what medicine and trauma supplies he had in his apartment, unsure of his ability to safely transport Quatre to a hospital with the creatures roaming the streets and citizens panicking; he hadn't thought to look at his communicator, then. Doing so had been the last thing on his mind.

Listening to rapidly-devolving mumbles and groans of pain and confusion when the fever hit the higher end of its uncontrolled rise and being able to do nothing had been difficult, as was tricking the blond into entering the bathroom and locking him in there after Quatre instinctively tried snapping at his hand when it moved too close to the boy's face. He hadn't known what to do while slowly-rotting pale fingers scraped hungrily at the cheap wood, standing in front of the door listening to the guttural, animalistic sounds and wondering helplessly what had happened to the person that had lived in that body before.

Trowa thought of everything he could while the thing riding Quatre's body continued to moan into the door, yes; that much was true. He thought of how stupid it had been for them both not to study more of the bacterial and viral threats of this era, and of how strange it was that the white-shirted monster in particular had moved so quickly when a man at a brisk walk could outpace the others. In his mind, he was faster, or smarter, or any number of things that would have let him make a change in the outcome--there, and there only, he was able to think ahead and prevent Quatre from standing outside unprotected, moved just a little faster to blow the creature's brains out before it could clamp down on the ex-pilot's shoulder, and knew exactly what to do when he saw the streak of fiery red running down from the wound in the afternoon to keep Quatre from becoming the not-dead thing currently dragging its decaying body across his bathroom floor.

All of those were very hard on him, but they were not yet the worst.

Closed//DONE

[unnamed_nothing]

Finally picking up the communicator and realizing, thanks to an anonymous post, that he could have done everything to prevent his current situation had he only checked the network sooner made him go cold inside. Reading about how to end the misery of someone who had already been turned nearly killed him.

In the end, though, as he pointed the gun at the door, still able to hear Quatre's--the creature's--bellows of hunger through and see the moving shadows at the bottom of it, he failed. He failed himself, and Heero, and his Captain. Most of all, however, he failed his best friend.

Trowa knew where his enemy lay, and knew that it was his enemy and no other--and yet, because it wore the face of that boy, because it stole Quatre like a shield and hid behind his features, he could not bring himself to kill it. The gun pointed straight at the door, the bullets sat ready and waiting inside, and his finger tugged hesitantly at the trigger, but it was hesitant, and he could not force it to be anything to the contrary.

He had been right to fear what he did, some months back, when he'd worried that giving in would change things. He'd known that it would come back to haunt him, some day, making him soft and weak and incapable of correctly fulfilling his primary duties as a soldier. It had destroyed any chance of his salvaging the situation already, and now it denied him the ability to finish what had been started, too.

Trowa shut his eyes then, the loaded and waiting gun clattering to the floor without going off, and leaned against the bathroom door while typing his message. His presence, so close to the waiting jaws of the undead thing behind it, only made the Quatre-shaped thing groan louder.

Admitting these things to the people he had only barely been able to begin considering friends, displaying his weakness, asking them to shoulder the burdens he hadn't managed to bear; that had very nearly been the worst part, but it, too, fell short of the honor. Even after he had realized that giving out his address had meant he would need to move, shortly, to prevent compromise.

No. Now that they had been and gone again, the healer whose name he couldn't recall just then in his mental haze tagging along in their wake having failed to fix his best friend--that was a lie. He had fixed the blond, freeing him from the zombie's curse; the only thing he hadn't managed to do was bring the boy back to the kind-hearted and vibrant life Trowa had become so accustomed to--Trowa sat there between the basic little white toilet and the basic little white bathtub, knees pulled up to his chest, arms wrapped around them tightly, numb green eyes looking through the disheveled auburn fringe of hair at the dead little white body of someone he had never believed he could possibly lose.

The boy had asked them to leave Quatre where he lay, and they'd obliged him. But he had made no move to disturb the blond, had not touched him at all, even though he wanted to do nothing more than grab the frighteningly still body by the shoulders and shake it and order his friend to get back in there where he belonged; to suck in a sudden deep breath and blink surprisingly unglazed teal eyes, and be here, with him, where he was supposed to be--how was he supposed to know how to react to these emotions? What was he to do when he had never allowed himself to feel anything over someone's death, before? Why wasn't Quatre there to help him with this?

That, you see, was truly the worst part of the entire affair to him: that despite all of his years as a soldier, trained from childhood to be a spectre of war itself come to the battlefield, surrounded by the dead and the dying almost from the time he could hold a proper conversation and raised to do no more in response than blink an eye and leave the past behind him, Trowa simply had no idea what to do with his best friend's body.