veils
in
crookedhalt
when all the circuits will blow; chuck
title: when all the circuits will blow.
rating: pg/r.
word count: 2042.
summary: At first he thinks maybe it is a nuclear explosion, maybe he will spend a century in a bunker with the other survivors; even as the dust is only just settling on what has happened he thinks I may spend a hundred years with John Casey. apocalypse fic, character death.
notes: sometimes, i unconsciously smoke crack and i feel the need to bastardize stuff. like chuck bartowski. fallout is a video game about the apocalypse.
The day the world starts to end, Chuck thinks that he must be dreaming theories again. But this apocalypse turns out nothing like Fallout, or halfway through Final Fantasy VI, he is simply standing in the Nerd Herd station, and then the acrid smell of electrical fire is burning his throat as the sprinklers shower water into the smoke and pressing screams of what he can only register are people dying. At first he thinks maybe it is a nuclear explosion, maybe he will spend a century in a bunker with the other survivors; even as the dust is only just settling on what has happened he thinks I may spend a hundred years with John Casey.
He sits next to what is left of the Nerd Herd sign, burnt at the edges, and catalogues. Nothing is broken, nothing is bleeding profusely. His eyes water from the smokiness he has to try and see through, and he stands slowly upright, knots settling in his gut.
“Bartowski!” the gruff edge of a voice ends with a cough, and there are only seconds until he feels heavy fingers grip his arm, the feeling of a thumb pressed into the hollow of his elbow reassuring.
As he is dragged through mess and charcoal he lends a thought to Sarah, and his flesh turns cold at the thought of her possible fate. Casey heads them both toward the door, and Chuck tries not to think of what he’s stepping over, pretends he hasn’t seen shoes and the outlines of twisted limbs.
The view outside is no better than in. He feels like fainting as he sees what can only be the shells of cars on the road, their dark smoke rising with that of the buildings on fire. All he can do is close his eyes and try to breathe, letting the air blaze through his lungs and out again, listen for anything that might help them.
He tries not to think about Sarah.
“We’ve got to try and get into the Castle - if Agent Walker’s got any sense about her she would’ve headed there first.” Casey speaks as though nothing has happened, he says nothing about the layer of debris they’re standing in, that he is stained with blood and blackness; he doesn’t tell Chuck not to be terrified.
They pick their way towards the Orange Orange and through the broken glass of the door, but there’s no ground to stand on once they’re through. Chuck can barely hold back a shout and chokes on the s in her name, seeing a million pictures of a mangled pale body that have nothing to do with government secrets. Casey swears, and tests the edge of the crater before sending a hesitant yell of “Agent Walker?” down into the darkness. Chuck steps along the rim of the gaping mouth he’s certain Sarah must be in, finding his way to what’s left of the freezer and not heeding Casey’s warning noises. It’s strange to feel the loose ends of cold air through the hairs on his arms as he climbs warily over a door, his legs not willing to hold him.
His voice is pitched high when he sees her trying to make her way up the remnants of the stairs. “Sarah?” He scrambles, and the metal is hot on his fingers. A fire burns beneath her feet.
“Chuck!” her mouth is only thin lines, and she doesn’t quite smile as he reaches out a hand to her, but as her arms fall around his shoulders and grasp at the back of his shirt he knows that she isn’t just happy to see him because of his value to the American government.
She picks through her words as she speaks to him, he asks how the hell did this happen? And she honestly doesn’t know, the technology’s destroyed and they’ve got no higher authority figures now, just themselves and Chuck almost wishes he’d maybe greeted the end of the world in something other than a Buy More uniform and a pocket protector. Almost, but then, he didn’t know he needed to change until he got home.
Then home is a word that he fears - his fingers pull at Sarah and he can see her only in lighter hues, oh god, what about Ellie, what about Ellie. She holds his hands, sliding her thumbs over his knuckles and he calms himself enough to see her eyes; her words press on his eardrums - we can’t be trying to save her right now.
There is a part of him, somewhere inside, that understands this; they have to stay in one place, spies take inventories and do headcounts (body counts) and it makes sense. But Ellie is Chuck’s sister and he doesn’t want to find her dead because they waited too long.
When they make it back outside, Chuck stands numbly next to Sarah, who pulls ash out of her pockets instead of a cell phone, and fixes Chuck with a look that scares even the strength of his bones.
She doesn’t know what to do.
For hours, they try to find survivors. Chuck can see the outline of Casey’s gun as he passes behind him, and all he can think is everyone I know is dead. He can’t look as Lester raises the body count to fifty-three, and he feels sick when he’s quietly glad it’s Morgan’s day off. If all the objects and appliances in town (the country? The world?) requiring power are destroying themselves, Morgan will have more chance of surviving if he isn’t at work.
At least, that’s Casey’s theory; Chuck can’t think to make up a better one.
When it starts to get dark, they give up. The three survivors they found have died - two of severe injury and one of what Casey thinks is radiation poisoning; the grim set of his mouth makes Chuck feel just that much worse. And he knows they haven’t found everyone.
They can’t drive to make it home, and they’re in the middle of what used to be Burbank Boulevard; Chuck knows without any uncertainty that the world is dying, and he knows he might die with it.
He follows Sarah blindly as they walk what she says is west, and they stop outside half a Costco as the sun rests just over the horizon. Casey pulls out his gun and they take what they need; Chuck doesn’t flinch as he grabs the neck of a bottle of Merlot.
He drinks half of it himself and refuses to eat; Sarah tries to tell him it isn’t safe to go home (“Chuck, it’s an hour by foot, and it’s dark. I’m not letting you go”), so he sits almost drunk against the wall of a broken Costco and wishes for something a little stronger than wine.
He listens to the agents talk, about what they should do, about him, and he knows they want to go to Washington.
None of them sleep, and as soon as they can feel the sun coming up they start walking. Sarah keeps close to Chuck, and he knows she’s got knives strapped to her thighs; he keeps his eyes on the road under his feet, and doesn’t notice her stares.
Burbank Airport is crowded with survivors, but the planes are gone; simple skeletons devoid of aerodynamics.
Casey finally says we’ll have to find another way.
Chuck wonders: why go to Washington at the end of the world?
Hey retrace their steps and there seems to be one thing for it - they walk to Washington. After Casey pulls his gun, Chuck lets them lead him.
When they come across the horses on the side of the road, Sarah looks at them with a question and Casey shrugs his approval; Chuck remembers the pony that bit him at one of Ellie’s riding lessons when they were kids. The horses have wandered from a property along the road, one wall of the large house blown out into the garden, the roof in various stages of collapse. There are more horses in the barn, and Chuck learns something new - Sarah knows what she’s doing.
“Sarah, this is one of the worst ideas you’ve ever had.” For the moment, he’s forgotten that this is nothing short of an apocalypse, that he may never see the only family he has left again; right now he is standing in front of a large brown horse that is causing him to reminisce about things he’d rather not. “I don’t know anything about horses.”
She only says, we’re not walking to Washington, Chuck.
He scrambles on and feels like a loser when Casey rides into his line of vision and looks like he knows what he’s doing. To make it even worse, his horse is bigger than Chuck’s.
Sarah shoulders a bag Chucks knows she wasn’t carrying before, and watches her swing herself onto a leggy grey horse; even in the state they are, he still thinks she’s a badass.
They start to head west again, and Chuck is left to mull over his thoughts with the slow rock of the horse under him. It’s a hard thing to wrap his head around, riding a horse towards the end of the world in a uniform from an electronics store. It wasn’t in his five-year plan, at any rate.
Chuck doesn’t know how long they’ve been riding for. He doesn’t really count the days anymore, he gets up when Sarah wakes him, rides in the middle of a single file line, and gets off when they stop for the night. His muscles ache against his bones, and his thoughts aren’t trains, only circles.
He wonders if they’ll die riding across what’s left of America. It feels almost epic, and he even catches himself looking too long at Sarah again. If Bryce Larkin could see me now (but truthfully, even that thought hurts).
They don't give up.
The day Casey gets sick is the day they meet survivors.
He’s running a fever when they wake up, and all the survivors can say when they meet them is he has the sickness.
After three days, they have to stop.
Chuck is afraid.
His fever doesn’t go down, and he can’t sit up for the dizziness and fatigue.
After a week, he’s vomiting blood, and even Sarah can’t keep up appearances. Chuck has always thought Casey could get through anything, but as he sees the agent pale and clammy on a blanket near him, he wonders if he truly is dying.
When he sees Sarah hastily brushing errant tears from her eyes on the eighth night, he knows it has to be true.
On the twelfth, they dig a grave and she cries openly.
Keep going, Bartowski.
For once, he packs them up in the morning, loads their gear onto the horse Sarah will start calling Casey, and holds her after she says goodbye, her hands tangled in his shirt.
They stop for several days on the far side of St Louis, Missouri, in a motel they hope is empty.
“Everyone is dying, Sarah.” I’ll never see Ellie again.
She comforts him with the press of her mouth against his, something warm left in a world growing colder.
Sitting on the bed in their room, the curtains eaten at by moths brushing lightly against the windowsill, they drink whiskey straight from the bottle and he voices a fear.
“What if there’s nothing in Washington?”
“We might not make it to Washington.”
Sarah is a truthful drunk, and it wounds.
He sobers up on the floor of the bathroom, and finds he’s forgetting.
Her hair is too long now, dragging over her shoulders in waves and twists, and he only notices as they cross the border into Kentucky. The horses wander through the bluegrass on the side of the road, and he wonders if this could be their end of the world.
Secretly, as they spend a week in a barn near the bank of a stream, Chuck hopes Sarah is losing her resolve.
If we’re going to die anywhere, it might as well be here.
She doesn’t disagree.
Later, his last thought will be well, I definitely didn’t think it would be like this.
It will rain for the first time in months.
rating: pg/r.
word count: 2042.
summary: At first he thinks maybe it is a nuclear explosion, maybe he will spend a century in a bunker with the other survivors; even as the dust is only just settling on what has happened he thinks I may spend a hundred years with John Casey. apocalypse fic, character death.
notes: sometimes, i unconsciously smoke crack and i feel the need to bastardize stuff. like chuck bartowski. fallout is a video game about the apocalypse.
The day the world starts to end, Chuck thinks that he must be dreaming theories again. But this apocalypse turns out nothing like Fallout, or halfway through Final Fantasy VI, he is simply standing in the Nerd Herd station, and then the acrid smell of electrical fire is burning his throat as the sprinklers shower water into the smoke and pressing screams of what he can only register are people dying. At first he thinks maybe it is a nuclear explosion, maybe he will spend a century in a bunker with the other survivors; even as the dust is only just settling on what has happened he thinks I may spend a hundred years with John Casey.
He sits next to what is left of the Nerd Herd sign, burnt at the edges, and catalogues. Nothing is broken, nothing is bleeding profusely. His eyes water from the smokiness he has to try and see through, and he stands slowly upright, knots settling in his gut.
“Bartowski!” the gruff edge of a voice ends with a cough, and there are only seconds until he feels heavy fingers grip his arm, the feeling of a thumb pressed into the hollow of his elbow reassuring.
As he is dragged through mess and charcoal he lends a thought to Sarah, and his flesh turns cold at the thought of her possible fate. Casey heads them both toward the door, and Chuck tries not to think of what he’s stepping over, pretends he hasn’t seen shoes and the outlines of twisted limbs.
The view outside is no better than in. He feels like fainting as he sees what can only be the shells of cars on the road, their dark smoke rising with that of the buildings on fire. All he can do is close his eyes and try to breathe, letting the air blaze through his lungs and out again, listen for anything that might help them.
He tries not to think about Sarah.
“We’ve got to try and get into the Castle - if Agent Walker’s got any sense about her she would’ve headed there first.” Casey speaks as though nothing has happened, he says nothing about the layer of debris they’re standing in, that he is stained with blood and blackness; he doesn’t tell Chuck not to be terrified.
They pick their way towards the Orange Orange and through the broken glass of the door, but there’s no ground to stand on once they’re through. Chuck can barely hold back a shout and chokes on the s in her name, seeing a million pictures of a mangled pale body that have nothing to do with government secrets. Casey swears, and tests the edge of the crater before sending a hesitant yell of “Agent Walker?” down into the darkness. Chuck steps along the rim of the gaping mouth he’s certain Sarah must be in, finding his way to what’s left of the freezer and not heeding Casey’s warning noises. It’s strange to feel the loose ends of cold air through the hairs on his arms as he climbs warily over a door, his legs not willing to hold him.
His voice is pitched high when he sees her trying to make her way up the remnants of the stairs. “Sarah?” He scrambles, and the metal is hot on his fingers. A fire burns beneath her feet.
“Chuck!” her mouth is only thin lines, and she doesn’t quite smile as he reaches out a hand to her, but as her arms fall around his shoulders and grasp at the back of his shirt he knows that she isn’t just happy to see him because of his value to the American government.
She picks through her words as she speaks to him, he asks how the hell did this happen? And she honestly doesn’t know, the technology’s destroyed and they’ve got no higher authority figures now, just themselves and Chuck almost wishes he’d maybe greeted the end of the world in something other than a Buy More uniform and a pocket protector. Almost, but then, he didn’t know he needed to change until he got home.
Then home is a word that he fears - his fingers pull at Sarah and he can see her only in lighter hues, oh god, what about Ellie, what about Ellie. She holds his hands, sliding her thumbs over his knuckles and he calms himself enough to see her eyes; her words press on his eardrums - we can’t be trying to save her right now.
There is a part of him, somewhere inside, that understands this; they have to stay in one place, spies take inventories and do headcounts (body counts) and it makes sense. But Ellie is Chuck’s sister and he doesn’t want to find her dead because they waited too long.
When they make it back outside, Chuck stands numbly next to Sarah, who pulls ash out of her pockets instead of a cell phone, and fixes Chuck with a look that scares even the strength of his bones.
She doesn’t know what to do.
For hours, they try to find survivors. Chuck can see the outline of Casey’s gun as he passes behind him, and all he can think is everyone I know is dead. He can’t look as Lester raises the body count to fifty-three, and he feels sick when he’s quietly glad it’s Morgan’s day off. If all the objects and appliances in town (the country? The world?) requiring power are destroying themselves, Morgan will have more chance of surviving if he isn’t at work.
At least, that’s Casey’s theory; Chuck can’t think to make up a better one.
When it starts to get dark, they give up. The three survivors they found have died - two of severe injury and one of what Casey thinks is radiation poisoning; the grim set of his mouth makes Chuck feel just that much worse. And he knows they haven’t found everyone.
They can’t drive to make it home, and they’re in the middle of what used to be Burbank Boulevard; Chuck knows without any uncertainty that the world is dying, and he knows he might die with it.
He follows Sarah blindly as they walk what she says is west, and they stop outside half a Costco as the sun rests just over the horizon. Casey pulls out his gun and they take what they need; Chuck doesn’t flinch as he grabs the neck of a bottle of Merlot.
He drinks half of it himself and refuses to eat; Sarah tries to tell him it isn’t safe to go home (“Chuck, it’s an hour by foot, and it’s dark. I’m not letting you go”), so he sits almost drunk against the wall of a broken Costco and wishes for something a little stronger than wine.
He listens to the agents talk, about what they should do, about him, and he knows they want to go to Washington.
None of them sleep, and as soon as they can feel the sun coming up they start walking. Sarah keeps close to Chuck, and he knows she’s got knives strapped to her thighs; he keeps his eyes on the road under his feet, and doesn’t notice her stares.
Burbank Airport is crowded with survivors, but the planes are gone; simple skeletons devoid of aerodynamics.
Casey finally says we’ll have to find another way.
Chuck wonders: why go to Washington at the end of the world?
Hey retrace their steps and there seems to be one thing for it - they walk to Washington. After Casey pulls his gun, Chuck lets them lead him.
When they come across the horses on the side of the road, Sarah looks at them with a question and Casey shrugs his approval; Chuck remembers the pony that bit him at one of Ellie’s riding lessons when they were kids. The horses have wandered from a property along the road, one wall of the large house blown out into the garden, the roof in various stages of collapse. There are more horses in the barn, and Chuck learns something new - Sarah knows what she’s doing.
“Sarah, this is one of the worst ideas you’ve ever had.” For the moment, he’s forgotten that this is nothing short of an apocalypse, that he may never see the only family he has left again; right now he is standing in front of a large brown horse that is causing him to reminisce about things he’d rather not. “I don’t know anything about horses.”
She only says, we’re not walking to Washington, Chuck.
He scrambles on and feels like a loser when Casey rides into his line of vision and looks like he knows what he’s doing. To make it even worse, his horse is bigger than Chuck’s.
Sarah shoulders a bag Chucks knows she wasn’t carrying before, and watches her swing herself onto a leggy grey horse; even in the state they are, he still thinks she’s a badass.
They start to head west again, and Chuck is left to mull over his thoughts with the slow rock of the horse under him. It’s a hard thing to wrap his head around, riding a horse towards the end of the world in a uniform from an electronics store. It wasn’t in his five-year plan, at any rate.
Chuck doesn’t know how long they’ve been riding for. He doesn’t really count the days anymore, he gets up when Sarah wakes him, rides in the middle of a single file line, and gets off when they stop for the night. His muscles ache against his bones, and his thoughts aren’t trains, only circles.
He wonders if they’ll die riding across what’s left of America. It feels almost epic, and he even catches himself looking too long at Sarah again. If Bryce Larkin could see me now (but truthfully, even that thought hurts).
They don't give up.
The day Casey gets sick is the day they meet survivors.
He’s running a fever when they wake up, and all the survivors can say when they meet them is he has the sickness.
After three days, they have to stop.
Chuck is afraid.
His fever doesn’t go down, and he can’t sit up for the dizziness and fatigue.
After a week, he’s vomiting blood, and even Sarah can’t keep up appearances. Chuck has always thought Casey could get through anything, but as he sees the agent pale and clammy on a blanket near him, he wonders if he truly is dying.
When he sees Sarah hastily brushing errant tears from her eyes on the eighth night, he knows it has to be true.
On the twelfth, they dig a grave and she cries openly.
Keep going, Bartowski.
For once, he packs them up in the morning, loads their gear onto the horse Sarah will start calling Casey, and holds her after she says goodbye, her hands tangled in his shirt.
They stop for several days on the far side of St Louis, Missouri, in a motel they hope is empty.
“Everyone is dying, Sarah.” I’ll never see Ellie again.
She comforts him with the press of her mouth against his, something warm left in a world growing colder.
Sitting on the bed in their room, the curtains eaten at by moths brushing lightly against the windowsill, they drink whiskey straight from the bottle and he voices a fear.
“What if there’s nothing in Washington?”
“We might not make it to Washington.”
Sarah is a truthful drunk, and it wounds.
He sobers up on the floor of the bathroom, and finds he’s forgetting.
Her hair is too long now, dragging over her shoulders in waves and twists, and he only notices as they cross the border into Kentucky. The horses wander through the bluegrass on the side of the road, and he wonders if this could be their end of the world.
Secretly, as they spend a week in a barn near the bank of a stream, Chuck hopes Sarah is losing her resolve.
If we’re going to die anywhere, it might as well be here.
She doesn’t disagree.
Later, his last thought will be well, I definitely didn’t think it would be like this.
It will rain for the first time in months.