[fanfic] Afterword
AO3 mirror
Characters/Pairings: PruHun, Austria, Kugelmugel, some SuFin, Sealand, Ladonia, some PoLiet
Rating: G
Word Count: 5k
Warnings: mentions of violence??? also zombies
Summary: A couple months ago the world ended, but for some reason it forgot that killing everyone was part of the protocol. Zombie apocalypse AU.
A/N: i've been watching a lot of the walking dead lately.
“Zombies, huh?”
“Looks like.”
“Of all the things I would’ve thought would end the world - famine, global warming, North Korea - I gotta say, man. Zombies weren’t on the list.”
Erzsébet loads another round into her pistol. The safety on, she leaves it in her lap and pulls her hair out of his messy bun, running her hand through it a couple of times to loosen it. It creates the slightest of breezes, more than welcome in the heavy August air. “You can’t be serious about that.”
Gilbert, who is reclining in the driver’s seat beside her, shrugs. “Sorry to disappoint.” He seems half asleep - unsurprising in this weather, but a dangerous state all the same. Erzsi cuts him a bit of slack. It’s been a long night.
“You had unicorns on your list, Gilbert,” she says, raising an eyebrow.
“Don’t talk to me about unicorns, Erzsi. Those bastards can stick you to the wall if they goddamn please and it’s not like we’ve treated them with the respect they demand.”
“I’d take a unicorn apocalypse over a zombie apocalypse any day.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I know exactly what I’m saying.”
Gilbert scoffs, then outright laughs at her. She suspects that his obnoxious guffawing can be heard by everyone for at least a mile around. “Nah, Erzsi. At least with zombies we know what we’re dealing with. Like, shoot ‘em in the head, burn the bodies, don’t get bit. The list goes on.” A woodchipper, for example. Erzsébet had discovered back in Italy that a woodchipper would dispose of just about anything.
“I’m sure that for the plethora of zombie fiction out there,” Erzsébet replies dryly, “there’s at least twice as much unicorn fiction.”
“You’d be surprised. Zombie fiction mostly agrees that when a corpse comes ambling toward ya, you run the other direction. But I haven’t found two unicorns that are the same. Do they fart rainbows or breathe fire? We just don’t know.” He takes a drink from the fast-food carton, the little liquid that is left slurping through the straw.
She snatches the drink from him and sips it herself. A strawberry slurpee. “When did you get this?” she demands. “The store had no one in it.”
Gilbert takes it back. It is his hard-earned slurpee, after all. “S’not hard to hop behind the desk and take something. Besides, you were taking way too fucking long.”
Aghast, she retorts, “Well, I apologize for being a woman and having needs.”
“Don’t worry, I forgive you.”
Erzsébet takes the empty cup and tosses it onto the road. There’s not enough room in the car for her to punch him, so this will have to do. Gilbert protests with an indignant expression and a yell of ‘Hey’. “We don’t have time for this, let’s go.”
“You are such a buzzkill.”
“I’m also the girl who hauled your ass out of a tight spot and so far, hasn’t gotten anything in return.”
“You got a ride didn’t you?” Gilbert starts the car and begins to pull out of the gas station, squinting against the sun that glints off the roofs of abandoned cars, abandoned bicycles - abandoned everything, actually.
Erzsébet pulls out a stick of gum and tosses it in her mouth. It is minty and delicious and feels good after a long lack of tooth-brushing. She’d never dreamt she’d miss tooth-brushing. “I could’ve hotwired the car myself. Instead I got a driver who thinks he’s funny.”
“I may have a piss-poor sense of humor but I sure ain’t a bad shot.”
Now it’s Erzsi’s turn to laugh. She does, at a much higher and more annoying pitch than Gilbert’s, though she’ll be the last to admit it. “You really think I’m gonna just hand you one of my guns?”
“I wish. You’ve got enough to arm the entire Prussian military. And I would know, my grandad was one of ‘em.”
“Your grandfather was Prussian?”
“Maybe it was my great-grandfather. It was a long time ago.”
Erzsébet shakes her head, smiling to herself.
“What?” Gilbert asks defensively.
“Oh, nothing,” she hums. “Never met a Prussian before.”
“Then hold on, sweetheart. You’re in for the ride of your life.”
“I’m more of a driver myself.”
“Excuse me, who’s the one with the keys?”
“Not for long.”
“Hey! Hey, lady!”
That was how he’d greeted her. It wasn’t the words that had gotten her attention as much as the tone, which she’d only heard once before when her little brother went missing in the woods. It was a tone of fear and desperation and hysteria, and she hadn’t been able to simply walk by.
His eyes weren’t actually wild, because she couldn’t see them from the distance she was at. But she liked to describe them that way. “You gotta get me out,” he panted in German, “I-I swear I’ll do anything.”
Erzsébet didn’t like the way the barbed wire tangled around his leg, cutting so deeply that the wound would surely be infected later. It might be the kindest thing, she thought, to shoot him now and let the zombies have him. She had enough to worry about, enough to carry, and she’d resolved ages ago that she would move faster alone.
“Anything,” he said again.
She pursed her lips. “Like?”
“I’ve got a car. I’ll take you anywhere you want. Wherever. Seriously, you name it! Just, just hurry-” Frantically glancing behind himself, his tone accelerated when he saw how close the creatures had wandered. Erzsébet couldn’t hear them, but she knew that Gilbert probably could.
She felt a twinge of sympathy. That had to drive a guy insane: being caught in a trap, passed over by every Samaritan who came along, while your death approached with a steadiness you could set your watch by.
But it wasn’t her problem.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t.”
He bit his hand, as if to hold back a sob. “No,” he then hissed at her. “You can, you’re strong and young- hell, can’t be any older than me. You just don’t want me to drag you down. I won’t, I fucking swear. I can shoot, I can survive, I was in the fucking army. You don’t even have to keep up with me, j-just cut me loose, yeah?”
There was no time left to consider it, so Erzsébet listened to her instincts and pulled out a knife.
They’re shooting for Warsaw, one of the last cities that still seems to be functioning, which they hear has closed its borders to all but a select few. Neither is quite sure how they’ll get in. At the moment, it’s less a question of how and more a question of if - since starting, they’ve made it to somewhere in Austria and crossed the Danube a little while back. Erzsébet hadn’t expected it to take this long to get there.
Gilbert is blaming the slow pace on the sheer amount of roads rendered untravellable by hordes, by vehicles left in the middle of the highway, by the complete lack of any sort of organization. “It’s like everyone who’s supposed to be in charge just up and blew his brains out,” he says.
“The world did end,” Erzsi points out.
“Doesn’t mean we did.”
On one hand he’s right, she thinks. The world ending is probably not a good excuse to stop trying to make things run efficiently. But on the other hand, she hadn’t liked her place in the efficiently run world at all, and is hesitant to believe that her current situation isn’t a step up. She’s seen and done more in the past few weeks than she has in her entire life.
Somewhere halfway through Austria is the first time Gilbert gets a chance to repay his debt to her. He takes the head off a zombie that’s got her pinned, and the grin on his face when the body collapses is the grin of the high school jock who knows he’s better than you and has just proved it. First she thanks him for saving her life, then she socks him in the jaw for looking at her like that. He learns quickly.
“Are we at least even?” he demands, rubbing his chin. It’s going to bruise, he can just tell.
“I could’ve handled it,” she replies, picking up her weapons and walking away. “You just got in the way.”
“That thing was about to tear you in half.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of strategy?”
Gilbert, of course, knows all about strategy - he was in the army, obviously. Erzsébet rolls her eyes at that because this is the same man who used the women’s bathroom for the novelty of it.
The radio in their car - some Italian model built for speed rather than an apocalypse - is broken, so there’s not much to do while driving except talk. They spend a lot of time arguing, and Erzsébet isn’t sure if she enjoys it or finds it annoying. Gilbert’s one of the first people she’s met who can actually hold his own against her, and that in itself is worthy of a commendation, but he’s also an arrogant asshole whose near death experience doesn’t seem to have changed him at all. If it has, and this is the watered-down version of Gilbert Beilschmidt, then she never wants to know the original.
Outside of Vienna they meet a man travelling with a child. Roderich, he says his name is, and Klaus is his little brother.
Klaus glares at them.
Erzsébet glares back.
Gilbert finds some stale chocolate in a rest-stop and gives it to the kid, then offers them both a ride. Roderich, to say the least, seems completely surprised. He sniffs like an aristocrat, staring at their ramshackle vehicle and haphazard clothing. Erzsi had thought they were doing pretty well for starting from scratch, but Roderich clearly did not share the sentiment. “Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. You guys are heading to Vienna, right?”
“Yes, we are.”
Gilbert’s expression is pained. “I haven’t been there,” he admits, “but I come from Berlin, and you don’t want to know what I saw there, trust me. I wouldn’t go to Vienna if I were you.”
Roderich takes a while, but eventually he agrees to accompany them to Warsaw. Erzsébet smiles and welcomes them along, and she even finds a set of crayons and paper for Klaus. But the second she’s able she takes Gilbert aside and does what she does best.
“Ow- damn it, Erzsi, was that necessary?” Gilbert rubs his head, certain that there’s going to be a bruise there too. His leg still isn’t up to speed, it’s too easy for her to catch him off guard. He’s going to be more purple than an eggplant by the time they get to Warsaw.
“You can’t just do that, Gilbert,” she hisses at him. “You can’t just pick up random strangers and offer to bring them along! This isn’t the yellow brick fucking road!”
Gilbert retorts, “Hey, if you hadn’t shown me a little compassion back there, I’d be dead! This guy has a kid, Erzsébet, I can’t just ignore that.”
“Ours is no place for a kid,” she reminds him. “We’re scavengers. He’ll be eaten alive.” It’s sad to think how literally she means that.
“What do you want, for me to tell them sorry you can’t come along, my girlfriend said no?!”
Her left hook is just as fierce as her right one, Gilbert learns. “I am not your girlfriend,” Erzsébet insists.
“Yeah, I know that, and you know that, but I don’t think Roddy cares.”
She bites her lip, thinking for a bit. “Fine,” she finally says. “But if they die, it’s on you.”
It’s not on him, and Erzsi knows she is stupid to assume that it is. Far be it from her to associate herself with Beilschmidt, at least beyond convenience for travelling, but when it comes down to it she will hold herself responsible for anybody within the same vicinity as herself. Perhaps that’s why she ended up rescuing Gilbert when her best bet would have been to leave him - after all, he’s clearly proved nothing more than a burden piling on still more burdens. He can’t ever walk for long, she’s the one who ends up doing the raiding while he keeps watch, and for all his army training he’s essentially useless without troops to command. He seems to be under the impression she’s one of his soldiers, which she most certainly isn’t.
No matter how good a shot she is.
That has nothing to do with it.
In the end, Roderich and Klaus quickly begin to drive her insane. Klaus, being the child he is, complains quickly and easily about absolutely everything. Are we there yet? Is there any food? What’s going on? What do you think of my drawing? Erzsébet would strangle him with his own white hair if she didn’t think Gilbert would shoot her for it.
Gilbert, over the short days that they travel together, really takes to Roderich and Klaus for some unfathomable reason. Roderich is just as OCD as he is and Erzsi supposes she isn’t that surprised, but he’s almost more annoying than his kid. He nags constantly, and is useless in a fight - how he’s managed to keep them both alive for so long is completely beyond her. Good thing he’s pretty.
At some point Roderich and Gilbert are discussing a soap opera they followed only last month, both ranting and raving about this character cheating on that one, and how this one girl was pregnant but obviously the father did not know, and is that kid really being sent away to military school, and somewhere along the way time travel gets involved but she’s long since dozed off. She’s woken roughly by someone shaking her shoulder. She begins to cuss out the culprit before realizing it’s Klaus, at which point she shuts her mouth abruptly.
“Miss Erzsébet?” he says, his usual monotone colored slightly with fear.
Erzsi yawns and blinks. “Hey, kid. Why aren’t you asleep?”
“Mister Beilschmidt went out to get something, and then Roderich followed him and told me to wake you if they didn’t return in ten minutes.”
Outside, the sun has all but sunk beyond the horizon and their car is still sitting in the middle of a highway, a few abandoned vehicles scattered around but nothing like the roads in and out of cities. There are a few signs in Czech scattered about, but nothing useful or indicative of their position, even if they could read it. Roderich and Gilbert are nowhere to be found.
“Fuck,” Erzsébet says, disregarding any qualms she might have had about cussing in front of the kid in order to properly express her distress at their extreme stupidity. Klaus flinches, but she doesn’t notice. “D’you know where they went?”
Klaus shakes his head, curling into a small ball in the backseat as he is prone to doing. Erzsébet ties up her hair and checks her pistol for the tenth time that day, then grabs one of Gilbert’s from his bag. Germans, she thinks with distaste.
“Stay here,” she commands, gazing sternly at Klaus. She’s about to leave, but then pulls a knife from her belt and hands it to him.
“What’s this?” Klaus asks, staring at it with wide eyes.
“It’s a knife,” she tells him, her gut twisting itself into a huge knot at the thought of what she is doing. He’s a kid, she thinks. This shouldn’t be necessary. He shouldn’t have to grow up in this world, and she personally resolves to chop off the head of whoever triggered the goddamn end of the world in the first place. “If anyone you don’t know comes close, stab them in the head. Through the eye is a good place to do it, just try to aim down if you can.” If you see Gilbert or Roderich, stab them anyway.
“I don’t think-”
“I don’t care what you thing, Klaus. But that’s only for if something gets close. I want you to run away first, okay? Just run away, and climb a tree if you can. Keep quiet. We’ll come find you.”
Her instincts hiss at her with discomfort. Are you really doing this? they demand. Are you really going to just leave this kid behind?
Perhaps she ought to wait until morning. Klaus does look awfully scared.
Erzsébet sighs, then climbs into the back seat and settles down. “Screw those assholes. They can find their own way back. We’ll just have a party on our own, yeah? And they’re not invited.”
Klaus clings to her arm and doesn’t let go.
When Gilbert returns, Roderich is not with him.
After that, Klaus has abandonment issues. He refuses to go anywhere unless Gilbert or Erzsébet - usually Erzsébet - is with him, and if she’d thought she was being driven insane before, she certainly is now.
“We can’t keep doing this,” she finally says, tiredly, to Gilbert. “I’m not cut out for it. I’m not a mom.”
In the backseat, Klaus has curled up and is sleeping with a knife nearby in its sheath. It’s early in the morning, about six, and the sun is just coming up over the horizon in a way Erzsébet hasn’t seen since Roderich’s death. It’s been gray and cloudy, raining occasionally. She doesn’t mind. Now with the sun, the weather is finally (finally!) cooling down and the world feels fresh and clean. If not for the bodies littered about, she could almost pretend things are normal again
Gilbert glances behind them at the kid. His expression is part concern, part defeat - because he knows that Erzsi is right, neither of them is a parent or knows Klaus like Roderich did, and it’s becoming clear they are completely out of their league. “We owe it to him,” Gilbert says.
“No, we don’t,” Erzsébet replies. A little too loudly; Klaus stirs and she covers her mouth. Softer, she continues: “We didn’t make any sort of promises, Gilbert. We didn’t even know the man.”
“What do you propose, then? Just leave the kid on the side of the road?”
She purses her lips, avoiding Gilbert’s gaze, then mutters something too low for him to hear.
“What was that?”
“I said a quick death would be better for him than growing up in this hellhole.”
There’s a long pause. Gilbert simply drives, swerving carefully to avoid piles of debris that sit in their way. His face is harder than she’s ever seen it before, and she knows inherently that she’s said something wrong. She doesn’t care. It’s the truth. Eventually, Gilbert says with disbelief, “You’re not serious?”
“I am.”
“Erzsi, no-”
“Don’t tell me how to think, Gilbert!” Erzsébet says.
“I’m not,” Gilbert hisses in reply, before she can continue. “That’s not what this is. Erzsébet,” he sighs, “you’re a great girl and I respect you, but I’m not gonna let you just dispose of any human life like you’re the goddamned grim reaper.”
“Hey,” she interrupts.
He doesn’t let her. “I don’t care if it’s for the greater good and I don’t care if your own survival is your first fucking instinct. You deserve a chance, and I deserve a chance, and that boy right there deserves a chance too. And you know, I’m gonna make sure he gets it. So if you even think about touching that boy, I’ll pull over and you can walk to Warsaw by yourself. Then you’ll have two deaths on your hands.”
He knows her too well, she realizes, even after the brief amount of time they’ve spent together. Killing the dead? She can do it, it’s easy. They can’t feel anything and it spares them a humiliating existence, so in the end shooting every zombie she sees is a good thing. But she can’t allow someone living to die when there’s something she can do to prevent it. Roderich’s death, though she’s tried desperately not to think of it, is a terribly heavy weight.
If Roderich and Klaus wouldn’t last long, Gilbert and Klaus might manage a little longer - but eventually they’ll fail, she knows it, they know it, and they need her around to keep them strong.
Erzsi is loathe to admit it, but she thinks she needs Gilbert around too.
“Fine,” she says.
Later, as she watches Gilbert try to teach Klaus how to skin a chipmunk (a disaster; the kid is queasy and easily sickened and Gilbert is testy from the argument earlier), she wonders what happened to the girl she was two months ago. The girl who wouldn’t kill if her life depended on it. What became of her?
It’s probably that her life began to depend on it.
Three days and a close fucking call later, they arrive at Warsaw only to find that what they’d heard was right - it is closed. There’s a huge refugee camp all outside the city lines, filled with tents and cars and people packed in so tightly that it can’t possibly be more sanitary than roughing it out in the woods. Erzsébet’s heart drops into her shoes as she stares at the vast expanse of smoke and the stench of unwashed bodies, even death, and reprimands herself for putting so much hope in so flimsy an object.
Gilbert grits his teeth and puts Klaus on his back. Erzsébet shoulders a couple of packs, and they continue to the camp on foot.
They meet a family because the elder son tries to pickpocket Gilbert. He fails, easily, and Erzsébet catches him and is relishing the boy’s pleas for his life until his father shows up. The father, a tall, bear-like creature with blond hair and a glare like ice, speaks only Swedish and doesn’t understand their frantic German. He does understand the waifish creature on Gilbert’s back, though, and Klaus takes to him immediately.
As Klaus and the Swede seem to communicate only through expression, Gilbert and Erzsi exchange incredulous glances. “Well, shit,” Gilbert says. Erzsébet wonders if they can’t get Klaus to translate.
The Swede - Berwald - has taken up residence with a Fin called Timo who speaks enough broken German for them to communicate. But the family’s language is clearly an odd mix of Finnish and Swedish, and Erzsébet sits with a tiny bowl of watery stew, closing her eyes and pretending she’s back home, listening to her grandmother speak Hungarian so quickly she can’t hope to understand it.
“How long have you been here?” Gilbert asks. They’re trying to find out what the odds of them getting into the city are, which are beginning to look even lower than they’d initially assumed. Both, without saying a word to each other, are beginning to think that they’d fare better going back whence they came.
Timo frowns, then slowly says, “One month? We live outside Łódź, come when the dead start walking.” Berwald is speaking in Swedish to Peter and Oscar, the children; from the looks of it he is telling a story. Enraptured, Klaus listens, though Gilbert and Erzsébet doubt he understands a word. Gilbert nods. “You?” Timo asks.
Erzsébet glances at Gilbert, then says, “I don’t have anything else left.”
“Same,” Gilbert adds. She looks at him, mildly concerned, and he avoids her gaze.
Motherly - fatherly? - sympathy fills Timo’s eyes, and he bites back a sob. “You stay with us,” he says immediately. “We are your new family. Berwald, he is priest, he will marry you!”
Gilbert chokes on his stew (Berwald stares at him, and they have to reassure him that it really is quite good) and Erzsébet laughs. “Oh no,” she says, shaking her head.
“We’re not together,” Gilbert manages, still coughing.
“He’s a conceited douchebag, why would I want to date him?” she scoffs.
“She’s a stinking bitch, I’d never want to go out with her,” he retorts.
Timo raises an eyebrow and gives them an odd look, but marriage isn’t brought up again.
Timo’s a sneaky bastard, and he introduces them to a man who goes in and out of the city on a regular basis.
“I’m Feliks,” he announces, holding out a hand with manicured, though unpainted, nails. Erzsébet only notices because she hasn’t seen neat hands in forever. “I run the black market.”
“You.” Gilbert crosses his arms and scrutinizes him. Erzsi will admit, it’s hard to believe. Feliks is shorter than Timo and wearing pink, with his hair braided off to one side and hardly a speck of dirt on his clothes. It’s an odd contrast to the tent he’s set up office in, which is small and cramped and dirty, just like everywhere else.
“Well,” Feliks amends, “I run a black market. With my best man Toris. Hey, Toris! Get out here and say hi, or something.”
Toris leans out of another tent. He’s a friendly-looking man, taller than Feliks, and clearly more nervous. However, he does nothing but flip the three of them off.
“He’s a keeper,” Gilbert says sardonically.
“Yeah,” Feliks sighs, with a faint smile. Then he claps his hands and is once again entirely business - or as business as he can get. “So. What can I do you for?” He winks.
“We want to get into the city,” Erzsébet replies, getting straight to the point.
A grimace. “Ew. Why would you want that? It’s all crowded and dirty and dystopian and shit. Better out here, trust me. They don’t even have hot water.”
“We don’t have hot water.”
“Exactly! What makes you think it’s a better place?”
“We’re just,” Gilbert says, then trails off.
There is a brief silence that is not quite silent, for the sounds of the camp continue to echo around them. Shouts, and clangs, and occasionally tears - the tent’s thin walls are barely adequate to hide the sights. Erzsébet picks up where Gilbert left off. “We’re looking for a new start,” she says hesitantly. “The plague, it . . . it kinda took everything we had, everything we ever lived for. I don’t really care where I end up, I just want to be doing something productive.” I don’t want to have to worry about this.
Feliks gives her a sympathetic, yet somewhat condescending smile. “Hun, if I had a złoty for every time I’ve heard that story, I’d have enough to pay for the eradication of every zombie walking the earth. It’s just not something I can do. I can, like, get you stuff from the city, arrange for messages sent in and out, I might even be able to get you inside if we had a good enough deal. But I can’t set you up with a new life. Trust me, you’re better off out here.”
“You don’t know what it’s like out there, man,” Gilbert replies, his jaw trembling slightly. “There is nothing-”
“And there’s nothing here too. Why d’you think the city’s not letting anyone in? They haven’t got enough to support the poor bastards already there, much less a shitton of refugees from around the world. Go to Dusseldorf, or further north to Trømso. Maybe even Scotland, though good luck crossing the sea. But you know what, I bet you anything they’ll tell you the same thing I’m telling you now.” Feliks folded his hands, his expression one of helplessness. “My hands are tied, lovelies. Take what you have and make something out of it, because at the end of all things, it’s just survival of the fittest.”
“Maybe he’s right.”
“No,” Gilbert replies. Then, more firmly, “No. No, I can’t accept that.”
“What do you mean?”
They stop in the middle of what probably counts as a street in the middle of this shantytown. It’s dark now. Most people are huddled together within their tents, hoping and praying they survive another night. There should be a moon, but either the clouds or the pollution from the city are too much for it because it can’t be seen at all. The only light there is comes from lanterns and fires: dim and orange.
“I mean,” Gilbert says, then tries to think about what he means. Erzsébet huffs and keeps walking. She considers just walking and walking until she leaves Warsaw, leaves Poland, just walks off the face of the earth - she’s done with this, really, and her hair and clothing are stuck to her with sweat and when is the last time she bathed? Warsaw had been her last hope, really-
“I mean that he can’t be right, about this being the end and all that. That’s just fucking unacceptable.”
“Well, then, Gilbert.” Erzsi turns around, laughing humorlessly. “What do you suggest we do about it?”
“He told us to go north. Let’s go south.”
“South?” The last report Erzsébet had seen, the further south one went, the thicker the spread of the virus. Easier for the dead to fester and incubate and for the disease to be spread; to go south was to go to your own doom.
“It’ll be cold soon,” Gilbert explains. “Further south will be easier to get around in than north, you know? And I’ve got some friends in Romania. Maybe we could hook up with them, I dunno. I don’t like how cramped this place is, I feel like I’m gonna wake up one day and every last bastard is gonna be trying to bite my head off.”
Clearly, Gilbert is grasping at strings. “I don’t know,” she trails off.
“Or,” Gilbert continues, “you could stay here. I mean, I promised I’d get you to Warsaw and I did, and you never owed me anything, so I understand if you don’t want to come-”
When he begins to talk about leaving her behind, that’s when it happens. She’s not sure what it is, and later she can’t explain what changed, but she knows for a fact that she’s not going to stay in this shitpile when he’s off travelling the world. “You really think I’m gonna stay in this dump?” she scoffs, and even laughs.
“Well-”
“Don’t think you can get rid of me that easily,” she says.
She didn’t think Gilbert would smile so much at the idea. She finds she rather likes his smile. “Sounds like a plan,” he replies.
“After all. What have we got to lose?”
Characters/Pairings: PruHun, Austria, Kugelmugel, some SuFin, Sealand, Ladonia, some PoLiet
Rating: G
Word Count: 5k
Warnings: mentions of violence??? also zombies
Summary: A couple months ago the world ended, but for some reason it forgot that killing everyone was part of the protocol. Zombie apocalypse AU.
A/N: i've been watching a lot of the walking dead lately.
“Zombies, huh?”
“Looks like.”
“Of all the things I would’ve thought would end the world - famine, global warming, North Korea - I gotta say, man. Zombies weren’t on the list.”
Erzsébet loads another round into her pistol. The safety on, she leaves it in her lap and pulls her hair out of his messy bun, running her hand through it a couple of times to loosen it. It creates the slightest of breezes, more than welcome in the heavy August air. “You can’t be serious about that.”
Gilbert, who is reclining in the driver’s seat beside her, shrugs. “Sorry to disappoint.” He seems half asleep - unsurprising in this weather, but a dangerous state all the same. Erzsi cuts him a bit of slack. It’s been a long night.
“You had unicorns on your list, Gilbert,” she says, raising an eyebrow.
“Don’t talk to me about unicorns, Erzsi. Those bastards can stick you to the wall if they goddamn please and it’s not like we’ve treated them with the respect they demand.”
“I’d take a unicorn apocalypse over a zombie apocalypse any day.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I know exactly what I’m saying.”
Gilbert scoffs, then outright laughs at her. She suspects that his obnoxious guffawing can be heard by everyone for at least a mile around. “Nah, Erzsi. At least with zombies we know what we’re dealing with. Like, shoot ‘em in the head, burn the bodies, don’t get bit. The list goes on.” A woodchipper, for example. Erzsébet had discovered back in Italy that a woodchipper would dispose of just about anything.
“I’m sure that for the plethora of zombie fiction out there,” Erzsébet replies dryly, “there’s at least twice as much unicorn fiction.”
“You’d be surprised. Zombie fiction mostly agrees that when a corpse comes ambling toward ya, you run the other direction. But I haven’t found two unicorns that are the same. Do they fart rainbows or breathe fire? We just don’t know.” He takes a drink from the fast-food carton, the little liquid that is left slurping through the straw.
She snatches the drink from him and sips it herself. A strawberry slurpee. “When did you get this?” she demands. “The store had no one in it.”
Gilbert takes it back. It is his hard-earned slurpee, after all. “S’not hard to hop behind the desk and take something. Besides, you were taking way too fucking long.”
Aghast, she retorts, “Well, I apologize for being a woman and having needs.”
“Don’t worry, I forgive you.”
Erzsébet takes the empty cup and tosses it onto the road. There’s not enough room in the car for her to punch him, so this will have to do. Gilbert protests with an indignant expression and a yell of ‘Hey’. “We don’t have time for this, let’s go.”
“You are such a buzzkill.”
“I’m also the girl who hauled your ass out of a tight spot and so far, hasn’t gotten anything in return.”
“You got a ride didn’t you?” Gilbert starts the car and begins to pull out of the gas station, squinting against the sun that glints off the roofs of abandoned cars, abandoned bicycles - abandoned everything, actually.
Erzsébet pulls out a stick of gum and tosses it in her mouth. It is minty and delicious and feels good after a long lack of tooth-brushing. She’d never dreamt she’d miss tooth-brushing. “I could’ve hotwired the car myself. Instead I got a driver who thinks he’s funny.”
“I may have a piss-poor sense of humor but I sure ain’t a bad shot.”
Now it’s Erzsi’s turn to laugh. She does, at a much higher and more annoying pitch than Gilbert’s, though she’ll be the last to admit it. “You really think I’m gonna just hand you one of my guns?”
“I wish. You’ve got enough to arm the entire Prussian military. And I would know, my grandad was one of ‘em.”
“Your grandfather was Prussian?”
“Maybe it was my great-grandfather. It was a long time ago.”
Erzsébet shakes her head, smiling to herself.
“What?” Gilbert asks defensively.
“Oh, nothing,” she hums. “Never met a Prussian before.”
“Then hold on, sweetheart. You’re in for the ride of your life.”
“I’m more of a driver myself.”
“Excuse me, who’s the one with the keys?”
“Not for long.”
“Hey! Hey, lady!”
That was how he’d greeted her. It wasn’t the words that had gotten her attention as much as the tone, which she’d only heard once before when her little brother went missing in the woods. It was a tone of fear and desperation and hysteria, and she hadn’t been able to simply walk by.
His eyes weren’t actually wild, because she couldn’t see them from the distance she was at. But she liked to describe them that way. “You gotta get me out,” he panted in German, “I-I swear I’ll do anything.”
Erzsébet didn’t like the way the barbed wire tangled around his leg, cutting so deeply that the wound would surely be infected later. It might be the kindest thing, she thought, to shoot him now and let the zombies have him. She had enough to worry about, enough to carry, and she’d resolved ages ago that she would move faster alone.
“Anything,” he said again.
She pursed her lips. “Like?”
“I’ve got a car. I’ll take you anywhere you want. Wherever. Seriously, you name it! Just, just hurry-” Frantically glancing behind himself, his tone accelerated when he saw how close the creatures had wandered. Erzsébet couldn’t hear them, but she knew that Gilbert probably could.
She felt a twinge of sympathy. That had to drive a guy insane: being caught in a trap, passed over by every Samaritan who came along, while your death approached with a steadiness you could set your watch by.
But it wasn’t her problem.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t.”
He bit his hand, as if to hold back a sob. “No,” he then hissed at her. “You can, you’re strong and young- hell, can’t be any older than me. You just don’t want me to drag you down. I won’t, I fucking swear. I can shoot, I can survive, I was in the fucking army. You don’t even have to keep up with me, j-just cut me loose, yeah?”
There was no time left to consider it, so Erzsébet listened to her instincts and pulled out a knife.
They’re shooting for Warsaw, one of the last cities that still seems to be functioning, which they hear has closed its borders to all but a select few. Neither is quite sure how they’ll get in. At the moment, it’s less a question of how and more a question of if - since starting, they’ve made it to somewhere in Austria and crossed the Danube a little while back. Erzsébet hadn’t expected it to take this long to get there.
Gilbert is blaming the slow pace on the sheer amount of roads rendered untravellable by hordes, by vehicles left in the middle of the highway, by the complete lack of any sort of organization. “It’s like everyone who’s supposed to be in charge just up and blew his brains out,” he says.
“The world did end,” Erzsi points out.
“Doesn’t mean we did.”
On one hand he’s right, she thinks. The world ending is probably not a good excuse to stop trying to make things run efficiently. But on the other hand, she hadn’t liked her place in the efficiently run world at all, and is hesitant to believe that her current situation isn’t a step up. She’s seen and done more in the past few weeks than she has in her entire life.
Somewhere halfway through Austria is the first time Gilbert gets a chance to repay his debt to her. He takes the head off a zombie that’s got her pinned, and the grin on his face when the body collapses is the grin of the high school jock who knows he’s better than you and has just proved it. First she thanks him for saving her life, then she socks him in the jaw for looking at her like that. He learns quickly.
“Are we at least even?” he demands, rubbing his chin. It’s going to bruise, he can just tell.
“I could’ve handled it,” she replies, picking up her weapons and walking away. “You just got in the way.”
“That thing was about to tear you in half.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of strategy?”
Gilbert, of course, knows all about strategy - he was in the army, obviously. Erzsébet rolls her eyes at that because this is the same man who used the women’s bathroom for the novelty of it.
The radio in their car - some Italian model built for speed rather than an apocalypse - is broken, so there’s not much to do while driving except talk. They spend a lot of time arguing, and Erzsébet isn’t sure if she enjoys it or finds it annoying. Gilbert’s one of the first people she’s met who can actually hold his own against her, and that in itself is worthy of a commendation, but he’s also an arrogant asshole whose near death experience doesn’t seem to have changed him at all. If it has, and this is the watered-down version of Gilbert Beilschmidt, then she never wants to know the original.
Outside of Vienna they meet a man travelling with a child. Roderich, he says his name is, and Klaus is his little brother.
Klaus glares at them.
Erzsébet glares back.
Gilbert finds some stale chocolate in a rest-stop and gives it to the kid, then offers them both a ride. Roderich, to say the least, seems completely surprised. He sniffs like an aristocrat, staring at their ramshackle vehicle and haphazard clothing. Erzsi had thought they were doing pretty well for starting from scratch, but Roderich clearly did not share the sentiment. “Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. You guys are heading to Vienna, right?”
“Yes, we are.”
Gilbert’s expression is pained. “I haven’t been there,” he admits, “but I come from Berlin, and you don’t want to know what I saw there, trust me. I wouldn’t go to Vienna if I were you.”
Roderich takes a while, but eventually he agrees to accompany them to Warsaw. Erzsébet smiles and welcomes them along, and she even finds a set of crayons and paper for Klaus. But the second she’s able she takes Gilbert aside and does what she does best.
“Ow- damn it, Erzsi, was that necessary?” Gilbert rubs his head, certain that there’s going to be a bruise there too. His leg still isn’t up to speed, it’s too easy for her to catch him off guard. He’s going to be more purple than an eggplant by the time they get to Warsaw.
“You can’t just do that, Gilbert,” she hisses at him. “You can’t just pick up random strangers and offer to bring them along! This isn’t the yellow brick fucking road!”
Gilbert retorts, “Hey, if you hadn’t shown me a little compassion back there, I’d be dead! This guy has a kid, Erzsébet, I can’t just ignore that.”
“Ours is no place for a kid,” she reminds him. “We’re scavengers. He’ll be eaten alive.” It’s sad to think how literally she means that.
“What do you want, for me to tell them sorry you can’t come along, my girlfriend said no?!”
Her left hook is just as fierce as her right one, Gilbert learns. “I am not your girlfriend,” Erzsébet insists.
“Yeah, I know that, and you know that, but I don’t think Roddy cares.”
She bites her lip, thinking for a bit. “Fine,” she finally says. “But if they die, it’s on you.”
It’s not on him, and Erzsi knows she is stupid to assume that it is. Far be it from her to associate herself with Beilschmidt, at least beyond convenience for travelling, but when it comes down to it she will hold herself responsible for anybody within the same vicinity as herself. Perhaps that’s why she ended up rescuing Gilbert when her best bet would have been to leave him - after all, he’s clearly proved nothing more than a burden piling on still more burdens. He can’t ever walk for long, she’s the one who ends up doing the raiding while he keeps watch, and for all his army training he’s essentially useless without troops to command. He seems to be under the impression she’s one of his soldiers, which she most certainly isn’t.
No matter how good a shot she is.
That has nothing to do with it.
In the end, Roderich and Klaus quickly begin to drive her insane. Klaus, being the child he is, complains quickly and easily about absolutely everything. Are we there yet? Is there any food? What’s going on? What do you think of my drawing? Erzsébet would strangle him with his own white hair if she didn’t think Gilbert would shoot her for it.
Gilbert, over the short days that they travel together, really takes to Roderich and Klaus for some unfathomable reason. Roderich is just as OCD as he is and Erzsi supposes she isn’t that surprised, but he’s almost more annoying than his kid. He nags constantly, and is useless in a fight - how he’s managed to keep them both alive for so long is completely beyond her. Good thing he’s pretty.
At some point Roderich and Gilbert are discussing a soap opera they followed only last month, both ranting and raving about this character cheating on that one, and how this one girl was pregnant but obviously the father did not know, and is that kid really being sent away to military school, and somewhere along the way time travel gets involved but she’s long since dozed off. She’s woken roughly by someone shaking her shoulder. She begins to cuss out the culprit before realizing it’s Klaus, at which point she shuts her mouth abruptly.
“Miss Erzsébet?” he says, his usual monotone colored slightly with fear.
Erzsi yawns and blinks. “Hey, kid. Why aren’t you asleep?”
“Mister Beilschmidt went out to get something, and then Roderich followed him and told me to wake you if they didn’t return in ten minutes.”
Outside, the sun has all but sunk beyond the horizon and their car is still sitting in the middle of a highway, a few abandoned vehicles scattered around but nothing like the roads in and out of cities. There are a few signs in Czech scattered about, but nothing useful or indicative of their position, even if they could read it. Roderich and Gilbert are nowhere to be found.
“Fuck,” Erzsébet says, disregarding any qualms she might have had about cussing in front of the kid in order to properly express her distress at their extreme stupidity. Klaus flinches, but she doesn’t notice. “D’you know where they went?”
Klaus shakes his head, curling into a small ball in the backseat as he is prone to doing. Erzsébet ties up her hair and checks her pistol for the tenth time that day, then grabs one of Gilbert’s from his bag. Germans, she thinks with distaste.
“Stay here,” she commands, gazing sternly at Klaus. She’s about to leave, but then pulls a knife from her belt and hands it to him.
“What’s this?” Klaus asks, staring at it with wide eyes.
“It’s a knife,” she tells him, her gut twisting itself into a huge knot at the thought of what she is doing. He’s a kid, she thinks. This shouldn’t be necessary. He shouldn’t have to grow up in this world, and she personally resolves to chop off the head of whoever triggered the goddamn end of the world in the first place. “If anyone you don’t know comes close, stab them in the head. Through the eye is a good place to do it, just try to aim down if you can.” If you see Gilbert or Roderich, stab them anyway.
“I don’t think-”
“I don’t care what you thing, Klaus. But that’s only for if something gets close. I want you to run away first, okay? Just run away, and climb a tree if you can. Keep quiet. We’ll come find you.”
Her instincts hiss at her with discomfort. Are you really doing this? they demand. Are you really going to just leave this kid behind?
Perhaps she ought to wait until morning. Klaus does look awfully scared.
Erzsébet sighs, then climbs into the back seat and settles down. “Screw those assholes. They can find their own way back. We’ll just have a party on our own, yeah? And they’re not invited.”
Klaus clings to her arm and doesn’t let go.
When Gilbert returns, Roderich is not with him.
After that, Klaus has abandonment issues. He refuses to go anywhere unless Gilbert or Erzsébet - usually Erzsébet - is with him, and if she’d thought she was being driven insane before, she certainly is now.
“We can’t keep doing this,” she finally says, tiredly, to Gilbert. “I’m not cut out for it. I’m not a mom.”
In the backseat, Klaus has curled up and is sleeping with a knife nearby in its sheath. It’s early in the morning, about six, and the sun is just coming up over the horizon in a way Erzsébet hasn’t seen since Roderich’s death. It’s been gray and cloudy, raining occasionally. She doesn’t mind. Now with the sun, the weather is finally (finally!) cooling down and the world feels fresh and clean. If not for the bodies littered about, she could almost pretend things are normal again
Gilbert glances behind them at the kid. His expression is part concern, part defeat - because he knows that Erzsi is right, neither of them is a parent or knows Klaus like Roderich did, and it’s becoming clear they are completely out of their league. “We owe it to him,” Gilbert says.
“No, we don’t,” Erzsébet replies. A little too loudly; Klaus stirs and she covers her mouth. Softer, she continues: “We didn’t make any sort of promises, Gilbert. We didn’t even know the man.”
“What do you propose, then? Just leave the kid on the side of the road?”
She purses her lips, avoiding Gilbert’s gaze, then mutters something too low for him to hear.
“What was that?”
“I said a quick death would be better for him than growing up in this hellhole.”
There’s a long pause. Gilbert simply drives, swerving carefully to avoid piles of debris that sit in their way. His face is harder than she’s ever seen it before, and she knows inherently that she’s said something wrong. She doesn’t care. It’s the truth. Eventually, Gilbert says with disbelief, “You’re not serious?”
“I am.”
“Erzsi, no-”
“Don’t tell me how to think, Gilbert!” Erzsébet says.
“I’m not,” Gilbert hisses in reply, before she can continue. “That’s not what this is. Erzsébet,” he sighs, “you’re a great girl and I respect you, but I’m not gonna let you just dispose of any human life like you’re the goddamned grim reaper.”
“Hey,” she interrupts.
He doesn’t let her. “I don’t care if it’s for the greater good and I don’t care if your own survival is your first fucking instinct. You deserve a chance, and I deserve a chance, and that boy right there deserves a chance too. And you know, I’m gonna make sure he gets it. So if you even think about touching that boy, I’ll pull over and you can walk to Warsaw by yourself. Then you’ll have two deaths on your hands.”
He knows her too well, she realizes, even after the brief amount of time they’ve spent together. Killing the dead? She can do it, it’s easy. They can’t feel anything and it spares them a humiliating existence, so in the end shooting every zombie she sees is a good thing. But she can’t allow someone living to die when there’s something she can do to prevent it. Roderich’s death, though she’s tried desperately not to think of it, is a terribly heavy weight.
If Roderich and Klaus wouldn’t last long, Gilbert and Klaus might manage a little longer - but eventually they’ll fail, she knows it, they know it, and they need her around to keep them strong.
Erzsi is loathe to admit it, but she thinks she needs Gilbert around too.
“Fine,” she says.
Later, as she watches Gilbert try to teach Klaus how to skin a chipmunk (a disaster; the kid is queasy and easily sickened and Gilbert is testy from the argument earlier), she wonders what happened to the girl she was two months ago. The girl who wouldn’t kill if her life depended on it. What became of her?
It’s probably that her life began to depend on it.
Three days and a close fucking call later, they arrive at Warsaw only to find that what they’d heard was right - it is closed. There’s a huge refugee camp all outside the city lines, filled with tents and cars and people packed in so tightly that it can’t possibly be more sanitary than roughing it out in the woods. Erzsébet’s heart drops into her shoes as she stares at the vast expanse of smoke and the stench of unwashed bodies, even death, and reprimands herself for putting so much hope in so flimsy an object.
Gilbert grits his teeth and puts Klaus on his back. Erzsébet shoulders a couple of packs, and they continue to the camp on foot.
They meet a family because the elder son tries to pickpocket Gilbert. He fails, easily, and Erzsébet catches him and is relishing the boy’s pleas for his life until his father shows up. The father, a tall, bear-like creature with blond hair and a glare like ice, speaks only Swedish and doesn’t understand their frantic German. He does understand the waifish creature on Gilbert’s back, though, and Klaus takes to him immediately.
As Klaus and the Swede seem to communicate only through expression, Gilbert and Erzsi exchange incredulous glances. “Well, shit,” Gilbert says. Erzsébet wonders if they can’t get Klaus to translate.
The Swede - Berwald - has taken up residence with a Fin called Timo who speaks enough broken German for them to communicate. But the family’s language is clearly an odd mix of Finnish and Swedish, and Erzsébet sits with a tiny bowl of watery stew, closing her eyes and pretending she’s back home, listening to her grandmother speak Hungarian so quickly she can’t hope to understand it.
“How long have you been here?” Gilbert asks. They’re trying to find out what the odds of them getting into the city are, which are beginning to look even lower than they’d initially assumed. Both, without saying a word to each other, are beginning to think that they’d fare better going back whence they came.
Timo frowns, then slowly says, “One month? We live outside Łódź, come when the dead start walking.” Berwald is speaking in Swedish to Peter and Oscar, the children; from the looks of it he is telling a story. Enraptured, Klaus listens, though Gilbert and Erzsébet doubt he understands a word. Gilbert nods. “You?” Timo asks.
Erzsébet glances at Gilbert, then says, “I don’t have anything else left.”
“Same,” Gilbert adds. She looks at him, mildly concerned, and he avoids her gaze.
Motherly - fatherly? - sympathy fills Timo’s eyes, and he bites back a sob. “You stay with us,” he says immediately. “We are your new family. Berwald, he is priest, he will marry you!”
Gilbert chokes on his stew (Berwald stares at him, and they have to reassure him that it really is quite good) and Erzsébet laughs. “Oh no,” she says, shaking her head.
“We’re not together,” Gilbert manages, still coughing.
“He’s a conceited douchebag, why would I want to date him?” she scoffs.
“She’s a stinking bitch, I’d never want to go out with her,” he retorts.
Timo raises an eyebrow and gives them an odd look, but marriage isn’t brought up again.
Timo’s a sneaky bastard, and he introduces them to a man who goes in and out of the city on a regular basis.
“I’m Feliks,” he announces, holding out a hand with manicured, though unpainted, nails. Erzsébet only notices because she hasn’t seen neat hands in forever. “I run the black market.”
“You.” Gilbert crosses his arms and scrutinizes him. Erzsi will admit, it’s hard to believe. Feliks is shorter than Timo and wearing pink, with his hair braided off to one side and hardly a speck of dirt on his clothes. It’s an odd contrast to the tent he’s set up office in, which is small and cramped and dirty, just like everywhere else.
“Well,” Feliks amends, “I run a black market. With my best man Toris. Hey, Toris! Get out here and say hi, or something.”
Toris leans out of another tent. He’s a friendly-looking man, taller than Feliks, and clearly more nervous. However, he does nothing but flip the three of them off.
“He’s a keeper,” Gilbert says sardonically.
“Yeah,” Feliks sighs, with a faint smile. Then he claps his hands and is once again entirely business - or as business as he can get. “So. What can I do you for?” He winks.
“We want to get into the city,” Erzsébet replies, getting straight to the point.
A grimace. “Ew. Why would you want that? It’s all crowded and dirty and dystopian and shit. Better out here, trust me. They don’t even have hot water.”
“We don’t have hot water.”
“Exactly! What makes you think it’s a better place?”
“We’re just,” Gilbert says, then trails off.
There is a brief silence that is not quite silent, for the sounds of the camp continue to echo around them. Shouts, and clangs, and occasionally tears - the tent’s thin walls are barely adequate to hide the sights. Erzsébet picks up where Gilbert left off. “We’re looking for a new start,” she says hesitantly. “The plague, it . . . it kinda took everything we had, everything we ever lived for. I don’t really care where I end up, I just want to be doing something productive.” I don’t want to have to worry about this.
Feliks gives her a sympathetic, yet somewhat condescending smile. “Hun, if I had a złoty for every time I’ve heard that story, I’d have enough to pay for the eradication of every zombie walking the earth. It’s just not something I can do. I can, like, get you stuff from the city, arrange for messages sent in and out, I might even be able to get you inside if we had a good enough deal. But I can’t set you up with a new life. Trust me, you’re better off out here.”
“You don’t know what it’s like out there, man,” Gilbert replies, his jaw trembling slightly. “There is nothing-”
“And there’s nothing here too. Why d’you think the city’s not letting anyone in? They haven’t got enough to support the poor bastards already there, much less a shitton of refugees from around the world. Go to Dusseldorf, or further north to Trømso. Maybe even Scotland, though good luck crossing the sea. But you know what, I bet you anything they’ll tell you the same thing I’m telling you now.” Feliks folded his hands, his expression one of helplessness. “My hands are tied, lovelies. Take what you have and make something out of it, because at the end of all things, it’s just survival of the fittest.”
“Maybe he’s right.”
“No,” Gilbert replies. Then, more firmly, “No. No, I can’t accept that.”
“What do you mean?”
They stop in the middle of what probably counts as a street in the middle of this shantytown. It’s dark now. Most people are huddled together within their tents, hoping and praying they survive another night. There should be a moon, but either the clouds or the pollution from the city are too much for it because it can’t be seen at all. The only light there is comes from lanterns and fires: dim and orange.
“I mean,” Gilbert says, then tries to think about what he means. Erzsébet huffs and keeps walking. She considers just walking and walking until she leaves Warsaw, leaves Poland, just walks off the face of the earth - she’s done with this, really, and her hair and clothing are stuck to her with sweat and when is the last time she bathed? Warsaw had been her last hope, really-
“I mean that he can’t be right, about this being the end and all that. That’s just fucking unacceptable.”
“Well, then, Gilbert.” Erzsi turns around, laughing humorlessly. “What do you suggest we do about it?”
“He told us to go north. Let’s go south.”
“South?” The last report Erzsébet had seen, the further south one went, the thicker the spread of the virus. Easier for the dead to fester and incubate and for the disease to be spread; to go south was to go to your own doom.
“It’ll be cold soon,” Gilbert explains. “Further south will be easier to get around in than north, you know? And I’ve got some friends in Romania. Maybe we could hook up with them, I dunno. I don’t like how cramped this place is, I feel like I’m gonna wake up one day and every last bastard is gonna be trying to bite my head off.”
Clearly, Gilbert is grasping at strings. “I don’t know,” she trails off.
“Or,” Gilbert continues, “you could stay here. I mean, I promised I’d get you to Warsaw and I did, and you never owed me anything, so I understand if you don’t want to come-”
When he begins to talk about leaving her behind, that’s when it happens. She’s not sure what it is, and later she can’t explain what changed, but she knows for a fact that she’s not going to stay in this shitpile when he’s off travelling the world. “You really think I’m gonna stay in this dump?” she scoffs, and even laughs.
“Well-”
“Don’t think you can get rid of me that easily,” she says.
She didn’t think Gilbert would smile so much at the idea. She finds she rather likes his smile. “Sounds like a plan,” he replies.
“After all. What have we got to lose?”