Another post-apocalyptic fic!
Title: Cat Stevens in the Badlands
Rating: PG-13
Pairing,Character(s): Mercedes/Sam/Quinn
Warnings: Minor disturbing images, implied violence.
Spoilers: None.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Author Notes: Unbeta'd. Unrelated to Ash.
Summary: Another night patrol in Mercedes' new normal.
Word Count: 2,847
The sliver of crescent moon crouched low and dirty in the blackened sky like a fingernail shaving, distorted by the haze. Rubble crunched underfoot, scraps of insulation and ripped plastic making a dead-leaf rattle with every stale puff of wind.
Mercedes grimaced at the stench of decay pervading the air, even cutting through the acrid dustiness that she’d mostly stopped noticing in recent years. She wanted to think that she had hardened herself enough not to care, but she knew that if she came across the source of the sour carcass smell, she’d probably still scream like she had on her last trip to the badlands. Sam had made fun of her, but as far as she was concerned, Blondie could shove it, because she’d been the one who stepped on what was left and he’d still been the one looking like he wanted to throw up, even after Mercedes had gotten over the shock of her boot sinking into something with far less resistance than it should have had.
She gripped the handle of her gun harder at a faint metallic shriek, before recognizing it as the sound of corroded metal tearing as it finally twisted loose. The crash that should have followed never came, and she let out a breath, realizing that it had been farther away than she’d thought. Focus, Jones, she told herself firmly. You can freak out over stupid things when you’re finished.
There were only the faintest of shadows, showing in jagged darker shades of black on black, rough and sharp around the edges like a moonshadow should never have been. I’m being followed by a moonshadow, her mind supplied automatically, moonshadow, moonshadow. She almost snorted at herself, but the idea of accidentally taking in more of the dirty air than she had to sounded incredibly unappealing. Distracted, her foot caught on a ragged bit of concrete and she stumbled before catching her footing. She froze. The sound of her boot scuffing against the concrete and her heavy footfall were too loud in the dense silence. Had anything heard her?
There was no answering footfall anywhere, no hoarse ominous shout in the distance to tell her that she’d given herself away to a roving band of raiders. It wasn’t as if being quiet kept them away, but if she ran into a group, she wanted it to be on her own terms. Her gun felt burning-hot in her hands as it absorbed body heat and held it despite the cool dank air, and she clutched it hard, willing her heart to stop thundering against her ribcage. The memory of the last ambush crouched, ready to spring and rip at her confidence, and she did not have time for this. She narrowed her eyes and took a few fast steps across a small clear stretch of ground.
There was a wall ahead of her, a section almost as tall as a man left standing, although the rest of whatever it had once supported was strewn around like bone fragments in the wan moonlight. She held her breath without meaning to as she forced herself to creep toward it, gun held level and steady in front of her. Nearly everything else around her was flattened; rows of foundations cropped up at knee level, ready to trip the inattentive, and the omnipresent rubble formed a minefield of hazards, but this was the only thing she’d seen for a half hour that could provide shelter to an invader. The rank smell was getting stronger.
Mercedes gritted her teeth and gripped the gun harder, taking slow and careful steps until she was standing with her back against the closest side of the wall. Then she inhaled deeply, trying to ignore the urge to choke on the smog and stink, and whipped around the end of the wall with a grim expression, gun pointed straight out, finger on the trigger, and bracing herself against the recoil if anything was there to be shot. There was nothing but darkness.
She blinked and glanced around again. There was no one hiding there, no silhouettes laying in wait to club her over the head or shoot back, no raider or desperate lone wanderer ready to try and force the location of her camp out of her. The relief was almost choked out when the smell registered, though. She automatically let go of the gun with one hand to cover her nose and mouth with the other, filtering out what she could as the stench of rot made her eyes start watering. In the hazy dark, she couldn’t make out much, but it looked like there was a shape of something between uneven chunks of fallen brick and mortar. There was a subtle buzz of flies under the quiet whistle of wind insidiously forcing itself through cracks in the segment of wall. She wrinkled her nose and looked closer, holding her breath in disgust. A bit of matted fur, a gleam of bone, half a pointed ear.
A low whistle cut through the deceptive almost-silence, cut off, then repeated twice on a higher pitch. Mercedes pulled back from the carcass in disgust and took a few steps away before whistling a response of one long high note that would have been piercing if it weren’t dampened by the heavy atmosphere - all clear, no danger to report. She took a last glance around her surroundings and the dead animal before retracing her steps and going back the way she’d come, stepping carefully over bits of shattered buildings.
It was at least another twenty tension-strung minutes, as far as she could guess, before she had any other sign that she wasn’t the only living person wandering through the ruins of some town whose name she’d forgotten - maps had been hard to come by and even harder to rely on in the last seven years. There was a faint thud and a choked-out curse somewhere in the distance, carried across the momentary stillness. Mercedes froze and lifted her gun again, but there was an immediate whistle, a long high note that pitched up at the end, as if in question. She relaxed and answered with another ‘all clear.’ Now that she gazed in that direction and squinted her eyes, focusing through the haze and darkness, she could make out a faint movement, the dirty glint of moonlight on gunmetal. She nodded to herself and kept picking her way across the desolation, back to the place they’d split up.
Sam didn’t look hurt when they finally met up again, although when Mercedes peered close, she could see the rip in his pants’ knee where he was brushing at the fabric sheepishly. She lifted an eyebrow, knowing from the way he ducked his head in embarrassment that he could feel the force of her scrutiny, but neither of them said anything as they turned and walked side-by-side back to camp, both of them glancing around warily with their hands resting on their guns.
Her muscles barely burned anymore from the extended exertion, and she spared a moment to be proud of that - although she’d gotten used to the constant movement since, the first year After had been torturous at best. She hadn’t been able to face the loss of absolutely everything with the same numbness most of the other survivors had retreated into, so the sudden, forced change to a nomadic lifestyle as the world around them plunged into chaos and desolation had left her holding back sobs of exhaustion far too many nights, even after the immediate (and subsequent) losses became less freshly painful.
As soon as they reached camp, they let the woman on decontamination duty take their boots and return their personal footwear before they ventured into the settlement proper. Mercedes spared a second to be glad that the paranoia over tracking anything in had lessened to the point of only needing to trade out boots in the past two years. Passing through the second set of gates, they set their steps toward the central cluster of buildings to report back. They were soon giving near-identical accounts of their patrol in the flickering lamplight of a crude shack: no raiders and no sign of them, no vegetation, no animals larger than insects. After she was done describing her patrol, Mercedes finished with, “Only organic thing I saw was a dog. It was dead, though.”
Sam raised his eyebrows and they disappeared under his ridiculous mop, shaggier than ever these days and darkened to a dull mousy brown now that he didn’t have anything to bleach (or wash) it with. He glanced at the officer, then back at Mercedes, and asked, “Why didn’t you bring it back? No one’s found anything for-“
Mercedes snorted and cut him off. “Please, I am not eating that shit.” She paused and pursed her lips before reluctantly admitting, “Besides, it was half-rotted, anyway.”
Sam rolled his eyes but left it at that, and the grizzled woman at the desk nodded curtly and dismissed them, jotting down perfunctory notes of their reports.
Mercedes sighed and stretched as soon as the door had swung shut behind them, the joints in her back popping as she locked her hands in the small of her back and arched. “All I want to do now is collapse and sleep for a week,” she groused, glad that they had finally been released. “These night patrols are a bigger pain in the ass than guard duty, if that’s even possible.”
Sam snorted as he loped along beside her towards their shack. “Please, you whined about guard duty for a month straight, last time you were assigned. At least there’s a change of scenery during patrols.”
“And a chance to nearly maim yourself, apparently,” Mercedes added, glancing down pointedly at Sam’s knee. “You’d better not have gotten anything into that scrape.” There were no lights outside to act as a beacon for raiders, but the pathways of trodden dirt were clear and level enough, so they made their way in the dark by memory, turning automatically at the end of a short row of sturdy but ugly buildings.
She couldn’t see Sam’s flush under the dual cover of darkness and the dust that clung to all of them like a second skin, but she knew it was there as he tried to bluster it off with a grin. “Hey, everyone trips.”
“Yeah, especially you and Quinn,” she retorted. “God, the pair of you,” she sighed, rolling her eyes. “I’m surprised neither of you has fallen off the walls yet, the way you flail around.”
“Hey!” Sam protested weakly, but they were back at their shack and the door was opening, so any attempt to defend his coordination would have to wait.
“Welcome back.” Quinn tried not to sound overly relieved, but Mercedes could hear the smile in her voice as she held the door open for them. “Sam, shoes!” she chided once Mercedes was in, having toed off her boots, and Sam tried to follow.
“Sorry,” Sam muttered, following Mercedes’ example. Quinn smiled at him once he was done and pecked him on the lips before shutting the door behind them.
Mercedes, further into the single room, reached for the familiar faint glow and lifted the cover off the lamp. The room was illuminated as she did, the mismatched furniture they’d been able to salvage filling the small space with uneven shadows. The back wall was covered with a sheet of plastic to conceal the fact that the shack only had three sides, the back of it adjoining the inner of the defensive walls that surrounded the camp.
Quinn was making a concerned face when Mercedes turned around again, crouching at a level that made Sam blush and look away as she brusquely examined the ripped knee of his pants. “It doesn’t look like you’re bleeding,” she murmured.
Mercedes rolled her eyes. “Mr. Coordination here managed to trip over his own feet while we were coming back,” she informed Quinn. “He’s walking just fine, though.”
Quinn nodded and stood up again, giving a sheepish Sam an exasperated look before throwing her arms around him tightly. “Don’t you dare actually get hurt out there,” she ordered him. Mercedes could see the line of her shoulders shaking slightly in the lamplight, though, so she sighed and came up behind her, wrapping her own arms around Quinn’s waist. She leaned up so that she could rest her chin on Quinn’s shoulder, slotting their bodies together like puzzle pieces as Sam slid his hands off Quinn’s back to include Mercedes in his embrace. Pressed together like that, she could feel Quinn gradually relax, some of the lingering tension running out of her own body as a result.
After a few moments of staying wrapped up between them, Quinn shrugged them both off and pulled away clearing her throat haughtily. “The same goes for you, Mercedes,” she added, as if there hadn’t been a break in the conversation. “Did you see anything while you were out?” As she spoke, she walked to the far corner and returned with two cracked plates, on which she’d apparently snuck food from the storage center. Mercedes and Sam both gratefully accepted them and sat, Sam on a chair, Mercedes on the edge of the bed with Quinn settling down beside her.
“I didn’t see anything,” Mercedes observed between bites. She always forgot how hungry the release of sustained fear could make someone. Most of the time, there was nothing to be found in the badlands beyond the camp, but when there was… “If there’s anything out there, it’s too far away to find us soon.”
“I didn’t come across anything, either,” Sam shrugged, aimlessly pushing food around on his plate until Quinn leveled a glare at him. He nearly stabbed himself with his fork as he attempted to take a bite too hastily. After swallowing, he pointed the fork at Mercedes and grinned, brightening up, “She totally found another corpse, though.”
Mercedes narrowed her eyes and chewed almost viciously. Once her mouth was clear, she met Quinn’s concerned gaze and huffed, “It was just a dog. Sam’s being an idiot.”
“Yeah, but did you scream this time?” Sam was clearly not willing to let it drop yet.
“Nah. You weren’t around to act like a little girl about it, so there wasn’t anyone I had to balance out,” Mercedes said with a dismissive wave of the hand holding her fork.
Quinn sighed and looked toward the ceiling as if asking for patience.
“I still say you freaked out harder,” Sam pointed out, still grinning.
“Whatever, I’m not the one who almost cried the first time he looked in a bit of mirror and saw brown roots,” Mercedes said pointedly.
Stung, Sam looked like he was gearing up to respond until Quinn gritted out, “Fine, you’re both melodramatic, can we leave it at that? I stayed up to wait for you even though I have morning clinic duty, and I would like to go to sleep sometime before dawn.”
Sam mumbled a sheepish apology and Mercedes made a sympathetic face before kissing Quinn on the cheek. Quinn nodded as if graciously accepting the apologies.
Once the plates had been cleared and stacked on a side table, they’d shucked off their dirty clothes, and the lamp was dimmed, they all collapsed onto the thin mattress and let Mercedes pull the cover over them, fussing with it for a moment before wrapping her arms around Quinn and resting her cheek on her shoulder. Sam reached across Quinn to drape an arm over both of them, his hand coming to rest familiarly on Mercedes’ lower back. Things seemed to be settling into a steady peace with nothing to disturb the silence but their breaths, but then Sam chuckled suddenly and piped up, “Okay, you gotta admit the shriek was hilarious that time. You’d just been saying that you were finally starting to feel like-“
“Not again,” Quinn moaned, wriggling until she could get an arm free to gently smack Sam on the top of the head.
Mercedes snorted, unwilling to lose the last word, even if the adrenaline crash was finally starting to catch up with her. “Still not as funny as the time you were out with Brittany and found out she honest-to-God thought that ‘raiders’ had been a football reference all along.”
“Yes, and then he had to convince her otherwise after he’d played along because he thought it was a joke and was mostly impressed she knew the team name, and it was hilarious, I know,” Quinn grumbled, sneaking a hand around Mercedes to pinch her lightly. Mercedes jumped and scowled at Quinn in the dark, but she just received a sleepy sigh in response. “Now go to sleep, both of you.”
Silence fell in the shack again, thicker and more peaceful than the fitful tension outside, and even though they were all gritty and sticky from dust and sweat, the three of them curled together as closely as possible as they drifted off to sleep.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing,Character(s): Mercedes/Sam/Quinn
Warnings: Minor disturbing images, implied violence.
Spoilers: None.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Author Notes: Unbeta'd. Unrelated to Ash.
Summary: Another night patrol in Mercedes' new normal.
Word Count: 2,847
The sliver of crescent moon crouched low and dirty in the blackened sky like a fingernail shaving, distorted by the haze. Rubble crunched underfoot, scraps of insulation and ripped plastic making a dead-leaf rattle with every stale puff of wind.
Mercedes grimaced at the stench of decay pervading the air, even cutting through the acrid dustiness that she’d mostly stopped noticing in recent years. She wanted to think that she had hardened herself enough not to care, but she knew that if she came across the source of the sour carcass smell, she’d probably still scream like she had on her last trip to the badlands. Sam had made fun of her, but as far as she was concerned, Blondie could shove it, because she’d been the one who stepped on what was left and he’d still been the one looking like he wanted to throw up, even after Mercedes had gotten over the shock of her boot sinking into something with far less resistance than it should have had.
She gripped the handle of her gun harder at a faint metallic shriek, before recognizing it as the sound of corroded metal tearing as it finally twisted loose. The crash that should have followed never came, and she let out a breath, realizing that it had been farther away than she’d thought. Focus, Jones, she told herself firmly. You can freak out over stupid things when you’re finished.
There were only the faintest of shadows, showing in jagged darker shades of black on black, rough and sharp around the edges like a moonshadow should never have been. I’m being followed by a moonshadow, her mind supplied automatically, moonshadow, moonshadow. She almost snorted at herself, but the idea of accidentally taking in more of the dirty air than she had to sounded incredibly unappealing. Distracted, her foot caught on a ragged bit of concrete and she stumbled before catching her footing. She froze. The sound of her boot scuffing against the concrete and her heavy footfall were too loud in the dense silence. Had anything heard her?
There was no answering footfall anywhere, no hoarse ominous shout in the distance to tell her that she’d given herself away to a roving band of raiders. It wasn’t as if being quiet kept them away, but if she ran into a group, she wanted it to be on her own terms. Her gun felt burning-hot in her hands as it absorbed body heat and held it despite the cool dank air, and she clutched it hard, willing her heart to stop thundering against her ribcage. The memory of the last ambush crouched, ready to spring and rip at her confidence, and she did not have time for this. She narrowed her eyes and took a few fast steps across a small clear stretch of ground.
There was a wall ahead of her, a section almost as tall as a man left standing, although the rest of whatever it had once supported was strewn around like bone fragments in the wan moonlight. She held her breath without meaning to as she forced herself to creep toward it, gun held level and steady in front of her. Nearly everything else around her was flattened; rows of foundations cropped up at knee level, ready to trip the inattentive, and the omnipresent rubble formed a minefield of hazards, but this was the only thing she’d seen for a half hour that could provide shelter to an invader. The rank smell was getting stronger.
Mercedes gritted her teeth and gripped the gun harder, taking slow and careful steps until she was standing with her back against the closest side of the wall. Then she inhaled deeply, trying to ignore the urge to choke on the smog and stink, and whipped around the end of the wall with a grim expression, gun pointed straight out, finger on the trigger, and bracing herself against the recoil if anything was there to be shot. There was nothing but darkness.
She blinked and glanced around again. There was no one hiding there, no silhouettes laying in wait to club her over the head or shoot back, no raider or desperate lone wanderer ready to try and force the location of her camp out of her. The relief was almost choked out when the smell registered, though. She automatically let go of the gun with one hand to cover her nose and mouth with the other, filtering out what she could as the stench of rot made her eyes start watering. In the hazy dark, she couldn’t make out much, but it looked like there was a shape of something between uneven chunks of fallen brick and mortar. There was a subtle buzz of flies under the quiet whistle of wind insidiously forcing itself through cracks in the segment of wall. She wrinkled her nose and looked closer, holding her breath in disgust. A bit of matted fur, a gleam of bone, half a pointed ear.
A low whistle cut through the deceptive almost-silence, cut off, then repeated twice on a higher pitch. Mercedes pulled back from the carcass in disgust and took a few steps away before whistling a response of one long high note that would have been piercing if it weren’t dampened by the heavy atmosphere - all clear, no danger to report. She took a last glance around her surroundings and the dead animal before retracing her steps and going back the way she’d come, stepping carefully over bits of shattered buildings.
It was at least another twenty tension-strung minutes, as far as she could guess, before she had any other sign that she wasn’t the only living person wandering through the ruins of some town whose name she’d forgotten - maps had been hard to come by and even harder to rely on in the last seven years. There was a faint thud and a choked-out curse somewhere in the distance, carried across the momentary stillness. Mercedes froze and lifted her gun again, but there was an immediate whistle, a long high note that pitched up at the end, as if in question. She relaxed and answered with another ‘all clear.’ Now that she gazed in that direction and squinted her eyes, focusing through the haze and darkness, she could make out a faint movement, the dirty glint of moonlight on gunmetal. She nodded to herself and kept picking her way across the desolation, back to the place they’d split up.
Sam didn’t look hurt when they finally met up again, although when Mercedes peered close, she could see the rip in his pants’ knee where he was brushing at the fabric sheepishly. She lifted an eyebrow, knowing from the way he ducked his head in embarrassment that he could feel the force of her scrutiny, but neither of them said anything as they turned and walked side-by-side back to camp, both of them glancing around warily with their hands resting on their guns.
Her muscles barely burned anymore from the extended exertion, and she spared a moment to be proud of that - although she’d gotten used to the constant movement since, the first year After had been torturous at best. She hadn’t been able to face the loss of absolutely everything with the same numbness most of the other survivors had retreated into, so the sudden, forced change to a nomadic lifestyle as the world around them plunged into chaos and desolation had left her holding back sobs of exhaustion far too many nights, even after the immediate (and subsequent) losses became less freshly painful.
As soon as they reached camp, they let the woman on decontamination duty take their boots and return their personal footwear before they ventured into the settlement proper. Mercedes spared a second to be glad that the paranoia over tracking anything in had lessened to the point of only needing to trade out boots in the past two years. Passing through the second set of gates, they set their steps toward the central cluster of buildings to report back. They were soon giving near-identical accounts of their patrol in the flickering lamplight of a crude shack: no raiders and no sign of them, no vegetation, no animals larger than insects. After she was done describing her patrol, Mercedes finished with, “Only organic thing I saw was a dog. It was dead, though.”
Sam raised his eyebrows and they disappeared under his ridiculous mop, shaggier than ever these days and darkened to a dull mousy brown now that he didn’t have anything to bleach (or wash) it with. He glanced at the officer, then back at Mercedes, and asked, “Why didn’t you bring it back? No one’s found anything for-“
Mercedes snorted and cut him off. “Please, I am not eating that shit.” She paused and pursed her lips before reluctantly admitting, “Besides, it was half-rotted, anyway.”
Sam rolled his eyes but left it at that, and the grizzled woman at the desk nodded curtly and dismissed them, jotting down perfunctory notes of their reports.
Mercedes sighed and stretched as soon as the door had swung shut behind them, the joints in her back popping as she locked her hands in the small of her back and arched. “All I want to do now is collapse and sleep for a week,” she groused, glad that they had finally been released. “These night patrols are a bigger pain in the ass than guard duty, if that’s even possible.”
Sam snorted as he loped along beside her towards their shack. “Please, you whined about guard duty for a month straight, last time you were assigned. At least there’s a change of scenery during patrols.”
“And a chance to nearly maim yourself, apparently,” Mercedes added, glancing down pointedly at Sam’s knee. “You’d better not have gotten anything into that scrape.” There were no lights outside to act as a beacon for raiders, but the pathways of trodden dirt were clear and level enough, so they made their way in the dark by memory, turning automatically at the end of a short row of sturdy but ugly buildings.
She couldn’t see Sam’s flush under the dual cover of darkness and the dust that clung to all of them like a second skin, but she knew it was there as he tried to bluster it off with a grin. “Hey, everyone trips.”
“Yeah, especially you and Quinn,” she retorted. “God, the pair of you,” she sighed, rolling her eyes. “I’m surprised neither of you has fallen off the walls yet, the way you flail around.”
“Hey!” Sam protested weakly, but they were back at their shack and the door was opening, so any attempt to defend his coordination would have to wait.
“Welcome back.” Quinn tried not to sound overly relieved, but Mercedes could hear the smile in her voice as she held the door open for them. “Sam, shoes!” she chided once Mercedes was in, having toed off her boots, and Sam tried to follow.
“Sorry,” Sam muttered, following Mercedes’ example. Quinn smiled at him once he was done and pecked him on the lips before shutting the door behind them.
Mercedes, further into the single room, reached for the familiar faint glow and lifted the cover off the lamp. The room was illuminated as she did, the mismatched furniture they’d been able to salvage filling the small space with uneven shadows. The back wall was covered with a sheet of plastic to conceal the fact that the shack only had three sides, the back of it adjoining the inner of the defensive walls that surrounded the camp.
Quinn was making a concerned face when Mercedes turned around again, crouching at a level that made Sam blush and look away as she brusquely examined the ripped knee of his pants. “It doesn’t look like you’re bleeding,” she murmured.
Mercedes rolled her eyes. “Mr. Coordination here managed to trip over his own feet while we were coming back,” she informed Quinn. “He’s walking just fine, though.”
Quinn nodded and stood up again, giving a sheepish Sam an exasperated look before throwing her arms around him tightly. “Don’t you dare actually get hurt out there,” she ordered him. Mercedes could see the line of her shoulders shaking slightly in the lamplight, though, so she sighed and came up behind her, wrapping her own arms around Quinn’s waist. She leaned up so that she could rest her chin on Quinn’s shoulder, slotting their bodies together like puzzle pieces as Sam slid his hands off Quinn’s back to include Mercedes in his embrace. Pressed together like that, she could feel Quinn gradually relax, some of the lingering tension running out of her own body as a result.
After a few moments of staying wrapped up between them, Quinn shrugged them both off and pulled away clearing her throat haughtily. “The same goes for you, Mercedes,” she added, as if there hadn’t been a break in the conversation. “Did you see anything while you were out?” As she spoke, she walked to the far corner and returned with two cracked plates, on which she’d apparently snuck food from the storage center. Mercedes and Sam both gratefully accepted them and sat, Sam on a chair, Mercedes on the edge of the bed with Quinn settling down beside her.
“I didn’t see anything,” Mercedes observed between bites. She always forgot how hungry the release of sustained fear could make someone. Most of the time, there was nothing to be found in the badlands beyond the camp, but when there was… “If there’s anything out there, it’s too far away to find us soon.”
“I didn’t come across anything, either,” Sam shrugged, aimlessly pushing food around on his plate until Quinn leveled a glare at him. He nearly stabbed himself with his fork as he attempted to take a bite too hastily. After swallowing, he pointed the fork at Mercedes and grinned, brightening up, “She totally found another corpse, though.”
Mercedes narrowed her eyes and chewed almost viciously. Once her mouth was clear, she met Quinn’s concerned gaze and huffed, “It was just a dog. Sam’s being an idiot.”
“Yeah, but did you scream this time?” Sam was clearly not willing to let it drop yet.
“Nah. You weren’t around to act like a little girl about it, so there wasn’t anyone I had to balance out,” Mercedes said with a dismissive wave of the hand holding her fork.
Quinn sighed and looked toward the ceiling as if asking for patience.
“I still say you freaked out harder,” Sam pointed out, still grinning.
“Whatever, I’m not the one who almost cried the first time he looked in a bit of mirror and saw brown roots,” Mercedes said pointedly.
Stung, Sam looked like he was gearing up to respond until Quinn gritted out, “Fine, you’re both melodramatic, can we leave it at that? I stayed up to wait for you even though I have morning clinic duty, and I would like to go to sleep sometime before dawn.”
Sam mumbled a sheepish apology and Mercedes made a sympathetic face before kissing Quinn on the cheek. Quinn nodded as if graciously accepting the apologies.
Once the plates had been cleared and stacked on a side table, they’d shucked off their dirty clothes, and the lamp was dimmed, they all collapsed onto the thin mattress and let Mercedes pull the cover over them, fussing with it for a moment before wrapping her arms around Quinn and resting her cheek on her shoulder. Sam reached across Quinn to drape an arm over both of them, his hand coming to rest familiarly on Mercedes’ lower back. Things seemed to be settling into a steady peace with nothing to disturb the silence but their breaths, but then Sam chuckled suddenly and piped up, “Okay, you gotta admit the shriek was hilarious that time. You’d just been saying that you were finally starting to feel like-“
“Not again,” Quinn moaned, wriggling until she could get an arm free to gently smack Sam on the top of the head.
Mercedes snorted, unwilling to lose the last word, even if the adrenaline crash was finally starting to catch up with her. “Still not as funny as the time you were out with Brittany and found out she honest-to-God thought that ‘raiders’ had been a football reference all along.”
“Yes, and then he had to convince her otherwise after he’d played along because he thought it was a joke and was mostly impressed she knew the team name, and it was hilarious, I know,” Quinn grumbled, sneaking a hand around Mercedes to pinch her lightly. Mercedes jumped and scowled at Quinn in the dark, but she just received a sleepy sigh in response. “Now go to sleep, both of you.”
Silence fell in the shack again, thicker and more peaceful than the fitful tension outside, and even though they were all gritty and sticky from dust and sweat, the three of them curled together as closely as possible as they drifted off to sleep.