FIC: With Crooked Hands (The Office, Jim/Ryan), Part 1
Title: With Crooked Hands
Fandom: The Office (US)
Rating: R (for sex and violence)
Pairing: Jim/Ryan
Length: 19,700 words
Summary: Jim and Ryan, on their way home.
AN: For festschrift. This is a fic set in the Mosepocalypse (the still unpublished apocalyptic Office fic from Mose's point of view, veering off from canon in mid-season 3, that kyrafic and I have been writing for well over a year). It's basically a deleted scene, by which I mean that it's twice as long as the original fic, about events Mose doesn't witness. So yes, that's right, I am ficcing my own unpublished fic. I AM LOST IN A MAZE OF MIRRORS. Whatevs, anyway, it's apocalyptic Jim/Ryan hurt/comfort, if you're into that kind of thing, and it should stand on its own. Title from Tennyson. Thanks to kyrafic and agate for betaing.
**
The emptiness of Ryan's parents' house is deep and unnerving, the house stuffy and closed up, smelling the way it did when they bought it and it was new, like wood floors and lemon cleaner. The beds are still mussed, crusted-over dinner pans are still soaking in the sink, and the sports section of the paper is still next to his dad's easy chair. Like Vesuvius hit, and everything is perfectly preserved the way it was the night before the attacks, when his parents must have gone up to bed not knowing anything was on the brink of happening. At first, Ryan's relieved that they don't find their bodies, but as he enters each empty room, one by one, the loneliness of being left behind is almost as bad as if they did.
After they go over the whole first floor, Gil and Oscar volunteer to search the basement while Ryan, Karen and Jim look upstairs. It's creepy, the silence of the place, the only sound the occasional creaking of the floor under their feet. Everyone's on edge, expecting to find something terrible behind every door, even though the quiet and the musty air make it pretty clear no one's been in here since his parents left. Jim's knuckles are white on the baseball bat he's holding, and Karen's jumping at every little sound, which is a little nerve-wracking since she's the one Dwight entrusted with the rifle. Ryan's leading the way, and having the paranoia twins behind him is not helping.
"Okay, seriously," he says under his breath. "You guys need to chill."
"Right, yeah," Karen says, keeping her voice down but sounding annoyed. "Whereas you're cool as a cucumber, clearly."
"Shut up," Ryan says, and swings open the door to his old bedroom. There's no one there either. Jim lets out a long sigh and slumps against the wall as Ryan moves forward into the room.
His little league trophies are still on top of his bookshelf, blankets on the bed undisturbed. It's weirder than if the looters had been there, having it all preserved and everyday like this. His parents aren't that far out of Scranton proper, and even though it's only been a few weeks, it feels like a really long time since things were normal. The sun is starting to set out the window, past the trees.
Behind him, Jim starts clicking the light switch up and down, which is the new compulsive habit he's picked up. Ryan's not sure if he honestly thinks that maybe this light will be the one where the electricity works, or if it's just a nervous tic, but it's driving him up a wall a little bit, that clicking in every room they walk into.
"Could you not do that just for once?" Karen says before Ryan can.
Jim makes a face at her but he stops. Ryan and Karen exchange a look.
Ryan goes to look out the window, but all he can see is the familiar backyard stretching out in front of him, maple trees on the horizon. Nothing's moving outside, like Scranton's a ghost town.
"Nothing here," Ryan says, looking around the room one more time. "That's the whole second floor."
Jim adjusts his grip on the baseball bat nervously. "Where do you think they are?"
Ryan would rather not think about that, and it's taking all his energy to mentally avoid the question. He shrugs, looking at the Phillies poster on his wall. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Karen glaring at Jim like he's an idiot for saying that.
"Oscar and Gil are probably done searching the basement," Ryan says. "Let's go downstairs."
It's almost dark by the time they've conferred on what they should do, so they end up bunking down in Ryan's parents' living room, blankets from upstairs wrapped around them. It's kind of stupid to all sleep on the floor when there are perfectly good beds empty upstairs, but.
**
Ryan wakes up early, aching all over from sleeping on the floor and from the times he fell the day before. Everyone else is still asleep, including Jim, whose version of taking last watch seems to mean sleeping sitting up, snoring softly. Ryan lies still, blinking and watching the sky outside turn from navy blue to gray. He thinks maybe they didn't think the plan through before they left Dwight's farm, but he hadn't really expected all their families to be gone. Dead, maybe. Gone, no. How are they ever going to find them again? He pulls his cell phone out of his hoodie pocket and holds it up so he can see it, the dim light of the display still glowing softly after all this time. He only has one bar of battery life left, but there hasn't been any cell reception since two days after everything went to hell anyway, so it doesn't really matter. And it's stupid, but he feels vaguely panicky about his phone dying, like maybe the cell towers will suddenly power back up again, and if his phone is dead, he won't even know. He'll miss it, the window of opportunity to call his mom or whatever.
Of course, if the cell towers power back up, everything else probably will too, so it's not like he won't be able to charge his phone. It's idiotic to feel like your cell phone dying is a symbol of civilization as we know it ending, especially after all the times before that he let his phone die on purpose so Kelly couldn't get through. But that's still how it feels, like his cell phone is the last pointless link to how things used to be. He shoves the useless phone back in his pocket and lies there looking at the pale plaster of the ceiling, wondering if he can fall back asleep.
He doesn't. And the floor's hurting his back, so he finally pushes himself up, grabs his toothbrush and a half-full bottle of water, and goes to brush his teeth outside. The plumbing isn't working, here or anywhere. When Ryan had flipped on the tap in the kitchen, some brown water had spurted out, then stopped.
He stands in his parents' backyard, brushing his teeth with one hand, the other shoved into the front pocket of his hoodie, looking up at the tree tops and shivering a little bit in the April pre-dawn. He starts when he hears the door behind him open, but it's just Jim.
"Morning," Jim says.
Ryan nods, his mouth full of toothpaste. He spits onto the ground and goes to grab the water bottle, pouring it carefully into his mouth without putting his toothpaste-y mouth on the rim.
Jim sits down on the back steps, folding his arms across his chest to keep warm. "So," he says.
Ryan wipes his mouth on his sleeve. "Karen and them still asleep?"
"Yeah," Jim says. The sun isn't up yet, so it's understandable. Jim's looking somewhere over Ryan's head, but when Ryan turns to look, there's nothing much there. Tree branches. A sparrow. "So what now?" Jim says.
Ryan watches the sparrow fly across the yard to land on the rain gutter of the neighbor's house. "I was just thinking we hadn't thought it through," Ryan says. "No families. What's Plan B?"
Jim shrugs. "We didn't have one."
"Yeah," Ryan says. He puts both hands in his hoodie pocket and hunches his shoulders. He's been constantly cold for three weeks, which isn't much fun. He never really appreciated central heating the way he apparently should have.
"News, I guess," Jim says. "You think the paper's delivering?"
Ryan gives a small amused puff of air, which, even so, is a little more than the joke deserves.
"Maybe we can find somebody who knows what's going on," Jim says. He starts rubbing at his eye, picking the sleep out of it.
"Yeah," Ryan says. "Those guys yesterday seemed really friendly." He hadn't ever been shot at before, in his past life as a Scranton paper salesman. He could've done without.
Jim shrugs. "What else are we going to do?"
Ryan wishes he knew. He fiddles with the bristles of his toothbrush inside his hoodie pocket, rubbing his thumb back and forth over them. "Well, if you were someone who knew what was going on, or who was in charge, how would you tell people?"
Jim thinks for a few seconds, eyes going up, looking over Ryan's shoulder. "City hall?" he says, finally.
That's actually not a bad idea, and everyone else seems to agree when they go back inside. Oscar, sitting up in a nest of blankets with a crease mark on his cheek, says, "Well, it's worth a shot." Karen nods, yawning, her hair going every which way.
The car attracts too much attention, so they decide to leave it in Ryan's parents' driveway and walk into town. The neighborhood's quiet -- maybe everyone did what they were supposed to and left town when the bombing started like everyone at Dwight's farm did -- so there's a pretty good chance it'll still be there when they get back. Gil locks the car carefully and says, "If we get separated...."
"Yeah," Oscar says. Gil touches his back.
"We'll meet here," Karen says, adjusting the rifle on her shoulder. Jim touches her arm, and all of a sudden Ryan feels like a fifth wheel. Which is the dumbest thing he's ever heard. He's holding a baseball bat so he can club anyone who comes after them, because it's fucking World War III, and he's worried about being a fifth wheel.
Whatever. He hefts the baseball bat over his shoulder, and they start walking down the edges of the suburban street in a nervous clump, looking over their shoulders all the way. Nothing's moving but them.
**
They'd skirted Scranton proper the day before, taking roundabout routes, trying to avoid the main roads. They do more or less the same today; between that and how much longer it takes to walk, it's mid-afternoon before they come up on city hall. Or what would've been city hall, if it weren't a big pile of rubble. God, who would bother to bomb Scranton City Hall?
"Well, crap," Jim says, but in this weary, unsurprised tone, like he's having a bad day and on top of everything his pen just ran out of ink. Ryan and Oscar exchange looks. Karen blows her bangs out of her eyes.
They pick half-heartedly through the ruins, but there isn't much there. Walls only half standing, paper skittering across the burnt out surface. The sky's dark gray, so it barely feels like daylight, and Ryan hopes the heavy cloud cover isn't, like, fallout blowing in. He sees Gil glancing apprehensively upwards too, but he doesn't want to say the words out loud. The last they heard, no cities near Scranton had gotten nuked, but... well, that was just the last they heard. He's betting L.A. wasn't the only place that got it, in the end.
There's really no point in thinking about it, but it's hard not to. That goes for a lot of things, these days. A loose piece of paper blows up against his leg, but when he pulls it off, it's just a Wendy's hamburger wrapper. He... could really go for Wendy's right now, actually. It's funny the things that end up sucking about the complete collapse of societal infrastructure.
Ryan starts flipping over rocks with his foot, trying to see if anything interesting's underneath. But it's mostly just bugs. He picks up every little piece of paper to see if there's a map or a piece of news, but there's nothing even as interesting as a Wendy's wrapper. This picking through the rubble leads the five of them in all different directions, fanning out naturally, so after fifteen minutes or so, Ryan's pretty far away from the others. He's just leaned over to pick up an old piece of newspaper with a headline about March Madness on it when he hears the first shot.
His head immediately goes up, but he can't find the source of the shooting. Fuck, which way should he run?
"Run!" Karen yells, from across the square. "Scatter!" She's got the rifle down and is crouching behind a little ridge of wall, apparently unsure where to point the thing.
Yeah, thanks for the helpful information, Karen. But Ryan does what she says anyway, takes off running for the nearest cover, towards a burnt out old convenience store. At least if he gets out of range, maybe Karen won't shoot him by accident. He rounds the corner and just sees a flash of a bearded face and a rifle butt before his head explodes into pain and everything goes dark.
**
Ryan doesn't know how long he was unconscious. It might've only been a few minutes, but it was long enough that when he wakes up, he's been dragged into the shelter of a doorway, and his backpack, baseball bat, and shoes are missing. Great. He should probably just be glad to be alive, but he really liked those sneakers. And the supplies. Goddammit.
He tentatively reaches a hand up to the side of his face and pain radiates out so intensely from the enormous lump he touches that he feels like he's going to throw up. His hand comes back bright and sticky, and when he sits up gingerly, Jesus Christ, he's got a headache.
"Ryan," someone hisses from nearby. He looks around warily. Jim's across the street, sitting in a doorwell with his back against a wall, clutching at his leg like something's wrong. Ryan squints but can't quite see.
He figures he better go over there, but first he looks around. Whoever attacked them seems to be gone, now. What the hell? Maybe they'd just gotten spooked, and shot at them out of panic. Or something. They couldn't have been that vicious, since Ryan and Jim are still alive, but it's almost worse if they weren't real enemies. Like apparently your Scranton neighbors will go feral and shoot at you if conditions are right.
"Hang on," Ryan says. "I'm coming." He slowly gets to his feet, leaning heavily against the brick wall next to him. He feels dizzy and light-headed, his vision almost blacking out, but it steadies. He concentrates on breathing deeply and evenly and finally gets it together to the point where he can jog across the street in his stocking feet to crouch in the doorway next to Jim.
Now that he's close, he can see that Jim's pale and sweating, clenching his teeth, and when he looks down at Jim's leg, just above the knee where Jim's holding onto it, he can see blood bubbling out through Jim's fingers.
"Oh fuck," Ryan says. He stares at the blood, which is darker than he would expect. Oh shit. Oh shit. Why didn't Terry come with them? She's a nurse. Shit. They didn't think this through and Jim got shot, fuck fuck fuck.
"Yeah," Jim says. "Um, actually, it doesn't hurt as much as you'd think." He's talking in a matter-of-fact, self-deprecating tone, but his eyes are kind of glassy and his whole body is shaking, and he's so pale Ryan suddenly wonders what on earth he's going to do if Jim dies.
"Yeah, I bet that's not a good sign," Ryan says. Why didn't he take a first aid class recently? God, he has no useful skills and his half-finished MBA did not prepare him for this kind of scenario.
Well, okay. He looks around the street, but can't see Karen or Gil or Oscar anywhere, and he feels really exposed, crouching here in full view of any threat that might come along. So okay. Fuck. He's got to do something.
The doorway they're crouched in is to a Borders, and even though the door's been broken into, weirdly, the merchandise looks largely intact. Guess looters don't make books a high priority.
"Okay," Ryan says, starting to pull off his hoodie and the t-shirt he's wearing underneath. Once he's got them both off, he fumbles for the knife Dwight gave him, in its creepy little leather sheath, and starts to cut the t-shirt into big strips. The April air is cold on his chest, and it's starting to smell like rain might be blowing up. Shit.
He's trying to make the t-shirt into, like, a giant gauze bandage, something they can use to put pressure on the bullet wound, and there's so much blood he's just trying to cut as fast as he can. The knife's awkward to cut the fabric with, though, and strips of it come off unevenly, trailing thread. Jim's watching him with eyes that are starting to go vacant. Fuck. "Jim!" he says.
Jim blinks and seems to get more alert. "What?" he says.
"Talk to me," Ryan says. "What year is it?"
"Two thousand seven," Jim says.
Okay, well, good. Ryan goes back to concentrating on cutting up the t-shirt. "Who's the president?" he asks absently.
"How should I know?" Jim says. That's true, that was a bad question. "Kim Jong-Il."
"That's not funny," Ryan says. "Here, okay, move your hands real fast."
Jim takes his hands away from his leg slowly, the blood sticky between his fingers. Ryan takes his knife and carefully cuts Jim's jeans, making the rip in them bigger so he can see the actual wound. It's a jagged hole in Jim's leg, seeping blood. Fuuuuck. But it could be a lot worse -- it's actually not bleeding as much as he thought it was, so it must've missed the major arteries and veins and crap. There's an exit wound on the back of Jim's leg, too, so the bullet went right through. On the one hand, holy God, there's a hole all the way through Jim's leg, but on the other hand, at least Ryan doesn't have to worry about somehow getting a bullet out. Jesus.
"Okay," Ryan says, and puts a quarter of the folded up t-shirt strips over the bullet wound on the top of Jim's leg. He puts another quarter of them on the exit wound on the bottom of Jim's leg, so the bandage is resting on the ground, with Jim's leg on top of it. "Put some pressure on that, I guess. Press your leg down so you're putting pressure on both sides at once. We have to stop the bleeding." The shirt strips are still warm from Ryan's body, which is weird, and when Jim puts his hands back down on the t-shirt and presses, he catches some of Ryan's fingers under his.
Ryan extricates himself, feeling dizzy all over again looking at the blood, and tries to take deep breaths. Okay. Okay. Maybe it'll be okay.
"Keep holding that down," Ryan says. "I'll tie it up in a minute. But first we have to get out of the open." He wipes his bloody hands on his jeans and pulls his hoodie back over his head, shivering a bit from having his chest bare for so long. "Jim, keep talking," he says, pulling his arms through.
"What happened to your head?" Jim says. That's not really what Ryan meant by "Keep talking," but okay.
"Uh, somebody hit me, I guess," Ryan says. God, it really hurts, too, but with Jim's blood all over everywhere, a little bump on the head doesn't seem that important.
"I bet you have a concussion," Jim says. "Were you knocked unconscious?"
"That," Ryan says, pushing himself up and squinting into the Borders interior, wondering if they could at least camp out there until the bleeding stops, "is neither here nor there."
"Seriously, that's not good," Jim says. Ryan looks at him, barely restraining himself from rolling his eyes. No kidding, Halpert. Jim shakes his head a little, and instead says, "Did you see where Karen went?"
Ryan closes his eyes briefly. "No, man," he says. God, he hopes they're all okay. "They'll probably just meet us back at the car."
"Right," Jim says in a subdued voice. Ryan steps over him to push the door to the bookstore, and it swings open easily. Someone's shot the lock off, it looks like, but the interior of the store seems pretty normal, not a lot of broken glass, just dark and empty, books still on their shelves. Back when there was electricity, you didn't think much about how a lot of these stores are giant warehouses without windows, but man, it's dark in there now. Once you get past the front windows, you might as well be walking into a cave.
He probably shouldn't move Jim -- it'll probably make the bleeding worse -- but he thinks it's probably riskier to just sit there out on the street where anybody could take another shot at them. And at least the dark cavern of the Borders will keep people from being able to see them.
"Okay," Ryan says. "I'm going to check inside this Borders. And then -- do you think if it's clear, you can make it inside?"
Jim shrugs. "Sure," he says. Ryan doesn't really believe that, but what choice does he really have?
"Okay," Ryan says. He looks around for his backpack before he remembers that it got fucking stolen. God. "You don't by any chance have the flashlight Dwight gave you, do you?" he asks Jim. Dwight gave them all crucial supplies before they left. It's funny how being a freak in the ordinary world apparently makes you really, really useful in the middle of a war zone.
"In my bag," Jim says, and Ryan suddenly realizes that Jim's leaning back against his messenger bag. Oh, thank God.
Jim sits up to let him get at it, and Ryan pulls out a flashlight, noticing that Jim also has, among other things, a water bottle, some canned food, extra shirts they could use for bandages. Okay. Okay, maybe they will survive.
"Okay," Ryan says, grabbing the bottle of water and one of the cans. Canned peaches. Okay. He finds Jim's Leatherman in the bag too, and flips out the can opener attachment to pry off the lid of the peaches.
"What's your favorite color?" he says, trying to keep Jim conscious. Jim doesn't say anything. "Jim!" he says, worrying he's finally passed out, but when he looks up Jim seems okay, just watching him as he opens the can.
"That's a lame question," Jim says. Ryan can see blood starting to soak through to the top layer of t-shirt, seeping dark. Swell. "Blue, I guess."
"Okay," Ryan says. He feels weird about leaving Jim, even just to go inside the store, but there's not much he can do about it. He sets the bottle of water and the can of peaches down next to Jim. "You've lost a lot of blood, so you need to eat, okay?" he says. "Eat all those peaches and drink all that water. And drink the syrup on the peaches too. It's got...." He was going to say nutrients, but that's not exactly true. "Well, sugar," he says.
Jim shakily moves his left hand off the bandage and picks up the bottle of water. Ryan watches him take a sip. "All right, be right back," Ryan finally says as Jim lowers the water bottle back down, and he heads into the Borders.
The coffee bar got pretty well looted, all the food and stuff gone, and it looks like the employee break room got hit, too. From what Ryan can see in the beam of the flashlight, anyway. But the books are all still on the shelves, and there are comfortable arm chairs around, and the whole place feels like wandering into civilization again, a world where people read romance novels and biographies of John Quincy Adams and don't shoot at you on the street. Ryan finds a dark corner with a sofa in it, and thinks it's pretty well as good as they're going to get. It's hidden, it's dark. No one cares about books. Since there's no way to block off all the windows, people's apathy is what's going to guard them here.
By the time Ryan gets back, Jim's halfway through the can of peaches, lifting a slippery section carefully to his mouth with long fingers. He still looks terrible, but Ryan thinks he's not quite as pale, that his eyes aren't quite as glazed. He smiles weakly when he sees Ryan, his right hand still pressing down hard on his thigh.
"It looks okay in there," Ryan says. "Better than a lot of places, anyway."
"Good, okay," Jim says, through a mouthful of peach.
Ryan crouches down next to him and moves Jim's hand off the bandage. Jim's skin is cold and clammy, and Ryan tries desperately to remember what you're supposed to do if someone goes into shock. He can't.
Luckily, the bleeding seems to have slowed a lot -- there isn't much more blood soaked through to the top now than there was when Ryan had left.
"Good," Ryan says. "The bleeding's stopping."
Jim's stopped eating and is watching Ryan carefully. "Keep eating those," Ryan says. "I'm going to try to tie this up."
"Okay," Jim says. He reaches obediently for another slice of peach, his hand almost too big to fit into the can. Ryan can see that he's still shaking all over, his hands and his leg shivering under Ryan's hand. God, that fucking bullet must've hurt. Jesus.
Ryan reaches for the leftover t-shirt strips he made before, folding one up and putting it on top of the soaked through bandage. He vaguely remembers something from first aid training about not changing the bandage when it might be stuck to the wound, something about not risking re-opening it. You're just supposed to keep bandaging on top of it until you can get to the hospital.
The hospital. Yeah. Well.
Jim winces a little bit as Ryan presses down. "Sorry," Ryan says. Jim's sweating again, and as he lifts the bottle of water to get a drink, he's so shaky he almost spills it all over himself. "Careful," Ryan says. Jim shakes his head a little, his face strained. "I'll try to -- sorry," Ryan says. "This is probably going to hurt no matter what. But I'll try not to press too hard."
He starts to wrap strips of the cloth around Jim's skinny thigh to hold the bandages down on top and bottom, wrapping layers around and around. It's tough to do, because it needs to be tight enough to put pressure on the wound, but not so tight that it makes Jim pass out or anything. It's stressful, and he has to keep glancing back at Jim for signs of pain. Jim's clenching his jaw so he doesn't make noise, and by the time Ryan finally has it bound up, he and Jim are both white and sweating. Ryan's hands ache from trying to pull it tight, but not too tight, and God, his head's still killing him.
He sits back on his heels and tries to breathe deeply. There's blood all over his hands, in a puddle under Jim's leg, on both their clothes, all over the place. That smell of iron, and God, how are they going to get back to the car to meet the others with Jim's leg shot? Fuck fuck fuck fuck.
He's vaguely aware that he's getting dizzy thinking about it, and puts his hand up gingerly to feel his head, and God, he could swear the lump is bigger than before. Like he has half a tennis ball sprouting out of his temple.
Jim's still watching him, concerned like he's not the one whose blood is all over the street. "Seriously," Jim says. "You probably have a concussion. You shouldn't be running around like this."
"You're right," Ryan says. "I should definitely go lie down while you bleed to death."
Jim shrugs. "I'm not going to die."
"Promise?" Ryan says weakly. He meant it like a joke, but it didn't quite come out that way. One thing, at least, Jim's almost finished with the water and peaches, and he's getting some color back in his face. Ryan watches as Jim lifts the can to his mouth to drink the syrup the peaches came in. His Adam's apple works as he swallows, and Ryan wonders how on earth he's going to get a big guy like Jim all the way to the back of the Borders.
A drop of water hits Ryan square on the top of his head. Fuck, it's finally going to rain like the clouds have been threatening. And not only does getting wet suck when you don't have a change of clothes, but he doesn't trust rain anymore -- you don't know what might be in it.
"Okay," Ryan says, watching drops start to speckle the remains of the sidewalk. "We've got to get inside." He picks up Jim's messenger bag and slings it across his body. He has to shorten the strap an embarrassing amount -- fucking tall Halpert.
"Right," Jim says, looking dubious.
"So, um, try not to move that leg much," Ryan says. "You don't want it to start bleeding again. So I guess I'm going to sort of half drag you. Try to, I don't know, crab-crawl with your hands and other leg. Okay? And, um, you're going to have to hold the flashlight. If you can."
"It's okay," Jim says. "It's okay, I can do it." Ryan passes him the flashlight, trying hard to keep the shaking of his hands minimal.
It's a horrible, awkward process. Ryan grabs Jim under the arms and slides him backwards while Jim scrabbles with his other limbs, his injured leg awkwardly sticking straight out, the flashlight beam going every which way. At least they're inside before it really starts pouring rain, but that's almost the only thing that goes right. At one stage, Ryan accidentally bumps Jim's bad leg into a bookshelf and Jim lets out the most agonized half-moan half-scream that Ryan's ever heard.
"Fuck, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Ryan says. God, he's starting to feel frantic and upset. And he doesn't even really like Jim, is the stupid thing about how worried he is. Jim's just his lame coworker who used to spend his days annoying the whole office by getting Dwight all wound up. Ryan didn't think that someday they'd be stuck together in a Mad Max, post-apocalyptic nightmare Scranton, bleeding out and concussed. That he'd ever be this scared of Jim dying. God, where the fuck did Karen and Oscar and Gil go?
It must take them at least an hour to cross the store like that, staggering and dragging. They have to sit down and rest three times, whenever Ryan starts feeling like he's going to pass out. But finally Ryan helps Jim up onto that couch he found, the one in the back, settling him against the cushions. Jim props his leg up and closes his eyes, breathing deeply through his nose.
"You okay?" Ryan says. He's taken the flashlight back, and is using it to examine the bandages on Jim's leg. They're not soaked through yet, so that's something.
"Mmmhmm," Jim says, his eyes still closed. Ryan should make him open his eyes, stop him from passing out, but he feels a little bit too much like he's going to pass out himself. He slumps down, sitting on the floor with his back against the couch, his shoulders nudging Jim's arm. When he flips the flashlight off, the room is almost perfectly dark, just the looming of shelves between them and the dim light from the windows, far away.
He lets himself close his own eyes for a long moment, trying to concentrate on not throwing up, on not thinking about the pounding in his head.
"Don't go to sleep," Jim says. "You have a concussion."
"Fuck off," Ryan says mildly, but he opens his eyes. He reaches for the messenger bag, feeling for more cans. "You need to eat more."
Jim groans. "I'm not hungry, man. You eat something."
Ryan flips on the flashlight to find the can opener, but then mostly opens the can in the dark. Doesn't want to waste the battery, doesn't want anybody to see the light. In the dark, everything else is magnified -- the heat of Jim's body behind him, the sound of the can opener, Jim's breathing. The smell of books, of paper and printing, a clean, school kind of smell. A Dunder Mifflin kind of smell, actually. He never thought that memory would ever feel comforting, but it turns out atomic bombs kind of recalibrate what you find comforting and what you don't.
He gets the can open and passes it back to Jim. It's pineapple -- too much fruit, but eating baked beans with their hands is more of an operation than Ryan really feels up for.
They sit there in silence for awhile, listening to the rain outside, the sound of Jim chewing. Ryan's usually okay with silence, but this is just giving him time to think, nothing distracting him from the pain in his head, his missing supplies. Ryan wiggles his toes inside his socks and wonders where he's going to get new shoes. How they're going to travel. Fuck. Fuuuuckity fuck fuck. He's trying really hard not to have a panic attack over it, because he's got to take care of Jim, and if the others meet back at the car and he and Jim aren't there, maybe they'll leave them, and, oh God. They're going to die out here, him and Jim Halpert, and no one will ever know what happened to them.
Jim's hand comes down onto the back of Ryan's neck, and Ryan almost jumps a foot.
"Sorry," Jim says, into the darkness, but he keeps his hand there, this giant warm hand right on the base of Ryan's neck, fingers stretching out along where Ryan's neck turns into his shoulders, rubbing gently like he's trying to get the stress out of Ryan's muscles. Sort of petting him like Ryan's a dog he's trying to calm down. It's pretty fucking gay, to be perfectly honest, but, well. It's a stressful situation, is all. And Ryan's so on the verge of really freaking the fuck out that -- oh, he doesn't know, it's hard to describe. But it's like Jim's hand is full of calm, or sanity, or something. He doesn't want him to take it away. Jim just holds it there, steady, and Ryan focuses on breathing and not losing it, and it takes a long time, getting it together.
It's embarrassing that Jim can probably feel how he's shaking all over. God. It's just the concussion. Anyone would be shaking. Ryan leans back into Jim's hand a little bit and lets him pet him, and thinks about how fucked they both are, what a miracle it'll be if they survive. Jim's fingers keep moving, gentle on Ryan's neck.
"We'll be okay," Jim says, after a long time of sitting like that in the dark. Outside, it sounds like the rain has stopped. The air blowing in from the windows is wet and smells like spring. Spring and ash, which is a weird mixture.
Ryan closes his eyes again and breathes. "Yeah," he says, and starts to push himself up. Jim's hand pulls away reluctantly as Ryan separates them. "Did you finish that pineapple?"
"Yes, Nana," Jim says.
Ryan ignores him. "You need more food. And water. Can I borrow your shoes to go scavenge for some?"
Jim almost snorts. "I don't think they'll fit, man."
Ryan rolls his eyes, not that Jim can see him in the dark. "There's broken glass and nails and shit all over the place out there. Your clown shoes are better than nothing."
There's a long pause, so long that Ryan finally flips the flashlight on, pointed at Jim's face, the light like a blow after all that darkness. Jim winces, blinking in the brightness, his face all screwed up. "Jeez, Ryan!"
"Sorry," Ryan says, and points it away from him. "I thought maybe you'd finally passed out."
"No," Jim says. Ryan can just barely see him in the diffuse light from the pointed-away flashlight, and Jim's face is hard to read, the lines of it sort of tight. "Um," Jim says. "Not to point out the obvious, but what if you don't come back?"
God, Ryan doesn't want to have this discussion. "I will," he says.
"What if you don't?"
Ryan pushes his hand up through his hair, forgetting for a second about the lump. His fingers graze it and he flinches. Jesus God. Jim's watching him with his eyes bright, staring at Ryan's temple like he's saying, see?
"You lost a lot of blood," Ryan says. His voice comes out a little more gravelly than he was expecting, and he clears his throat. "If you don't eat more, you might go into shock or pass out or something overnight. And then -- well."
Jim's right hand is on his thigh, Ryan notices, sort of tracing around the edges of the bandage, pressing intermittently at the sides like maybe that helps distract from the pain. He can see Jim weighing the risks, Ryan alone with Jim dead, Jim alone with Ryan dead.
"Fuck," Jim says very quietly.
"Yeah," Ryan says.
Jim shakes his head, back and forth, very slowly. "All right," he says finally, and shrugs. "Take the shoes."
Ryan lets out a breath. "Thanks, man." He goes around to Jim's feet to unlace his sneakers. They're enormous, tied in double knots, and it takes him a little bit to get them off. He gets self-conscious, thinking Jim's watching him fumble with the laces, but when he glances up, Jim's eyes are closed and his lips are moving a little bit. Maybe they're both on the verge of freaking out here.
They really are like clown shoes when Ryan puts them on. He ties them as tight as he can, but he's still clomping around like a little kid in his dad's slippers. Jim's opened his eyes and is trying not to smirk.
"Shut up," Ryan says, and puts his knife back on his belt. So creepy, that sheath, but handy. He checks that he has everything else he might need. His cell phone, useless but still not dead, chilling in his pocket. He leaves Jim the flashlight -- he'll probably need it more, here in the cave -- but takes Jim's messenger bag, emptied out so he'll have something to carry food in.
"So," Jim says, as Ryan pats his pockets, a final check. "Um. See you soon. Right?"
"Yeah," Ryan says. "You will." He slings the messenger bag over his shoulder and clomps off towards the door of the bookstore, trying to make as little noise as possible and failing.
**
He feels ridiculous, slinking along the wet streets all hunched over. He only sees one other person while he's out, and she panics when she sees him, goes scuttling off around a corner. It's just as well, since she saved Ryan the trouble of doing the same thing. And scuttling is so undignified.
He doesn't want to go far, afraid that if he does he might get too dizzy to make it back, so his looting opportunities are more limited than sometimes. But he finds a 7-11 four blocks away that actually has some stuff left in it, so that's not bad. Granted, it's not good stuff -- it's mostly things other people didn't want. A couple of battered cans of Spaghetti-o's, three 20-oz bottles of ginger ale. The Coke's all gone from the fridge, but ginger ale, nobody takes. Better yet, he finds a half-empty bottle of rubbing alcohol that he figures he can pour on Jim's leg. Ryan loads up his bag with what he can, ends with it bouncing swollen against his back, cans hitting him in the kidneys as he walks.
He goes around a different side of the block on his way back, in case there's anything there he didn't see. But most of the stores are blown out, or just offices. He figures there isn't much he'd want at an accountant's. There's a corpse in the middle of the street, though, a man about Ryan's size, recently dead.
He hates that he thinks this way now, he really does. But the guy has sneakers on, and Jim's shoes are really not cutting it for Ryan. He moves toward the body warily -- sometimes it's hard to tell when people aren't quite dead. And you don't really want to approach a body if you're not sure how it died, especially with that whole smallpox thing they kept hearing about. But Ryan can see the blood from a bullet hole spreading out over this guy's chest, so that's probably all right. Bullet holes aren't catching, last he checked.
It's a middle-aged guy, gray in his beard. He looks like he's probably somebody's dad. Jesus.
Ryan shakes his head and kneels down to take the shoes as quickly as he can. He has to disconnect himself from his body a little bit as he does it, though. He hums an REM song under his breath and tries to name all the teachers he ever had in his head, starting with kindergarten. Miss Maureen, Ms. Guthrie, Mrs. Britt.
He's got the shoes off by the time he hits 8th grade, and he immediately takes them around the corner to put them on. He doesn't want to be able to see the body while he does. The guy's ankles were cold under his hands.
The shoes do fit a lot better, and once they're on he ties Jim's laces together and slings the shoes around the strap of the messenger bag, like he's going to the gym after work. Doing that seems so far away now that it's like somebody else's memory.
**
When Ryan gets back to the Borders around nightfall, everything looks pretty much the same from the outside, which he hopes means that nothing terrible has happened to Jim while he's been gone. He's also pleased to see that Jim's not at all visible from the street -- doubly pleased when he gets halfway through the store and realizes that Jim's got the flashlight on, reading a paperback. Ender's Game, Ryan notes when he's close enough to see. His new shoes make a lot less noise than Jim's did, so Jim doesn't hear him until Ryan's almost right up to him.
Jim noticeably starts when Ryan's shoes squeak against the linoleum, but when his head goes up and he sees it's Ryan, he immediately relaxes, letting out a long breath. He closes his eyes, like the waiting's been a strain.
"Good book?" Ryan says, his voice dry.
Jim looks a little chastened. "Yeah," he says. "I know, I know, I'm wasting the battery."
Ryan wasn't going to say anything about that, but yeah, he is. "I was going to say you weren't supposed to get up. You probably started bleeding again."
"I was careful," Jim says, and gestures to the science fiction shelves, which are the closest to them. "It was just right there."
"Still," Ryan says, and takes the flashlight out of Jim's hand to inspect the bandage. The blood from before has dried, stiff and dark, and there's not any more added to it. Well, that's good, anyway.
"It feels better," Jim says. Ryan gives him a don't-lie-to-me look, but doesn't say anything, just hands the flashlight back to him and starts unloading cans from the bag.
Jim looks down at Ryan's feet. "You got new shoes," he says. "Where'd you find them?"
Ryan puts the cans of Spaghetti-o's in a row, lining them up more carefully than he needs to, the ginger ale behind them. He doesn't really want to answer Jim's question, so.
"Oh," Jim says, after a long pause. God, whatever, Ryan can't deal with him. He feels a little sick. Jim just sits there watching him until it starts to make Ryan uncomfortable.
"Stop," Ryan mutters. The last thing in the bag is the rubbing alcohol, and he pulls it out, stows the bag. "Here, let me see your leg."
Jim rolls his head around on his neck. "Oh God, please don't do that."
"Don't be a pussy," Ryan says. "It'll just sting a little." He makes Jim point the flashlight at the bandage, and starts feeling at the edges. He's pretty sure the bandage is still too stuck to the clot to really disturb, so he ends up just pouring the alcohol liberally over the outside of the bandage.
Jim, whose muscles were so tense waiting for Ryan to pour it that they felt solid, actually screams when the alcohol soaks down through, making this horrible sound like it's killing him.
"Sorry!" Ryan says. Oh God, Jim was loud. He looks around wildly, hoping nobody heard.
Jim's swearing under his breath, sweat standing out on his forehead. "Fuck," Jim says through gritted teeth. "Oh my God, holy fuck." He's rocking back and forth, rubbing at the skin around the bandage again.
"Sorry," Ryan says again, still worried someone heard and is going to come after them. "You don't want it to get infected."
"God, I think infected would hurt less," Jim mutters. He seems to be finally getting it together, his face less pinched, but apparently is trying to distract from the pain by sounding angry. "That's great. And now I smell like a wino."
"You kind of look like one, too," Ryan says. Jim's wearing a ball cap, has two days worth of stubble, and there's blood all over him.
Jim rolls his eyes, finally letting go of his leg and wiping some of the sweat off his face. "Here," he says, apparently wanting something else to think about. "Let me see your head."
"I'm fine," Ryan says. He hasn't felt like he needs to throw up for at least twenty minutes, which is some definite progress.
Jim points the flashlight at him. "Come on," he says. "Crouch down."
Ryan just looks at him.
"Come on," Jim says.
Ryan rolls his eyes a little bit, but finally crouches so his face is level with Jim's.
"Closer," Jim says. "I can't see."
Jesus. Ryan moves in closer, until their faces are so close it's practically like they're about to kiss. Luckily the flashlight's so bright in his eyes he can barely see. He stares vaguely forward, trying not to think about Jim's face right there. Clinical, like he's at the doctor's.
Jim puts two fingers along Ryan's jaw, turning Ryan's head so he can see the lump. Jim's fingers are warm, and Ryan hadn't thought about it before, how intimate touching someone's face is. It's weird.
Jim sucks in a sympathetic breath when he sees the lump in all its glory. Oh great, it's that bad? Jim carefully runs one finger very lightly around its edges, but even that hurts. Ryan tries his best not to wince, but Jim's watching his expression carefully.
"Sorry," Jim says. Ryan shrugs a little. "Okay," Jim says. "For a concussion you, like, check someone's pupils, right?"
"I don't know," Ryan says. "I guess." But he lets Jim turn his face back and shine the flashlight right in his eyes. After a long moment, Ryan says, "What are you looking for?"
"I don't know," Jim says doubtfully. "I think... I don't know, they look okay to me."
"Then get that light out of my eyes," Ryan says. When Jim does, he slumps back down to where he'd been sitting before, his back against the couch, and starts to open one of the cans of Spaghetti-o's.
Jim groans.
"Shut up," Ryan says. "You need to eat." He wrenches the can open and hands it to Jim, along with one of the plastic spoons he found in the 7-11.
Jim looks at it. "Oh, cold Spaghetti-o's," he says. "My favorite."
What a baby. "Sorry," Ryan says, opening a can for himself. "Did you want me to cut the crusts off for you?"
Jim's hand floats down in front of Ryan's face, middle finger extended. Ryan lets out an amused breath through his nose despite himself.
**
There's another couch halfway across the store, and Ryan would sleep on it, but doesn't want to be so far away. Whether not wanting to be far away is for his benefit or Jim's, he couldn't say. Finally, after some discussion, Ryan ends up pushing it over next to Jim's couch, his muscles straining while Jim holds the flashlight. He finally gets it to within a couple of feet of where Jim's lying, and figures that's close enough. If something awful happens during the night, at least they'll be together.
They bunk down, each wrapped in one of Dwight's lightweight silver space blankets, Ryan curled up so his legs barely fit on the short couch, Jim with his giraffe legs sticking off the end of his.
"You know I'm going to have to wake you up every two hours, right?" Jim says, his voice thick with sleep. "My college roommate played lacrosse, I know the concussion drill."
"I don't have a concussion," Ryan's pretty sure he says then, but he's almost asleep so it's hard to tell.
"I'm setting my watch," Jim says, and Ryan hears the little beeps of him doing so. He wonders vaguely how long it'll be until all their watches finally die. He falls asleep wondering it.
**
Ryan wakes up, groggy and disoriented, when a warm hand settles gently on the uninjured part of his forehead. His immediate reaction to someone touching him is flight-or-flight, and before he's consciously thinking about it, his right hand grabs the wrist as hard as he can, while his left hand scrabbles for his knife. I'll kill the fucker, Ryan thinks, like a crazy person, before Jim's voice comes out of the darkness and whispers, "Hey. Hey. It's just me."
Oh God. Crap. Ryan stops reaching for the knife, glad for once that he couldn't get to it fast, and lets go of Jim's wrist. He can barely breathe, and his heart's pounding. Jeez.
"Sorry," Jim says. "It's just me. Do you know where you are?" He's still got his hand on Ryan's forehead, his thumb stroking back and forth soothingly. Ryan doesn't know when Halpert got so touchy, but when he's all sleepy like this, he's okay with it. It feels like his mom's hand, checking him for a fever.
He closes his eyes for a second to try to slow his heart back down, to calm down. He focuses on the movement of Jim's thumb, soft against his skin. "Borders," he says.
"Good," Jim says. "Who am I?"
"Jim fucking Halpert," Ryan says. Jim laughs and moves his hand. For a second, Ryan feels it as a loss, but then he realizes Jim's just shifted to run one finger over the lines of Ryan's face, tracing how much swelling there is. Ryan can feel that it's getting a lot worse since he's been lying down -- he can barely open his left eye.
Jim's finger traces lightly over Ryan's forehead, down his nose, over his cheekbone. It's the kind of thing Kelly used to do in bed, actually, trace Ryan's face and kiss his shoulder, and without his meaning to, the memory makes Ryan shiver.
Jim stops his finger where it's feeling out the swelling around Ryan's eye. "Sorry, does that hurt?"
Ryan swallows. "Not yet," he says, trying to shake off the memory of Kelly's body, of being in his own apartment, safe and sound.
"Okay," Jim says, but he stops and takes his hand away. Ryan's face feels cold without it.
"Careful with that leg," Ryan says, as Jim hops the two steps back to his own couch.
"I am," Jim says, and then it takes a few minutes for Ryan to fall back asleep. He keeps thinking about the light touch of Jim's finger over his face, about Kelly. He wonders what she's doing right now, back at the farm, and wishes he'd stayed there. He wishes a lot of things.
**
It's a bad night. In the early stages of it, Ryan's dreams are awful. He's dead and cold and someone's taking off his shoes, or he's gotten shot in the leg and is bleeding out, like his subconscious has decided that a review of recent trauma is in order. Jim wakes him up every two hours, and Ryan just hopes that he's not making any frightened noises, not moaning in his sleep. Ryan doesn't try to knife Jim again, though, so at least that's something.
But later in the night, Ryan's dreams shift and he dreams about his mother, about Kelly, about warm hands in the dark. The last time Jim wakes him up, he actually leans into Jim's hand, almost nuzzling it, and shit, that's embarrassing. He hopes they're both so half-asleep they won't remember it in the morning. But Ryan remembers it, at least, though they never talk about it, even later.
Anyway, it's a bad night. Finally when Ryan wakes up, there's gray daylight seeping in the distant windows, so he can see his surroundings dimly through the one eye he can manage to open. Morning. Thank God. He's not rested, but he's glad the unsettling night's over. His left eye is swollen shut, crusted and disgusting when he runs his hand over it. Great.
Jim's still asleep, his face quiet in repose, his chest gently rising and falling. One of his hands is dangling off the couch, and Ryan looks at it, remembers it settling heavily on his head. He wonders if Jim will wake him up like that the next night too.
Jim needs to shave, needs to wash the blood off himself. He has a little smear of it on his cheekbone, and he looks like death. Ryan imagines he looks roughly the same; he runs his hand over his chin experimentally, feels the itchy scrape of stubble. The right side of his face feels normal, but when his hand touches the left, he can feel the swelling even way down his cheek. No wonder he can't open his eye. Fantastic.
He's still looking at Jim in a vague way and prodding at the edges of the swelling when Jim's eyes blink open. Ryan jerks his head away so Jim doesn't catch him looking at him, which... well, it's a weird thing to do, and Ryan doesn't want to think about it much more than that.
"You look terrible," Jim says, his voice low and rough from sleep.
"Good morning to you, too," Ryan says.
Jim ignores his tone. "Your head must be killing you," he says.
It is, but it's not like they have aspirin or anything -- morphine, codeine, God, anything --, so what's the point of talking about it? Anyway, Jim looks pretty pinched and white from pain himself.
"How's the leg?" Ryan asks.
Jim half shrugs. "Feels like someone took a shot at it," he says.
Ryan sits up and Jesus, his head hurts more upright. For a second he seriously feels like the pain's gonna make him throw up.
Jim's eyes have widened a little bit. "You okay, man?"
For a second, Ryan's concentrating too hard on not barfing to answer. But his body adjusts to sitting up eventually, and the pain goes back to a semi-manageable throb. "Yeah," Ryan says. He puts his elbows on his knees and tries to think. How are they going to travel? Fuck. Fuck. Apparently he's almost as bad as Jim, if just sitting up makes him want to puke.
Jim reaches down to grab his ball cap and pulls it on while he's still lying down. His leg's propped up on the end of the loveseat, which is probably good for it. Elevation and all that. "So," Jim says, his eyes now hidden by the brim. "We've got to get back to the car."
Ryan slides off the couch to sit cross-legged by the pile of supplies, putting him right next to Jim's head. "Yeah," he says, rummaging for their map of Scranton. "Somehow."
"I can walk," Jim says.
Ryan throws him a look, pulling the map out from under Jim's extra shirts.
"Okay, hop," Jim says. He reaches out a finger and lays it gently on Ryan's swollen cheekbone. For a second the touch makes Ryan feel like crying, like all the stuff he purposefully isn't feeling is about to come bubbling up. His missing parents, how he and Jim are probably going to die. Jesus. His cheek feels hot and swollen, the skin pulled too tight over the swelling.
"Are you going to be able to make it?" Jim asks, his voice low and concerned.
Ryan shrugs and moves his head away from Jim's hand before he loses it altogether. "Yeah," he says.
Jim looks doubtful, but Ryan gets the map unfolded and holds it between them, figuring business-like is the way to go. "We've got to figure out a route," he says, and he finds city hall, putting his finger on it. "We're here," he says, and then puts his other index finger on his parent's house, up in Jessup. "And we've got to get here," he says.
He and Jim stare at the space in between Ryan's fingers.
"Before they decide we aren't coming and leave without us," Jim says.
Ryan nods. "And avoiding highways," he says, thinking about the tanks they'd seen on their way off Dwight's farm. Jim nods, giving a barely perceptible shudder. They -- well, they hadn't really looking like American tanks. But it's hard to say, these days, what anything is.
They spend the next hour bent over the map in the dim light, arguing over their options. Ryan thinks they should go as directly as possible, because of Jim's leg -- adding extra distance seems stupid to him -- but Jim insists he'll be fine walking and they should go around the most dangerous areas. Head straight towards Lake Scranton and then skirt the city up towards Dunmore, walking in places that are more out of the way. He says going straight won't be faster if they end up dead, and in the end he argues Ryan down. Whatever. It's probably a bad decision, but there's not really a good decision to choose, so.
After an incredibly disgusting breakfast of cold baked beans and applesauce, they pack up their stuff and get ready to go. Ryan insists on pouring more rubbing alcohol over Jim's leg -- Jim shakes and gasps, but doesn't scream this time --, and then he rebinds the bandage, tighter this time. Jim keeps up a constant stream of swearing under his breath, but when Ryan stops pulling it as tight, Jim says, "I'm fine, I'm fine, don't ease up." God, it sucks, though, hurting someone like that. But once he's done Jim says it's easier to stand on, so maybe it's worth it.
Once they have everything packed up, Ryan wears the messenger bag slung across his body, and Jim puts his arm over Ryan's shoulders, so Ryan's his human crutch. It's not easy, but they do manage to walk that way, Jim leaning heavily on Ryan to take the weight off his bad leg. But limping along like that is hard on both of them, and they're already breathing raggedly by the time they hit the street.
Fuck, Ryan thinks as his left foot steps, and shit, he thinks, as his right foot steps, and the rhythm of profanity keeps up in his head as they go, fuck, shit, fuck, shit. Jim's weight is really heavy, making his shoulders ache, and Jim's clearly gritting his teeth against the pain.
They rest a lot, but even so, it's a bad day. Ryan doesn't know how much more there is to say about that.
**
Continued in Part 2
Fandom: The Office (US)
Rating: R (for sex and violence)
Pairing: Jim/Ryan
Length: 19,700 words
Summary: Jim and Ryan, on their way home.
AN: For festschrift. This is a fic set in the Mosepocalypse (the still unpublished apocalyptic Office fic from Mose's point of view, veering off from canon in mid-season 3, that kyrafic and I have been writing for well over a year). It's basically a deleted scene, by which I mean that it's twice as long as the original fic, about events Mose doesn't witness. So yes, that's right, I am ficcing my own unpublished fic. I AM LOST IN A MAZE OF MIRRORS. Whatevs, anyway, it's apocalyptic Jim/Ryan hurt/comfort, if you're into that kind of thing, and it should stand on its own. Title from Tennyson. Thanks to kyrafic and agate for betaing.
**
The emptiness of Ryan's parents' house is deep and unnerving, the house stuffy and closed up, smelling the way it did when they bought it and it was new, like wood floors and lemon cleaner. The beds are still mussed, crusted-over dinner pans are still soaking in the sink, and the sports section of the paper is still next to his dad's easy chair. Like Vesuvius hit, and everything is perfectly preserved the way it was the night before the attacks, when his parents must have gone up to bed not knowing anything was on the brink of happening. At first, Ryan's relieved that they don't find their bodies, but as he enters each empty room, one by one, the loneliness of being left behind is almost as bad as if they did.
After they go over the whole first floor, Gil and Oscar volunteer to search the basement while Ryan, Karen and Jim look upstairs. It's creepy, the silence of the place, the only sound the occasional creaking of the floor under their feet. Everyone's on edge, expecting to find something terrible behind every door, even though the quiet and the musty air make it pretty clear no one's been in here since his parents left. Jim's knuckles are white on the baseball bat he's holding, and Karen's jumping at every little sound, which is a little nerve-wracking since she's the one Dwight entrusted with the rifle. Ryan's leading the way, and having the paranoia twins behind him is not helping.
"Okay, seriously," he says under his breath. "You guys need to chill."
"Right, yeah," Karen says, keeping her voice down but sounding annoyed. "Whereas you're cool as a cucumber, clearly."
"Shut up," Ryan says, and swings open the door to his old bedroom. There's no one there either. Jim lets out a long sigh and slumps against the wall as Ryan moves forward into the room.
His little league trophies are still on top of his bookshelf, blankets on the bed undisturbed. It's weirder than if the looters had been there, having it all preserved and everyday like this. His parents aren't that far out of Scranton proper, and even though it's only been a few weeks, it feels like a really long time since things were normal. The sun is starting to set out the window, past the trees.
Behind him, Jim starts clicking the light switch up and down, which is the new compulsive habit he's picked up. Ryan's not sure if he honestly thinks that maybe this light will be the one where the electricity works, or if it's just a nervous tic, but it's driving him up a wall a little bit, that clicking in every room they walk into.
"Could you not do that just for once?" Karen says before Ryan can.
Jim makes a face at her but he stops. Ryan and Karen exchange a look.
Ryan goes to look out the window, but all he can see is the familiar backyard stretching out in front of him, maple trees on the horizon. Nothing's moving outside, like Scranton's a ghost town.
"Nothing here," Ryan says, looking around the room one more time. "That's the whole second floor."
Jim adjusts his grip on the baseball bat nervously. "Where do you think they are?"
Ryan would rather not think about that, and it's taking all his energy to mentally avoid the question. He shrugs, looking at the Phillies poster on his wall. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Karen glaring at Jim like he's an idiot for saying that.
"Oscar and Gil are probably done searching the basement," Ryan says. "Let's go downstairs."
It's almost dark by the time they've conferred on what they should do, so they end up bunking down in Ryan's parents' living room, blankets from upstairs wrapped around them. It's kind of stupid to all sleep on the floor when there are perfectly good beds empty upstairs, but.
**
Ryan wakes up early, aching all over from sleeping on the floor and from the times he fell the day before. Everyone else is still asleep, including Jim, whose version of taking last watch seems to mean sleeping sitting up, snoring softly. Ryan lies still, blinking and watching the sky outside turn from navy blue to gray. He thinks maybe they didn't think the plan through before they left Dwight's farm, but he hadn't really expected all their families to be gone. Dead, maybe. Gone, no. How are they ever going to find them again? He pulls his cell phone out of his hoodie pocket and holds it up so he can see it, the dim light of the display still glowing softly after all this time. He only has one bar of battery life left, but there hasn't been any cell reception since two days after everything went to hell anyway, so it doesn't really matter. And it's stupid, but he feels vaguely panicky about his phone dying, like maybe the cell towers will suddenly power back up again, and if his phone is dead, he won't even know. He'll miss it, the window of opportunity to call his mom or whatever.
Of course, if the cell towers power back up, everything else probably will too, so it's not like he won't be able to charge his phone. It's idiotic to feel like your cell phone dying is a symbol of civilization as we know it ending, especially after all the times before that he let his phone die on purpose so Kelly couldn't get through. But that's still how it feels, like his cell phone is the last pointless link to how things used to be. He shoves the useless phone back in his pocket and lies there looking at the pale plaster of the ceiling, wondering if he can fall back asleep.
He doesn't. And the floor's hurting his back, so he finally pushes himself up, grabs his toothbrush and a half-full bottle of water, and goes to brush his teeth outside. The plumbing isn't working, here or anywhere. When Ryan had flipped on the tap in the kitchen, some brown water had spurted out, then stopped.
He stands in his parents' backyard, brushing his teeth with one hand, the other shoved into the front pocket of his hoodie, looking up at the tree tops and shivering a little bit in the April pre-dawn. He starts when he hears the door behind him open, but it's just Jim.
"Morning," Jim says.
Ryan nods, his mouth full of toothpaste. He spits onto the ground and goes to grab the water bottle, pouring it carefully into his mouth without putting his toothpaste-y mouth on the rim.
Jim sits down on the back steps, folding his arms across his chest to keep warm. "So," he says.
Ryan wipes his mouth on his sleeve. "Karen and them still asleep?"
"Yeah," Jim says. The sun isn't up yet, so it's understandable. Jim's looking somewhere over Ryan's head, but when Ryan turns to look, there's nothing much there. Tree branches. A sparrow. "So what now?" Jim says.
Ryan watches the sparrow fly across the yard to land on the rain gutter of the neighbor's house. "I was just thinking we hadn't thought it through," Ryan says. "No families. What's Plan B?"
Jim shrugs. "We didn't have one."
"Yeah," Ryan says. He puts both hands in his hoodie pocket and hunches his shoulders. He's been constantly cold for three weeks, which isn't much fun. He never really appreciated central heating the way he apparently should have.
"News, I guess," Jim says. "You think the paper's delivering?"
Ryan gives a small amused puff of air, which, even so, is a little more than the joke deserves.
"Maybe we can find somebody who knows what's going on," Jim says. He starts rubbing at his eye, picking the sleep out of it.
"Yeah," Ryan says. "Those guys yesterday seemed really friendly." He hadn't ever been shot at before, in his past life as a Scranton paper salesman. He could've done without.
Jim shrugs. "What else are we going to do?"
Ryan wishes he knew. He fiddles with the bristles of his toothbrush inside his hoodie pocket, rubbing his thumb back and forth over them. "Well, if you were someone who knew what was going on, or who was in charge, how would you tell people?"
Jim thinks for a few seconds, eyes going up, looking over Ryan's shoulder. "City hall?" he says, finally.
That's actually not a bad idea, and everyone else seems to agree when they go back inside. Oscar, sitting up in a nest of blankets with a crease mark on his cheek, says, "Well, it's worth a shot." Karen nods, yawning, her hair going every which way.
The car attracts too much attention, so they decide to leave it in Ryan's parents' driveway and walk into town. The neighborhood's quiet -- maybe everyone did what they were supposed to and left town when the bombing started like everyone at Dwight's farm did -- so there's a pretty good chance it'll still be there when they get back. Gil locks the car carefully and says, "If we get separated...."
"Yeah," Oscar says. Gil touches his back.
"We'll meet here," Karen says, adjusting the rifle on her shoulder. Jim touches her arm, and all of a sudden Ryan feels like a fifth wheel. Which is the dumbest thing he's ever heard. He's holding a baseball bat so he can club anyone who comes after them, because it's fucking World War III, and he's worried about being a fifth wheel.
Whatever. He hefts the baseball bat over his shoulder, and they start walking down the edges of the suburban street in a nervous clump, looking over their shoulders all the way. Nothing's moving but them.
**
They'd skirted Scranton proper the day before, taking roundabout routes, trying to avoid the main roads. They do more or less the same today; between that and how much longer it takes to walk, it's mid-afternoon before they come up on city hall. Or what would've been city hall, if it weren't a big pile of rubble. God, who would bother to bomb Scranton City Hall?
"Well, crap," Jim says, but in this weary, unsurprised tone, like he's having a bad day and on top of everything his pen just ran out of ink. Ryan and Oscar exchange looks. Karen blows her bangs out of her eyes.
They pick half-heartedly through the ruins, but there isn't much there. Walls only half standing, paper skittering across the burnt out surface. The sky's dark gray, so it barely feels like daylight, and Ryan hopes the heavy cloud cover isn't, like, fallout blowing in. He sees Gil glancing apprehensively upwards too, but he doesn't want to say the words out loud. The last they heard, no cities near Scranton had gotten nuked, but... well, that was just the last they heard. He's betting L.A. wasn't the only place that got it, in the end.
There's really no point in thinking about it, but it's hard not to. That goes for a lot of things, these days. A loose piece of paper blows up against his leg, but when he pulls it off, it's just a Wendy's hamburger wrapper. He... could really go for Wendy's right now, actually. It's funny the things that end up sucking about the complete collapse of societal infrastructure.
Ryan starts flipping over rocks with his foot, trying to see if anything interesting's underneath. But it's mostly just bugs. He picks up every little piece of paper to see if there's a map or a piece of news, but there's nothing even as interesting as a Wendy's wrapper. This picking through the rubble leads the five of them in all different directions, fanning out naturally, so after fifteen minutes or so, Ryan's pretty far away from the others. He's just leaned over to pick up an old piece of newspaper with a headline about March Madness on it when he hears the first shot.
His head immediately goes up, but he can't find the source of the shooting. Fuck, which way should he run?
"Run!" Karen yells, from across the square. "Scatter!" She's got the rifle down and is crouching behind a little ridge of wall, apparently unsure where to point the thing.
Yeah, thanks for the helpful information, Karen. But Ryan does what she says anyway, takes off running for the nearest cover, towards a burnt out old convenience store. At least if he gets out of range, maybe Karen won't shoot him by accident. He rounds the corner and just sees a flash of a bearded face and a rifle butt before his head explodes into pain and everything goes dark.
**
Ryan doesn't know how long he was unconscious. It might've only been a few minutes, but it was long enough that when he wakes up, he's been dragged into the shelter of a doorway, and his backpack, baseball bat, and shoes are missing. Great. He should probably just be glad to be alive, but he really liked those sneakers. And the supplies. Goddammit.
He tentatively reaches a hand up to the side of his face and pain radiates out so intensely from the enormous lump he touches that he feels like he's going to throw up. His hand comes back bright and sticky, and when he sits up gingerly, Jesus Christ, he's got a headache.
"Ryan," someone hisses from nearby. He looks around warily. Jim's across the street, sitting in a doorwell with his back against a wall, clutching at his leg like something's wrong. Ryan squints but can't quite see.
He figures he better go over there, but first he looks around. Whoever attacked them seems to be gone, now. What the hell? Maybe they'd just gotten spooked, and shot at them out of panic. Or something. They couldn't have been that vicious, since Ryan and Jim are still alive, but it's almost worse if they weren't real enemies. Like apparently your Scranton neighbors will go feral and shoot at you if conditions are right.
"Hang on," Ryan says. "I'm coming." He slowly gets to his feet, leaning heavily against the brick wall next to him. He feels dizzy and light-headed, his vision almost blacking out, but it steadies. He concentrates on breathing deeply and evenly and finally gets it together to the point where he can jog across the street in his stocking feet to crouch in the doorway next to Jim.
Now that he's close, he can see that Jim's pale and sweating, clenching his teeth, and when he looks down at Jim's leg, just above the knee where Jim's holding onto it, he can see blood bubbling out through Jim's fingers.
"Oh fuck," Ryan says. He stares at the blood, which is darker than he would expect. Oh shit. Oh shit. Why didn't Terry come with them? She's a nurse. Shit. They didn't think this through and Jim got shot, fuck fuck fuck.
"Yeah," Jim says. "Um, actually, it doesn't hurt as much as you'd think." He's talking in a matter-of-fact, self-deprecating tone, but his eyes are kind of glassy and his whole body is shaking, and he's so pale Ryan suddenly wonders what on earth he's going to do if Jim dies.
"Yeah, I bet that's not a good sign," Ryan says. Why didn't he take a first aid class recently? God, he has no useful skills and his half-finished MBA did not prepare him for this kind of scenario.
Well, okay. He looks around the street, but can't see Karen or Gil or Oscar anywhere, and he feels really exposed, crouching here in full view of any threat that might come along. So okay. Fuck. He's got to do something.
The doorway they're crouched in is to a Borders, and even though the door's been broken into, weirdly, the merchandise looks largely intact. Guess looters don't make books a high priority.
"Okay," Ryan says, starting to pull off his hoodie and the t-shirt he's wearing underneath. Once he's got them both off, he fumbles for the knife Dwight gave him, in its creepy little leather sheath, and starts to cut the t-shirt into big strips. The April air is cold on his chest, and it's starting to smell like rain might be blowing up. Shit.
He's trying to make the t-shirt into, like, a giant gauze bandage, something they can use to put pressure on the bullet wound, and there's so much blood he's just trying to cut as fast as he can. The knife's awkward to cut the fabric with, though, and strips of it come off unevenly, trailing thread. Jim's watching him with eyes that are starting to go vacant. Fuck. "Jim!" he says.
Jim blinks and seems to get more alert. "What?" he says.
"Talk to me," Ryan says. "What year is it?"
"Two thousand seven," Jim says.
Okay, well, good. Ryan goes back to concentrating on cutting up the t-shirt. "Who's the president?" he asks absently.
"How should I know?" Jim says. That's true, that was a bad question. "Kim Jong-Il."
"That's not funny," Ryan says. "Here, okay, move your hands real fast."
Jim takes his hands away from his leg slowly, the blood sticky between his fingers. Ryan takes his knife and carefully cuts Jim's jeans, making the rip in them bigger so he can see the actual wound. It's a jagged hole in Jim's leg, seeping blood. Fuuuuck. But it could be a lot worse -- it's actually not bleeding as much as he thought it was, so it must've missed the major arteries and veins and crap. There's an exit wound on the back of Jim's leg, too, so the bullet went right through. On the one hand, holy God, there's a hole all the way through Jim's leg, but on the other hand, at least Ryan doesn't have to worry about somehow getting a bullet out. Jesus.
"Okay," Ryan says, and puts a quarter of the folded up t-shirt strips over the bullet wound on the top of Jim's leg. He puts another quarter of them on the exit wound on the bottom of Jim's leg, so the bandage is resting on the ground, with Jim's leg on top of it. "Put some pressure on that, I guess. Press your leg down so you're putting pressure on both sides at once. We have to stop the bleeding." The shirt strips are still warm from Ryan's body, which is weird, and when Jim puts his hands back down on the t-shirt and presses, he catches some of Ryan's fingers under his.
Ryan extricates himself, feeling dizzy all over again looking at the blood, and tries to take deep breaths. Okay. Okay. Maybe it'll be okay.
"Keep holding that down," Ryan says. "I'll tie it up in a minute. But first we have to get out of the open." He wipes his bloody hands on his jeans and pulls his hoodie back over his head, shivering a bit from having his chest bare for so long. "Jim, keep talking," he says, pulling his arms through.
"What happened to your head?" Jim says. That's not really what Ryan meant by "Keep talking," but okay.
"Uh, somebody hit me, I guess," Ryan says. God, it really hurts, too, but with Jim's blood all over everywhere, a little bump on the head doesn't seem that important.
"I bet you have a concussion," Jim says. "Were you knocked unconscious?"
"That," Ryan says, pushing himself up and squinting into the Borders interior, wondering if they could at least camp out there until the bleeding stops, "is neither here nor there."
"Seriously, that's not good," Jim says. Ryan looks at him, barely restraining himself from rolling his eyes. No kidding, Halpert. Jim shakes his head a little, and instead says, "Did you see where Karen went?"
Ryan closes his eyes briefly. "No, man," he says. God, he hopes they're all okay. "They'll probably just meet us back at the car."
"Right," Jim says in a subdued voice. Ryan steps over him to push the door to the bookstore, and it swings open easily. Someone's shot the lock off, it looks like, but the interior of the store seems pretty normal, not a lot of broken glass, just dark and empty, books still on their shelves. Back when there was electricity, you didn't think much about how a lot of these stores are giant warehouses without windows, but man, it's dark in there now. Once you get past the front windows, you might as well be walking into a cave.
He probably shouldn't move Jim -- it'll probably make the bleeding worse -- but he thinks it's probably riskier to just sit there out on the street where anybody could take another shot at them. And at least the dark cavern of the Borders will keep people from being able to see them.
"Okay," Ryan says. "I'm going to check inside this Borders. And then -- do you think if it's clear, you can make it inside?"
Jim shrugs. "Sure," he says. Ryan doesn't really believe that, but what choice does he really have?
"Okay," Ryan says. He looks around for his backpack before he remembers that it got fucking stolen. God. "You don't by any chance have the flashlight Dwight gave you, do you?" he asks Jim. Dwight gave them all crucial supplies before they left. It's funny how being a freak in the ordinary world apparently makes you really, really useful in the middle of a war zone.
"In my bag," Jim says, and Ryan suddenly realizes that Jim's leaning back against his messenger bag. Oh, thank God.
Jim sits up to let him get at it, and Ryan pulls out a flashlight, noticing that Jim also has, among other things, a water bottle, some canned food, extra shirts they could use for bandages. Okay. Okay, maybe they will survive.
"Okay," Ryan says, grabbing the bottle of water and one of the cans. Canned peaches. Okay. He finds Jim's Leatherman in the bag too, and flips out the can opener attachment to pry off the lid of the peaches.
"What's your favorite color?" he says, trying to keep Jim conscious. Jim doesn't say anything. "Jim!" he says, worrying he's finally passed out, but when he looks up Jim seems okay, just watching him as he opens the can.
"That's a lame question," Jim says. Ryan can see blood starting to soak through to the top layer of t-shirt, seeping dark. Swell. "Blue, I guess."
"Okay," Ryan says. He feels weird about leaving Jim, even just to go inside the store, but there's not much he can do about it. He sets the bottle of water and the can of peaches down next to Jim. "You've lost a lot of blood, so you need to eat, okay?" he says. "Eat all those peaches and drink all that water. And drink the syrup on the peaches too. It's got...." He was going to say nutrients, but that's not exactly true. "Well, sugar," he says.
Jim shakily moves his left hand off the bandage and picks up the bottle of water. Ryan watches him take a sip. "All right, be right back," Ryan finally says as Jim lowers the water bottle back down, and he heads into the Borders.
The coffee bar got pretty well looted, all the food and stuff gone, and it looks like the employee break room got hit, too. From what Ryan can see in the beam of the flashlight, anyway. But the books are all still on the shelves, and there are comfortable arm chairs around, and the whole place feels like wandering into civilization again, a world where people read romance novels and biographies of John Quincy Adams and don't shoot at you on the street. Ryan finds a dark corner with a sofa in it, and thinks it's pretty well as good as they're going to get. It's hidden, it's dark. No one cares about books. Since there's no way to block off all the windows, people's apathy is what's going to guard them here.
By the time Ryan gets back, Jim's halfway through the can of peaches, lifting a slippery section carefully to his mouth with long fingers. He still looks terrible, but Ryan thinks he's not quite as pale, that his eyes aren't quite as glazed. He smiles weakly when he sees Ryan, his right hand still pressing down hard on his thigh.
"It looks okay in there," Ryan says. "Better than a lot of places, anyway."
"Good, okay," Jim says, through a mouthful of peach.
Ryan crouches down next to him and moves Jim's hand off the bandage. Jim's skin is cold and clammy, and Ryan tries desperately to remember what you're supposed to do if someone goes into shock. He can't.
Luckily, the bleeding seems to have slowed a lot -- there isn't much more blood soaked through to the top now than there was when Ryan had left.
"Good," Ryan says. "The bleeding's stopping."
Jim's stopped eating and is watching Ryan carefully. "Keep eating those," Ryan says. "I'm going to try to tie this up."
"Okay," Jim says. He reaches obediently for another slice of peach, his hand almost too big to fit into the can. Ryan can see that he's still shaking all over, his hands and his leg shivering under Ryan's hand. God, that fucking bullet must've hurt. Jesus.
Ryan reaches for the leftover t-shirt strips he made before, folding one up and putting it on top of the soaked through bandage. He vaguely remembers something from first aid training about not changing the bandage when it might be stuck to the wound, something about not risking re-opening it. You're just supposed to keep bandaging on top of it until you can get to the hospital.
The hospital. Yeah. Well.
Jim winces a little bit as Ryan presses down. "Sorry," Ryan says. Jim's sweating again, and as he lifts the bottle of water to get a drink, he's so shaky he almost spills it all over himself. "Careful," Ryan says. Jim shakes his head a little, his face strained. "I'll try to -- sorry," Ryan says. "This is probably going to hurt no matter what. But I'll try not to press too hard."
He starts to wrap strips of the cloth around Jim's skinny thigh to hold the bandages down on top and bottom, wrapping layers around and around. It's tough to do, because it needs to be tight enough to put pressure on the wound, but not so tight that it makes Jim pass out or anything. It's stressful, and he has to keep glancing back at Jim for signs of pain. Jim's clenching his jaw so he doesn't make noise, and by the time Ryan finally has it bound up, he and Jim are both white and sweating. Ryan's hands ache from trying to pull it tight, but not too tight, and God, his head's still killing him.
He sits back on his heels and tries to breathe deeply. There's blood all over his hands, in a puddle under Jim's leg, on both their clothes, all over the place. That smell of iron, and God, how are they going to get back to the car to meet the others with Jim's leg shot? Fuck fuck fuck fuck.
He's vaguely aware that he's getting dizzy thinking about it, and puts his hand up gingerly to feel his head, and God, he could swear the lump is bigger than before. Like he has half a tennis ball sprouting out of his temple.
Jim's still watching him, concerned like he's not the one whose blood is all over the street. "Seriously," Jim says. "You probably have a concussion. You shouldn't be running around like this."
"You're right," Ryan says. "I should definitely go lie down while you bleed to death."
Jim shrugs. "I'm not going to die."
"Promise?" Ryan says weakly. He meant it like a joke, but it didn't quite come out that way. One thing, at least, Jim's almost finished with the water and peaches, and he's getting some color back in his face. Ryan watches as Jim lifts the can to his mouth to drink the syrup the peaches came in. His Adam's apple works as he swallows, and Ryan wonders how on earth he's going to get a big guy like Jim all the way to the back of the Borders.
A drop of water hits Ryan square on the top of his head. Fuck, it's finally going to rain like the clouds have been threatening. And not only does getting wet suck when you don't have a change of clothes, but he doesn't trust rain anymore -- you don't know what might be in it.
"Okay," Ryan says, watching drops start to speckle the remains of the sidewalk. "We've got to get inside." He picks up Jim's messenger bag and slings it across his body. He has to shorten the strap an embarrassing amount -- fucking tall Halpert.
"Right," Jim says, looking dubious.
"So, um, try not to move that leg much," Ryan says. "You don't want it to start bleeding again. So I guess I'm going to sort of half drag you. Try to, I don't know, crab-crawl with your hands and other leg. Okay? And, um, you're going to have to hold the flashlight. If you can."
"It's okay," Jim says. "It's okay, I can do it." Ryan passes him the flashlight, trying hard to keep the shaking of his hands minimal.
It's a horrible, awkward process. Ryan grabs Jim under the arms and slides him backwards while Jim scrabbles with his other limbs, his injured leg awkwardly sticking straight out, the flashlight beam going every which way. At least they're inside before it really starts pouring rain, but that's almost the only thing that goes right. At one stage, Ryan accidentally bumps Jim's bad leg into a bookshelf and Jim lets out the most agonized half-moan half-scream that Ryan's ever heard.
"Fuck, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Ryan says. God, he's starting to feel frantic and upset. And he doesn't even really like Jim, is the stupid thing about how worried he is. Jim's just his lame coworker who used to spend his days annoying the whole office by getting Dwight all wound up. Ryan didn't think that someday they'd be stuck together in a Mad Max, post-apocalyptic nightmare Scranton, bleeding out and concussed. That he'd ever be this scared of Jim dying. God, where the fuck did Karen and Oscar and Gil go?
It must take them at least an hour to cross the store like that, staggering and dragging. They have to sit down and rest three times, whenever Ryan starts feeling like he's going to pass out. But finally Ryan helps Jim up onto that couch he found, the one in the back, settling him against the cushions. Jim props his leg up and closes his eyes, breathing deeply through his nose.
"You okay?" Ryan says. He's taken the flashlight back, and is using it to examine the bandages on Jim's leg. They're not soaked through yet, so that's something.
"Mmmhmm," Jim says, his eyes still closed. Ryan should make him open his eyes, stop him from passing out, but he feels a little bit too much like he's going to pass out himself. He slumps down, sitting on the floor with his back against the couch, his shoulders nudging Jim's arm. When he flips the flashlight off, the room is almost perfectly dark, just the looming of shelves between them and the dim light from the windows, far away.
He lets himself close his own eyes for a long moment, trying to concentrate on not throwing up, on not thinking about the pounding in his head.
"Don't go to sleep," Jim says. "You have a concussion."
"Fuck off," Ryan says mildly, but he opens his eyes. He reaches for the messenger bag, feeling for more cans. "You need to eat more."
Jim groans. "I'm not hungry, man. You eat something."
Ryan flips on the flashlight to find the can opener, but then mostly opens the can in the dark. Doesn't want to waste the battery, doesn't want anybody to see the light. In the dark, everything else is magnified -- the heat of Jim's body behind him, the sound of the can opener, Jim's breathing. The smell of books, of paper and printing, a clean, school kind of smell. A Dunder Mifflin kind of smell, actually. He never thought that memory would ever feel comforting, but it turns out atomic bombs kind of recalibrate what you find comforting and what you don't.
He gets the can open and passes it back to Jim. It's pineapple -- too much fruit, but eating baked beans with their hands is more of an operation than Ryan really feels up for.
They sit there in silence for awhile, listening to the rain outside, the sound of Jim chewing. Ryan's usually okay with silence, but this is just giving him time to think, nothing distracting him from the pain in his head, his missing supplies. Ryan wiggles his toes inside his socks and wonders where he's going to get new shoes. How they're going to travel. Fuck. Fuuuuckity fuck fuck. He's trying really hard not to have a panic attack over it, because he's got to take care of Jim, and if the others meet back at the car and he and Jim aren't there, maybe they'll leave them, and, oh God. They're going to die out here, him and Jim Halpert, and no one will ever know what happened to them.
Jim's hand comes down onto the back of Ryan's neck, and Ryan almost jumps a foot.
"Sorry," Jim says, into the darkness, but he keeps his hand there, this giant warm hand right on the base of Ryan's neck, fingers stretching out along where Ryan's neck turns into his shoulders, rubbing gently like he's trying to get the stress out of Ryan's muscles. Sort of petting him like Ryan's a dog he's trying to calm down. It's pretty fucking gay, to be perfectly honest, but, well. It's a stressful situation, is all. And Ryan's so on the verge of really freaking the fuck out that -- oh, he doesn't know, it's hard to describe. But it's like Jim's hand is full of calm, or sanity, or something. He doesn't want him to take it away. Jim just holds it there, steady, and Ryan focuses on breathing and not losing it, and it takes a long time, getting it together.
It's embarrassing that Jim can probably feel how he's shaking all over. God. It's just the concussion. Anyone would be shaking. Ryan leans back into Jim's hand a little bit and lets him pet him, and thinks about how fucked they both are, what a miracle it'll be if they survive. Jim's fingers keep moving, gentle on Ryan's neck.
"We'll be okay," Jim says, after a long time of sitting like that in the dark. Outside, it sounds like the rain has stopped. The air blowing in from the windows is wet and smells like spring. Spring and ash, which is a weird mixture.
Ryan closes his eyes again and breathes. "Yeah," he says, and starts to push himself up. Jim's hand pulls away reluctantly as Ryan separates them. "Did you finish that pineapple?"
"Yes, Nana," Jim says.
Ryan ignores him. "You need more food. And water. Can I borrow your shoes to go scavenge for some?"
Jim almost snorts. "I don't think they'll fit, man."
Ryan rolls his eyes, not that Jim can see him in the dark. "There's broken glass and nails and shit all over the place out there. Your clown shoes are better than nothing."
There's a long pause, so long that Ryan finally flips the flashlight on, pointed at Jim's face, the light like a blow after all that darkness. Jim winces, blinking in the brightness, his face all screwed up. "Jeez, Ryan!"
"Sorry," Ryan says, and points it away from him. "I thought maybe you'd finally passed out."
"No," Jim says. Ryan can just barely see him in the diffuse light from the pointed-away flashlight, and Jim's face is hard to read, the lines of it sort of tight. "Um," Jim says. "Not to point out the obvious, but what if you don't come back?"
God, Ryan doesn't want to have this discussion. "I will," he says.
"What if you don't?"
Ryan pushes his hand up through his hair, forgetting for a second about the lump. His fingers graze it and he flinches. Jesus God. Jim's watching him with his eyes bright, staring at Ryan's temple like he's saying, see?
"You lost a lot of blood," Ryan says. His voice comes out a little more gravelly than he was expecting, and he clears his throat. "If you don't eat more, you might go into shock or pass out or something overnight. And then -- well."
Jim's right hand is on his thigh, Ryan notices, sort of tracing around the edges of the bandage, pressing intermittently at the sides like maybe that helps distract from the pain. He can see Jim weighing the risks, Ryan alone with Jim dead, Jim alone with Ryan dead.
"Fuck," Jim says very quietly.
"Yeah," Ryan says.
Jim shakes his head, back and forth, very slowly. "All right," he says finally, and shrugs. "Take the shoes."
Ryan lets out a breath. "Thanks, man." He goes around to Jim's feet to unlace his sneakers. They're enormous, tied in double knots, and it takes him a little bit to get them off. He gets self-conscious, thinking Jim's watching him fumble with the laces, but when he glances up, Jim's eyes are closed and his lips are moving a little bit. Maybe they're both on the verge of freaking out here.
They really are like clown shoes when Ryan puts them on. He ties them as tight as he can, but he's still clomping around like a little kid in his dad's slippers. Jim's opened his eyes and is trying not to smirk.
"Shut up," Ryan says, and puts his knife back on his belt. So creepy, that sheath, but handy. He checks that he has everything else he might need. His cell phone, useless but still not dead, chilling in his pocket. He leaves Jim the flashlight -- he'll probably need it more, here in the cave -- but takes Jim's messenger bag, emptied out so he'll have something to carry food in.
"So," Jim says, as Ryan pats his pockets, a final check. "Um. See you soon. Right?"
"Yeah," Ryan says. "You will." He slings the messenger bag over his shoulder and clomps off towards the door of the bookstore, trying to make as little noise as possible and failing.
**
He feels ridiculous, slinking along the wet streets all hunched over. He only sees one other person while he's out, and she panics when she sees him, goes scuttling off around a corner. It's just as well, since she saved Ryan the trouble of doing the same thing. And scuttling is so undignified.
He doesn't want to go far, afraid that if he does he might get too dizzy to make it back, so his looting opportunities are more limited than sometimes. But he finds a 7-11 four blocks away that actually has some stuff left in it, so that's not bad. Granted, it's not good stuff -- it's mostly things other people didn't want. A couple of battered cans of Spaghetti-o's, three 20-oz bottles of ginger ale. The Coke's all gone from the fridge, but ginger ale, nobody takes. Better yet, he finds a half-empty bottle of rubbing alcohol that he figures he can pour on Jim's leg. Ryan loads up his bag with what he can, ends with it bouncing swollen against his back, cans hitting him in the kidneys as he walks.
He goes around a different side of the block on his way back, in case there's anything there he didn't see. But most of the stores are blown out, or just offices. He figures there isn't much he'd want at an accountant's. There's a corpse in the middle of the street, though, a man about Ryan's size, recently dead.
He hates that he thinks this way now, he really does. But the guy has sneakers on, and Jim's shoes are really not cutting it for Ryan. He moves toward the body warily -- sometimes it's hard to tell when people aren't quite dead. And you don't really want to approach a body if you're not sure how it died, especially with that whole smallpox thing they kept hearing about. But Ryan can see the blood from a bullet hole spreading out over this guy's chest, so that's probably all right. Bullet holes aren't catching, last he checked.
It's a middle-aged guy, gray in his beard. He looks like he's probably somebody's dad. Jesus.
Ryan shakes his head and kneels down to take the shoes as quickly as he can. He has to disconnect himself from his body a little bit as he does it, though. He hums an REM song under his breath and tries to name all the teachers he ever had in his head, starting with kindergarten. Miss Maureen, Ms. Guthrie, Mrs. Britt.
He's got the shoes off by the time he hits 8th grade, and he immediately takes them around the corner to put them on. He doesn't want to be able to see the body while he does. The guy's ankles were cold under his hands.
The shoes do fit a lot better, and once they're on he ties Jim's laces together and slings the shoes around the strap of the messenger bag, like he's going to the gym after work. Doing that seems so far away now that it's like somebody else's memory.
**
When Ryan gets back to the Borders around nightfall, everything looks pretty much the same from the outside, which he hopes means that nothing terrible has happened to Jim while he's been gone. He's also pleased to see that Jim's not at all visible from the street -- doubly pleased when he gets halfway through the store and realizes that Jim's got the flashlight on, reading a paperback. Ender's Game, Ryan notes when he's close enough to see. His new shoes make a lot less noise than Jim's did, so Jim doesn't hear him until Ryan's almost right up to him.
Jim noticeably starts when Ryan's shoes squeak against the linoleum, but when his head goes up and he sees it's Ryan, he immediately relaxes, letting out a long breath. He closes his eyes, like the waiting's been a strain.
"Good book?" Ryan says, his voice dry.
Jim looks a little chastened. "Yeah," he says. "I know, I know, I'm wasting the battery."
Ryan wasn't going to say anything about that, but yeah, he is. "I was going to say you weren't supposed to get up. You probably started bleeding again."
"I was careful," Jim says, and gestures to the science fiction shelves, which are the closest to them. "It was just right there."
"Still," Ryan says, and takes the flashlight out of Jim's hand to inspect the bandage. The blood from before has dried, stiff and dark, and there's not any more added to it. Well, that's good, anyway.
"It feels better," Jim says. Ryan gives him a don't-lie-to-me look, but doesn't say anything, just hands the flashlight back to him and starts unloading cans from the bag.
Jim looks down at Ryan's feet. "You got new shoes," he says. "Where'd you find them?"
Ryan puts the cans of Spaghetti-o's in a row, lining them up more carefully than he needs to, the ginger ale behind them. He doesn't really want to answer Jim's question, so.
"Oh," Jim says, after a long pause. God, whatever, Ryan can't deal with him. He feels a little sick. Jim just sits there watching him until it starts to make Ryan uncomfortable.
"Stop," Ryan mutters. The last thing in the bag is the rubbing alcohol, and he pulls it out, stows the bag. "Here, let me see your leg."
Jim rolls his head around on his neck. "Oh God, please don't do that."
"Don't be a pussy," Ryan says. "It'll just sting a little." He makes Jim point the flashlight at the bandage, and starts feeling at the edges. He's pretty sure the bandage is still too stuck to the clot to really disturb, so he ends up just pouring the alcohol liberally over the outside of the bandage.
Jim, whose muscles were so tense waiting for Ryan to pour it that they felt solid, actually screams when the alcohol soaks down through, making this horrible sound like it's killing him.
"Sorry!" Ryan says. Oh God, Jim was loud. He looks around wildly, hoping nobody heard.
Jim's swearing under his breath, sweat standing out on his forehead. "Fuck," Jim says through gritted teeth. "Oh my God, holy fuck." He's rocking back and forth, rubbing at the skin around the bandage again.
"Sorry," Ryan says again, still worried someone heard and is going to come after them. "You don't want it to get infected."
"God, I think infected would hurt less," Jim mutters. He seems to be finally getting it together, his face less pinched, but apparently is trying to distract from the pain by sounding angry. "That's great. And now I smell like a wino."
"You kind of look like one, too," Ryan says. Jim's wearing a ball cap, has two days worth of stubble, and there's blood all over him.
Jim rolls his eyes, finally letting go of his leg and wiping some of the sweat off his face. "Here," he says, apparently wanting something else to think about. "Let me see your head."
"I'm fine," Ryan says. He hasn't felt like he needs to throw up for at least twenty minutes, which is some definite progress.
Jim points the flashlight at him. "Come on," he says. "Crouch down."
Ryan just looks at him.
"Come on," Jim says.
Ryan rolls his eyes a little bit, but finally crouches so his face is level with Jim's.
"Closer," Jim says. "I can't see."
Jesus. Ryan moves in closer, until their faces are so close it's practically like they're about to kiss. Luckily the flashlight's so bright in his eyes he can barely see. He stares vaguely forward, trying not to think about Jim's face right there. Clinical, like he's at the doctor's.
Jim puts two fingers along Ryan's jaw, turning Ryan's head so he can see the lump. Jim's fingers are warm, and Ryan hadn't thought about it before, how intimate touching someone's face is. It's weird.
Jim sucks in a sympathetic breath when he sees the lump in all its glory. Oh great, it's that bad? Jim carefully runs one finger very lightly around its edges, but even that hurts. Ryan tries his best not to wince, but Jim's watching his expression carefully.
"Sorry," Jim says. Ryan shrugs a little. "Okay," Jim says. "For a concussion you, like, check someone's pupils, right?"
"I don't know," Ryan says. "I guess." But he lets Jim turn his face back and shine the flashlight right in his eyes. After a long moment, Ryan says, "What are you looking for?"
"I don't know," Jim says doubtfully. "I think... I don't know, they look okay to me."
"Then get that light out of my eyes," Ryan says. When Jim does, he slumps back down to where he'd been sitting before, his back against the couch, and starts to open one of the cans of Spaghetti-o's.
Jim groans.
"Shut up," Ryan says. "You need to eat." He wrenches the can open and hands it to Jim, along with one of the plastic spoons he found in the 7-11.
Jim looks at it. "Oh, cold Spaghetti-o's," he says. "My favorite."
What a baby. "Sorry," Ryan says, opening a can for himself. "Did you want me to cut the crusts off for you?"
Jim's hand floats down in front of Ryan's face, middle finger extended. Ryan lets out an amused breath through his nose despite himself.
**
There's another couch halfway across the store, and Ryan would sleep on it, but doesn't want to be so far away. Whether not wanting to be far away is for his benefit or Jim's, he couldn't say. Finally, after some discussion, Ryan ends up pushing it over next to Jim's couch, his muscles straining while Jim holds the flashlight. He finally gets it to within a couple of feet of where Jim's lying, and figures that's close enough. If something awful happens during the night, at least they'll be together.
They bunk down, each wrapped in one of Dwight's lightweight silver space blankets, Ryan curled up so his legs barely fit on the short couch, Jim with his giraffe legs sticking off the end of his.
"You know I'm going to have to wake you up every two hours, right?" Jim says, his voice thick with sleep. "My college roommate played lacrosse, I know the concussion drill."
"I don't have a concussion," Ryan's pretty sure he says then, but he's almost asleep so it's hard to tell.
"I'm setting my watch," Jim says, and Ryan hears the little beeps of him doing so. He wonders vaguely how long it'll be until all their watches finally die. He falls asleep wondering it.
**
Ryan wakes up, groggy and disoriented, when a warm hand settles gently on the uninjured part of his forehead. His immediate reaction to someone touching him is flight-or-flight, and before he's consciously thinking about it, his right hand grabs the wrist as hard as he can, while his left hand scrabbles for his knife. I'll kill the fucker, Ryan thinks, like a crazy person, before Jim's voice comes out of the darkness and whispers, "Hey. Hey. It's just me."
Oh God. Crap. Ryan stops reaching for the knife, glad for once that he couldn't get to it fast, and lets go of Jim's wrist. He can barely breathe, and his heart's pounding. Jeez.
"Sorry," Jim says. "It's just me. Do you know where you are?" He's still got his hand on Ryan's forehead, his thumb stroking back and forth soothingly. Ryan doesn't know when Halpert got so touchy, but when he's all sleepy like this, he's okay with it. It feels like his mom's hand, checking him for a fever.
He closes his eyes for a second to try to slow his heart back down, to calm down. He focuses on the movement of Jim's thumb, soft against his skin. "Borders," he says.
"Good," Jim says. "Who am I?"
"Jim fucking Halpert," Ryan says. Jim laughs and moves his hand. For a second, Ryan feels it as a loss, but then he realizes Jim's just shifted to run one finger over the lines of Ryan's face, tracing how much swelling there is. Ryan can feel that it's getting a lot worse since he's been lying down -- he can barely open his left eye.
Jim's finger traces lightly over Ryan's forehead, down his nose, over his cheekbone. It's the kind of thing Kelly used to do in bed, actually, trace Ryan's face and kiss his shoulder, and without his meaning to, the memory makes Ryan shiver.
Jim stops his finger where it's feeling out the swelling around Ryan's eye. "Sorry, does that hurt?"
Ryan swallows. "Not yet," he says, trying to shake off the memory of Kelly's body, of being in his own apartment, safe and sound.
"Okay," Jim says, but he stops and takes his hand away. Ryan's face feels cold without it.
"Careful with that leg," Ryan says, as Jim hops the two steps back to his own couch.
"I am," Jim says, and then it takes a few minutes for Ryan to fall back asleep. He keeps thinking about the light touch of Jim's finger over his face, about Kelly. He wonders what she's doing right now, back at the farm, and wishes he'd stayed there. He wishes a lot of things.
**
It's a bad night. In the early stages of it, Ryan's dreams are awful. He's dead and cold and someone's taking off his shoes, or he's gotten shot in the leg and is bleeding out, like his subconscious has decided that a review of recent trauma is in order. Jim wakes him up every two hours, and Ryan just hopes that he's not making any frightened noises, not moaning in his sleep. Ryan doesn't try to knife Jim again, though, so at least that's something.
But later in the night, Ryan's dreams shift and he dreams about his mother, about Kelly, about warm hands in the dark. The last time Jim wakes him up, he actually leans into Jim's hand, almost nuzzling it, and shit, that's embarrassing. He hopes they're both so half-asleep they won't remember it in the morning. But Ryan remembers it, at least, though they never talk about it, even later.
Anyway, it's a bad night. Finally when Ryan wakes up, there's gray daylight seeping in the distant windows, so he can see his surroundings dimly through the one eye he can manage to open. Morning. Thank God. He's not rested, but he's glad the unsettling night's over. His left eye is swollen shut, crusted and disgusting when he runs his hand over it. Great.
Jim's still asleep, his face quiet in repose, his chest gently rising and falling. One of his hands is dangling off the couch, and Ryan looks at it, remembers it settling heavily on his head. He wonders if Jim will wake him up like that the next night too.
Jim needs to shave, needs to wash the blood off himself. He has a little smear of it on his cheekbone, and he looks like death. Ryan imagines he looks roughly the same; he runs his hand over his chin experimentally, feels the itchy scrape of stubble. The right side of his face feels normal, but when his hand touches the left, he can feel the swelling even way down his cheek. No wonder he can't open his eye. Fantastic.
He's still looking at Jim in a vague way and prodding at the edges of the swelling when Jim's eyes blink open. Ryan jerks his head away so Jim doesn't catch him looking at him, which... well, it's a weird thing to do, and Ryan doesn't want to think about it much more than that.
"You look terrible," Jim says, his voice low and rough from sleep.
"Good morning to you, too," Ryan says.
Jim ignores his tone. "Your head must be killing you," he says.
It is, but it's not like they have aspirin or anything -- morphine, codeine, God, anything --, so what's the point of talking about it? Anyway, Jim looks pretty pinched and white from pain himself.
"How's the leg?" Ryan asks.
Jim half shrugs. "Feels like someone took a shot at it," he says.
Ryan sits up and Jesus, his head hurts more upright. For a second he seriously feels like the pain's gonna make him throw up.
Jim's eyes have widened a little bit. "You okay, man?"
For a second, Ryan's concentrating too hard on not barfing to answer. But his body adjusts to sitting up eventually, and the pain goes back to a semi-manageable throb. "Yeah," Ryan says. He puts his elbows on his knees and tries to think. How are they going to travel? Fuck. Fuck. Apparently he's almost as bad as Jim, if just sitting up makes him want to puke.
Jim reaches down to grab his ball cap and pulls it on while he's still lying down. His leg's propped up on the end of the loveseat, which is probably good for it. Elevation and all that. "So," Jim says, his eyes now hidden by the brim. "We've got to get back to the car."
Ryan slides off the couch to sit cross-legged by the pile of supplies, putting him right next to Jim's head. "Yeah," he says, rummaging for their map of Scranton. "Somehow."
"I can walk," Jim says.
Ryan throws him a look, pulling the map out from under Jim's extra shirts.
"Okay, hop," Jim says. He reaches out a finger and lays it gently on Ryan's swollen cheekbone. For a second the touch makes Ryan feel like crying, like all the stuff he purposefully isn't feeling is about to come bubbling up. His missing parents, how he and Jim are probably going to die. Jesus. His cheek feels hot and swollen, the skin pulled too tight over the swelling.
"Are you going to be able to make it?" Jim asks, his voice low and concerned.
Ryan shrugs and moves his head away from Jim's hand before he loses it altogether. "Yeah," he says.
Jim looks doubtful, but Ryan gets the map unfolded and holds it between them, figuring business-like is the way to go. "We've got to figure out a route," he says, and he finds city hall, putting his finger on it. "We're here," he says, and then puts his other index finger on his parent's house, up in Jessup. "And we've got to get here," he says.
He and Jim stare at the space in between Ryan's fingers.
"Before they decide we aren't coming and leave without us," Jim says.
Ryan nods. "And avoiding highways," he says, thinking about the tanks they'd seen on their way off Dwight's farm. Jim nods, giving a barely perceptible shudder. They -- well, they hadn't really looking like American tanks. But it's hard to say, these days, what anything is.
They spend the next hour bent over the map in the dim light, arguing over their options. Ryan thinks they should go as directly as possible, because of Jim's leg -- adding extra distance seems stupid to him -- but Jim insists he'll be fine walking and they should go around the most dangerous areas. Head straight towards Lake Scranton and then skirt the city up towards Dunmore, walking in places that are more out of the way. He says going straight won't be faster if they end up dead, and in the end he argues Ryan down. Whatever. It's probably a bad decision, but there's not really a good decision to choose, so.
After an incredibly disgusting breakfast of cold baked beans and applesauce, they pack up their stuff and get ready to go. Ryan insists on pouring more rubbing alcohol over Jim's leg -- Jim shakes and gasps, but doesn't scream this time --, and then he rebinds the bandage, tighter this time. Jim keeps up a constant stream of swearing under his breath, but when Ryan stops pulling it as tight, Jim says, "I'm fine, I'm fine, don't ease up." God, it sucks, though, hurting someone like that. But once he's done Jim says it's easier to stand on, so maybe it's worth it.
Once they have everything packed up, Ryan wears the messenger bag slung across his body, and Jim puts his arm over Ryan's shoulders, so Ryan's his human crutch. It's not easy, but they do manage to walk that way, Jim leaning heavily on Ryan to take the weight off his bad leg. But limping along like that is hard on both of them, and they're already breathing raggedly by the time they hit the street.
Fuck, Ryan thinks as his left foot steps, and shit, he thinks, as his right foot steps, and the rhythm of profanity keeps up in his head as they go, fuck, shit, fuck, shit. Jim's weight is really heavy, making his shoulders ache, and Jim's clearly gritting his teeth against the pain.
They rest a lot, but even so, it's a bad day. Ryan doesn't know how much more there is to say about that.
**
Continued in Part 2