pridecroweth

[ Stairs are a bad business. Easy to get pushed down and he dislikes how sound echoes in this room, all the open corners. Carver feels his fingers twitch and stills them, taking a careful watch as they move. If you let something sneak up in the dark, you deserve what's done to you.

The world is simple like that. Praise God.

Carver hums again. He doesn't really want to think of Korengal right now, those cold nights and the way blood sank black into the dirt. The ambushes and the time he got blown up, shrapnel biting through his armor and nearly shredding his hip. He carries the scars now but he survived, which was his privilege. God loves you, son, the commander whispers.

Or God did love him. Hard to be sure about the here and now. ]

Everything was simple there.

[ He supposes he misses that, though the lesson was echoed out afterward. Is still being echoed. ]

Kinda like now. You fight or you die.

[ It's a bleak outlook. But equally as much, it's one he recognizes. One he felt, those years he spent wandering Europe more bird than man.

They hit the street, which looks war-torn enough to be familiar. Twisted scrap metal that used to be vehicles, cracks in concrete from mortar rounds or whatever the equivalent is on this world. They don't walk abreast of one-another, Carver lingering behind him. But their steps are nearly soundless, walking quietly in sync.

The rifle rests comfortably in the crook of his arm, ready to sling up at a moment's notice. ]

Simple, huh?

[ That's one way of looking at it. Simple's relative. He's not sure yet if he misses the desk job or not — but there's sure something primal about living a kill-or-be-killed lifestyle. It crowds out room for everything else. It strips you down to nothing. It's uncomfortably familiar, heavy like the wedding ring hung around his neck.

Simple. It implies that what followed wasn't. ]

What'd you do after?

[ Carver strikes him as being like Anderson — very till death do us part. But he could be speaking literally — that Afghanistan itself was simple, and any deployments that followed were less so. He'd started feeling conflicted about Iraq long before the ambush. ]

[ This place got shredded once. Carver and Sam walk through the damage, familiar - he imagines - to both of them. But the ground hasn't been stained black by napalm, and in that there rests a line. These people weren't burned, not like back home.

Not yet, anyway.

Carver just shrugs at that, watching the corners, watching Sam. He's thinking about Sam's rifle and whether he wants to take it. The cost benefit analysis of drawing his pistol and shooting Sam in the back of the skull. There's no honor in the scrum, not really, not like he thought when he was green. And a good, working rifle is worth more than a man's life these days.

It'd be trouble, though. More than he wants just yet. Maybe later. He supposes Sam's making a similar equation about the body armor, about the resources that Carver's taken from the group. Food, clean water, ammunition. It all adds up. ]

Contractor, [ he replies blandly. ] And then the world ended.

[ So it goes. ]

[ There's no obvious disapproval. Nothing overt. Not even a twitch. But something curdles in his gut, sour and mistrustful at the admission. It's reflexive — he can't help it. Not a big fan of mercenaries, Sam. ]

'Ended' how?

[ It's lightly curious, no judgment. could be an exaggeration, could be something like Armageddon (less Bruce Willis). Could even be a dramatic way of saying he died — Sam's learned not to make assumptions out here, not when every other person talks about gods and monsters, not when being a shifter is pretty well small-fry. ]

People got sick. The dead came back hungry.

[ It's said without much emotion at all. Carver's given that speech a couple times now and not a single person has recognized what he's talking about. Or if they have, they reference movies he's never seen, books he's never read, with an air of indulgent pity that makes his jaw tense up and his chest ache. No one understands, or cares to try.

It shouldn't bother him. He hates that it does. That on some level, everyone he meets is wondering if he's lost his marbles. Because you have to wonder, don't you, when somebody starts listing off impossible shit.

Everything comes with a context, after all.

He keeps walking. Steps through broken glass, watching for trip wires. For IEDs. For hungry, grasping hands. ]

It's nice having food, [ he adds, in that same bland tone. He knows it won't last, but it's nice, even with the rationing. ]

[ His first thought, admittedly and perhaps uncharitably, is that maybe he underestimated how crazy this guy actually is. He toes his way around a skeleton carefully, respectfully — considering a reply as he does. What's that Lasso dude say, be curious, not judgmental? Yeah, well.

But by that same stroke, if he were to tell someone he's a Shifter, that he's been hunted for it, that there's a witch who can call the dead who's been after his family for generations, they'd think he was crazy too. So, maybe he can manage curious. ]

Huh. [ That's it, the sum of his response to the hungry dead. ] Be a lot nicer if we had a couple rib-eye now and then.

[ Actually not untrue — expired MREs leave a lot to be desired in the flavour department. ]

Whole time I was in Iraq, all I could think about was carne asada.

[ Carver, meanwhile, steps over the skeleton only because the sound of vine crunching under his boot would be loud and they can’t afford the echo. Stupidity is a sin, grave as all the rest. If you get your brothers killed—

But his brothers aren’t here, Carver reminds himself. His brothers are dead on the ground in Meridian. Rotting like all the other forgotten bones.

His fingers twitch. It takes him a moment to refocus, to remember that Sam’s here, sniping and forth with him. Sam, who doesn’t say a damn thing about the rotters or the world ending but once missed carne asada, which Carver’s grandmother used to make sometimes. ]

Enchiladas for me, [ he says after a moment, more honest than he cares for. ] The real ones. Not the bullshit they served.

[ He laughs. It's low, pitched so as not to carry. ]

Good ol' number 15. Only edible with tabasco sauce.

[ And even then, 'edible' is... debatable. ]

Had one guy on my crew that loved 'em. Crazy fucker.

[ Carver snorts at that. He’ll eat old MREs if they’re in front of him like he’ll eat dogs and rats and things worse than that if the alternative is starving. But he remembers a time when he swore off MREs with great sincerity and feeling. Never again, he told himself. I’m better than that now. ]

Kids went hog for the chili mac, [ he replies, a little wistfully. ] Never saw the appeal.

[ Kids, he calls them, though most of those soldiers were only a year or two younger than Carver himself at the time. All of them were seasoned, brutal fighters. But they were his responsibility in a lot of ways and so his kids they remained. Most of them died there. ]

I was more a beef stew guy, myself.

[ You could eat it hot or cold, and it tasted about the same. Plus, it came with m&ms — always good for a trade. ]

Didn't hate the maple sausage. Close second.

[ Hell, he can still taste 'em. Lot of long nights beneath the stars in the cold of the Hindu Kush, relying on the heating packs built into some of the MREs to get a lukewarm cup of coffee, shoveling down calories in spare moments. He misses the men, not the misery. ]

What was your holy grail?

Whatever came with m&ms.

[ That little burst of chocolate and the crunch between his teeth—yeah. He felt human then.

Carver steps over another skeleton, watching their corners. ]

I made fry bread once over a hot plate, though. That was a hit. Don’t ask where I got the oil.

[ There's a firebombed tank hidden in the shadow of a building as they round the next corner. It's been picked clean — nothing left except maybe the heavy armour plating, holes punched through it with some sort of piercing round, that could be smelted into something else, not something that's worth their time on a trip like this. But it brings him back, and he finds himself tapping his knuckles against one of the damaged treads as they pass by. A little ritual, ages old. ]

Brother, I don't want to know.

[ Sometimes you're better off not asking. Needs drive, and all that. It's not lost on him that a white guy wouldn't get the significance behind it — but he's never met anyone with a lick of native blood that didn't have their grandma's frybread recipe memorized by heart. ]

You're in for it now, though. We find the ingredients for it, I'm gonna hold your feet to the fire until you whip up a batch. Hell, I'll make wajapi if we can track down something like a chokecherry.

Edited 2025-08-29 04:42 (UTC)

[ That gets a huff and a surprised grin; he hadn't been expecting the recognition, really. Most people he meets don't know what the fuck fry bread is except some kind of food, the inevitable answer given the name, and they'll eat it because everyone eats these days if they've got the option. You choke down rot and garbage, whatever gives you a few calories, and you're thankful for it. ]

Fuck, I haven't had wajapi in years. My grandma's friends made that shit when they visited.

[ It's more honest than he intended when they set out, crossing over bones and broken ground. Maybe too honest. But: ]

We're Purépecha, [ he adds, watching Sam. ] But granny was friends with everybody. She knew folks from all over.

It's the way of the grandmothers.

[ His was just the same. Community is held together by the will of women. There's a brief, speculative silence as they pass by the burnt-out tank, slowing to check corners and sightlines, and then: ]

Oglála Lakȟóta Oyáte.

[ That's deliberate. He'd have stopped at Lakota with most other people, but acknowledging the sub-tribe — and its prominence as a member of the seven council fires — it's more personal. There was a time he would have been too ashamed to say it, back when he kept his hair short and knew only a handful of words. Now, nearly fluent, these things have a way of building a home inside you. ]

[ Carver tilts his head, watching Sam. Curious, now. There's history in that statement. The weight of knowing. Of belonging. He wonders if Sam speaks the language. Carver never learned. His grandma never taught him and if his mom ever knew, she wasn't around long enough to show it. There's so much he didn't know then and has no way of learning now. All of his blood family is dead and their history with them. The Reapers gave him new traditions, but it wasn't the same. Couldn't be the same.

Those are melancholy thoughts. He puts them away. ]

I grew up around the Ute Mountain Utes. Wasn't one of them, though.

[ There'd always been that little bit of distance. It didn't matter until his grandma died and then it did. ]

[ It's not quite defensiveness, but Sam recognizes the statement for what it is — similar but separate. Belonging is a tricky thing, and for a moment Sam feels — guilty, almost, for having that belonging and rejecting it for so long, when other people didn't even get that much.

He may not like the mercenary bit, but that's a whole other fight. Unless the guy drops the bombshell that he was one of the Blackstone bastards that set up the ambush, he'll try to set aside the grudge.

He drops back, just enough that they can walk briefly abreast, and he nudges his shoulder in against Carver's. Companionable, but not overbearing about it. ]

My grandmother was of the opinion that if you were invited by a people to live with them, share food, work and a roof — you were kin enough. Can't speak to Ute custom, but that's how it would've been for us. It's about belonging, not blood.

[ It’s a small gesture, on balance. Given by another Reaper, Carver would’ve taken it as a comfort, maybe even returned it. How many times did he throw his arm around Bossie and Turner, muss up their hair while they flailed and laughed but never really tried to get away?

Never again, Carver thinks, because Turner got beaten to death and Bossie died screaming and hurt and they never said a word about it. Not a single thing. He’s thinking about his brothers, though, and that’s why he only stiffens when Sam closes the distance and doesn’t do anything about it.

It’s meant kindly. Carver’s not so far gone he can’t see that, given the subject, the shit they are and aren’t saying that Carver never could talk about with the Reapers because he was the only one among them who could say anything about it. And why bother, really? They were all orphans by the time it kicked off, or good as. They had nothing and so they built something, simple as that.

He shifts a little further away from Sam as they walk, so they won’t touch again. Not even by accident. ]

They let us in, [ Carver says after a moment, when the silence feels like it might stretch into something he can’t control. ] Nobody made ‘em do that. Guess that’s something.

[ He doesn’t give people much grace these days. Doesn’t care to. But the aunties and uncles who ringed his childhood took care of him, brought him in. He wasn’t one of them, not really, but that didn’t matter. Or at least it didn’t until his grandma died and he’d already gotten fucked up in Korengal, and it turned out all those little lines folks had stepped over for him as a child suddenly mattered a whole lot. ]

[ He recognizes distance when he sees it, and doesn't try to bridge the gap. Just steps back into place in the line with an acknowledging nod. ]

When I was in Iraq, [ he begins almost lightly. Because for all the stoicism his old man beat into him, he's never been able to let someone bleed unacknowledged — ] There was this old guy. Khalil. Lived in the desert. Lost his family back in the 90's.

[ Desert Storm, he doesn't say — but their worlds seem to align enough he's sure it won't be missed. ]

Could've hated us pretty easy. Instead, he shared his fire, his food.

[ The rest is too personal. He lets that us do the heavy lifting, though the others were dead by then, and Sam so nearly that his memories are vague and amorphous. An old man singing Gorani Kurdi Kon by firelight. Sometimes it was his grandfather, singing an appeal to the Bear. Sometimes it was Billie, humming an old lullaby she'd once thought she would pass down to their kids. And then it would be Khalil again, urging him to drink what tasted like black tar tea in broken English that seemed, at the time, to transcend fluency.

That old man dug six bullets out of him, and he'll never forget the screaming panic that had him by the throat when his lung collapsed. Panic into peace, when he felt that he might just get to fucking rest.

But even then, there'd been real anger around the edges. Hoi was a Buddhist. He should have been cremated, and instead he was left to rot. ]

Nobody made him do that, either. But it sure doesn't mean there aren't dickheads the world over, huh?

[ Instinct says to show his teeth. To bite back against that quiet tone Sam takes, the one that says he's about to share a soldier's story. All of those end the same, Carver knows. The details bleed at the corners. They go soft like the bad fruit feeling of his drowning dreams. It's always about blood soaked into the sand one way or another. A bad turn, the civilians watching, dying, forgotten. And the brothers and sisters who didn't make it.

Carver twitches. He keeps walking, not looking at Sam. But he doesn't interrupt, either. He doesn't say any of the hundred shitty things he could say to break the moment. Make it so ugly and brittle that Sam would never talk to him like a person again. He steps over another broken skeleton, somebody's ghost locked to the ground, and he listens.

It's a familiar story, in the end. He has his own. ]

He died, right? That's how it ended.

[ It comes out soft and a little bitter. He thinks everyone who ever took him in back home is dead, too. He thinks they were killed by men just like him. ]

[ One of those statements that says a lot without saying hardly anything at all. Sam shakes his head, adjusting his grip on the rifle just a little. ]

Yeah, but not the way you're thinking.

[ Not ugly, not violently, not cruelly. ]

He died in his eighties. Years later, in his sleep. He got to meet my nieces and nephews, called them the grandkids he never had. More a father to me and my sisters than my old man ever was.

[ Don't speak ill of the dead, people always urge. But he never said a good word about John Samuel Crowe when he was alive, and he wasn't about to start just because the bastard kicked off and left him a small fortune and that hated house. ]

[ That stills him, if only for a breath. No one gets to die in their sleep anymore. Not unless something like Carver creeps in and slits their throat.

Carver twitches. He doesn't look at Sam. Then, flatter: ]

What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?

[ It doesn't come out nearly so angry as he intends. ]

You don't have to do anything with it.

[ The road's gutted ahead, a great furrow in the concrete that splits the street. They could spend the time climbing down one side and up the other, but it's easier to cut through the mostly-intact building to one side — and they're not the only ones who've had the idea, by the worn path through the detritus. Sam ducks beneath a tangle of rebar, and then turns to keep an eye on the street as Carver follows suit.

Inside, the place smells musty and damp, rot an unmistakable throughput. Rifle's not much use in such close quarters, so he slings it across his back instead, and pulls a knife. His voice is lower, but still conversational as he replies — ]

Just two guys having a conversation, man.

Edited 2025-08-30 01:42 (UTC)

[ What're you doing, son? the commander whispers in his ear. Carver jerks his head, trying to shake it like a dog with a fly. Something that nags at his skull, or maybe his soul. What're you doing here? Playing house?

No one here is civilized. They're all pretending until things get bad and then they'll turn on each other the way people always do. Nobody thinks they're a cannibal until they get real goddamn hungry and then -

And then.

He crouches down without a word, checking for tripwires. Raiders were fond paths like this back home. The ones that got worn down enough to mark, an obvious route away from a hazard. Sometimes they won't even kill their target first, just restrain them. Leave them to hang for the dead to find and tear apart.

It's an ugly way to die. He doesn't know why he's following Sam still except lack of a better idea and abruptly pulls ahead, just for the change. So what if Sam knows the route and Carver doesn't? He knows places like this just fine and his pistol fits easy in his hand.

It'd feel good to fight something here. It'd feel pure. ]

There anyone else out here?

[ He leaves well enough alone. Back to business — the soldier's veneer never far from his otherwise easygoing default. When Carver takes point, he doesn't protest, just falls into step. ]

No one from basecamp.

[ He'd almost said none of ours. But he can tell that Carver's struggling with the concept, and Sam's nothing if not adaptable. It's more important to acknowledge that no one goes north. He'd double, triplechecked all the patrol routes before they'd set out. But they have no idea how long the survivors of this place held on at first, when their world came down around them. Maybe there's enough of them that have held out, haunting ruins like these.

Likelier, anything they find out here is one of the Corrupted. ]

We can probably put another five miles behind us before we stop for the night.

[ He knows the place he wants to stop, scoped out and assessed as a crow flying high above the city. But he can't exactly admit that he's made that assessment without raising more questions than providing answers, so for now he's left just trying to gently steer them on the right path. ]

Not what I asked.

[ Whatever bullshit happened here didn't happen recently. But people can survive on nothing but scraps if they have to. Of course there's the monsters, too. Not rotters, no. Something a touch stranger.

Doesn't mean there aren't raiders hiding out in their little rat holes, or worse. It's been almost six months since Carver's run into a cannibal and he's not keen to repeat the experience.

Carver frowns back at Sam. ]

But you've gone this way?

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