A Clean slate

Honestly she’d rather be working with a random citizen right now than an actual trainer. There was just some kind pressure that came with working with someone considered an “expert int their field”. Squaring up to the bag, Adrian demonstrated the proper technique slowly for him a few more times before he finally excused himself, leaving her to do her drill at her own preferred pace. Instead. One - strike - two - strike….

[Adrian’s voice was flowering with emotion she dared not share with Natalie. And while the gesture was sweet, Nat wished Adrian didn’t feel the need to do so—there was only so long someone could hold up a front for someone else’s benefit. Besides, no one would blame Adrian for being tired; she had a right to be, she supposed they all did.]

[Natalie pulled away, not calling her out on her words but instead offering a tight lipped smile that voiced something of a ‘I get it.’ She rubbed the woman’s arms in a warm gesture before shrugging, eyes drawing over the scene of destruction around them as the words stuck to her throat—afraid to be uttered and confirm the reality of it all.] …No, not really. [She replied, and it was paired with something of a defeated yet relieved smile. She wasn’t ok, but she was. In fact, there was a nagging suspicion in the pit of her stomach that she was on her way to being…ok.] But I will be. Not a scratch on me that can’t be healed, so I’m thinking it could’ve been worse.

[It’s hard for her to keep her eyes off of the wreckage around them, the gnawing at her gut something familiar. They’d been through this before, and the second time around did hurt a little less. Practice made perfect, Nat supposed. Although it was equal parts concerning and pathetic that this was becoming their practiced norm.] Did you—did you manage to save anything? You know, grab anything before the dorms went down?

Try to see what - if anything - she could find of her old life that she had managed to carry all the way here. The last physical pieces she had of her sister and Erika. The photographs she managed to rescue from the apartment, the ring her sister gave to her for her eighteenth birthday

....all buried or incinerated by the inferno.]

“Yeah it could have been worse” she agreed, 

[The evacuation had proceeded smoothly: all of them cogs in a machine, working to move themselves underground and to safety. Elites more Elite than Boone had said it had only taken twelve minutes, all told, for all of the Colony’s residents to move themselves to their safe zones.

It had been enough to save them all. Their practice, and all their planning for the worst, had paid off.

But now that the immediate danger has passed, the Survivors released from the Church at the end of a long day, chaos has set in. There is no immediate purpose for the safe Survivors, nowhere they are meant to be, nothing they are meant to do. Boone is safe from the anxiety that comes with uselessness, there’s a mandatory Elite meeting in just ten minutes, where they will review the damage that other Elites are currently assessing, and come up with a plan to repair it.

Tomorrow, maybe, all returns to normal. As normal as can be, after the terror of today. After the loss of the Brink dorms, with the rubble still strewn throughout the Colony a grim reminder that as slow and painstaking as it was to build this bubble of safety at the end of the world, its destruction could be swift. They could be powerless to fight it.

Somewhere in the basement, a lump had set itself in his throat, and he’s been swallowing around it ever since. He doesn’t know how long it will stay there, how long it will be before he’s allowed to take a deep breath: he hopes that it’s soon. Tomorrow, the CISM offices will be overflowing. He will have to convince people that they’re safe, even when right now it feels like a promise he can’t make. He doesn’t know enough to be able to say.

But it’s okay, it’ll be okay: he has an Elite meeting to get to, and then maybe he’ll be able to sleep. He keeps his head down as he picks his way through the crowd, Survivors milling about looking for friends and loved ones that they have spent the entire day worrying about and trying to find. Reunions are occurring all around him, and—selfishly, hopefully—he looks around.]

Adrian! [He calls, struggling to part the crowd. There’s a ticking clock in his head, a reminder of his responsibilities, but they’re easily put aside when faced with the sudden urgency he feels upon catching a glimpse of her face in the hall.

—she’s still too far away.]

But Adrian was lost, adrift with nowhere to go. 

She was so struck by this realisation that it took her a moment to realise someone had call her name. Her head snapping in the direction of the familiar timbre before she had fully broken from her sad reverie As if her body knew what to do with or without her having to think it through. At first she was worried she might have imagined it, but once a group injured people cleared her line of sight she saw him. Boone. Just barely in the throng of people, almost the span of the entire hall away from her. Suddenly it’s as if someone has kickstarted her heart, reminding it to how to work again, to pump blood and oxygen through her veins. She has to move. It’s a painful kind of joy that spurs her on. She won’t be able to catch her breath until she closes this distance, until she can physically hold him, make sure he is alright. Boone, Boone, Boone, every step, every elbow thrust to push past someone is his name. 

Wild blonde curls, hazel eyes wide and unwavering from where she last saw him in the sea of faces, Adrian pushes her way through them. She doesn’t watch herself for once, school her reactions or think. She can only act, and once she’s close enough she’s throwing herself at him.] Oh thank god! [her voice cracking with the weight of all she feels].

But as her feet slowed to a stop, she saw the destruction with her own eyes. Really, it wasn’t so bad, she reminded herself—it was bricks burying clothes and possessions that weren’t really hers to begin with. She wasn’t sure how long she stood there, shifting and shuffling out of the way every now and again as she took a seat in front of the buzz. Natalie didn’t really know where else to go, something about the wreckage making her feel like an anchor cut loose and set free.]

[Somewhere along the way someone had handed her a water bottle, and Natalie was taking her own sweet time to sip that down. Her movements were robotic, fueled by the knowledge that this was what her body needed—conscious thoughts were effort she didn’t seem to want to invest in. That was, until her wandering eyes landed on a familiar face. Her gaze caught sight of Adrian, and the rush of relief flooding her bloodstream jolted Nat’s creaking body into motion. Pulling herself up, she headed straight for the woman, voice calling out to her before she actually reached her.] Adrian! [Her arms made quick work of wrapping her roommate and friend into a tight embrace. Natalie hadn’t even realized the worry she was feeling until it was relieved at the sight of Adrian (at least physically) unharmed.] Hey, are you alright—ok?

The universe was trying to finish what it started and maybe they deserved it.] Natalie? [Adrian sank into the other woman’s embrace, relived to find a familiar face, a friend. She didn’t realise how much she needed this until she was holding Natalie, glad she was alive and in one piece.] 

She stumbles somewhat aimlessly - unsure of where to go or what she should be doing. She heard someone mention dinner, but she doesn’t think she can eat. Everything’s worse now. The nausea and headache might be accredited to it, but she feels everything even more now than she had before. But then again, she had heard that other infected had been unable to control their infections as well. Maybe this was what she was going through. No control. 

Arielle bumps into someone, stumbles back and tries to focus her eyes on them. She vocalizes an apology. Maybe she needs to go lay down. Eventually they focus, and she glances to the building - destroyed - that the woman was looking at. She doesn’t know what to say, doing everything she can to avoid asking the woman if she’s okay, Arielle says probably the next stupidest thing.] They’re going to rebuild it.

Seeing Brink smoking and crumbling, it terrified Adrian. Up until now she had always spoke of the Colony as a collective, a hive, a machine she was simply part of. Yet now as she stood watching helpless and homeless  - for a second time due to the same natural occurrences, she realised she had just lost her home, and all that she had managed to call her own over the last two years since coming to 22. 

Adrian was on the verge of tears when someone bumped into her, waking her up from her reverie.]

There was a performance Boone had perfected, when he was using. Step one: meet someone, probably in a club when he was “working” and get their number. Step two: Set-up date. Step three: dazzle them with some display of competency—usually cooking—so they wouldn’t guess, and Boone could forget, that he was a fucking mess. Step four was where the path branched off: either rinse and repeat, or high-tail it out of their apartment with a watch, or some earrings, or some loose cash, because Boone didn’t have any of his own and he needed cigarettes, he needed alcohol, he needed more product than his employers could give him—and God help him if they caught him skimming off the top.

He’d needed a distraction, then, more than anything. He’d needed to escape from himself. And he thought that if he played the part of someone who had it together, and someone else believed it, then he couldn’t be as bad as he sometimes felt. He wouldn’t have to change.

Even when it all went up in flames—(as it usually did)—Boone would just pick someone else, start again, keep up the delusion. They’d catch him stealing, or they’d notice the pinprick bruises in his arms. He’d cook someone a meal in the apartment his employers stocked for him, but when he ran out of food before the end of the month, they’d just laugh at him: “we’re not here to get you laid.” 

He had tricks up his sleeve, then, all deliberately forgotten now. There’s something to this that felt like it could be coming out of his old playbook—“hey babe, let’s lay on a blanket and watch the stars”—if not for how earnest it all felt. 

That was the difference, he supposed: going into this not for a certain expected outcome, but for the person themselves. He’d known it, but he hadn’t really felt it, the casual dating he’d managed to in the short years before D-Day when he didn’t hate himself quite so much had never really been like this, not quite so heart-over-head. 

“The blind leading the blind?” he quipped, turning to the bundle of blankets that Adrian had charged him with. “I like the sound of that, better for my fragile ego.” 

There was a wryness to his words, a grinning wink-and-a-nudge, because Boone didn’t really have a fragile ego. Boone made a fool of himself on a regular basis. He made a point of it. Of never getting too comfortable, of not working himself into a rut of doing only what he knew and thought he was good at. The Colony, in a way, was good for that, because it made him do a lot of things he was objectively terrible at. But unlike Training, which he was terrible at and typically did not enjoy, trying to identify constellations with a beautiful woman was something he could maybe be terrible at, but would definitely enjoy.

He picked up one of the blankets and shook it out to lay it flat in the center of the room facing the screen. Pillows at the top, and another blanket on top, and it looked like a cozy kind of nest, somewhere he wouldn’t mind staying for awhile. There was the sound of Adrian somewhere to the side of him, her blonde head somewhere in his periphery. And it felt easy, despite the nerves. Companionable, each of them doing their tasks.

But when the blanket nest was set up, Boone hesitated, looking at it. Should he just get in? That felt a little—lurid, or something. Suggestive. He’d caught a blush on Adrian’s cheeks and guessed that she felt it too, the tickle of nerves as they contemplated being pressed against each other from shoulder-to-hip, on something that was unquestionably like a date rather than two particularly hug-y kind of friends.

Boone was used to projecting a confidence he did not feel. Used to exuding the kind of calm that made people comfortable in his presence. Part of him wanted to reach out, to take Adrian by the shoulders and soothe her, tell her that there was no pressure, but part of him was scared at looking this thing full in the face. Continuing to edge around it, baby steps towards the center of some kind of maze, where they would meet and everything would make sense: on the same page, at last, no more wondering. 

It seemed both huge and childish, the urge to look her in the face and just say it: “I like you. Where do we go from here?” Direct in a way that he encouraged, but couldn’t always manage himself, too used to protecting himself from bad things that he’d started protecting himself from the potentially good as well. Maintaining a stasis that was stable, sure, but static. Allowing no room for growth.

There were things that Boone told himself—be good, be open, let the good in—with little ability to actually put them into practice. In the Colony he was more machine than man, pushing down feelings in favor of service, focusing on others more than himself. He tried not to think that it made him a hypocrite, but maybe it did. 

But while he tried to help build support systems for his patients, he had very little in way of his own. No safety net if things went badly, not when Adrian was probably his closest friend here.

Adrian was nervous, Boone was nervous, they were both nervous, but Boone felt like it was on him to assuage all those nerves, to ignore his in favor of soothing hers. So, with, Adrian turning away from the Echo terminal, Boone toed off his shoes and settled—a little gracelessly, sure, but he wasn’t quite aiming for suave—into the center of the blankets, laying down with one arm underneath his head and the other stretched out in invitation, a silent request for Adrian to put herself there.

Sam treated her like she was beautiful, boys and men would always seek out her attention - at work, in line at the grocery store, on the bus, while she was pale and sickly at the doctors office. But she hardly paid attention. She was either with Sam at the point or single and only focused on making life better for her little sister. Now for the first time ever she had to try and pursue a guy and she wasn’t even sure if she was doing it right? What was the protocol? Adrian herself was a bit confused about where she stood with Boone at this point. She wanted to spend time with him, she loved his company and missed him dreadfully when she wasn’t with him. But she was afraid of her own feelings for him. She knew what she wanted, but could not seem to muster the courage to take it. Just inviting him here tonight to this suddenly very intimate setting had almost been too much for her to bare. 

Blushing at her own thoughts Adrian was glad the room was dark now, fiddling with her PDD a little longer than necessary to give herself some time. The astronomy program on the echo slolwy turning down the lights to simulate how light would gradually fade before nightfall. Time to collect her thoughts, catch her breathe. In her periphery she could see Boone moving about, taking his shoes off before laying down on the blanket. Funnily enough up until this moment she hadn’t pictured the evening getting this far, which was probably why she had not canceled in the first place. Now that she was here, at this point which was pretty pivotal she realised she was at a lost.

She felt like a high school boy trying to seduce someone using something they had read in their assigned English reading book. ‘A night under the stars’ - there was a reason it was a cliche associated with school dances and bad romantic comedies. Real people didn’t do this. Adrian’s only consolation was that she really had been learning about the stars, she had booked the room and rented out the specific program on the Echo - learning all about long before she had invited Boone to join her.

But now as she finally found the courage to cross the room , slowly, but not too slowly so as not to look like she was deliberately paying attention to how she walked. She circled around Boone’s head, throwing him a bashful smile as she passed, before following his lead and removing her shoes. She looked up at the ceiling one last time as the projection finished waking up in fully, stars appearing one by one as they would in the real nights’ sky. 

“Whoa, it almost looks real...” she said softly, sitting down amongst the nest-like structure Boone had somehow managed to create from the few things that had been brought along. Carefully she folded herself down onto the blanket, lying down next too Boone close enough to feel the heat radiating from his arm beside her. I am not afraid, she tried to tell herself, folding her hands on her stomach so she could easily control the simulation using her PDD. She was not sure what to do with them otherwise. Adrian chose her next words carefully, trying to stay away from anything too suggestive or loaded. She wanted them to just have a nice relaxed time together. Even if she was almost buzzing with nerves, fighting every impulse to shift just a little closer to Boone, close the gap between them so she could feel his warmth, his clean and warm scent feeling very familiar to her. 

He woke up scrambling to clean them, his breathing harsh and desperate, and there was no comfort in knowing it was all just a nightmare. Because it was still a graphic scene that lived in his brain, engraved to its very core. It’s still nearly three hours until breakfast and he feels himself slip – lets himself slip, this time – into the persona that became of him whenever the pain was too much to bear. 

Staring at the ceiling only did so much to him, and he finds himself out of bed in a few minutes, hopefully to clear his mind and just get some fresh air before the first meal. It was good to be reminded that the world out there was still moving, the sun was still coming up.

Some people are already up, but no one seems to mind each other at this time of the day, amongst the awkward silence and the morning breeze. He doesn’t know exactly how much he walks until he sits facing a window that just so catches a glimpse of the sun rising, and he watches in silence until someone approaches him.]

What have you come to me for, Horatio? I’ve had a bad enough night, I’ll have you know, I don’t need the added trouble.

The problem with doing things in a constant repetitive cycle was that eventually even your body got used to anything. She wasn’t being pushed hard enough in training this week. She wasn’t boneless and heavy with fatigue. It gave her time to think, too dwell, to regret. For her guilt to catch up to her, overtake her, overwhelm her. 

Erika.

So much hurt and pain wrapped up in one word, a word which represented a person. They very person who was once Adrian’s whole world. She haunted Adrian’s dreams, her eyes like Adrian’s, her hair soft and golden too but the set of her mouth like Sam’s. Would she be strong and solid, or tall and willowy now? Or is she? Adrian couldn’t know the answers to these questions and they would most likely haunt her for the rest of her natural life. 

By the time the birds outside her window had begun their predawn squawking Adrian had given up on sleep and stolen into the Brink Common room with her blanket, to watch the sun rise from there. Lost in thought she hadn’t realised how much time had passed, or that the usual early risers had now too awoken. In fact it wasn’t until someone had joined her at the window, though she was pretty sure he hadn’t seen her. No, he too was deep in thought, the words tumbling from his lips were both too deliberate and too thoughtless to be aimed at her.] 

It was pitiful.

She thought about her father—something she found herself doing more often, but she quickly learned that the more she thought about him, the longer she lived. At times where it felt that as if she would lose her mind, he would tell her to find things that kept her sane and stable. Needless to say, it was easier said than done, Raylan had to really think back to things that made her happy. How could one find happiness in destruction? The answer is you don’t.  But she didn’t have anything to lose by trying.

Reading. That was something, that she enjoyed.

There was a silent power that the brunette always appreciated when it came to books. Having the ability to make a person feel emotions with just a few words was nothing short of amazing to her. She didn’t have much time to read before the world went to shit, there were better things that she could have been doing with her time.

However, now she had all the time in the world and literally no clue what to do with it. So what better thing to do than read? It was easy to find the library—granted a few books were worn and tattered, but she couldn’t afford to be picky.  Glancing over the selection that the Colony, Raylan grabbed the first book that caught her attention before finding solace in the corner of the room.]

Adrian had hardly been afforded a peaceful childhood, though she was smart she never had the time or energy to dedicate to school enough. She passed all her subject just slightly above average, despite her general curiosity about the world. But thoughts of furthering her eduction were a non-starter. She hadn’t even been given the opportunity to find what she was good at really - too bust raising a sister and keeping the house running. So what if there was an adult present. It mean they were equipped to raise two daughters. 

Back then she could not really understand her father. Today she had a better idea about how her father might have ended up the way he did. Maybe one day she might even forgive him for everything...and Sam too. They only had the stack of psychology books she had just returned to thank. 

Aimlessly she walked through the stacks, not sure what she wanted to read next, only that she felt definitely wanted to keep reading. Bit nothing was jumping out at her -

Well other than the person she almost trips over in the corner.] 

Oh sorry! Almost didn’t see you there!