picture perfect bottled rage

The car was directed into the parking space indelicately, crooked between the lines. Tension had begun to rise again in Ellis’ chest during the last few minutes of their return trip. The cry he had earlier may have helped to purge gallons of accumulated misery, sure, and Keith had taken the revelation with minimal comment, which was… Probably good…

Gone was the fear of imminent and violent rejection, and that was nice. It was. But in its place rose something else, growing to be equally uncomfortable if not as viscerally terrifying. Ellis couldn’t quite put his finger on it, fatigued as he was, and he didn’t much care to, either. He really just didn’t feel like thinking about it at all, wanted to shove it down and stomp dirt onto it until it was out of sight, and thus out of mind.

He looked up at the cheap plastic siding that covered every face of the Nelson brothers’ apartment building. The pastel blue greeted him with a kind of exhausted, worn cheer, and the buildings flanking it, colored an equally dusty pastel yellow, felt like they were trying too hard to be happy past their weathering. Despite the structure’s familiarity and its association with people he loved, it currently felt like he was eyeing a penitentiary. The uncomfortable feeling in his chest churned again.

Keith roughly jostled his keys out of the ignition and let his hand flop to his lap. His head then pointedly swiveled to face Ellis, and the shorter man felt the pressure of the look despite keeping his eyes averted. A long, pensive sigh wheezed out of Ellis’ throat and slouched him forward under the weight of Keith’s gaze, and he was sure he looked a little bit like a scolded puppy when he managed to rasp out, “Can’t I just stay in the car forever…?”

Keith didn’t smile fully, but he did sound in very good humor when he barked out, “Nope!” with a sharp jerk upward of his brows.

Ellis let out a low, rattling groan of dread and began to turn to unbuckle his seatbelt and reach for the car door. When he loosened his grip to release Keith’s hand, the blond man casually took it back into his own space, popping the trunk and hopping out of the car easily. “You get the bike, I’ll get the door,” the driver declared, taking the walk to the Nelson brothers’ ground-floor unit half-backwards in long strides, nearly tripping over the curb in the process despite being situated right next to a slope of wheelchair-accessible sidewalk.

Compliance was assumed, though not without merit. He rocked himself out of the passenger’s seat and onto the pale, cracked and patched asphalt. The sun was entering a low hang in the sky, now, and the sound of spring peepers and crickets had already risen to take its place. Soon, the temperature would drop, enabled by a mostly-clear sky, and tiny dewdrops would begin to gather on window screens. In a month, the noise from the frogs would be a proper uproar. In three, cicadas and katydids would be deafening in their cacophony.

The threatened humidity and damp ambiance soothed him, just slightly, as he made his way to the trunk to extract the dirt bike from where it was laid over the trunk bed and folded-down back seats. His hand had settled on the base of the trunk hatch, ready to close it, when he heard Keith’s voice faintly announce, “Ellis is stayin’ here tonight!” from inside.

Paul was home.

Obviously he was. Ellis knew he would be. His custom-modified car was parked right there in his self-assigned handicapped spot. Of course he was home. It’s part of why Ellis was hesitant to get a move on, after all, but being reminded of it halted his progress all the same. If more was said, he didn’t hear it. He did hear the door open and close, and the shuffling of Keith’s sneakers, gentle clicking sounding out from one shoelace dragging on the ground. 

“‘Ey, slug-ass!” came the bark from around the car, followed quickly by Keith craning an impatient look around the lifted trunk door. “Hurry it up. ‘M hungry,” he said pointedly before disappearing again. The taller man was acting… Normal.

It prodded Ellis into motion, though his hand still moved loosely as it dragged the trunk closed with a heavy thunk. He hauled the bike in, door held open for him by Keith, and immediately turned to march his way past the combined living and dining area, straight toward Keith’s room on the left. Paul wheeled out of the master bedroom, just a bit farther down the hall than Keith’s. 

“Hey, Ellis.”

Ellis just barely got himself to make eye contact. And even then, it was only for a moment, with a weak flash of teeth where a smile should have gone.

“Hey, Paul.”

Paul was acting normal. Why wouldn’t he be? It’s not like Ellis told him, too. Though he did briefly think he saw Paul giving him a critical look, out of the corner of his eye.

Ellis wished he, himself, were acting normal.

Keith had already taken up the task of spreading frozen chicken nuggets on a cookie tray when Paul made it into the small, but workable kitchen. The slimmer brother tossed the plastic away before going back to the freezer to grab a bag of premade french fries.

“Nugs‘n’fries,” he declared plainly.

“Oh, hell, no,” the older man asserted, pointing to a cabinet that held a different plastic bag. “You’re gonna fry up the rest of them potatoes. They’re startin’ to look at me funny.”

When Keith turned to scrunch up his face in a childish protest, his brother immediately fixed him with a suspicious and inquisitive look, jerking a thumb over his shoulder with a quirked brow. It shouldn’t have surprised Keith that his brother, perceptive as he was, had managed to pick up on something being different with Ellis, but the speed at which it happened surprised him all the same. While he did his best to school his expression into something innocently neutral and shrug nonchalantly, it was almost certain that some discomfort leaked onto his face. With a turn that was perhaps a bit too hasty, Keith made to pull out a cutting board before heading to the vegetable cabinet. He didn’t know how to communicate to Paul any of the Ellis developments through gestures alone, so he opted to look as normal as possible instead. 

When he turned around with the bag in one hand and a knife in the other, to see Paul still scrutinizing him, he was unsurprised. His brother lifted a meaty fist and raised his thumb upward. Then he flicked his wrist, quickly fixing his thumb downward for a moment, then to the side. It was a simple question, and one he could actually answer without talking about the subject within earshot.

Keith shifted on his feet a moment, trying to figure out how to answer. He settled on angling his remaining full thumb halfway between up and sideways, wiggling it there, and grimacing theatrically to indicate a kind of uncertain, tentative quality to his assessment. Paul’s mouth turned down slightly below his moustache, but the way his brows raised looked vaguely contented, or pleased, maybe. Satisfied, perhaps. After holding that expression for a moment, processing the little news he’d received, he sharply nodded, and turned to look out the kitchen archway and through Keith’s bedroom door directly across the hall.

“Ellis, get out here’n make sure this dumbass doesn’t cut another finger off.”

Neither brother could hear Ellis’ quiet sigh over the sound of potatoes being washed. Socked feet shuffled along the floor as he muttered, “I’m comin’, I’m comin’,” making his way around Paul into the kitchen to scoop up the knife and start cubing the potatoes that Keith had scrubbed.

Preparing the meal was quiet and quick, Ellis long having mastered knifework and seasoning under the guidance of his mother, and navigating around Keith under the guidance of bruised shins and bonked foreheads. Dodging walls and furniture in his perpetual impatience with two plates in hand, Keith led the way to the kitchen table, where Paul was already situated. The TV was on some dumb history thing, volume turned low, and the meal only began when Ellis himself sat down, his own plate in one hand and ketchup and mustard bottles pinched between the fingers of the other.

Chatter at the table was sparse. Ellis had little desire to talk, and the three men spent so much time together that there was little to talk about aside from idle daily updates and questions about plans for the rest of the week. It was comfortable. Familiar. Nice. It had been… a while since Ellis had felt like the company of his friends was anything more than tolerable. When he had been dating Nick, he still loved being with his family, but he was often afraid the conversation would turn toward him in the worst of ways, even though everyone danced around the issue with some degree of grace.

After the breakup, being around other people just felt like chewing on pine needles. The pressure to feign happiness, normalcy, combined with his gross inability to do so, was suffocating. Constant fantasies of escaping would plague him as he tried to pay enough attention to the conversation to reply when it was appropriate.

Currently, he still wanted to crawl under a rock and curl up in moss like a roly-poly, but… Being in the company of the two brothers wasn’t the worst thing he could imagine.

Keith, to his credit, was still acting normal enough whenever he got words out around his latest shoveled mouthful of chicken and potato. When he got up for a fiber shake to slake his bottomless appetite further, leaving Paul alone with Ellis, the older man acted normal enough, too. Minding his business, finishing up his meal in silence.

Ellis still couldn’t help feeling like they were stepping strategically around him.

Plates cleared and delivered to the sink, the three gathered around the TV, Paul lounging comfortably in a recliner while the two younger men sprawled over each other on the couch. The cheap beers they were nursing loosened their tongues. By the time the sun had fully set, the whole lot found themselves laughing at each other for drooling over big guns on the screen, despite the fact that it was obviously just a program to flex the military’s ego.

Like always, Paul interjected with little bits of trivia he knew about relevant programs, followed by some snide comment like “More money than god fer fancy targeting systems, but we had to buy glue traps ourselves for the damn roaches,” or “I know I said it before, but it’d be nice if they’d’uh spent a dime on fixin’ the heater back when I was at Bragg. Swear we was shittin’ icicles half the time.”

Their chatter and the alcohol produced a warmth that was unbroken by the trying-too-hard narrator and his tasteless guitar accompaniment, and when Ellis found himself yawning and blinking away sleep, he realized he felt halfway okay. Of course, this realization was only made after Keith turned a look toward him, more scrutinizing than he’d been in over the past couple hours, and told Ellis to leave with a dismissive wave of his hand toward the hallway.

“Go to bed, grampaw.”

The order took a moment to process through Ellis’ fatigue, and he still wasn’t quite sure if Keith had been talking to him. “Huh?” He managed through slowly-blinking eyes.

“Go on ‘n’ git, yer fallin’ asleep. Take my bed. I’mma stay up a bit later, anyhow. Ain’t tired yet.” The mouth of a nearly-empty bottle was rolling around on his slack lips, like couldn’t be bothered to put it down or continue drinking.

Ellis quirked a brow. “... You for real?”

Keith let his head loll to the side, giving Ellis a low-lidded look with raised brows before returning his gaze to the television just as slowly. “Don’t blame me if yer late for work.” The brunet felt an additional side-eye from Paul.

It was not a harsh command, no more harsh than how Keith usually gave directions, anyway. But being told to take himself to a room reminded him of his previous deeply avoidant behavior, constantly wanting to run off to sequestered safety. The sweet, fuzzy haze of camaraderie faded in the face of being told to go. In its place, his desire to rebel against his friend was only superseded by his desire to resume hiding. The friction between the bottle’s neck and his strangling grip produced a small squeak.

Keith watched in his peripheral vision as Ellis petulantly oozed his legs onto the floor. The shorter man was halfway to standing when Keith asked, “Did’juh tell Ma you’re stayin’ the night?” and his reward for being considerate was watching his friend collapse onto his stomach and groan loudly into the carpet.

Both the Nelson brothers snorted.

Once Ellis had retretreated to Keith’s room, the accident-prone man muttered to himself around the mouth of his bottle. “Good Lord, that guy…”

Paul grunted, and took the opening. “Seriously. He does seem better, though, just a lil’. Or at least less dead. Somethin’ happen?” The question’s tone was casual, noncommittal. Tactically so.

Keith exhaled through pursed lips and puffed-out cheeks, shaking his head, struggling with what he should say. What he could say. “I… I think we’re finally gettin’ somewhere.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Mmhmm.”

Paul glanced at his youngest brother.

“So what happened?”

It was unusual for Keith to need to be prompted.

“Uh… Well, we had a chat, um…” A grimace flitted across his face. “Euuhhh, I, um… I know why he’s been so cagey about shit now, I guess. Which is good… But I didn’t get much more’n that.” Clicking taps reverberated in his mouth as he clinked the bottle against his teeth. The depth of his discontented thought was written into his brow, and his ponderous silence lasted too long for Paul to drop the subject.

“So what was it?”

His mouth turned down abruptly. A struggle played out in his eyes, and eventually the only thing he could think to say was, “I can’t say,” as if he didn’t know. While it was a double entendre, and he directed his tone toward deceit, he trusted that Paul was insightful enough to take the correct meaning. A dark blond brow quirked in his direction.

“Oh yeah?”

Thoughts were trying to rise to the surface in response to the prodding, making his open jaw grind on the air. “Eeeeeyuuuuuup.”

“Izzat right?” The question was delivered flatly, and perhaps it was the disinterested tone that left room for Keith’s temper to rise into the empty space.

“God, Paul, it’s so stupid,” he blurted, hands flying out to either corner of the room. “I mean– maybe it’s not? I dunno? But it just– and he just seems so, like–” his hands shifted around like was trying to grasp at the air in front of his belly.

“He’s got himself convinced it’s this whole thing… And maybe it’s a big deal? But I don’t really think– man, I just don’t get why–” He made an ugly noise in his throat. “I mean, maybe I do? Maybe it’s a big deal…?” He tried for another moment, fruitlessly, to figure out how to communicate anything at all without communicating anything at all. In his failure, he opted to let out a feral snarl and writhe around, flopping onto his belly to face Paul while extending his hands as if to strangle the air between him and his brother. The beer bottle thunked onto the floor. “Stupid fuckin’ motherfuckin’ piece’a shit lookin’ piss smellin’ motherfucker,” he cursed into the couch arm, before biting the worn fabric as hard as he could and jerking his neck around violently.

Amusement and a twinge of concern flared Paul’s nostrils. “Well alright, then,” he drawled slowly, shifting himself back into his wheelchair. He knew when to bother pushing an issue, and Keith was struggling so severely with his inability to ‘say’ that the older man knew to drop it. Maybe he could break his brother’s reticence by playing on his temperament. He was pretty sure he could, in fact, and it would only take one question, if answered honestly, to reach his own conclusions about the topic. But it would have felt wrong to push the issue, and Ellis’ trust in Keith was probably the only thing that could help their family friend heal even a little. He wouldn’t take that from them. “As long as you think things’re lookin’ up, I ain’t gonna complain.”

He began the short journey to the end of the hall, aiming for his door beyond the two rooms of his brothers. Before he got out of earshot, he muttered deep and low, “Got tired’a watchin’ him mope.”

The words alone may have sounded harsh and uncaring, but Keith knew what Paul really meant by them. 

I’m tired of seeing him suffer.

Keith was, too.

Unfortunately, Paul’s prompting had brought back uncertainties in Keith’s mind, and his departure left room for them to fester.

So Ellis was datin’ a guy, he deliberately thought to himself. It was the first time he’d really thought about it since the revelation, and it felt just as weird as processing it the first time.

Guess that means he likes dudes?

It’d explain why he managed to have so many girl friends without having any girlfriends.

Sliding forward over the arm of the couch, his neck and torso crumpled inward, shoulder blades on the floor, legs hanging onto the edge of the furniture. Blood flooded into his head. One of his arms was bent awkwardly against the ground, shoulder and wrist sending stabs of protest that he ignored. 

Do I care?

His other hand idly pinched at the loose, puckered skin around his tummy. There used to be more of it, his reward for the “concerningly fast” weight loss he achieved in the wake of his attempt to mass produce dry-aged squirrel steaks. The weight loss which was, coincidentally, also medically necessary to avoid a whole list of things that Dr. S read off to him very gravely after some blood work results came in. Hardly any remained, now, nearly all of it being consumed to patchwork-graft away the worst of the marring he’d inflicted upon his face. And some other parts.

I don’t think I care. Not like that, at least. Not the way he’s thinkin’.

He didn’t really get it, of course. Ladies were hot as fuck. How could a guy not want to bang ‘em? But there were a lot of things in the world he didn’t get. Not getting things never stopped him from being a badass, or doing whatever the fuck he wanted.

And right now, what he wanted was to be let back into his friend’s life. Hell, be let into his life for the first time, apparently. How long had Ellis been keeping this from him? How had Keith not noticed something was off?

As he vaguely recalled commenting on a hot chick in a movie, with Ellis agreeing in a way that now seemed less respectfully measured and more straight-up dodgy, the answer was obvious.

He simply hadn’t been looking for it.

It’s not like he felt guilty about it, of course. It wasn’t his job to monitor the guy constantly. Wasn’t his job to push and pry at every little thing, and doing so would’ve made both of them miserable. He wasn’t Ellis’ mom, and he didn’t want to be, and Ellis was keeping her out of the loop anyway, too.

Ain’t like I tell him ‘bout every hole I stick my dick in.

But he knew Ellis. He knew that his friend could be a real softie under the gung-ho attitude. He cared deeply for people, felt his emotions just as strongly as Keith did, and if Keith had picked up on anything from earlier today, it’s that Ellis had been deathly, paralyzingly afraid of letting anyone into what was apparently a very important part of his life. Important enough to kill him when it ended.

Must have been really, really fuckin’ lonely.

Kinda made Keith pissed.

Painful pounding thrummed through his face and skull, driving him to kick his legs up and over, flopping fully onto his back. He scowled at the ceiling, stewing in the anger while his blood sloshed back to a more reasonable distribution.

He marched off to brush his teeth and retie his hair into its stubby ponytail, and when he sprawled back over the couch to begin dozing, there was only one thing on his mind, fiery and uncompromising.

-The green flu/ apocalypse is very much still alive.

it’s seen as a more “biblical” event (if that makes sense…).

-The l4d1 crew start in the East Coast and head to New Orleans. then bill sacrifices himself and the crew head to the Florida Keys (more or less the same story..)

-The l4d2 crew start in New Orleans and are trying to head as far west as possible. so basically their end goal is California lol (they don’t rely on the military in this one)

-They all don’t meet in the same place.. they meet each other at different points in the journey.

Ex. Coach and Nick meet first in New Orleans, then Ellis in the wild somewhere, then Rochelle in a deserted town.

-Coach was a stagecoach driver in New Orleans until the apocalypse hit.

-Nick was in an american gang in NYC. He was in New Orleans for some business until he encountered the infected.

His gang is inspired by the Five Points Gang and is also rival gangs with Francis’.

-Ellis was in a ragtag outlaw gang with Kieth, Paul, and Dave. he was separated from them when they encountered the infected.

-Rochelle was a typist for a local newspaper before the apocalypse. She was left behind after the whole town left overnight.

She was able to survive since she was taught how to use a gun by her father (something something baby blue bedroom)

-They all have horses

-All the horses love Ellis

-All the horses hate Nick (even his)

-Nick has never ridden a horse before the apocalypse—was bucked off his a millions times before he finally got a hold of it.

-Rochelle has a bad habit of feeding the horses too many treats

-Ellis and Coach are the main caretakers of the horses. It was also both their ideas to head west.