#anend1ng

Mori was out of bed before Basil. A typical thing, as he got up even before dawn broke and checked on things, and then would go to make breakfast. He'd seen the boat out there again, but this time it was more or less still in the water. Which was... Odd. He didn't know what to make of it. He watched it for awhile, but besides ensure the light in the lighthouse was working properly, there was little he could do about it. It was far out there, but, he noted, not nearly as far as before. He goes to make breakfast. There is, as there always has been, a radio on the counter. Although he's heard nothing but static from it for years, he keeps it on, he keeps the batteries in it, and keeps it on low so the static is more or less drowned out by the sound of the waves outside. He doesn't notice the break in the silence, then, until the voice on it crackles to life. "hi. hello. anybody out there." The voice is monotone, lacks inflection. Mori doesn't know what to make of it. He pauses in what he's doing. Freezes over the stove and waits. The voice continues, "is this the lighthouse i'm seeing. i'm trying to get in contact with the lighthouse i'm seeing. hellooooo." There's a sound of coughing in the background, father away than from the person speaking. Mori turns the stovetop off and then turns, grabs the radio, and rushes down the stairs to his and Basil's bedroom. He is normally quite gentle at waking Basil if Basil isn't up by the time breakfast is ready, but this time he's less so. He lays a hand on the other's shoulder and shakes him once-- though not too roughly. His voice is strained, bordering on near panic, "basil." And then, from the radio he's brought with him-- a simple thing, a transmitter-receiver radio that boats often have-- "i don't know how to land this boat. like, where do i go. so if there's anyone there who knows how and wants to walk me through it so, y'know, we don't die in the rocks or whatever, that'd be cool." More coughing in the background, followed by indistinct mumbling, then, the person near the mic saying, "yeah, you can't stand but you can land the boat. sure. shut up and go back to sleep." Mori, again, "basil..."

sleep never comes easy. it was true before, it's true now at the end of the world. drowsy hours passed sketching away at bad light, or just holding onto a body next to his own, letting his own thoughts carry him to such great distances without ever moving a muscle. nightmares no longer haunt him, and neither do these thoughts which he gives free reign over his mind, in hopes that in the end they might show mercy and drift him off to sleep.

most of the days he falls asleep just before dawn, and one of his last conscious thoughts belongs to the moving body before his own, a little slow, a little clumsy as it gathers itself from a dream, shifting to the edge, and waiting a little bit before getting up. the floor, the door, the stairs. somewhere along those ambient sounds, he drifts off. again, and again. he supposes this could be called his routine, but he does not enjoy it terribly, whereas mori seems entirely at peace with those same steps he takes every day. to him, there is comfort in mori, and that's that. sleep may take however long it does, so long as it's mori's face he wakes up staring at, however few hours later.

it is fewer, today, as he barely realises when it is indeed mori's face he wakes up to. his voice, too, speaking his name in thinly-veiled panic. and there's more. a noise that does not belong in this room. a digital hum, broken apart by a voice, machinised. he yawns, stretching as he props up on his elbows in bed, staring at mori quizzically. "wh——" then another voice breaks apart the unclean silence.

the meaning slowly drifts into his mind, and he frowns. "the ship——?" another yawn, then a flop onto his back as he stares at the ceiling. he's tired, not exactly the epitome of clear thought he'd like to be. "well, we are—" yawn, "we are a lighthouse."

Percy heard Victor come into the basement. And where Victor's presence would normally be enough to make him smile, enough to make him relax, at least enough to make him look up... Victor gets none of this. Instead, Percy keeps writing rapidly on a clipboard, notes about the person currently dying on the lab table he's fashioned into a bed for her. From the look of her, from the amount of blood dripping from her mouth and down her nose and out her ears, from the look of the pools of burned and singed skin sloughing off of her onto the bed with each twitch, she doesn't have much time left. "i'll be up in a few hours," Is all he says, "go back upstairs." He hasn't left the basement in almost three days. Food that Victor's brought down sits untouched on another counter. Something seems to occur to him, because he does look up, finally, eyes bloodshot behind his cracked glasses. "is it henri? is he alright?"

Victor may also be persistent, but he also knows when things aren't exactly hopeful.

Henri has been sleeping in fits. Victor has worn himself to utter exhaustion trying to keep an eye on both him and Percy. Things are far more difficult than he could've ever anticipated, and without his medication for his epilepsy, well, he's been having more and more absent seizures, which means a full blown one was probably on its way soon. Not that he wanted to worry Percy with any of that. He rests his hands on Percy's shoulders and frowns at the woman on the table, clicking his tongue.

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The Spruce Knob fire lookout had been abandoned by the broadcaster some time ago. He'd had plenty of reasons for it, but those reasons seemed so far away now, in his tarp covered room, strapped to this steel table. Somehow ending up here after walking through a patch of the same radiation he had spent years guiding a number of unfortunate travelers through. So perhaps he had eaten one or two of them; it was a fair cost, he thought. The rest, he had traded information for information, collected data on the world beyond what he came to view as his domain—that being, the entire mountain range around his lookout—and on any hotspots he was unfamiliar with, had they known any. He knew about as soon as he had walked into it, felt the headache growing beneath his skull, felt the nausea rising at the back of his throat...

Things were left as they were in the lookout, but secured against the weather, a sort of home base should he have desired to return to it. Or at least a cache of information in case he lost what he had on him. And then he had left... and ended up here. All cold steel beneath his back and hard straps holding his wrists down, his ankles, his head now; that one was newer. He'd bitten down rather hard on his captor's arm some time back. He had been too weak to do significant damage. Now, he couldn't move, not significantly, though he had fought the restraints until his wrists were bloody and his ankles bruised.

His strength was more than that of a normal human—he'd long since let go of the idea that he still qualified as such, as his nails had hardened, sharpened into claws, sometime after his teeth had fallen out and grown back in as fangs hard and sharp enough to bite through bone like it was nothing, night sight that rivaled the most nocturnal of the wild beasts—but he could not break these. Alastor could feel a kind of animal panic swell in his chest as he writhed in the restraints, even long knowing it was futile now, his claws leaving thin scratches in the metal beneath his palms.

It wasn't simply the restraints. It hadn't been his first round of radiation sickness, far from it, and he was quite familiar with the weakness it caused the body. It had been one of the worst bouts of it, though, and it had left him not only weakened, but disoriented, dizzy and vomiting blood, for far longer than he'd have liked. After he had recovered from the first wave of it, it turned out he didn't exactly understand radiation sickness as well as he thought. Alastor thought it had passed. The symptoms subsided, and he kept moving. He didn't know how far into Pennsylvania he'd made it by the time the symptoms came back in a flood, and had forced him to bed down again. It was survivable; whatever force was sustaining his body was slowly changing him, every time the sickness washed over him. It should have been fine.

But then he went out to scavenge.

Alastor couldn't recall when the disorientation took him, couldn't recall if he had passed out, or if he had been subdued, only that his next recollection was a series of hazy memories in this room, strapped to this damnable table, an IV buried in his arm. Too dehydrated and too little food to do more than dry heave, though the IV seemed to be supplying *some* fluids, and that was a mercy against the headache splitting his skull.

Sometimes blood came up instead, on top of what was coughed up from his lungs, running from his nose, his ears. It felt as if his ears were bleeding anyway, and perhaps they had been, before the changes had moved on to them, too. They grew into something more bestial and covered in soft fur, the same color as the red hair he had now. Not hair he was happy with exactly, but every time the radiation had caused him to lose chunks of hair, it had rapidly grown back in as a replacement until the tight, dark curls he'd had once were fully replaced with this coarse, crimson mess.

Lucidity had finally, slowly, returned over the last few days, maybe weeks; time had grown meaningless, the only occasional interruption being the man he had identified, not necessarily correctly, as his captor. He seemed to be the only one involved. Perhaps he simply hadn't been able to identify the presence of others beyond the room.

The sound of the man's voice brought his struggles to an abrupt standstill, every muscle going rigid as dark eyes snapped towards the man. No longer the dark brown of his mother's eyes, but now a dark, magenta-red hue when the light cast across his irises. Likewise his pupils had become slits somewhere in the process, flashing red when the light hit the reflective layer behind his retinas.

"Oh, it speaks!" He's laughing now; his voice sounds nothing like an organic creature, but instead more like a voice being broadcast through, tinny, and complete with static beneath the timbre of his voice. "I was starting to wonder if it could. No! I don't think I have!"

He pulled on the restraints again as if to make his point. Maybe he was a little insane by this point; his mental stability only got worse each year. By the French screaming he heard in the adjacent room, he wasn't the only one here who was a little off these days. Frustrated static rumbled in his throat, teeth bared in a snarl despite his effort to hold onto his grin; he was too weak in the aftermath of the radiation to break his restraints. And perhaps the lack of food; starvation couldn't kill him, he'd learned—or he could last significantly longer without food, at the very least—but that didn't mean he wasn't weaker for it. Both of them together, he knew it painted a rather grim outlook on his situation.

Finally, he seemed to actually tire himself out, going still. He tried desperately to keep his breath steady after the exertion, but it was ragged, gasping, made all the worse by the state his body was in at that moment.

"This is really rather rude, you know."

smutty starter prompts.

as much as dorian hated having to find things to trade now that the matter of money being pretty 'up in the air' due to the world ending, he didn't mind it whenever it came to getting something elias needed at all; and that was because he cared about him more than he cared about himself. so, to say that dorian had fallen in love with elias wouldn't be inaccurate. from the first night that the other had taken shelter with him, there was just something so precious about him... and as a result, going out to see if there were any humans out there willing to barter their blood for some rare but very useful supplies is what dorian found himself doing that day. he had actually come back with four bags of blood as well after coming across two humans whose eyes went almost as wide as saucers at the sight of what dorian had (it was a bunch of MRE's, as it were, and weapons that were very hard to come by now).

It's something so small. He comes back, looking for Basil, his hair brushed. His expression is a little nervous. A little shy. But he wants Basil to see it anyway.

the little things are what lighthouses get built out of. stone, and electricity. light, and stucco. the little things they do for one another, every day. pigment, and oil, like those basil mixes in the kitchen when mori is out. melting together to create something that might start to feel like home.

steps on the stairs, eyes bright underneath a sliver of hair. it does look so much more like silver now that it's brushed. it catches light in a different way, basil notes that straightaway. then the eyes, the little fire burning in them. then the flushed cheeks, from the wind outside — speaking of a battle out there, rather than the regular huddled up hours of peace. basil wonders if some hair got caught on the stone, on the lone grass and lichen that grows there. it's all tinted in green and grey, anyway. it would have been right at home. mori, no longer. he stepped off the beach, all rock in its tone, and into the water — the highlights as bright as the sea on a warm day. basil could almost feel the dancing sun in his eyes.

"you look well." i love you.

THE FIRST THING I REALIZE IS THAT I'M NOT DEAD.

The second thing is that everything hurts, which is consistent with not being dead.

I try to sit up. Big mistake.

I slump back down with a groan and lie still, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the spinning to stop. My ribs are the main complaint, followed closely by my face, then my hands, which I remember using to block more than they were designed to.

The bike is gone. That's the next thing I remember. Shit.

I turn my head carefully and try to assess my surroundings. There's light coming from somewhere, wrong color for electric, too steady for a fire. I turn my head again. Stone walls, high windows. Somehow I feel like I'm very far from the ground, though I don't know why.

Someone must've brought me here. Someone who isn't trying to finish my attackers' job, apparently, since I'm still breathing and I smell food nearby.

"Hello?"

It comes out as a croak. I clear my throat and try again.

"...Hello."

They walk up to the man, hand on their hip, grin on their face. Their face is soft, slightly round, scars plastered over the center-- three of them in messy lines from under their eye, across their nose and diagonally down all the way to their other cheek. Their eyes give away that they're not human-- human eyes aren't red. Their long brown hair is back in a bun, their bangs pushed out of their eyes with a black headband.

Ana was hoping to ask the man for something to eat. That's what he gets for letting Bee step forward. Because what Bee asks, bold and unaffected by anything at all is, "can i have a cigarette?"

Ilya watches the person walking towards him. He doesn't bother reaching for his gun just yet. He's come to learn that whilst paranoia is important, too much of it serves as a hindrance. It can lead to missing out on opportunities that might be good for survival.

He flicks ash from the end of his cigarette, an eyebrow arching as he looks at them. "What - For free?" He 'tsks' in through his teeth, looking at the packet. He shouldn't just give them away, who knows when he'll find more. They're getting harder to scrape together as the end of the world drags on.