#faihth

She understands it, even if she doesn’t want to. This world is a brutal thing -- an abscess that grows painful and dark under a fucking storm cloud. Compassion is hard sought after out there; Isaac’s ebbs and flows from within base camp with every passing day, even when she avoids the cells and hosing down the blood and teeth that chatter loose in the corners by the drains. There’s nothing he won’t do for intel. Good or bad -- mostly bad -- this is life now. 

            “You’re looking in the wrong world for compassion.”   She’s heard stories of before -- she’s heard about charity, and aid work, and philanthropy that stretches from one part of the world to another, but you stare a strange in the face now, and if you don’t end up riddled with bullets or bite wounds, you’ve done well. Compassion was stomped out on day one. Fuck compassion.

(She understands it, even if it sucks. The world makes you tough. The world gives you your brass fucking knuckles and beats you to a pulp with them until you can fight back -- or maybe that’s just what’s out there. Either way, Faith stares with those eyes in the middle of an outbreak and it makes her want to listen. Eden’s Gate feels way too biblical to fully hook her in, but her voice is soothing. Fuck that.)

@faihth​ asked: I didn’t need your help! [ accepting ] 

     ‘ I don’t believe you. ’ 

     Rachel might think she can talk her way out of this one, that she might convince them all she’s perfectly fine, but Robin isn’t an idiot. He sits with her in the back of the truck while they drive along, away from that bastard Joseph’s influence. By the looks of things --- the sounds of things --- they’re already too late. Robin, though, wouldn’t be Robin if he just gave up the second things got a little complicated. 

A leg crosses over another as she takes a drag of the recently-lit cigarette. One beat. Two beat. She glances over at the company the other side of the desk in the bodega. (She thinks it must be Pete being Pete -- pretty girl, vague-magic-talent and here we are. Test one.)

       She lets the smoke plume out in front of her face and her arms cross over her chest. Okay. Test one it is.

The statue sits amongst its ruins -- a smoke of shattered stone plumes from the debris and you can just about make out the shape of a hand, or a book, or the rim of a stone-carved pair of glasses from the ground that shattered with the impact. The metal rungs are bent outward from the stone like a fucking wilted ornament -- it’s a tribute to Joseph, or a tribute to his regime... either way, Abby’s heart’s only just started to right itself from the fucking pumping in her chest, and the nausea when she’d taken the book and thrown it. 

Faith’s own copy sits scattered in ash amongst the dirt. The statue had to come down, she knew that much. It had to sit in its own shit and she had to watch the Peggies that scuttled out like fucking beetles from beneath it.

(She still remembers the way the ladders waned under her weight, and how she felt fucking dizzy the higher up she climbed. I’m not fucking dying here. I’m fucking not. It was a mantra, with each rope that jostled in the wind -- fuck, I’m high up, fuck this -- and the way her knuckles went white under the pressure. Faith had her wrapped around her finger, but there’s a moment of clarity that came shattering through. She stared at that statue and knew what needed to be done.

                     I thought this was getting better.

Faith had talked to her about anger. Anguish. Rage. Vengeance. Faith had wheedled her way in, dug drug-infused fingers into the mass of black in her chest and twisted. (It’s so heavy...) Abby stared up at that statue and knew. Metal beams jutted out, and Abby had to shuffle along on her front with her eyes screwed shut because she thought she was going to fucking die--

Faith appears the way she always appears -- Abby’s camped out in an abandoned lodge just south of the water treatment centre, and there’s a stove in the corner with a tin of rice she’d nabbed from some over-enthusiastic prepper bunker on the north side. (There’s bliss, and Abby’s back straightens hard. Is she ever even fucking here?)

              "It is better,”   is all she says. Faith’s book is charred, razed, she burnt the fucker down one step at a time and waited until she was on the ground to lay there, staring up, heaving and shuddering. (She thinks she vomited at some point, and swilled a canteen of water round her mouth until she could feel the tips of her fingers again. Fuck this fucking region.)

“i am not one of your mindless fucking zombies.”     bliss grows in every available pasture.  there’s a scape of plants that go from one side of the river to another that abby’s managed to avoid this far.  (there’s a baptism that she oversaw a couple weeks back  —  the fumes string off them like a 

they poison the rivers.  (there’s a stream of them  —  they leave a trail of debris that leaves her hands smelling more like bliss and blood than gunpowder and sweat.  dad never meant for any of this to happen,  and the more he knew she was spending time with faith see.d,  the less she knows she’s doing the right thing.)

                “i’m going to bring joseph down.”     at least she’s been  true  from the first instance.  there’s a knot in her neck that she hasn’t been able to smooth out,  and there’s a trail of fires left snuffed out from one burnt-down gas station to the next.  faith’s fucking  angels  follow her from one end of the region to the next,  and as jacob pummels his own men in war,  abby tries to pull them out,  one wretch after another.

@faihth​ asked: // ❛  looking for me?  ❜ :)

sentence starters taken from supermassive’s 2015 game  ‘ until dawn ’ - accepting !

❝    𝐇𝐎𝐖 𝐃𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔 look down your nose at me 𝖑𝖎𝖐𝖊 𝖙𝖍𝖆𝖙.    ❞