#post-apocalyptic setting

I.

The carapaces are out in full force today. You're ambushed as you're coming home, your arms laden with canned meat and vegetables scavenged from a heretofore undiscovered nook inside one of the local supermarket ruins. The first band you easily dispatch, but the second and third waves take your battle weary body by surprise, and you only just manage to subdue them. Your arm breaks when you smash your fist into a carapace skull, and once you manage to limp "home" to your shoddy cabin you spend the next three hours fixing it, tinkering with the wires and the flimsy metal paneling until you can finally feel your fingers again. 

You flex your hand, listening to the screech and pop of the irregular metal parts grinding against one another. You get up from your workbench, massaging the aching flesh next to where the screws and wires graft the arm into your shoulder socket. You feel your calves and back strain and tear as you rise--a bodily casualty of your strife with the carapacians. 

It's just another typical day for you in the Post-Reckoning world. Another brush with death. Another broken robot arm, another semi-expired can of beans, another day looking at the symbol you'd carved into the beaten metal shell of your arm and wishing Jake was still here with you to make it not hurt so damn bad.  

Your mechanical fingers knead into your brow, your human arm wrapped securely around your torso to suppress the sick feeling rising up inside you. Somedays you wished you hadn't carved that symbol into your arm, because somedays you feel it would be easier to forget. Forget about Jake. Forget about what had happened. Forget what you had done to him. How you had failed him. 

II. 

It'd been a foolish mistake. On your part or on Jake's was still unclear, but years of living alone has convinced you that there must have been something you could have done. You could have moved faster. You could have shouted look out sooner. You could have been more on your toes while the two of you were traveling back through the brush to the cabin. You could have decided not to go out foraging for food that day. You could have done a million things, each of which would have slightly altered the present timeline that you'd been stuck with.

But you hadn't done any of those other million things, you had shouted too late and moved too slowly and before you'd known it a carapace had appeared out of the trees before Jake and brought its misshaped mace down upon his skull with an audible crack. 

It'd taken you a moment to fully register what had happened, but once you saw Jake collapse in a bleeding heap on the ground, worthless worthless worthless why did you go out for food today cans of meat and potatoes scattering around him, you'd howled and sprinted forward, your sword making short work of the carapace's neck before it'd even began to turn at your scream. 

You'd ran and skidded into a crouch at Jake's side, hands poised over him and unsure what to do, how to fix this and make it right, and Jake hadn't been moving and there had been too much blood on his face and matted in his hair. You'd seen blood countless times before but this time it was on Jake, and it wasn't just a tiny cut or gash, this had been serious, this had been bad--

You should have known that moving him would only cause him pain, but you had picked him up anyway and ran home even as he moaned and clutched at your shirt and shook. 

After laying him on his bed you'd tried to clean his wound, somehow patch the cracked and bleeding fissure running from the base of his skull to his crown, but you'd known. Even after he'd stopped bleeding and stopped moaning you'd known. His breath had grown even and he'd laid completely still, seemingly asleep but you'd known, you'd known better. You'd held his barely warmed hand and sobbed and apologized over and over and begged him to wake up, begged him to please Jake, please be okay, I need you to be okay please--

You'd kept him alive for a couple of days in anxious hope and perhaps a need for a warm body in bed with you, no matter how still it was. You'd trickled water between his slack and pale lips, replenishing him like one would do a houseplant, because that's what he had been then, a fucking plant. And yet you couldn't just let him die, withered up and shriveling into a husk of his former self. Jake had taught you the power of undeterred optimism and hope in the face of grisly situations. Jake had kept you going, kept you eating and breathing and living despite all the countless times where you'd wanted to collapse under the weight of the situation and let time take you. You couldn't have given up on him, not after all he had done for you. 

After a week, however, you hadn't been able to ignore the thinness in his ribs, or the sallow paleness in his cheeks. You'd had no way of getting food to him, not with your limited supplies and technology. You'd racked your brain of anything, stressed your intellect for any scrap of plan drained from your formerly unflappable ingenuity, only to come up with nothing. In a fit of desperation you had even resolved to grab a length of spare tubing and try to fashion a makeshift feeding tube, but your nerves had failed you the moment you'd pressed the knife to Jake's stomach and realized you couldn't do this. You hadn't yet been mad enough to try something with a higher risk of killing Jake than helping him. 

Instead you'd mashed up some of the canned food and tried to push it through his slacked lips, begging to his deaf ears to eat, please Jake you have to eat you can't leave me not after all this, Jake, Jake please but it had been futile. You had been running out of food as it were, your time spent foraging cut back by caring for Jake, which additionally left you deprived of an extra pair of hands whenever you did go out looking for food.  

As the second week of Jake's slumber continued you'd found that you had to face the painful, horrible truth. It'd hurt you to see Jake starving and sick and dead to the world but you'd known it had been hurting him more. It had been cruelty to keep Jake alive like that, no matter your selfish reasoning. You'd known this, and after a night of deliberation and tears you had come to a crossroads between two horrible solutions. 

One would let nature take its course and leave yourself guilt-free but at the price of perpetuating Jake's slow and degrading pain. And the latter would tear into the salvaged scraps of your heart but would let Jake go quickly and quietly and peacefully.  

It'd taken you a lot longer than you'd dared admit to choose the latter. 

Grabbing a syringe and a vial of medication you and Jake had salvaged from the local burned out hospital shell a couple of months back, you'd sat on the edge of his bed and filled up the syringe with an adequate dosage to gently ease Jake to rest. You'd used the meds a couple of times before, albeit in smaller doses, when the overwhelming pressure of your situation had been too much, and you'd just needed the sedate bliss that the drug could provide. 

You'd pushed back his hair and kissed him one last time, debating whether you should take some drug for yourself in order to stop the shaking in your hands and fingers. 

Your lips had lingered a long while against Jake's, languishing in a warmth you knew you would never feel again. Finally, you'd pulled away. You'd then tied off his arm until a vein pulsed through his skin, and after piercing the needle through Jake's skin you had pressed down the plunger and released the drug into his system.