#writebeeps

He finds Gordon, thankfully, still within sight of the arcade, out by the chain link fence that divides their parking lot from the next one over. Bran moves carefully, settling behind an abandoned car far enough back that Gordon doesn't realize he's been followed. While he could easily justify spying by the fact that secretly going off on one's own potentially puts the entire group at risk, the idea of the ex-student being angry at him, as opposed to just perpetually disgruntled -- not to mention almost certainly losing his trust -- is way more upsetting than he'd like to admit.

Gordon, wisely enough, is far removed from any of the remaining working parking lot lights that would make him visible at a distance, and Bran has to squint to make out his shape as his eyes slowly adjust to the dark. He catches a flash of bare arms and shoulders -- Gordon is stripped down to his black beater, and that's weird in itself because he never, ever goes outside without his leather jacket as a barrier between his skin and the jaws of the undead.

In one hand he's carrying his axe, red finish all but non-existent for the amount of sharpening he's subjected the blade to. In the other, he's dragging someone large and heavy behind him that they all recognize a little too easily now -- a body. Bran squints a little harder -- it has to be the corpse of one of the zombies they put down earlier (is that even the right term if all zombies are technically corpses to begin with?). They were going to burn them tomorrow, when the flames wouldn't be such a huge fucking beacon in the daylight. Bran watches as Gordon drops the arm, rolling his shoulders before gripping the axe with both hands.

The first swing impacts with a dull thud, and Gordon tosses away a foot severed neatly at the ankle. The next one is louder, crunching into bone. Bran hears Gordon's annoyance in a hiss of breath, planting his shoe down to dislodge the blade before taking a second swing, and then a third. This time, he comes away with a whole arm, fingertip to shoulder joint.

Limb by limb, he takes the zombie apart, sometimes pausing to choke up or down on the handle, swearing quietly when it takes more than one swing to separate a body part. Bran's eyes are adjusted now, and he can see gordon's face when he raises it from the shadows on the upswing.

It's not anywhere close to cold tonight, but Bran feels a shiver crawling down his spine all the same.

Maybe he was expecting anger -- it's the emotion Gordon is best at expressing, after all -- but watching the axe rise and fall over and over, he realizes, no, it's simpler than that, even pragmatic, and somehow that makes it that much more fucked up despite Bran being fully aware that this is the kind of person Gordon is. He's too methodical, his aim way too precise for this to be venting or stress relief or anything. The axe comes down with the same kind of focus as Bran used to see in him whenever they had a test, the determination of a straight-A student dead set on going pre-med who wouldn't settle for anything less than 100% success. Gordon has never been athletic, but he's also never not been able to do anything he worked at. Bran gets it now, why on their last raid they barely expended any ammo, why Gordon's been collecting kills like he probably never collected boy scout badges, even though he probably would've been great at it. The sadistic almost-grin on his face as he took apart zombie after zombie was practically identical to the one the kids in Bran's troop had whenever they got to burn shit.

So Gordon practices taking bodies apart, and he enjoys it, and Bran wonders why his instincts are still telling him he ought to be very fucking worried about all of this.

By the time Gordon gets to the head, he's got his form down perfectly. It flies off with one swing, rolling so far that Bran has to white-knuckle his shotgun to keep from reflexively kicking it away when it emerges from underneath the car and stops against his shoe. Even in the dark he can tell that the blood pooling onto the concrete is red, not the poisonous brown-black sludge that leaches from the undead. He toes it, carefully, quietly, teeth digging so hard into his lip that he tastes blood himself. He's been teaching home ec long enough to know how fresh meat is at a glance, a skill that, in a perfect world, ought to have zero application outside a kitchen context. Right now, that skill is assisting his brain in supplying him with the phrase "Hannibal Lecter sashimi."

He wishes he could be surprised, that the head he turns over doesn't belong to a zombie after all.

"Survivor scout. That group we ran into three days ago."

To his credit, Bran's far too busy willing himself not to puke to flinch at the voice. Gordon stares down at him, pale eyes as intense as ever, but otherwise looking far too relaxed for someone who presumably just murdered and dismembered another human (a human, not a zombie, jesus fucking christ). The axe is resting heavily over his shoulder, and he's breathing evenly, if not slightly heavier for the amount of effort he just exerted. His face is back to its usual expression, somewhere between blank and ambiguously irritated.

"Guess 'survivor' isn't really accurate anymore, though," he amends, gaze flicking towards Bran's feet. He brings his free hand up, absently wiping a stray splatter of gore from his cheek with the inside of his wrist. It doesn't do anything except smear it further.

"Yeah," Bran croaks, trying hard not to think about shitty hack-n-slash movies and whether or not he could get a shot off before Gordon could swing. He's almost certain he could.

Gordon's attention snaps back to Bran so suddenly that this time, Bran does flinch. The edge of his mouth quirks into something that isn't really a smirk, unreadable. He mouths something that Bran misses under the pounding in his ears. When Bran doesn't move, he repeats it, extending his hand.

"--back inside."

Bran's not sure what else he's agreeing to, but he nods. Back inside is good. His fingers ache when he finally manages to uncurl them from his shotgun, long enough to grasp Gordon's hand and allow himself to be pulled to his feet.

"Probably ought to expect the rest in the next day or so," Gordon says. "They'll be wondering what happened to their friend."

"Yeah," Bran repeats blandly. They're not the only ones.

Gordon offers him another not-smirk, and for one horrifying second, Bran thinks maybe he said the second part out loud -- but then Gordon turns and takes off without so much as a backwards glance. He doesn't see the way Bran stares after he narrow expanse of his back, searching for... something. Guilt, remorse, concern (not fear, he's never seen fear from Gordon and maybe that should've been his first clue). But there's nothing. Just the wrong shade of blood on gleaming metal.