Chapter Text
Although it sometimes felt like the only type of weather that Seattle could produce with any consistency, for reasons she couldn’t quite put her finger on, Mel secretly liked the rain. Maybe it was the calming pitter-patter on the big glass windows back at their quarters in the stadium, a reminder that she had shelter and was safe. Perhaps it was something more metaphoric; the rain washing away the blood that often flowed in these streets, and with it her sins. Maybe it was just the smell.
But now, the rain was picking up, and with it, the wind, blowing the detritus of both the old and the new world around the street in a kaleidoscope of color. Manny’s meteorologist was right, there was a storm coming.
She felt her chest tighten thinking of Manny and the others, the camaraderie, the laughter and the shared history, but then, as if to remind her that she had to make this journey, she felt a tiny flutter of something different in her abdomen, something new.
It was all such a mess.
She’d wanted to tell Owen as soon as she missed her period. Seeing how he’d decked out the aquarium for Christmas, an old-world tradition that only she seemed to give a shit about, had made her think that maybe it was all real, that the fragility of their relationship was something in her head, that they could be a family. But caught up in the romance of it all, and loathe to potentially spoil the mood, she’d held onto it until the ‘right’ time came.
There was no right time.
The journey to Wyoming was an uncomfortable one, and it wasn’t just the morning sickness. She’d hated Joel Miller for what he did, what he took, but as the years passed, that desire found itself recessed at the back of Mel’s mind, cramped by other desires, and even a few hopes. They’d chased leads over the years, but they’d all come to nothing. The butcher of Saint Mary’s had gone to ground.
When Abby had told her they may have found his brother, that thirst for righteous vengeance had squirmed itself out like a pit viper and she’d signed on with reckless abandon. But as the miles flowed below the bouncy suspension of their truck, she found herself hoping that this lead would likewise come to nothing, and she could say a final goodbye to that aspect of herself. A part of her that never really gelled with what she knew at an intellectual was just and right.
As their destination approached, that hope had turned into anxiety and she’d crawled into her shell, avoiding conversation, scarcely eating and recoiling at even Owen’s touch. Mel watched Abby likewise withdraw into herself as Jackson approached, but unlike Mel succumbing to her anxiety, Abby seemed to be steeling herself for what was to come, honing herself like some awful blade.
She should have known what lay ahead.
Would things have been different if she’d told Owen earlier, long before they were at Jackson's doorstep? No. No point dwelling on shit. What’s done is done.
It was at an abandoned motel just outside of Sugar City Idaho, on a snowy Saturday morning that she finally broke the news to Owen. It wasn’t the perfect time and place, but they’d all had a good time the night before and spirits were high. Nick had found a particularly nice single malt whiskey behind the front desk, and revelry had ensued. If anyone noticed Mel wasn’t drinking, they hadn’t said anything. Regardless, she’d felt the weight that had been growing since they left Seattle lift, at least for an hour or two.
She remembered feeling buoyant, hopeful and excited, but Mel had miscalculated, and misread the man she thought she knew. What she saw as a gift, Owen saw as a prison sentence. He didn’t want to be a dad, at least not with her.
“I can’t do this,” he’d told her.
Now here she was. Leaving Owen, and almost everyone she knew behind, all in the hope that she could find somewhere safer, kinder and more hopeful to bring the life growing inside her into the world.
When Ji-So had first come to her, sidling up to her in the cafeteria queue with rumors that the Fireflies were regrouping down south, she’d been hesitant. But as the weeks passed, and Owen’s strategy of avoiding her in the hopes that Mel and their child-to-be would somehow disappear became more obvious, her decision had become easier.
Knowledge of what the Washington Liberation Front did to deserters is what had forced Mel to largely neglect goodbyes, something that still didn’t sit right with her. In fact, Nora was the only one who knew.
Mel had never been much of a hugger, but when she hugged Nora goodbye, she found herself struggling to extricate herself and control her tears. When it came to her fellow surgeon, there were a lot of complicated feelings, long quashed, and thoughts of what could have been.
“May your survival be long,” Nora intoned.
“May your death be of old age,” Mel replied, subverting the standard WLF mantra with a sad smile.
The Salt Lake Crew. They’d been as thick as thieves, and she’d miss them, but Seattle had changed them all.
It reminded her of a book she’d borrowed from Abby ironically enough. It was an old, somewhat opaque story of some ivory traders in Africa. To Mel, it seemed to talk about how there was an aspect of savagery in everyone, even those who claimed to be ‘civilised’. She wondered what Abby had taken from it, as only yesterday both she and Manny had defended the murder of children in the name of a faction that seemed to exist only to dominate Seattle and wage war against the equally insane Seraphites.
There were good people here though. People doing their best with the hand they’d been dealt, but the WLF weren’t the Fireflies. She wasn’t working to save the world anymore, instead, she was putting soldiers back together so they could get right back to the business of killing. She’d experienced enough savagery to last her a lifetime, and worst of all, she’d played her part.
At least she still had Alice, but the war for the bones of Seattle had even corrupted her. Alice had been trained from birth to rip someone's throat out in an instant, but as she looked down at the dog, who looked back up at her, panting, she saw no malice, only affection.
“Must be pretty easy. Not having all this shit in your head all the fucking time ,” she said more to herself than her canine companion.
Suddenly, Alice tensed and froze in place, ears erect. Mel came to a halt and held her breath.
For a few moments, all she could hear was the rain pounding on the pavement and the otherworldly howl of the wind through the monumental skeleton of a city that must have once bristled with life. Then she heard it, the sound of something moving just round the corner.
There weren’t meant to be any WLF patrols here. Isaac was massing everyone at the FOB, and if they were Seraphites, she’d have been lucky to hear anything at all. Infected , she told herself. You can do this.
As quietly as she could, she unclipped the restraint on her hip holster and drew her sidearm. Quieter than her rifle and less of a dance with death than her knife. With any luck, the wind and rain would make it harder for any other infected to find her by sound.
It was weighty and gun-metal grey save for where time and use had worn its edges to reveal the dull steel below. It was as much a tool as any of her surgical implements, but not one she enjoyed putting to use. Still, she was a decent shot, and the ambidexterity that came with being a surgeon made her more flexible in its use than many soldiers.
She pulled the slide back and gently brought it back forward, taking pains to avoid the distinctive slap of the gun being made ready, before slowly pulling back the hammer and thumbing the safety.
Painfully aware that she had no one but Alice to watch her back, Mel’s heart raced and her chest heaved. The seconds dragged into what felt like an eternity and her stress-induced tinnitus decided to rear its ugly, morphing from a subtle ringing sound to a low roar in her ears.
The indistinct sound of something pushing its way through low-hanging vines and creepers grew louder and louder. It was just about on top of her.
Shambler?
She took one last deep breath, brought the gun up, and exhaled.
Her breath caught as a mass of brown fur trotted into view and dark eyes ringed with white fur looked at her quizzically. The doe paused, as a fawn, probably only days old, hesitantly followed her out of the overgrowth.
Alice, well-trained companion that she was, stayed stock still.
“Hey there,” Mel said softly.
That was all the deer needed to spook. Mel just about jumped out of her skin as the deer leapt away. Within moments they’d disappeared, flitting away into an overgrown building across the street.
Mel thumbed the safety back on her pistol, carefully lowered the hammer and made sure there was no round in the chamber before holstering it. She could picture Manny rolling his eyes at that, but as unlikely as it was, she preferred to minimize the risk of shooting her foot off.
The safehouse wasn’t far now. She was looking forward to getting off the street and starting a new chapter in her life.
It was good to get out of the rain. Her jacket was pretty good and she’d just rewaxed it, but it was older than she was and its waterproofness wasn’t what it once was.
She’d left Alice tied up outside, in the cover of the entranceway to dry off a little and the dog was starting to get agitated; pining and yowling.
“Easy girl. It’s just a few minutes,” Mel all but yelled in the dog's direction.
This wasn’t like Alice, she was better trained than that, but it was a strange situation for her as well, so Mel thought nothing of it.
Moving into the safehouse’s makeshift workshop, Mel left her rifle at the door, took off her backpack and turned to hang her jacket up to try.
Alice’s keening turned to outright barking and Mel heard rapid footsteps behind her.
Before she could turn, something slammed into her from behind and she found herself connecting painfully with the wall.
Someone grabbed her short hair, jarring her head back, and thrust a blade to her throat. She could smell her attacker, damp and musty, but not quite as horrific as some of the infected.
Alice was apoplectic now, her ears and nose showing her what her eyes couldn’t, her human friend in grave danger, while she was tied up outside unable to intervene.
“Shut that fucking dog up or I’ll fucking kill you right now,” a feminine voice ordered.
Mel tried to find her voice, but couldn’t form words until the woman pressed the knife harder against her neck.
“Fucking now!”
“Alice! Quiet!” She shouted, and her four-legged friend immediately complied, presumably with great reluctance and confusion.
The pressure on her throat eased a little and she allowed herself to breathe. A hand moved to her holster and she heard her knife clatter to the ground behind and felt her sidearm been taken as her assailant stepped back.
She kept herself still, pressed against the wall, terrified to move. Her heart felt like it was about to burst out of her chest and she rued to think about the distress all this cortisol would be causing the burgeoning life in her womb.
“Hand behind your head. Turn around. Slowly,” the voice ordered, this time quieter and calmer.
Mel did as instructed, and had to fight to stay standing as she came face to face with what she expected was death.
Auburn hair, freckles, and a compact frame. Younger than Mel by a couple of years give or take probably, but with a hard glint in her green eyes that reminded her a lot of Abby and spoke of violence and death.
The last time Mel had seen this face was in Jackson after Abby had caved Joel Miller's skull in with a golf club, as the girl screamed that she was going to kill them all, and now she was pointing Mel’s pistol at its owner.
“Please…” was all Mel could manage, and it sounded feeble and pathetic as soon as the word left her mouth.
The girl just looked Mel up and down, eyes lingering for a fraction on her abdomen.
“It’s Mel right?” the girl asked, and Mel nodded feebly, even as he struggled to understand how the girl knew her name.
But then she remembered. She’d introduced herself to the brother, Tommy.
Oh no, no, no. He must be here as well.
She’d seen the possibility of this back in Jackson. As blood still coursed through the old man's body, Tommy unconscious in the corner and the girl screaming for Joel to get up.
The thing that she had been a part of was a crime, and she did not want to see the reckoning that might come with it. She’d seen one of her best friends torture a man for hours and then brutally beat him to death all in the name of revenge. That darkness in all of their souls had festered since they left Salt Lake City behind and she could see the seeds of that insidious sickness being planted in the hearts of those Joel left behind.
“We can’t have loose ends,” she’d agreed when Manny had voiced what needed to be done.
Those words had embedded themselves in Mel’s brain the same way Joel’s broken body and the things that had been done to it had.
Her soul told her Owen was right; Tommy and the girl had done nothing wrong. They hadn’t shot up Saint Mary’s, murdered Jerry and Marlene, and so many others, but her brain told her that this cycle of violence would just continue if left unchecked. That the horror she’d just witnessed could soon be visited on her, her loved ones and the new life growing within her.
She hated who all this had forced her to be.
“You’re bigger than I remembered,” the girl said, Mel wincing as she pointed the gun at her belly, “How far through?”
“Nearly five months,” Mel said quietly, after a stuttering pause.
“Sit,” her captor ordered with a wave of the gun.
Mel slid slowly and awkwardly down the wall she’d been forced against, hand’s still behind her head and the girl grabbed her backpack from where Mel had left it, and upended it.
She rifled through the meagre belongings and supplies that Mel had crammed into her small pack. A neat cross-section of her life. There was a small cornucopia of surgical instruments and medical supplies, alongside a smaller selection of spares clothes, and personal effects; a pair of babies socks that Leah had knitted that she couldn’t bare to leave behind, her journal clogged with handwriting indecipherable to the untrained eye, and a small, nondescript plastic frame containing a photo of parents long gone.
“You a doctor or some shit?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing out here all by yourself?”
Mel mulled her answer over and decided there was no point in lying about it.
“I’m… We’re, leaving. A few of us.”
“Who else?” The girl demanded, her demeanour darkening, “Abby?”
“No, no. No one else who was there.”
“Names.”
She furrowed her brows. Why does she want to know their names? Does she think I’m lying? Does she know any of the others' names?
“Ji-So Huang, Chris Marsh, Adam Peters and Andre Dominguez,” Mel replied slowly, recounting the names of the four companions who were meant to be here already and whom she’d seen no trace in the safe house.
“Okay,” the girl said, gripping the gun tighter, “where’s Abby.”
“Last time I saw her was yesterday, was at the FOB… Forward operating base,” Mel replied truthfully.
“Point it out on here,” the girl demanded, as she pulled a folded-up map from a pocket and held it in front of Mel’s face.
It wasn’t particularly detailed, in fact, it looked like a pretty basic tourist map from pre-infection times. Mel struggled to find the general area the FOB was, in but managed to point it out after a few seconds.
“There. It’s an old apartment complex… there’s a big WLF banner hanging off it.”
She neglected to mention that Abby was no longer there, something she’d only learned herself late the night prior when a pair of WLF soldiers had dragged her out of her bunk and brought her before Isaac. Mel had been sure that they’d been found out but soon discovered that it was in fact Owen and Abby who had been found guilty of desertion.
Isaac was sure that Mel knew where they might have gone, and she did, but despite everything that happened, the way her friendship with Abby had shrivelled and disintegrated, or the way that Owen had silently cut her out of his life as soon he found out she was pregnant, Mel didn’t give them up.
She’d come close though. The interrogation had lasted what felt like hours, and although he didn’t hurt her, Isaac made it abundantly clear that if he found she’d lied to him, then he’d personally cut the child from her belly and feed it to the infected.
Now she was out of his reach but in the grasp of another agency, one who had every reason to want to kill her on the spot. She didn’t want to give Abby up, but she didn’t want to die here.
“You said it’s a base. How many of you are there?”
“I… Uh… I don’t know. Normally a hundred or so I guess. But somethings happening and everyone's being called there. Maybe five hundred now?”
The auburn-haired young woman groaned, “how do I get in.”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me, how I get the fuck in,” she snarled, pressing the gun against Mel’s forehead.
“I don’t know,” Mel repeated, “I’ve only worked at the hospital. Please. If I knew I’d tell you.”
She wasn’t lying. Mel hadn’t exactly snuck out. She’d hitched a ride downtown with a patrol and some story about searching for medical supplies, before slipping away.
The girl slumped to the ground in front of her and Mel exhaled.
Her captive adjusted her grip on the gun and in one rapid, smooth motion, straightened her arm, once more pointing the firearm between Mel’s eyes.
Mel flinched, squeezing her eyes shut and gritting her teeth.
But the shot didn’t come and after a few seconds, Mel opened her eyes.
The gun was still aimed at her head, and she saw the girl grip it even tighter before relaxing and lowering it, her expression unreadable.
She picked up Mel’s stethoscope, given to her by Jerry what felt like an age ago now, and peered at the nameplate on it; M A Jasnowski .
“You’re Fireflies, right? Salt Lake City?” She asked looking up.
Mel just nodded, with even that taking all her effort given she was almost paralyzed with fear.
“It true? The only one who could’ve fixed it all is dead?” The girl continued.
“Yeah,” Mel managed.
“It’s funny. I found your tape there. Hated him almost as much as you people did for it.”
My tape?
What should have probably occurred to them all back in Jackson if they weren’t all so focussed on Miller finally clicked into place for Mel.
“You’re her,” Mel said with a tiny bit of awe creeping into her voice.
“Yeah. I’m her.”
“You going to kill me now?” The little surgeon asked, trying to put on a brave face and appear stoic when all she wanted to do was beg for mercy or run.
“Not sure yet,” the girl shrugged.
“The others will probably be here soon. Could avoid a fight if you just leave,” Mel tried to reason.
The wild-eyed girl pressed her lip and looked at Mel thoughtfully for a moment before standing up and waving the gun in Mel’s direction.
“Get up. Pick your shit up,” she said gesturing at her belongings strewn across the floor, “you’re coming with me.”