#its much easier and safer for molly to let everyone thinks hes had a string of lovers or runs off to hang out at brothels instead of

[dent-de-leon]

Forever thinking about Caleb being so charming and sweet, he manages to even fluster Mollymauk--

[who-gave-atlas-a-pencil]

let us be brave

A/N: Title comes from Sanders Bohlke’s “The Weight of Us”.

Summary: It's been fifteen years since the world went to hell. In the midst of the chaos, five people find a way to make that hell a home.

(Zombie Apocalypse AU. Takes place in the world of The Last of Us, as the author is self-indulgent and obsessed. Expect both hope and hurt in equal measure. Work-in-progress.)

Read on AO3 for notes.

Chapter: 1/?

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If he dies tonight, he hopes it will be quick.

Matthew’s lungs ache from running. His ankle is twisted. His hands are covered in blood that doesn’t belong to him. They shake as he bolts the door shut behind him and wonders, not for the first time, if it’s too late to find God again. He wants to pray for a ceiling to crash down on his head, for a false step to break his neck, for anything that will spare him from the carnage he hears outside.

The sounds from the hallway are brutal, hellish clicks and deep, bassy roars. The mask around his face amplifies the already far too loud staccato of his breathing, makes it sound like he’s gasping into a megaphone. All the same, he doubts they hear him outside.

It’s hard to hear anything over the screams.

Matthew checks his gun, pats down his pockets – empty, both of them. He presses his back against the door and slides breathlessly down it, breathing hard in the spore-filled dark. This room has no windows. He’s run himself into a dead end. He wonders if one day someone will find his corpse here, holding onto a cross and an empty gun, and the thought would make him hysterical if he wasn’t already there.

Something heavy hits the ground outside and a familiar scream cuts off all too quick, the noises wet like ripping paper.

Matthew clutches his rosary in hands too slick with gore to hold it, presses his eyes shut, and prays.

---

There’s a gun barrel pressed to the back of his head. He’s twenty two now, has made it five years without succumbing to any of the many grotesque fates he’s watched other people suffer in the wake of the madness. He’s not sure how he’s managed even that much, when all he’s been for five years now is cold and shit-scared that one day he’s going to wake up dead.

The gun cocks and the man behind him spits. “This is for my fuckin' brother,” he snarls.

The knife in Matthew’s hand slides from its sheath quick as a snake. The gun goes off. The blood sprays.  

---

He doesn’t wake up dead, and that’s a relief as much as it is a burden. Sleeping would have been a nice solution to all of this. It would have spared him the terror of trying to get out of the mess he’s found himself in, at any rate. Nevertheless, it hasn’t happened, so- well. That’s that.

Outside, the screams have disappeared. All that remains is the faint, familiar horror of clicking echoing off the walls. Something whimpers inhumanly, and Matthew’s guts churn.

He can’t stay here. He knows that. That doesn’t make it any easier for him to push down the terror that works its way up his throat as he eases the door open as slow as he can. Outside, a pale grey light drifts through the hallway, illuminates the spores in the air until they look magical in some sick sort of way.

Mason swallows hard and wishes for a better mask. It makes the air breathable, but it doesn’t do shit for the way everything here reeks of death and rot. A bowie knife shakes in his hands and when his foot lands in something slick, he makes it a point to not look down. He already knows all too well who these bodies used to be. He doesn’t want the specifics.

He makes his way through the hallway, only breathing when he has to. The spores and the shaded grey on the eyes of his mask make it next to impossible to see, and it’s enough to make his skin crawl. The only thing worse than hearing the Infected stumble around the building is hearing them while having no idea where the fuck they are. Matthew’s not a religious man, but he finds himself reaching one hand toward the familiar and battered rosary in his pocket nonetheless. Get me out of here, he thinks, the words somewhere south of reverent. Either get me out or put me down. I don’t care which.

Immediately ahead of him, an experimental and ragged clicking noise fills the air. Matthew freezes, holding his breath. It comes again, closer now as a figure shambles through the haze of spores and shadows directly toward him.

He thinks it might have been a woman once. Clumps of long, ragged brown hair hang from what’s left of the creature’s skull, sticking out in fine tufts through the fungus that has flowered across its face and split its skull in two. The teeth are rotten in a mouth red with blood like smeared lipstick, and its throat jerks painfully with every fresh click, the abused muscles twitching around the growths that blossom from its neck.

There’s a ring on its left hand, the stone long broken out. He’s not sure why he notices that.

The creature jerks its head to the side like it’s heard something, clicking once again. This close he can smell the rot, and he swears, even though it’s blind, he feels eyes on him, ruined and covered in decay and the jaw unhinges inhumanly wide to scream and-

He doesn’t think about it. Matthew slams the bowie knife three inches into the side of the creature’s neck and twists, pulls it out and slams it in again. Blood sheets down his hand and the front of its shirt and he shoves an arm around it to keep it from hitting the ground too loud, holds the body as it twitches in his arms and fails to make a single noise through the now severed vocal cords. Bile rises in his throat at the smell, that god-awful fucking smell that hangs on these things like a shroud, and he holds the thing down until the twitching stops.

Covered in a long-dead woman’s blood, Matthew swallows hard and continues on his way. He doesn’t stop until he’s past them all, until he finally sees the heavy door with a disused exit sign hanging crookedly over it, until he’s through the door and into the cleaner air and the chill of the approaching evening. Then he runs.

It must be a mile or two later before his legs give out like jelly beneath him, his typical stamina sapped by the stress. Matthew stumbles to the ground with heaving lungs, rips off his mask and pukes hard and heavy, bile stinging his throat. His shoulders shake with effort and then he’s sobbing, breathless with relief that he’s made it this far, that he made it at all. He does not think of the eight people he’d entered the apartment complex with, of Derrick back at the base with a scavenged wedding ring and a plan for a proposal to a man who’s now a corpse, of the picture in Hannah’s pocket that they’d taken on a shitty polaroid two weeks before that must be drenched in blood now.

He knows every one of their names, but he doesn’t dare to think them. Matthew rubs his eyes and stands. Grabs the medallion from his neck and a rag from his pack, pours a little water on it. He scrubs at the blood until it comes off in thick clots, shakes it off on the grass and keeps cleaning until the tarnished face of it is visible again. He runs a thumb over the grooves and clenches it tight in his fist like a prayer. He thinks of Hannah and her sixteen-year-old eyes and the sound of her scream.

He should go to Fort Collins, tell them what happened. Everyone will be waiting. They’ll take the news hard, because there’s no other way to take it, but they’ll grieve together. They’ll find somewhere else to go, something else to do, some other tiny revolution to spark until a soldier puts a bullet in all their backs.

There’s a lot of things he should do, he thinks, and a lot of things he doesn’t want to. But it’s a long way from Ohio to Fort Collins. He’s got time to digest.

Matthew stands up, shoulders his bag, and puts the medallion back around his neck, tucks it under his shirt so he can keep it warm and safe and close to his chest. He looks in the direction he’s come from and thinks of the people still lying there and prays that their souls have found a safer rest.

When you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light.

The sun is setting. Matthew touches his medallion and heads west.

---

In the end, he goes back to Fort Collins just long enough to regret it. Derrick is on watch when he finally arrives after nearly a month on his own, and he asks Matthew where the others are only to crumple like a rag doll when he gets his answer. Two days later, it’s Matthew who finds the body, and he buries Derrick with his wedding ring on. It’s the least he can do.

The others look at him the way most people look at ghosts, wary and just a little bit angry too. Their eyes follow him with accusation, dare him to explain why he’s alive when none of the others are, and he wishes, more than anything, that he had an answer for them. The pendant around his neck hangs heavy as a millstone.

Two months later, another squad goes out to raise hell in Denver. It’s only supposed to be a week but two months pass and they’re still not back, and Matthew stops expecting them. Whatever light the fireflies are supposed to be bringing, it feels like it’s dying out, slow and painful. It’s been a lifetime now since it all went to hell, fifteen years of running. He wonders how much more time he's got before someone strings him up or shoots him in front of a crowd.

Hannah’s got a little sister named Molly. She’s thirteen now but she’s got eyes as old as the mountains west of them, and she never asks about the way it used to be. She used to, before Hannah died. Matthew remembers.

She goes out one day to hunt some game. She comes back with a snared rabbit and a bite wound she doesn’t tell anyone about and the next morning Matthew tries to wake her up and ends up putting her down instead. He takes her medallion and packs up what little he feels an attachment to in his room – a few scattered pictures, a broken bracelet from back before everything, a few comic books from some series Hannah’s mother had loved. Aside from that, he leaves no trace.

He runs into Marion when he leaves. She’s on her way in and he’s on his way out and he thinks she knows, even if he looks about like he always does. Her green eyes are catlike and keen in the dawning light and whatever she’s thinking, they don’t convey it. “Any way I can convince you to stay?” she asks without prelude.

Matthew smiles faintly and shakes his head. “Think it’s time I go look for a light somewhere else.” There’s so many shadows here for him now, so many ghosts. It’s hard to find anything worth fighting for in the wake of a dozen battles lost, and this world is hard enough but he has to live, or try to. He made a promise.

Marion nods, just once. “I hope you find one,” she says, tilting her head back. “Hope you send it our way, when you’re done.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“That’s all I can ask.” They share a hug, and Marion smiles with the closest thing to sincerity Matthew’s seen out of her in a long time. They keep walking in opposite directions. Neither of them look back.

---

He finds himself in South Dakota. The Black Hills nearly kill him on several different occasions but he makes it somehow, stumbles out on the far side with a badly sprained ankle and fuel enough for a month’s worth of nightmares. In the distance he can see a town, and he hopes to God that they’ll either be friendly or good enough shots to make him stop worrying.

He runs into a patrol on his way in, and the members of it turn out to fit the first criteria much better than the second. One of them is a fidgety man named Johnny, the other a woman in a ratty green sweater with eyes as sharp as knives. They both point a gun at him when they see him, but neither pulls the trigger, and he expects he ought to be thankful for that. They lead him back to Deadwood and they don’t ask any questions once they’ve clarified that he isn’t bitten.

He means to stay only for a day or two. When three weeks have passed, the man in charge of everything asks him if he just wants to set up in the church, because nobody else in the town has any interest in it and he’s clearly not leaving any time soon. Matthew accepts, because even if it’s a bit drafty and probably not all too structurally sound these days, it’s quiet there. It’s also right next to the graveyard, which means nobody goes there unless they’re forced to, but that suits Matthew just fine. He’s not antisocial by any means, appreciates company where he can find it. The dead just seem to be more his speed, these days.

He puts out the handful of things he took with him from Fort Collins in his room above the church in an attempt to make the place feel a bit like home. It feels like a mausoleum instead, and he takes it all down two days later, tucks it back into his backpack to keep with him always somewhere out of sight.

The town grows on him, and he grows into it. He never quite gets on with the man in charge, but he likes Johnny just fine, swings over to the Gem Saloon to share a drink when the time allows it. Some people take to calling him the Reverend on account of his living situation, and the name sticks.

The seasons change from a frozen winter to a spring that’s not much warmer. The leaves come back anyway, pale and green and gorgeous. Sunlight creeps through the pines and everyone stays out of the forest as much as they can. Matthew goes there more than most, hunting for food and the roots he finds that can be used for medicine. He waits for summer with the same cautious anticipation he used to reserve for waking up on April first, when his sisters were still around to jam his door with pennies so he couldn’t leave for classes.

Matthew keeps his expectations low and his bags packed. He holds onto his Momma’s rosary. He watches the sunrise every morning because he never sleeps through a night.

He waits.