#o:archer]

[jaybird-writes-blog]

’ What are you doing down here? ’ [archus]

The voice of the older man startled Austin, the boy’s body going rigid as his grip from his unbroken arm tensed around the baseball bat he’d taken with him. Slowly, his fingers uncurled and his knuckles faded back to their usual pink. “You scared the shit out of me.”Austin was already on edge. Most of them were after everything that had happened - Boone’s hand, losing Flip and now no sign of Ash with only a promise from a mad man that the kid was still alive...

“I needed space.”I had been the final straw. Watching Ivy shut down, watching his best friend fumble and try helplessly to adjust without his hand and then to have to listen to Dan’s voice cracking as he tried to keep it together without his youngest. It was too much; the worst part being that Austin felt entirely useless in the whole situation. If he could have traded places with Boone he would have - hell, his arm had been broken and fractured and stuck enough times that it was probably a sign he was better off without it. However, trading things like appendages wasn’t exactly doable and certainly not in the world they lived in now.

Looking over his shoulder, Austin let his eyes fall on Archer with a weak sigh. “I don’t know how you do it, babe. Keeping it all together...I feel like screaming but I haven’t got a right to.”

@negan-writes

[jaybird-writes-blog]

’ I know all about cannibalism. ’ [archan]

The subject was more commonly broached in this day and age, but still it held an air of taboo to it. That certain air flooded Dan’s lungs at the response he received in return to the light hearted comment he’d made. Sometimes the harshness of the world his best friend had seen before the apocalypse eluded Dan. His own life had been sheltered, his problems minuscule - death only something that happened to the elderly or to friends of friends of friends. But Archer had seen it first hand, and Dan could only guess he had faced it himself more than once.

An uneasy swallow cleared the man’s throat, words sticking in his throat and on his tongue until he swallowed them and looked at his apple in silence. But the silence broke as curiosity got the better of the teacher, his voice speaking up with a mouthful.“You didn’t....you haven’t actually....actually no. No. I don’t want to know.”

@negan-writes 

[jaybird-writes-blog]

“No doubt you have paid the price, but at least you’re alive today.” [archus]

It was true.Like most things Archer said - wise and well constructed with thought and fact - it was true. Austin looked down at his arm that bore scars from the two breaks it had suffered, a finger slid along the hard discoloured lump where his bone had broken through. The pain seemed distant now but if he lingered on it for too long he could remember it like he was still there.Around him he could hear the hungry whines of the dead as he waited in the rubble, looking up to where he’d fallen from and hoping to every deity he could think of that help returned before the creatures managed to break through the windows around him.He’d never been so scared, never felt more like a burden or a weight.

Swallowing, the younger man turned his head to the side, tugging his hat off and running his hand through his dirty hair before he looked back at Archer with a faint glow of a smile.“You need to stop being so good with words, you make me feel like a dumbass.”

@negan-writes