nadia costa (treta) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2016-02-18 11:41:00 |
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Entry tags: | # 2018 [12] december, nadia costa, nathaniel quinn |
my ankles are tired and i'm home here to stay.
Who: Nate Quinn & Nadia Costa
Where: A picked-over bookshop in Austin
What: Catching up re: her trip and the officers' arrests, and getting snowed in while scavenging for the library.
When: Way backdated to late December
December had moved by at a slow crawl, with Nadia throwing herself back into her supply scout duties with gusto, to make up for her extended absence and Olivia’s relocation to water duty. She and Nate had finally managed to arrange a meetup, however, finding a safe and neutral outside location, where his fugitive status shouldn’t cause trouble. So today she sits on a worn, battered, weather-blasted bench outside a bookshop—below what had once been a streetlight, before the power went out and the glass shattered—her backpack weighing between her shoulders and her hands twining in her lap. Rewind two and a half years and it might’ve been any girl under any streetlight, waiting to meet someone for a normal shopping excursion. She’s been so distracted by the relief of getting home alive, with all their original expedition alive plus one extra. By spending so much time with her older brother, drinking up all the hours and days they never had together, getting to know him as a person. It isn’t until she sees Nate’s familiar truck pulling up in front of the shop that Nadia finds herself surging back to her feet, suddenly antsy, and realises exactly how much she missed seeing her friend in person. When his door opens, her face breaks into a smile. He gets out, both feet on the dirt blown pavement and travels up to his friend. He’s quick to open his arms to her, wide and inviting and he isn’t bashful to scoop her into a hug. She rushes into that embrace without a second thought, almost colliding with Nate’s chest as she flings her arms around his neck, tucking her chin in against his collar. Company is very well appreciated, especially since his friend has landed himself in the worst place in all of Austin. Weeks have passed since the bombing on the Dog Park and his ass is mostly healed. It is hardly anything to move about. Nate is in good spirits because they’ve met at a two story book shop and have plans to pilfer the guts of it, looking for titles to keep and to offer to the lending library project at the LBJ. Spirits are also soaring because it has been forever that he’s seen Nadia and after he releases her from the hug he insists on, he can’t help but give her a peering, looming and scolding look. ”An' here ye are again. It's a pleasure tae see ye. Was it on purpose yer extended absence?” Her expression is sheepish, like a schoolgirl being caught doing something she shouldn’t; of course he’d hit on it at the start. She’d been gone almost an entire month. “I am so, so sorry about that,” Nadia says, her words coming out in a rush. She’d had to make amends with a distraught Alejo and Marina, too. Her hand catches at Nate’s for a moment, gives it an apologetic squeeze, then she folds her arms against herself. “It was not supposed to be quite so long—we thought it would only last a pair of days. Certainly not an entire month, but there were… complications. I hope I did not worry you—although I was concerned, too, when I heard about what was happening at the dog park.” Nate nods. So, she’s heard about the destruction, the officers being arrested, but truly he cannot merely give way to his thoughts and feelings on this with a shrug of his shoulders and polite conversation while they wait to ransack the insides. He looks up the side of the building and straight up until he notices that the sun has been snuffed out by an onary haze. She’s combing over his appearance now, her attention-to-detail quick to pick things out: there’d been a slight hitch to the way Nate moved, but he seems otherwise okay. “You’re alright?” “I am well enaw,” he confirms, not at all completely whole nor would he be until his brother was delivered back home to him. Walls and the rest be damned. “Let’s gang inside. Findin' books will be a goodly relief tae me surely.” He turns to get his bag and the weapon he’s brought. The door is boarded up but that by no means can ensure there is nothing lurking beyond it. “Let’s get inside,” he urges, and Nadia nods, quick to follow as they push open the long-abandoned door. They have to shove a bit, to get past the debris piled up inside. Nadia’s own hand hovers on the hilt of her gun, nerves strung tighter than they once used to be, ever since her assault. (She’s glad Nate never saw her with that swollen face and black eye; she’d told him about it, skimming past the details, but seeing firsthand is another matter.) She pauses once they’re on the threshold, marveling at the sight of toppled shelves and untouched stacks, paper protected from the elements and not warped from rain. No one’s bothered much with books. This sight is precious, an artefact from a world long-gone. “What sort of books are you looking for today?” she says, as if they really are shopping, and then her smile quirks. “Westerns?” “Ye remembered.” he puts a hand to his heart as he moves over to a roughly stacked pile. No westerns are found in this tower. It’s mostly new fiction, once upon a time they were new releases. Now they just might be some of the last printed copies of anything ever again. Westerns weren't exactly best sellers when the world went to hell. Finding something he hadn’t read would be difficult. “I had tae leave most of mae books at the Capitol.” so basically and realistically beggars could not be choosers. He’d take most of anything as long as it was new. He decides to make a pile for takers and a pile for books that would be a good fit for a lending library. Nadia drifts a couple aisles over, starting to sift through her own shelves. “So, where’d ye get to?” he asks, flipping over a book and lazily glancing at the summary, only half interested. “What took ye a month tae get back here?” Her lips purse at the question, facing away from the man, her shoulders set. “We found a town,” Nadia says, even as she remembers how many of the inhabitants didn’t want that particular news to get out. “We got supplies there and it was lovely, actually—I might have wanted to stay, if I did not have family back here. But they were very… guarded, I would say, and things got tense. Between us and the townspeople. Our cars had been sabotaged before we arrived, so that we couldn’t drive back without repairs. And then there was a horde…” One hand trails over the cover of some Penguin classics, and Nadia pauses again. “It all got more complicated than we expected. I’m very glad to be back.” Nate is quiet, whatever book he was palming is set down. His fingers strumming against it, tapping from pointer finger to ring. “I am too,” he adds. The idea that she could have decided to stay somewhere else is unsettling. It makes him uncomfortable. Silently he wonders if she would have contacted him after or if she would have just moved ahead with her life, left him as a blip on her map of experience. This of course is a perfectly selfish reaction the news that she had suffered through an ordeal and instead of mashing through all of it and asking more about it or prodding her for details, he is comfortably settling into the fact that she is here with him, looking through books. She’s fine. Healthy even… Maybe a little bit more tanned. But this begs the question that follows, “Will ye be goin’ on again? Lookin’ for greener pastures or is the girse okay on this side?” He picks up another book and lazily strums through the pages. It’s just a fidget, a gesture that might make him look less interested than he is. Nadia’s dark eyes watch him carefully, with the same sort of meticulous attention she paid to the Luckenbachers. After so long on the road, she’s always been painfully aware of others’ body language, and Nathaniel perhaps moreso than most. “After my last experience?” Her laugh is a gnarled little thing. “Hardly. It was long enough away. I found myself missing Austin, and I never thought I would have felt that way about this city. Just learning that about myself was valuable, I think.” She’s made her way to the romance shelf, but is still distracted, even from her favourite genre. She finds herself looking at the angles of Nate’s back instead, his hands fussing over the pages, titles he’s not reading. “This side is nice. I wouldn’t leave all of you. Maizie gives me peanut butter, and you arrange birthday parties.” The answer appeases the shake that had gotten into his fingers. Finally he can focus on actually making a pile that is worth something to someone. And for him too. It’s strange that he realizes now that they have no way for them to bring the books anywhere. No crates. Just their bags. Hardly practical for the undertaking they’ve taken. He chuckles to himself. How such an obvious thing could be missed… “We do nae have a crate or…” he peeks over his shoulder at her as she peruses the romances. This makes him smile too. He moves over with the book he’d been thumbing still in his hand and starts looking with her. Pulling out a few choice titles he finds Gentle Rogue. He pulls it down and glances over the cover. He wonders if there is any male romance writers. He looks across the shelves trying to find someone…anyone. “Admittedly, we do not have to carry back the entire store at once,” she says. “We could do it in batches, and come back another day?” She has no idea what Nate is looking for, but she’s started to browse in earnest herself, looking for eye-catching illustrations. They’re like old friends, these bodice-rippers; there’s always men with waxed chests, women with wind-blown hair, people posing in each others’ arms, perhaps dipping each other over some dramatically rocky crag in the middle of a storm. Other times, plastered atop of a terribly-designed background. The people are always too shiny and unreal, the books presenting a misty rose-hued image of the world where villains chew the scenery, and even the most terrible assholes have some inner softness if you can just strike the right chord, and rakes and rogues can be tamed if a woman is just stubborn enough, good-hearted enough, feisty enough. They fight, they have sex around the halfway point, they fight some more, they mend their ways, they get together and have more terrific sex. It’s a familiar formula, and that’s what makes it comforting. Then she comes across something, her eye drawn to the title on the spine: Never Seduce a Scot. And Nadia can’t help the laughter that bubbles out of her, an irrepressible sort of can you believe this amusement that she tries to press down, but fails. She wouldn’t have batted an eye at the cover before, but it’s funnier with this particular company. The woman tosses the book lightly at him. “Did you ever wear bright purple kilts?” “Aye. Often,” he says, catching the book nimbly enough so he can glance at the cover. “The likeness is there. Don’t ye think?” the question is asked as he holds the book up beside his face. His other hand goes through the scruff at his chin. He’s been lax on shaving since the apocalypse began. “It’s true, lass.” Nate tells her, after he’s sped read the back cover. “The delights I offer are too much for most. It’s a burden I must bear despite my ruggedness. The warning is owt. We Scots are sex machines.” “Hm, I do not know, he looks a bit too pretty.” Her hands raised as if to form the frame of a picture, Nadia squints at him through her fingers. Noticing his thoughtful chin-stroke, she then continues, “on the other hand, here is another book starring a hairy librarian. That fits you more, I think.” “What ye mean? I”m pretty.” He flutters his eyelashes as if to punctuate that point. His smile just adds two more periods, what with his dimples. All of this is a joke they’ve circled before, and it still makes her smile. Her shelter has stocked a lot of nonfiction, so today she’s beefing up the LBJ’s lending library with more piles of curated fiction: romance and magical realism for herself, plus some young adult (Maizie would appreciate it). When Nadia drifts into the foreign language section and finds an anthology of Portuguese poetry, she seizes on it like a life-vest, her heart soaring a little. The woman instinctively clutches the book to her chest, then starts rummaging through the rest of the shelves, pulling out as many as she can find, selfishly. But her heart is light. It’s fun. She realises that with a sort of dull shock: this is fun. It had become so easy over the years to forget that fun could still exist. “How are you doing, by the way?” Nadia asks, at last. “With everything, at the Dog Park. And with the Capitol.” After the question, she’s sorry to see the way Nate’s expression rearranges itself like clouds passing in front of the sun. But friendship means she doesn’t mind treading on more serious subjects. Their interview set the scene for that, after all. He’s starting his own pile and truthfully he is unsure how many he’ll be willing to part with when it’s time to divvy them up between the LBJ and his own personal stock. She’s asked a hard question and he’s tidying up the pile, aligning the spines of each book as he gets his own spine ready to answer. How is he doing? It’s a hard question to answer. It’s a hard question because he is realizing that he is doing just fine. He’s here, he’s free, he’s shopping and laughing while his brother is probably facing untold terrors in that place. The words choke up in his throat. Emotion is like that. He isn’t going to sob or break down but he feels frightened constantly. With everything that is happening, with the monsters and the villains out there feasting and plotting he knows that the only thing that anyone really had to lose anymore is each other. “Come on then…” Nadia has to know how hard he’s taking it all or she wouldn’t have brought it up. “Wrap me up in a hug. Tell me it’ll be alright.” She snorts, something close to a dry laugh. Were it anyone else, his request might have sounded like defensive bullshit, a joke. But one thing she’s learned about him over the last half-year: Nathaniel Quinn is earnest, and genuine, and wears his heart on his sleeve. (Like she used to.) “I cannot tell you it is going to be okay. I am not a… how do you call them, una vidente? They read crystal balls, tell the future.” She crosses over into his aisle anyway, finds the spot at Nate’s side, and jots herself under his arm, looping hers around him. She tightens the hug, tucking her jaw in against his shoulder. “But I have faith that you’ll be okay. He’ll be okay. It will all work out. You all broke them out before, yes?” Nevermind that her own shelter leader died. One must be optimistic and determined; Nadia learned that long ago. Outside the broken windows, a fine white ash has started falling. For that moment, she doesn’t notice. There was a frigid wind when they arrived earlier, but she’d simply assumed that was a part of Austin climate. “I think all kimmers are a wee bit of una vidente,” he returns, wrapping his arms around her tight, making her more involved in the hug than she might have wanted. He’s determined to have contact. He yearns for it really, as demonstrative a person as he is. The connection is everything to him. The now is glaringly bright. He rests his cheek on the top of her head, inhales the scent of her hair, lets his body press against her and his hands to pat and then stroke down her back and back up again. The woman goes stiff and rigid for a moment, before relaxing into the contact (she instigated it, after all, did she not?). A contented sigh releases as he forces her to remain like this for as long as he can hold onto it. The warmth is lovely and he realizes how cold he’d been before. How fitting that there’d be snow. Snow. He hadn’t seen snow for so long… “Snow? Whattya…” He looks up, looks out the window and scrutinizes. “How’s it snowin’ then….” It’s not an excuse to let go of her. It’s an excuse to hold her tighter. Nadia looks up, peers out across the tumbled wreckage of the store and out into the street. “So that is not normal? In Brazil, we would see snow sometimes up in the mountains, but I have no idea what is normal in Austin—” Let alone an Austin after the outbreak. After a pause to savour the sensation of the hug, Nadia squirms reluctantly out of his arms like a cat slipping through his grasp (and she’s reminded of Antón, of the last time she was held like this, hundreds of miles and half-a-year away). She pushes the thought aside, and stands outlined in the doorway as she squints at the drifting flakes. Before he can stop her, Nadia has extended a hand in wonder to catch one. “Filho da puta!” she hisses, her hand snapping backwards, fingers clenching reflexively as she scrubs the flake from her skin. There’s a small burn on her palm, searing and livid. There’s always a coldness that he feels when someone leaves his embrace. It’s an emptiness. Something he doesn’t like about it and so he had no desire to catch any snowflakes on his tongue. Instead he watches, arms empty, torso chilled. There’s no expectation that the snow is anything else and so he warms to her curiosity instead. Instead of delight though she flinches, hisses in pain and he lunges for her hand, for her wrist. “Whatae?” he asks her, thinking it has to be something like a bite… But no, when she relaxes her hand enough for him to see he sees the burn and he recoils, sweeping her with him inside and closing down the door so that a wayward gust of wind wouldn’t blow any skin melting flakes their way. His first thought of course, is the Dog Park and of Bunny. They are out in the open, in a trailer park and he knows that many of them would be getting the same kinds of burns as Nadia just did. It’s concerning and he reaches for his phone straight away in his pocket. One hand dials, the other is still clinging to Nadia, holding her wrist. With her spare hand, she keeps scrubbing at her palm with her sleeve, silent. He calls Bunny but there isn’t an answer. Only thing to do is leave a message. He tries Adelaide and he doesn’t get an answer. “Not tae is pickin’ up.” He looks worried but it is what it is. He’ll try again soon. “How is it?” he asks as he takes his bottle of water out of his bag to uncap it. Nate’s voice finally jolts Nadia out of her frenzied little reverie, her fingers curling around his. Her short nails dig into his hand, a way to distract herself from the pain, before she apologises and relaxes her deathly grip. “It’s not coming off,” she says, a little pleadingly. Over his shoulder, she can see lightning flickering in the clouds, and the snow—if it is snow, which it seems likely it isn’t anymore—is starting to come down harder. It’s not a pretty sight. It’s already looking impossible to make it safely back to his car. “It will sting…” he warns, flattening her palm before he begins to pour the water onto the singe the flake has left behind. The water carries away the chemical burn and left behind is a red blister. He tentatively blows on the wound to cool it and then looks back where Nadia is staring. There’s no way he’s risking any wayward flakes to get back to his jeep. They can wait it out some. For now they’re safe and sound. He has some food. Some water...a lifetime of stories to consume and good company to share it all with. “Better?” he asks, worrying but letting go finally so she doesn’t feel he’ll be attached to her the whole time. She flexes her fingers back and forth for a bit, testing the still-stinging sensation of pain. Not to mention, he thinks he has some ibuprofin somewhere in his bag. That’s where he gets to when he detaches and starts looking in the multitude of pockets that make up his impressively ambitious backpack. The woman settles on an overturned table, balancing carefully on the edge, her arms drawn up against her chest while Nate searches. “Have you ever seen something like this?” she asks, a little distantly. Still looking out the window. It’s one of those questions he could answer a hundred different ways. The possibilities all tremble there in his mouth, explanations and hypotheses all clamoring for release. It’s his logical side that grips him now. It pushes through his tendency for flights of fancy and arbitrary fantastiques. He’s seen blazing blizzards and frigid fires.He’s seen blob rain and scorched earth. He’s seen death and half dead humans. Nate has seen evil. “Nae.” It’s such a small world - so seemingly inconsequential. It isn’t though. That there’s a flesh eating blanket of chemicals leaking from the sky is awe inspiringly terrifying that he’s had to spend four minutes looking in the same pocket three times for the impish bottle of medicine. It makes him wonder what else is waiting for them. Is the moon a monster? Are the stars all lies. “You?” “No. But then again, the situation was very different further south?” Nadia offers, a lilting question in her voice, even if she isn’t quite sure what she’s asking. “The infection had made it that far, yes, but other governments did not try this gas thing. So it did not, to put it frankly, fuck up the weather quite so much. It was more normal, out there.” “I havenae seen any other place like Austin.” he interjects and then wonders about it as he pours two pills out onto his palm once his fight with the childproof cap is won. Why just Austin... Why the prax after, warehouses full and a mayor that still gets his groceries delivered from somewhere but from whom? I miss the outside sometimes, as awful as it was. Parts of it. The words are there on Nadia’s tongue, but she swallows them. Her family is here. And here, and here. Nadia’s chewing over another thought, staring at her palm and listening to Nate rummage. When she glances up again, she meets his dark blue eyes. “Would you ever go back to Scotland? If you were able to, today? By ship or plane?” “There is nothing for me there…” he steps back over, and takes her good hand in his and puts the two pills in the center of her palm. After her reaches for the water bottle. There’s enough liquid still inside for her to knock the pills back with. “There hasn’t been for a long time.” “We have probably talked about this before. Home is where the heart is, and everything. And now you are at the Dog Park, with Bishop and with Bunny. I suppose I am the same, with Brazil—I don’t know what I would find there. Probably ruins and zombies, same as anywhere else.” Nadia knocks back the painkillers, then shoots the man a grateful smile. “Thank you.” They’ve talked about it a lot, even in the few times they’ve manages to get together. It’s fulfilling to lose so much and then gain everything worth having. He’s entirely grateful for the family and friends he’s found here. Her hand will ache but hopefully he can distract her enough until the pain medicine starts to work some. With a mischievous smile he moves from her to take the book Never Seduce a Scot. She can’t suppress her burst of laughter once she realises what he’s about to do. Opening to page one he began, making sure to overshoot his accent. Afterall, this needed to be an authentic experience and it was then that he began to wow her with his narration, “Peace hud come tae th' highlands. Th' land whispered softly ay its gratitude for a brief respite frae violence, rebellion, an' bloodshed. Sprin' had come, brin' wi' it lush green girse amang th' rock ootcroppings an' boolders 'at waur sae predominant ower th' terrain….” |