Olivia Jensen is on her way to ʀᴇᴀʟʟʏ ғᴀsᴛ (sprinted) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2016-03-09 21:59:00 |
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Entry tags: | # 2019 [01] january, dave cutler, olivia jensen |
Who: Olivia Jensen and Dave Cutler
When: Backdated to the evening of January 9, before this scene with Dave and Nadia
Where: Just outside the Oval Office
What: Dave needs a babysitter.
It was the perpetual question in Dave's life as a parent -- how much exposure to former-human, brain-devouring monsters was too much? Wes had already endured more than most, though he claimed that he couldn't remember his mother turning, but Dave didn't think a near five year old was ready for picking up a handgun and shooting from the roof into a horde at the gates. The shelter leader's stepdaughter had been keen to babysit once before and Wes didn't seem to mind spending another night with Maizie so long as his father promised he wasn't going through the front doors, a promise made easier by omitting existence of a way onto the roof. Dave had never seen a walker coordinated enough to scale a building like the main library, so there was only a miniscule amount of guilt as he carried Wes through the building on his shoulders, making the boy laugh and hunch low every time he charged toward a doorway, slowing down only just before passing through. He knocked on the door to the oval office, and waited. The girl who opened it leveled a perplexed look at the pair of them before the puzzle pieces connected in her head and a look of recognition passed over her features. "Oh -- you're looking for Maizie, right?" Olivia's girlfriend had watched Wes a couple of times over the last two months and the short interactions she'd had with the boy's father had been enough for her to recognize in him someone who shared the same kind of sense of humor she had. Tonight, though, their mere presence was yet another reminder that Maizie was gone. "She's not here." "Well shit," Dave answered, though his tone wasn't as concerned as the words let on. If something bad had happened to the girl, this one would have had another way to describe her besides absent. He crouched down and Wes slid off his shoulders, dropping onto the ground. "I promised her stepmom I was gonna help put up some extra barricades inside, so we came to see if she wanted to hang out with Wes again." He glanced over her shoulder, and then back at the girl. "Liv, right?" Like Liv Tyler -- when they'd been introduced, Dave had wondered what the fuck had happened to one of his teenage crushes. "What're you up to, Liv?" "I -- yeah. That's me." It was still new sometimes, this feeling of having an actual nickname, and her heart ached suddenly for the girl who never called her anything else. She looked at Wes with clear trepidation as her mind spun, looking for a lie, but the stress of the last day made her come up empty handed. "Nothing," she said, steeling herself for the inevitable ask. After all, Dave was trying to like, help people and stuff, and she was holing up because she couldn't deal with her feelings. Damn it. "How long do you think you'll be?" "Wes, go see if the cat's here," Dave suggested, all but having gotten permission by Liv's begrudging admission that she was free. "Be gentle, remember if you sit still it'll come smell you." He inclined his head toward the hallway, waiting until she'd stepped out enough for the door to mostly close behind her. "'m supposed to go up on the roof and take shots for an hour or two, but he likes us to be in the same place when they're nearby, so if you could just hang out with him for a little while? You don't have to feed him or anything, he's not gonna bust the place up." Olivia couldn't help but look over her shoulder at the closed door, imagining the hijinks Wes was no doubt already up to while unattended. "Okay," she said doubtfully as she turned back to face Dave, pulling her phone out of her back pocket. "Yeah, I think I can manage that. Give me your number in case I need to get ahold of you?" It was both new and automatic -- in the years before the virus, Dave had put his phone number in a near endless number of girls' phones, but arriving in Austin to find out some nerds had managed to rebuild the internet and phone service had been a shock after living so long with the metaphorical cord cut. "Thank you," he said, offering a reassuring smile along with her phone. "You'll be fine, he's not gonna die in there, and I don't think you're a pedo, so you should be good for a couple hours." She took the phone back and bit her lip; try though she did, she couldn't fully muster up a smile in return. "Have you been outside already, then?" she added quickly, aware that they probably didn't want to leave Wes alone for too long. (She assumed as much, anyway. Kids seemed like so much work!) "How does it look?" "Nope, not since it started. Wanted to get a few people with chainsaws to thin the herd right at the beginning, but I guess y'all don't keep them in this building." He was cavalier about the suggestion, so much so that it was probably hard to tell if he was joking or not, but the last was slightly more serious, as she seemed to be genuinely concerned, even living inside the heart of a fortress. "I'll tell you what it's like up top when I come back for him." "Sure. Yeah, that would be great." Olivia had been looking out the window on and off for the past two days, even though each glimpse only served to ratchet her anxiety up even higher. Still, it was like a car crash she couldn't avoid thinking about. She needed Dave's testimony to corroborate what she already knew. "I guess I'll just…" She gestured over her shoulder at the door. "We'll be here, so just send me a text when you're coming up." "Will do," he promised, with a sloppily executed salute. "Text me from your phone so I have the number? Got it on silent, so whenever's fine." Dave gave his back pocket a pat, making one last attempt at a joke before departing. "Get your game face on Liv; they can smell fear until the age of eight." |