danny kwon (widereceiver) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2015-10-07 00:24:00 |
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It had been a bad fucking day. Danny was normally the picture of composure, but when the team came crashing back through the gates of Fox Grove, their football padding was blood-stained, their hair slick with sweat, the evidence of flesh and brains still lingering on the edges of their weapons. They’d lost a kid on the supply run today: only sixteen, one of their youngest. He’d seen the whites of the boy’s eyes as the runner dragged him down. The rest of them had fled. Hopped back on their bikes and tore out of the market like bats out of hell, because there were runners after them, which meant undead hell as far as Danny was concerned. He’d tried to find Persephone at first, but upon hearing that she was tied up in a meeting, Danny went roaming the hallways in restless dissatisfaction instead. After hitting up the cafeteria and their head of kitchens, he’d picked up some of their precious scavenged alcohol (because of course, they were teenagers, and so liquor stores always featured on their raids). Normally he would have stuck with the team, but all of them were shaken and incapable of looking each other in the eye, too aware of the fact that they’d run, that they’d left the boy behind. Jason had disappeared—to process in his own way, lapsing into one of those bitter fugues as he always did—and so Danny wandered like an untethered balloon. He’d taken a shower to get the blood out from under his fingernails and the rotting flesh from his hair. Vomited into the drain of the gym showers. Cleaned himself up as best he was able. By the time Lily found him, he was sitting morosely on the floor of the hallway next to his old locker, a bottle of tequila by his side. His hair was still wet, and he was dressed in just jeans and a worn white t-shirt. -- She’d woken in her bed with a start and a gasp, her forehead and back slick with nightmare-induced sweat that made her shirt cling to her with fervor. It was the same nightmare she always had (her father, his face half rotted away as he gave that awful death rattle), and she’d known right away that there would be no returning to sleep for her. Rather than fight a losing battle, she rose from her bed, got dressed for the day and started on the daily chores. When Lily wasn’t showing the newbies around, she typically had her face buried in some scientific journal or was tinkering with some new concoctions that they could try and use as a weapon. Sometimes, she was even successful. Sometimes, they had to avoid the science lab for the better part of a day because something gone wrong. But, hey, she won some, she lost some, right? Everything had been doing well enough as far as the apocalypse could go. Until she caught word of the supply run gone awry. They’d lost one of their own, a kid that Lily had never really been close with but that didn’t change the weight that settled over her shoulders. From that point on, it was like a pall had fallen over Fox Grove. The halls were mostly quiet, reduced to mournful and hushed whispers behind closed doors. Lily just thought of her father. She was walking through the west hallway, hands shoved deep in her fraying pockets as she worried absently at her lower lip, and that was when she saw Danny. He looked as morose as she was sure he felt, which was saying a fuck ton, and she hesitated briefly, unsure as to whether or not she should stop and say something. It wasn’t like she had been harboring a massive fucking crush on the football player ever since she joined the school or anything. Oh, wait, it was exactly like that. Either way, her soft heart won out and she found herself sliding down the wall next to him, her pale knees folding and her hands settling in her lap. “Wanna hear a joke?” -- Danny craned his head to watch Lily sink down beside him, one hand tipping the bottle back and forth, rocking it against the linoleum floor. “Hmm. Yeah. Shoot,” he said dully. With some effort, he managed to muster up a smile for her, but it slid off his face almost immediately afterwards, like a gust of wind blowing it away. -- Even if the smile was short lived and lacking true fervor, it was there all the same and earned him a little smile of her own in return. “Okay,” she mused, inwardly picking her brain for the perfect joke. She knew a lot of them, practically an endless supply, but she needed something so cheesy and awful that it was just good enough. “Why’d the one-handed man cross the road?” Lily posed, tilting her head to the side so she could better survey the football player. It was a shame, really, that such a handsome face could be so melancholy. Unfortunately, it was an expression that everyone around here knew well. Happiness was a fleeting thing in the apocalypse, as it turned out. -- Even when Danny was in a good mood, he tended to turn his smiles inward, averting his face to disguise his flickers of amusement. He needed people to take him seriously, to see him as a figure of authority rather than their friend. He’d been all grim determination on the football field, and he was grim determination on supply runs, and he was grim determination when posted at the council door while they were in meetings. Of the people who got to see the other side of him, the boy who laughed freely and fell out of his chair when he was too amused—those people were few and far between, and Lily wasn’t one of them. But he was patient, and open-minded, so he listened to the joke and considered it for a moment. The bottle stopped rocking. “To…” Danny was thinking, but he drew a blank. “Okay, I got nothing. Why did the one-handed man cross the road?” -- “To get to the second hand store!” she chirped, perhaps a little too happily, and she even went so far as to slap her knee. She knew it was a shitty joke, but sometimes those happened to be the best, didn’t they? Sometimes, you needed to hear a joke that was so bad it was funny, and she had an endless supply of those up her sleeves. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Maybe it won’t get me on Comedy Central, not that Comedy Central’s still a thing, but I think it’s pretty fuckin’ genius, myself.” Lily leaned the back of her head against the unyielding wall of the hallway and looked down at the bottle of tequila Danny had in one of his hands. She didn’t even like tequila, but right then it was looking pretty fucking delicious. “So, is that bottle for sharing or are you planning on dying of alcohol poisoning tonight?” -- He stared at her blankly for a moment, one long slow look of shock—that awful pun beating itself against the dull haze he’d sunk into—before Danny finally cracked a smile, one broad and genuinely amused. He almost laughed, but instead held out the bottle towards her. An offering, a reward. “Here, you deserve it. That was so shitty, you need to wash the taste of that joke off.” But there was still that smile creeping into the corners of his expression that betrayed his actual feeling. So his head tipped back against the wall as well, propping his forearms against the tilted angles of his knees. Staring at the grimy walls (water was too precious, and couldn’t be used for something so trivial as washing the building anymore), and the corkboards which had once held details about PTA meetings and after-school math tutoring and piano lessons and team meets. Nowadays, it was council meetings and power outages and cafeteria rationing and new birth announcements. “Do anything good today?” Danny asked, while she took over the bottle. It was better than thinking about the supply run he’d left behind. -- It was fucking cliche and ridiculous the way his smile very nearly had her heart skipping an entire beat in her chest. She wasn’t a girl that lost herself in a crush, not someone who fell head over heels and saw the world from behind rose colored glasses, but seeing him smile so broadly and brightly made her think that things might eventually turn out alright. It would be a longshot, but as long as people were still able to smile and laugh, that had to mean something, didn’t it? Lily took the offered bottle with an appreciative tilt of the neck toward Danny and, after preparing herself with a deep breath and a preliminary wince, she downed a hearty swallow of the amber-colored liquid that burned a trail all the way to her belly. “That is some bottom shelf tequila, my friend,” she said, feeling as though the words were tinged with liquid fire. “Almost as shitty as my joke.” “Beggars can’t be choosers,” he huffed back, his voice wry. That didn’t keep her from taking another drink, though. “Good? Nah, not really. Played around in the lab. I have this theory that if we can find a way to blast the geeks with liquid nitrogen, they’d just kind of fall apart. Like, literally. So I toyed with this compound and … and I realize this is probably not something you give a flying fuck about, so let’s take a drink together.” -- “Hey. Anything that kills geeks, I care about.” Part of him was always on the lookout for better and more efficient ways for them to operate, including leveraging all of those nerdy bespectacled chem students into building something awesome—not everyone could simply pick up a nailbat and start swinging, after all. That brought his thoughts skittering too dangerously close to what he was starting to think of as The Off-Limits. That bricked-up, caution-taped corner of his mind that he had shut the door firmly on, and wasn’t considering right now. So Lily was right, and there were better things to focus on. Desperate for anything to think about that didn’t involve the reality outside those doors, the hungry hordes, Danny instead levelled a look at her. His eyes were slightly hazy, his head buzzing with alcohol, his movements more loose and wobbly than they’d have been otherwise. “What did you want to do?” he asked suddenly. “Before the outbreak, I mean. Were you gonna go to school here?” He’d just realised he didn’t know anything about the girl sitting beside him. Lily had been ubiquitous at the parties, a laughing presence amongst her friends, but Danny hadn’t paid much attention to her. -- It was a question that managed to momentarily leave Lily faltering, speechless. Honestly, it had been so long since she considered it, what she wanted to do before, that for a brief moment or two, she had to actually think back and try to remember. It almost seemed impossible to think that there was a time before their lives revolved around beating back hordes of hungry undead and feeling the sharp sting of loss as their comrades fell around them like flies. That was just life now. “I wanted to do something with medicine. I couldn’t decide what, exactly, but I just kind of thought I’d figure that out once I got into college,” she mused with a little shrug, her smile bordering on an expression that was downright sad. Lily had been so excited about college, but she never got the chance to experience like so many others around here. When he asked if she wanted to go to the university in Austin, she shook her head as she took another drink, wincing yet again as it burned its way down in a trail of liquid wildfire. “No. My mom and I moved here because she got a job offer, but I was planning on moving back to Detroit to be with my dad. The day it all happened, I was gonna sit her down and break the news that I wanted to go back. It wasn’t that I didn’t love my mom or anything like that. She was great. I was just kind of always a daddy’s girl.” Lily realized she was talking about her parents in past-tense, and she cast her eyes down to her hands. “What about you, football star? Were you gonna make a career out of it?” -- “Seriously? The day it happened? Wow. Some kine luck.” He was giving her a closer look now, part astonished, part amused, part thunderstruck on Lily’s behalf. Coincidences, shitty timing, dramatic irony—then again, maybe she wouldn’t have been alive if she’d gone to Detroit. He shook his head about football, reaching over to take another sip of the tequila. “Nah. It was a means to an end. I needed it to get a ride to college, so I used it.” It’s one of the differences between him and the rest of the jocks; others were passionate about the sport, but Danny was passionate about the end result. “Guess I was hoping to get into engineering. My parents wanted me to make something of myself. My mom’s a nurse though, she would’ve approved of medicine.” Present tense. It’s one of the things he’s desperately grateful for, and he realised the disparity in their speech, but too late. “—Sorry. Here I am, just dredging up bullshit. Gimme another dumb joke.” -- Lily stayed quiet for the most part, more than content to listen. As comfortable as she was spewing word vomit, she was just as comfortable to sit back and listen. She often found that people felt the need to tell her their life story. Her mother always said it was because she had a “comforting presence” about her. Briefly, she thought about her mom — about her soft eyes and her slim features, so different from Lily’s, and she felt that familiar pang in her chest. “It’s not bullshit,” she assured him, reaching out to take a drink of her own. Already she could feel the beginning haze of tipsiness just on the outside of her consciousness, waiting for just a few more drinks before it could really take hold. When he asked for another dumb joke, she smiled a little and paused to think of the perfect one. “Why’d the Mexican push his wife off the cliff?” -- “Is this one gonna be offensive?” he deadpanned back, with a bit of a pause and an inquisitive look—but he couldn’t quite maintain the straight face, so even a relative stranger like Lily could tell that Danny wasn’t judging. -- “Probably, yeah, especially since you’re also a person of color,” she deadpanned right back, not especially worried about political correctness given the nature of the world. She just wanted to make him laugh, to lighten whatever burden he carried on his shoulders if only for a moment. “But hey, you’re not Mexican, so at least there’s that?” Smirking, she reached for the bottle of liquor and, with a nefarious raising of her eyebrows, she wiggled the bottle as she spoke. “He pushed her off the cliff Te-Quil-A.” -- “Oh my god.” He spluttered, and this time it was a real laugh, almost choking as he was caught off-guard. It was rare to see Daniel Kwon let down his usual strict tension like this. He sagged back against the wall, and in that moment, it was as if he’d finally shucked his metaphorical badge, dropping the shells and walls that constituted the Head of Security. Now he was just Danny. “You’re fucking ridiculous,” he said. And he was looking at Lily more carefully now, and columns and rows were aligning in his head, aided liberally by the tequila. He was in need of distraction, and the world seemed to have served one up to him on a platter. And she was nice, and cute, and made him laugh, and wasn’t leading any of the social factions, and a boy was dead but Daniel was alive and that was good enough of a reason, wasn’t it? Others in the school had done it for no better reason than the lights had gone out. So he leaned in, covering the short distance between them as they sat side-by-side on the floor, and kissed her. -- It was as if he was a totally different person right then and there, his shoulders suddenly relaxed against the wall and his laugh genuine and surprised. Lily found herself grinning in response, practically ear to ear, and she took a quick drink of the tequila as she watched him. And he was watching her. “Fucking ridiculous?” she asked with a little chuckle beneath her breath. “I’ve definitely been called worse. You should hear what —” She didn’t get to finish her sentence because he was leaning in to capture her mouth with his own, and Lily’s response was seamless. She parted her lips, her fingers reaching up to rest against his shoulder. She’d only imagined this a dozen times. Or a hundred. Suddenly, the bottle of tequila was forgotten in favor of the kiss. Everything was forgotten in favor of the kiss. -- He was unaware of her particular attachment (and still would be, months later), but it didn’t matter in this exact moment: she was hands and lips and teeth, fingertips winding into his shirt. Everything Danny needed right now. There had been a brief fleeting worry that he was trespassing his bounds, that she would just outright sock him in the jaw for daring to presume—but by Lily’s enthusiastic reaction, that fear was unfounded. They were almost on the verge of tipping right over onto the dirty linoleum floor of the public hallway, of knocking over the bottle beside them, before Danny managed to regain his balance, breaking away for air. “Do you want—” he started, then seemed unsure how to finish that sentence. He’d always held himself aloof from this sort of thing; unlike others on the football team, Daniel hadn’t exactly gone full-tilt into the tangle of apocalyptic hormones. -- Danny didn’t have to finish the sentence. She cut him off with another kiss, this one just at the corner of his lips, and when she pulled back for her own intake of breath, she was nodding. “Yep,” she said, her breath warm and smelling of the cheap tequila as it pooled against his lips and chin. “Sure do.” There were no fireworks, no chorus of gospel singers or the twitter of fairytale like birds, but it was everything Lily thought she wanted. She wanted Danny. She wanted to forget that she was likely an orphan, that they were losing friends faster than flies, and she couldn’t think of a better way to forget, even for just a little while. “C’mon,” Lily urged, moving to her feet and offering a hand to help him do the same. -- So he took the hand, and they both stumbled together in a tangle of limbs to the nearest source of privacy—which, as it turned out, was a nearby supply closet. Not exactly the most romantic of settings, yet it did the job. They were teenagers, so they were sloppy, messy, fumbling. At one point Lily banged her head against the shelf, and a broom jabbed Danny in the side before he was able to kick it away (seriously, was he not able to ever do this without someone getting injured?), and it was difficult to find their way in the dark. But they made the best of it in the end, their minds temporarily scrubbed empty of anything but this very basic urge—and they didn’t think of protection, and boy, would they regret that later. |