Rooms

Who: Beau & Amelia
What: Just an afternoon
Where: Courtyard at the prison
When: Recent
Warnings/Rating: None.
Status: Complete.

[Beau hadn't learned much from his mama before God took her up to heaven, but she had taught him a little bit of this and that. No, he hadn't liked sitting still while she taught him how to pull a thread through fabric, but he was grateful for her tutelage now as he sat there in the courtyard under the spring sun with a stack of things beside him. He had found a sewing kit in his bag, a little thing with only a couple of needles, and the thread was pulled from fabric too beat up to be worth saving, but it was enough to do a little patching, to pull together holes and clean up the things they had.

He was bent over a shirt as he worked, tongue sticking out the side of his mouth, neat little stitches just like his mama taught him.]

Who: Shane and Clem (+ Graham, eventually)
What: Show and tell gone wrong
Where: Graham/Shane's cell
When: Nowish
Warnings/Rating: Language, likely

Clem and Tess had found a consignment shop when they'd gone supply hunting, and Clem had piled a suitcase high with things that didn't fit a man. She was real tired of men's pants and men's shirts, and she would've taken that whole shop home to the prison if she could've done. As it was, she'd needed to sit on the suitcase to get it to closing, and she was plenty sure that Tess thought she was as vain and frivolous a woman as could be.

Clem didn't care even the smallest bit. She had clothes, and a few bars of nice smelling soap and some lipgloss from the tiny shop above the pharmacy, and it was like Christmas come in May, which was just crazy as could be for a girl raised knowing she had countless billions in the bank. But things were real changed these days, and the red dress that she slipped on after showering - washing her hair with soap that smelled liked roses and dotting her lips with gloss that tasted like cherries - that dress felt like something designer as could be. Truth was, the dress wasn't even a name brand, but she didn't care. It made her feel feminine for the first time in over a month, hem to mid-thigh and heels and underthings in the same red as the dress.

She let her hair dry, and then she went looking for Graham, because she knew she could twirl around and he would tell her how pretty she looked. She rounded into the cell he shared with Shane, a skip to her step that wasn't daunted any by the heels.

"Look-it what I got."

Who: Clementine and Tess
What: Going on a run
Where: A town a few miles off
When: Current to when it finishes
Warnings/Rating: Probably gore

Clem was done with wearing men's pants held up by Graham's belt. She was done with a shirt tied at the small of her back, too big by half and covered in gore stains that she couldn't wash out, no matter how she scrubbed at them. Maybe it was frivolous, but there had to be something like home left in this life of theirs. She was real sure voicing something like that would cause a ruckus, so she kept it to herself mostly. She told Graham, but she knew he wouldn't go telling Shane about it, even if they were thick as thieves, him and Shane.

But she decided to watch and wait, and when the opportunity came, she pounced on it. They needed some supplies, and she volunteered. It was Tess going, and Clem figured it would be easier to pop her head in a store with clothing if there was another woman with her. She wasn't real worried about that being sexist; she'd grown up on crinoline and rouge and women being real different from men.

One of Graham's guns tucked under that too-big belt, and a real nice machete tucked at her hip, and she followed Tess out to one of the cars they'd managed to scavenge. "There's a real quaint town a few miles out," she said, climbing into the passenger's seat. She was from the state, after all, now that she'd figured out just where in Georgia they were.

Summer was coming on thick and cloying. The journals functioned as a kind of calendar for those that were stuck in a world without access to television or radio or civilization. The days could bleed together, sticky and tough to stomach, ultimately scabbed over by loneliness so that a week felt more like a month in the end. The journals were a window to the rest of them. Them, Joey had come to think of the others as similar but separate. They were all cast into the same circumstance, but everybody else seemed to have an upper hand while those that were stuck at the prison were quite literally stuck. He'd stopped looking for a way out of the zombie apocalypse and acceptance was beginning to take root. He'd told Ella that he wouldn't give up, and he wouldn't stop trying to get out of this place, but even when he'd said it, it'd been a lie.

The only thing to do was push forward, to persevere, and to make sure that those around him were well. Shane and Graham seemed to always be out on supply runs, and the prison was quiet in the afternoons when everybody seemed to be waiting with wringing hands to see if as many people came back as had left that morning. Joey'd never been able to sit around and wait for things to happen though. He'd spent most of the morning out in the yard, gathering sun in the dusk of his skin and repairing a part on his bike. He came back in and cleaned off, swapping his grease-streaked clothes for a fresh t-shirt plucked up from a dwindling collection.

"Hey, you.." He thought the blond woman's name was Maggie, but it seemed safer not to go there in case he was wrong. "You're on laundry duty," he said while rubbing a dry rag over the wet sop of his hair, then tossed it onto the small mound of bloodstained, dirt smeared, grease-streaked cotton and denim that had accumulated in the prison over the last couple of weeks. She didn't seem to be doing anything, might as well make herself useful. Normally, Shane would have been the one delegating all of the shit that he wanted people to do while he was gone, but Shane wasn't here. And as gruff as Joey's tone was, it was about ten times nicer as any way his brother would have said it.

Who: Open to everyone in TWD
What: Rain!
Where: Everywhere!
When: Now!
Warnings/Rating: Warn in comments if needed

[Late in the afternoon, the rain starts. It had been cloudy before, grey and dreary, but the clouds finally decide to open up, releasing the rain that had been building. For a while, it seems as though it's going to end as soon as it begins, but the sprinkles turn into a shower, and with the grey clouds, it seems like it's going to go on for hours.

Cool and refreshing, it dampens the dust of the land and perks the plants right back up. It brings with it cool air that almost invites people out to refresh themselves, body and soul. There is no thunder, no flashes of lightning, just a spring rain that lasts the afternoon and well into the evening hours.]

Who: Maggie D and Shane A and open to anyone who wants to wander in.
What: Introductions and the 411 on how to live in zombie-land.
When: First light.
Warnings: Shane's mouth.

She had a motherfucker of a crick in her neck. It had been a couple months since she'd slept in her car. There had been no hits on the google-alert she'd set up for the boys (they'd get themselves into trouble, she knew it, but where they got themselves into trouble was the difference between settling in and getting the warm fuzzies over San Fran or hitting the road, burned rubber and a cleared out rental apartment in the rear-view) in long enough to get comfortable. Bed-comfortable. Pillows, blankets, the kind of stretch-out and sleep that came when the only thing bugging her had been making the receipts in the bar add up right.

When Maggie came-to, the light was clean, bright. It had heat in it, not much but the damp mugginess associated with thunderstorms and the kind of day a dog would lay down and pant over. The wheel had grooved ridges into her cheek; she wished for coffee, a split-second of scoping out the next spot to get some before the night-before ground itself into reality with the gun lying across the passenger seat, blunt and ugly and real.

The sedan wasn't making a lot of noise as it drove up the track toward the prison. Low-profile, but the sun glinting off the windshield, picking out the pale paint made it a beacon as the tires crunched over dirt. It was being driven slowly, like the woman behind the wheel had her hands wrapped tight around the wheel not because she was being dropping speed to idle, but because she was waiting for another thing to come out. The prison walls were apparent from a while away but close to, they were cracked cement and safety, her heart slowing in her chest. One of those walls was a hell of a lot more than her car window in between her and one of the things.

The car nudged forward, right up to the gate.

Who: Jo Harvelle and Open to TWD folks!
When: We'll go with this afternoon
Where: SPN, Hotel, TWD; someplace close to others?
Rating: TBD but it's The Walking Dead so...


( Sun sets' cross the ocean // I'm a thousand miles from anywhere // My pocketbook and my heart both just got stolen // And the sun acts like she don't even care )

[In the common area inside the prison, a room between the door outside and the bars that lead into C-block, denoted by a small sea of circular tables ringed by benches, Shane cleaned the crossbow with a rag made from an old prison uniform. They'd discovered a stash of the orange jumpsuits about a week ago, still clean and in all kinds of sizes. They'd been appropriated in various creative ways—rags, pillow cases, curtains, some people even wore them—like Shane. He didn't give a fuck. Since he hadn't gone out today, his usual vest was nowhere to be seen, and he sat in a grease and blood covered jumpsuit with an oil lamp lit nearby.

Every day the prison was settled into more. The little group there was getting better at getting along, though it was far from ideal.

It'd been quiet enough lately that tensions had eased some, in spite of the raging apocalypse outside. It was nearing dinnertime now and people would start coming in from their various jobs, shifts, and positions, in from the waning sun and stench of skin rotting. They'd mumble and complain about fuck, more canned corn, but they'd eat it.]

[The prison didn't feel like a prison, at least not like the ones he'd spent half of his adult life in. There was a calm here despite the promise of death that loomed(& staggered & dragged decaying feet) on the other side of the tall fence. The dead seemed to have some form of consciousness, they at least had an awareness that people were on this side, its what kept them rotting and pacing at the gates. The sun was high, and everything smelled like decay. Joey didn't know if it was just in his head or actual, but the great outdoors smelled just a bit more ripe than he thought it should have, even considering that the world was apparently overrun with zombies.

It was a little after noon when he sat out in the prison yard, concrete under him where inmates once would have played basketball. Tools were spread out beside him, and Joey picked up a small wrench as he started to tighten the bolts on a camshaft gear he'd previously taken off to clean. The world might have been an obsolete graveyard, but his bike was going to shine.]

[The cell wasn't much, but there was a bed, a place to sleep, and it was safe, and given the state of things beyond those walls, that counted for a lot in this world. Beau had seen some bad places when he traveled, people who slept on straw mats, people who clawed at the ground for what little sustenance they could eek out of it, and he had been grateful then that he didn't have to struggle. But now, without the safety of the modern world and with those things wandering the land out there, he longed for home, for the menial day to day things that were good and bad in the same breath.

He was stretched out on his bunk, fingers laced behind his head, looking up to the ceiling, lips pursed in thought. A noise to the side drew his attention to the one he was sharing the cell with coming in, and Beau lifted a hand in greeting.] Hey.

[Tess was something of a wreck. Sleep didn’t come easily, not in this awful place, and her waking moments were always filled with nervousness and dread. She couldn’t relax there, even if it was the safest place they knew of. It was still a prison, and there were still those undead things outside. Relaxing was something her brain refused to let her do, not when the idea of it being eaten was still on the list of possibilities.

Still, relax was what she tried to make do, at least for that moment. Right before they left. No sense in getting tense when she would be in that state once they were out in the open. She and Shane were meant to go out on supply run and she flipped through the journal she had, reading the pages and occasionally writing to people, as she waited for him. She was seated on the bike when she heard for footsteps, the sound making her start a little and reach for the gun that had been resting at her side. She settling back down when she was it was her brother. ] You ready?

[Clem didn't remember a thing between the house and the prison. Heck, she didn't even realize it was a prison until she woke up in a lower bunk, looking at bars. She had to blink a few times to be sure they were bars, and she hadn't spent any time in jail during her life, but this was definitely a prison cell. She considered sitting up, but she had a feeling that would hurt worse than lying still, so she decided to work her way up to moving. For the time being, she looked on down at her body, which she expected to be broken in near a thousand pieces. But nothing looked broke, and she wiggled everything from ankles up to her shoulders, looking for breaks that weren't there. Just bruising, then, and that made her feel a little better about the world.

With that covered, she finally let herself concentrate on the real important thing: Had she imagined the damn zombies?

In the end, she decided no, and she didn't like that decision in the slightest bit. She was reared on crinoline and ballrooms. Somehow, she didn't think there would be a lot of that during the zombie apocalypse. She dragged a hand along her forehead, and her fingers came away clean, which meant someone had fixed her up some. And it took some work, but she forced herself to sitting with a groan; she wasn't about to lie around if it meant becoming some rotting thing's snack.

She tried to call out, but it wasn't a whole lot more that a scratchy whisper.] Graham?

[After this.]

Need some help here. Closed up in a house full of dead people. Anyone out there?

( Log: Amelia and Shane, cut for slight length )

[This wasn't the hospital. She was real sure of that.

The house was some old place, and she could see dust lining every damn surface of the kitchen she was in. Old stove, and her back was flat up against it. She was still wearing a hospital gown, but she'd been moving around before this happened. Her hair was still dripping light brown from the dye Graham had brought, and everyone said she took after her sister when she didn't go to the trouble of making it blonde. She'd been dyeing it since Lorelei died, since that very day, and she looked down at the dripping strands before she forced herself to standing.]

Anyone here? [Her voice echoed through the empty house, and she had no clue what was waiting outside in the sunlight. She brushed some wayward blood off her forehead, and she climbed the stairs slow; she needed something to wear, and then she'd suss things out.]

[Shane has no fucking idea where he is. One second he's watching TV in the black of his fucking tiny living room (and probably dozing off), cat on his lap, and the next, it's dawn, and he's peeling himself off the ground in a goddamn forest, moss sticking to the bare skin of his arms and neck. Dew beads in his eyelashes. He sits up with a curse, keeping his head, amazingly, and looks around. His bike is parked nearby, loaded up, somehow, some fucking way, with an old canvas bag of his, and some fucking guns and that's when Shane stands up, his bones creaking.

Only then does he notice he's not alone. The smell of the dead hasn't hit him yet, or the sounds. For now, all he sees is Graham, seemingly alive and well, thank fuck.] What the fuck is going on?

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