forbidden (illicitus) wrote in the_colony, @ 2010-12-21 18:26:00 |
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Entry tags: | ^ week 24, alice munroe, thomas galloway, | alice and tom |
Week 24: Sunday
Characters: Tom and Alice
Location: Tom’s room.
Summary: Tom and Alice discuss the future.
Rating: PG
While it was true that they were in the middle of the winter season, that didn’t necessarily mean that there wasn’t a lot to do. Alice was by no means a farmer, but she knew enough about the seasons and basic gardening to find her way around a farmer’s almanac. Back home, she’d even managed to get a few miniatures going in her backyard lean-to that she’d jury-rigged into a a greenhouse, and she had the added bonus of having been a regular organic shopper in her old life.
Over the past month, with little ability to raid and way too much time on everyone’s hands, it left a lot of time for research. Alice stopped outside Tom’s door, her notebook tucked under her arm as she rapped her knuckles against the wood.
A check of his watch revealed that more time had passed than he thought, and Tom leaned back in his chair to rub his eyes for a moment. Sometimes there just weren’t enough hours in the day.
“It’s open!” It had taken Tom the better part of a year after leaving the army not to bark ‘enter’ or ‘get your ass in here’ when someone knocked on his office door. He stood as he called out and made his way around the desk, not wanting to treat Alice as a mere underling. It was his show, true, but he’d asked for her to be his deputy and she deserved to be treated with respect.
Besides, he considered her a friend and it wouldn’t do to have her come in and find him too busy to even greet her properly. It wasn’t as if he were responsible for all the enlisted men in a brigade anymore after all. Alice entered the room with a polite smile, still feeling a bit like a fish out of water whenever they did these meetings. Back when she’d been predominantly in charge, Jed had made no real effort to talk about or plan for stuff in the same way that Tom wanted to.
“Hey.”
“Hi Alice,” he smiled and tried to put her more at ease. “Right on time, as always.” This was still a bit new for them both, but it would get better with time. He hoped so anyway.
The veteran gestured toward the pair of chairs in front of the desk. “Why don’t we sit? No sense standin’ when we’ve got perfectly good chairs.”
Alice took the invitation with a small nod, settling easily and crossing her ankles as she opened her notebook in her lap. She remembered the comment, made so long ago, about what she’d do when she finally ran out of paper and ink; the memory made her smile faintly for just a moment.
“So, what’s first on the agenda?”
“Food.” Tom grinned slightly at providing the one word response, then elaborated. “Making sure we’ve got what we need once spring comes along and the ground is ready for us to start planting. I’m not a farmer, never wanted to be a farmer, but we’re all farmers now. There’s that tractor and all its gear in the pole-barn, we’ll need to make sure everything works so that we’re ready to go when the ground is.”
“I know Jed has experience with farm equipment,” Alice noted, the chewed her lip in thought. “Bridget knows a bit too, but I think hers is a little less about equipment and more about the mechanics of how to run on the schedule. Maybe a bit about livestock or crops, I can’t remember; we talked about it back in Vegas once.”
“That’s more than I’ve got, though I learned more than I ever wanted to know about farming in Iraq.” A wry smile. “Not that it would do us much good here, the climate’s wrong and we have no donkeys. We’ll have to talk to both of them, but Jed will be our go-to person for the spring planting. Bridget’s obviously not going to be in any shape for riding on tractors.”
He drummed his fingers on the side of the desk, thinking. “Louisa May might know a bit as well, being a farmer’s kid herself.” That was probably a long shot, as it had been a good twenty years since the doctor had been a kid.
“Feels a bit like tryin’ to force a square peg through a circle hole and having to carve bits off of it,” Alice murmured, frowning just a little. Though in all honesty, what choice did they have? It wasn’t as though they could just open a phone book and hope for the best. Alice’s brow furrowed a bit more. “I wish we had a way of going around and finding more people deliberately, instead of people always finding us or us finding them by accident.”
“Long term we’re going to need more people if we want to survive and thrive.” Tom agreed, thinking of inbreeding down the line if nothing else. Skills could be learned over time, but genetics didn’t change. “Though right now there’s no place we could put them. I was thinking we should probably work on expanding the house over the summer, once the crops are in the ground and we’ve got some sort of watchtower up. If those traders come up this way maybe we could have them spread word of what sorts of people we’re looking for.”
“I’ll make sure to tell Meg and Drew to keep an ear out for them,” Alice said with a nod. “Evie and I talked a bit at the barbecue about keeping in touch over the CB. She’ll know to look for us if she comes through.” Alice brushed her hair behind her ears, going back over what else he’d said in her head: they definitely needed to expand, no lies there. She was feeling the confinement, and if Tom brought it up there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that he felt it, too.
“Good.” Tom nodded at the response and looked down to check his own notes.
“What were you thinking about a watchtower?”
“Something that would give us a better view of the land around here, try to spot trouble before it gets right on top of us. I don’t like how little warning we’d have now if something really were to happen. We got lucky with Greg, both that we spotted him and that he was a friendly, and I don’t want to have to rely on luck. The only question is how long it would take to build and whether there’s enough material out there for everything we want to do.”
“If we gotta, we can always start breaking down the houses around the area,” Alice said pensively. “It’s better than trying to make boards out of trees. We just don’t have the equipment for that right now, and even if we dug it up I don’t know how we’d get to using it.” She tilted her head to the side in thought. “We oughta scout around for a mill or something. There’s gotta be a ton of mills around here. I bet there’d be materials there that aren’t being used.”
“There might be some around that didn’t get broken down for scrap or shipped to China that we could relocate,” Tom let his fingers drum along the desk again as he pondered, “but I think I remember hearing about how the spotted owl killed the lumber business in these parts back in the 90s.” He didn’t want them getting their hopes up or becoming too dependent on technology they couldn’t repair or replace once it broke down.
“Well, maybe they didn’t ship out as much during those last few months before...” Alice trailed off. They all knew how that story ended anyway; it didn’t need repeating. “It’s worth a look, at least. And we should know the area. We’ll save it for spring, obviously, but it wouldn’t hurt to look, and it’d certainly be easier than breaking down a house first.” She wasn’t even sure how they could do that, having never done home renovation in her life. They were getting sidetracked, though.
“If we’re going to plant after the thaw, we should get started on a greenhouse and get some seeds germinating.”
“Greenhouse is probably a good idea for some stuff,” Tom allowed, “but considering how many acres we’re going to need to plant I don’t think we’re going to be able to get a head start on everything.”
“Sure enough,” she agreed. “But not everything’ll be able to grow straight from the dirt. And we’ll need to be careful not to overplant, too; waste not, want not, or however that saying goes.”
“There are silos and storage bins around here,” Tom countered. “As long as we can make sure it isn’t going to rot before we can use it there’ll be no such thing as waste. Having a surplus in case next year is bad could mean the difference between surviving and starving.”
“But how do we even use those?” she asked, her brow creased with concern. “I noticed there’s a windmill on the property too, but hell if I know how to use it. And if we go planting huge acres, how are we going to manage to harvest it all without dedicated power and fuel?”
“More questions to ask those who know more than us.” Tom sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Christ, handling an infantry company was easier than this,” he admitted. “At least then I knew what I was doing.” Here, in private behind closed doors he could admit the feeling of being in over his head sometimes.
Alice nodded in agreement and sympathy. “I’ll try and go over the inventory and see how quickly we’ve been going through food. Maybe do some cross-referencing to see how much some of the regional vegetables can end up weighing. We could probably do...” she did the mental math. “Maybe 20 plots total to start? 16 by 18 feet each? About one plot per person, with a little extra to spare for animal fodder and winter storage.” She paused briefly, her frown deepening. “Unless that sounds like too much.”
“Personally it sounds like not enough, but it’ll do for a start.” Tom paused and ran a hand through his hair, thinking through the possibilities. “Do you have a list of the expiration dates on the foodstuffs? If any of it will last through next winter we should try to hold off on using it once we can forage again, for emergency rations if the need arises.”
“I’ll get on that,” Alice replied, writing a note in the top right-hand margin on the inventory page once she’d flipped to it. So we’ve gone over planting, talked about the greenhouse and a watchtower, and about expanding, she thought, frowning again.
“How are we gonna manage all of this?”
“We delegate as much as we can, and prioritize. The food and the watchtower have priority, the rest can wait until that is done.” A smirk. “Those of us who’ll be able bodied this summer will be busy little beavers.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” Alice said, giving a brief laugh and running a hand through her hair. At least she wouldn’t have to raid as much anymore once the fields were up and running well, assuming they got through it all.
“We’ll get through it.” Tom assured her. “Planting can’t take that long, and now that all the rain has melted most of the snow we can scout around for supplies and get a jump start on gathering what we’ll need.” He hoped so anyway. How hard could it be?
“We have a lot of stuff here already, thanks to Louisa’s contributions,” Alice replied, moving one hand back to rub her neck. “And she’ll know the most about this area, even if she’s not a farmer and whatever else. She’ll know what can grow here, and where to get things we haven’t gotten already.”
“Makes sense to check with the native first.” He nodded and scribbled something on his own notes. “I was also thinking about building supplies. The less time we have to worry about transporting things here during the building season, the more time we can spend actually building. Your idea about sawmills is a good one. Maybe Louisa May will have an idea where some of them were located around here, and we can hit the building supply stores in the area too.” They’d have to steer clear of going too far north of course, given what Greg had told them about the people around Eugene, but other than that it was open season.
Alice nodded in agreement. “I’ll try’n go through everything in the attic and the inventory over the next few days, if you’re up for talking to Louisa?” She was already seeing the woman plenty for her own reasons, and the questions about work-related stuff would probably be better coming through Tom than her anyway.
“I’ll talk to her.” It wouldn’t take long to go over the map with Louisa May. “Any other business we need to go over that I’ve forgotten?” He couldn’t think of anything but it didn’t hurt to check.
After scanning over her notes, Alice shook her head. “Not that I can think of. We might need to re-do the who-can-raid list in the future, and try’n sync it up with guard duty shifts, but that can wait a bit seeing as we haven’t gone on a big one since before it started snowing.”
“We’ll figure it out. We can always rearrange the guard schedules on raiding days if we need to.” Tom shrugged and mentally put ‘work’ issues to the side until later.
“On a different note, Louisa May and I are starting up a poker night, at least once a week. I figure we can let anyone who’s interested rotate off and on, it’d be good for morale. Interested in joining?”
The invitation pulled a laugh out of Alice before she was able to stop herself, but she smiled nonetheless. “I’m not any good at it, but I could probably give it a go. Not like my nights are full of interesting excuses anyway, aside from spending time with my jerk boyfriend.”
“It isn’t as if we’re playing for money, so no need to worry if you’re no good. Next raid we should look for a couple packages of poker chips at a store or something.” He paused, considering his next words carefully. The getaway obviously hadn’t helped them very much, and it was hard to hide personality conflicts when everyone was packed into the same house. “As for you and Jed...want to talk about it? Considering I’ve been divorced twice I’m probably not the best person to give advice, but I’m a good listener.”
Alice sighed, running both hands through her hair. Probably shouldn’t’ve said anything, she thought to herself. It was one thing to cry on Louisa May’s shoulder about the crap she was going through, but she wondered how good of an idea it would be to go complaining to the man who was pretty much her boss.
“It’s complicated,” she said quietly, closing her notebook up and sticking it under the chair so she could lean on her knees. “I’m... kinda stuck. On what to do, at this point.”
“Talking it out always helps, I’ve found.” Tom suggested. “Look Alice, I was voted in charge and I asked you to be my XO, but you and I both know this isn’t the old world. We’re going to have to be more of a tribe or extended family rather than some kind of business or pretend we’re something bigger than we are. I want to be a friend to you if you’ll let me.”
Alice couldn’t deny that hearing what he said helped ease some of the anxiety out of her. Everything felt different now than it had prior to the arrival of the new people, there was no doubt in her mind about that. She liked Tom. They worked well together, and he didn’t pressure her or make her feel uncomfortable like many of the other members of their little “extended family” did. Taking a slow breath and letting it out, she looked up at him with a wary smile.
“Guess it would be a good thing to get a guy’s opinion on all of it,” she said.
“I’m all ears, just keep in mind whatever advice I give comes from a twice divorced career soldier.” He smirked slightly at the self deprecating comment and leaned back in his chair. “It might not be the best advice to heed so use your own judgement than relying on whatever I tell you as gospel truth.”
Alice nodded, taking another steadying breath before she began: “I think the biggest thing is that we both want different things out of our lives. He’s happy with it being ‘just’ him and me--” she made finger quotes around the word with one hand, a frown creasing her forehead, “--but I’m not. Nevermind the fact that it isn’t just him and me anyway; every time we talk about anything ever, Jack’s name comes up. It’s getting to the point where I’m fed up, and it came to a head right before we left when she came and said all kinds of shit to me about how I’m basically taking him away from her and I’m a horrible person.”
“If you don’t think that’s going to change, what are you prepared to do about it? You’re obviously not happy with things as they are.”
Alice ran a hand over her face, eyes pointed down at her knees. “I don’t know. I can’t even come to a compromise with him. But what am I supposed to do? If we break up, there’ll be all kinds of tension between him and me, you can bet on it.” Not to mention Little Miss Entitled, she added inwardly, but that wouldn’t change by much. Though on second thought, it might. No doubt she’d love to lord that shit over me.
Her thoughts shifted to Leo, which only made her frown more. “And if I...” her voice got a little unsteady. “If I went back to Leo, it’d be even worse. And I can’t-- I won’t lie: I still have feelings for him.” She felt a strange sort of relief at being able to admit it aloud.
“And you staying with Jed and making both your lives miserable is better than having things be tense for a few months?” Tom sighed and rubbed the back of his head, wondering what the right course of action really was. “I’m not going to be one of those people who asks you to ‘take one for the team’ on something like this, Alice. I admit I don’t trust Leo yet, but he’s been back two weeks and has done everything we’ve asked and more. The probation period is more about letting him rebuild the bridges he burned and making sure Louisa May is comfortable with having him around.” It went unsaid that the doctor was more important to the survival of the group than the ex-con, and Tom wasn’t going to rub it in Alice’s face. “The latter part seems to have happened, and time should take care of the first if he keeps doing what he has.
“I guess you have to ask yourself: what would make Alice happy? Don’t worry about what would happen, we’ll deal with it as it comes unless you think Jed would become violent. That needs to be dealt with ASAP, but aside from that...” He shrugged.
Alice nodded, sighed again, and dropped her head so her chin rested against her chest. “God, I’m so stupid for having even gotten with him,” she muttered. “With either of them. Biggest mistake I’ve made so far, aside from the whole letting a mole into our place thing.”
“The heart wants what it wants Alice, if I’d listened to my brain instead I never would have gotten married a second time. If you think Leo will make you happy then you should see where it goes, just take your time this go round instead of rushing into things” Tom leaned forward and jabbed a finger toward her. “As for Jared, he had a choice: he could have stayed with us and forgotten all about the group he’d been running with before, he chose another path and he paid for it with his life. That chapter’s over, don’t kick yourself over something you had no control over.”
Everything he was saying was right, two divorces or not, and Alice knew that. The real agony of the whole thing was making waves. For all that she was loud and intimidating when she wanted to be, she would have rather avoided any sort of conflict to begin with, and creating any upset her. But he’s right. I need to worry about my own happiness, she thought. Even if it means hurting the people I love.
Because in all truth, she loved Jed. She loved him from the moment he pursued her past their first meeting, in the empty shopping center back in Vegas. She would’ve given him everything, if only he’d done the same. No amount of talking about it was going to fix things, she knew. Better to just rip off the bandaid. Stop trying to drag it out. It won’t make anything better.
“God, just thinking about breaking it off is makin’ me feel sick,” she admitted with a weak laugh, her chest feeling constricted.
“Nobody ever said it was easy Alice.” Tom reached over and patted her hand. “God knows I’ve got experience in breakups and they always suck. All you can do is try to move forward and get it behind you as quick as possible.” A sigh. “Not that it’ll be easy, what with the two of you running into each other every day.” The sooner they got started on that expansion so that people had more space to hide out in the better off they’d be. That and warmer weather so people would feel good about spending time outdoors and not have cabin fever.
“Maybe I should wait it out a little longer,” she murmured.
“For what?” Tom raised an eyebrow, waiting for her to elaborate.
“I...” she licked her lips, then shook her head a little. “I don’t know. For things to smooth out. Maybe I’m just being impatient. It was our first real try doing something together. Maybe I’m just overreacting. Or I could wait until spring, when there’s enough stuff to do that he doesn’t have to focus on it.” She gave a weak laugh that she didn’t feel and closed her eyes. “He thinks I’m baby crazy. Said it to my face, actually. Maybe I am.” She frowned, her voice hurt. “So I got Louisa to give me an IUD.”
Tom nodded as he took that news in, keeping his expression neutral. “IUDs can be taken out if you change your mind at least. I don’t know if having a kid right now is the best thing in the world, but a year or two down the road when we’re more established I would think it a necessity if we’re going to do anything other than mark time until we die of old age. If that were all we're doing we might as well mix up a bunch of Jonestown kool-aid and end things right now.”
“Right?” she replied, her laugh only slightly more genuine. “That’s what I said, when we first talked about it. But he doesn’t want kids at all. He said he might change his mind, but he doesn’t know. He gets this panicked look on his face every time we’re...” her face colored a little. “Y’know. I mean, every time. I haven’t told him I fixed the situation. I’m too afraid he’ll be happy about it, and I’d...” she ran a hand over her face again. “I couldn’t handle it. I wouldn’t even want to touch him, if he reacted like it was the best news ever.”
“If you can’t handle it then maybe it’s time to just break things off and the two of you go your separate ways, as much as someone can in this situation.” Tom shook his head. “You’ve got my support whatever you decide to do.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly. She needed to think about this more. Talking about it with Jed certainly wouldn’t result in anything less than a fight, with all the same things repeated between them. She didn’t want that. It hurt enough the first five or ten times.
“Anytime Alice. You’re always welcome to lean on my shoulder, that’s what I’m here for.” He stood up and stretched. “If you want me to have a sitdown with Jed at some point just say the word.”
Alice’s eyes moved up to Tom’s. “What would you say?” she asked, feeling a twinge of anxiety.
“I’d tell him that being a father was the best thing that ever happened to me, and going through life scared something is going to happen isn’t really living.” He sighed and met Alice’s eyes. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t miss Tommy, or that I don’t thank god for letting my son be a part of my life all those years.”
Alice felt her eyes mist up almost immediately. She and Tom had never really discussed their lives prior to the virus, but she’d known vaguely about the loss of his son. She felt deep empathy with him in their shared loss. Before she really knew what she was doing, she was on her feet and hugging him.
Tom stiffened in surprise for a brief instant, but then his body relaxed and his arms went around her. “It’ll be all right.” He murmured in soothing tones as he patted her back lightly, trying to provide what comfort he could.
“Yeah,” she said against his shoulder, her eyes closing in an attempt to keep from all-out crying. “One way or another.” She let out a shuddering breath, her embrace tightening just for a moment before she pulled back and rubbed at her eyes. “I should let you get back to work.”
“I think I’ve got as much work out of myself as I’m going to at the moment.” Tom glanced at his desk and shook his head. “It can wait a while. Why don’t you and I head over to the kitchen and play a few hands? You look like you could use a little fun and I know I could.”
Alice gave a small laugh, sweeping her hair out of her face and leaning down to pick up her notebook. She gave him a nod and a close-lipped smile. “That’s the best idea I’ve heard all day.”