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stateofdecay2024-10-24 05:56 pm
homesteading) wrote in stateofdecay2024-10-24 05:56 pm
(no subject)
WHO: Emmett Wright & Gregory Roswell
WHEN: Evening of October 19th, right after the storm rolled in
WHERE: A ranger station in Lake Kelenqua National Park
WHAT: Taking shelter from the storm and reminiscing.
WARNINGS: idk they're both depressed
WHEN: Evening of October 19th, right after the storm rolled in
WHERE: A ranger station in Lake Kelenqua National Park
WHAT: Taking shelter from the storm and reminiscing.
WARNINGS: idk they're both depressed
The ranger station is quiet and still, almost frozen in time at Day Zero besides a broken window and some slight disarray where the storage has been ransacked. There are still evacuation orders pinned to the corkboard. It’s a little unsettling, but Roswell tries not to let it pull his focus as he works through the back rooms and offices of the building, making sure they’re clear of zombies.
He has a bolt-action rifle, a communal piece of property Lundegaard residents use for hunting. It isn’t the first time he’s held a gun since The Incident, since he isn’t insane or suicidal enough to go out into the Quad without one, but it still feels foreign and dangerous to him in a way it didn’t before — when being armed meant being safe, first and foremost. As he nudges another door, loose on its hinges, open in front of him, he braces himself to see a zombie in his flashlight beam. Shooting one of the undead is something he hasn’t had to do since The Incident, and he momentarily wonders if he could do it without flinching. But the room is empty, like all the others have been, and he lets out a sigh as he slings the rifle back over his shoulder.
“All clear back here,” he says, shucking his pack to the floor of the ranger station and ruffling the rain out of his own hair. It’s storming even harder than it was when they’d ducked inside, the torrential rain thunderous against the building’s metal roof. In the early days of the outbreak, rain like this was a godsend, offering a little relief from the critical need to be as silent as possible. Now, it’s a headache. He’s already thinking about the patchy spot in the roof of town hall that he’s been meaning to mend for weeks.
“Geez,” he remarks, pointing up towards the ceiling.
Emmett finishes his sweep of the other end of the station and returns to meet Roswell, giving him an affirmative nod as he slings his own personal hunting rifle back over his shoulder. "All clear on the rest of it, too," he echoes.
This time capsule of a station makes Emmett feel uneasy—for a moment, it's almost as though the past nearly-two years had ceased to exist. It's 2012 and there's terror and confusion and—
Roswell is here, as steady a presence as ever, and Emmett uses that to ground himself. His eyes follow Roswell's pointer finger up toward the ceiling. "It's really coming down now, yikes. Hopefully this roof holds up. Looks like we're gonna have to sit tight for awhile. Good thing I packed blankets."
“There’s a wood stove in the back room, too, if we can find some dry firewood,” Roswell says. He glances around the front room before tapping a finger on a solid oak table. “You think they’d mind?”
He’s only half-joking. They aren’t likely to find anything dry enough to work as kindling anywhere else, but there’s something a little too uncivilized about chopping up perfectly furniture for him to stomach, even a year and a half into the end of the world.
"Oh, but that's oak," Emmett sighs, equally aghast at the idea of it, silly as it is. He deeply appreciates nice things, despite all his efforts to keep this hidden. He's not impractical, but destroying something useful is never his first choice. "I've got some fire starter in my backpack, but maybe let's find some uglier furniture or a phone book or something before we start ruining the heirloom-quality stuff."
He begins to search the room, and finds a stack of old tabloid magazines rotting away in a corner.
"Here, let's start by setting the monarchy on fire. Good riddance," Emmett suggests.
“Good plan,” Roswell says, picking up a dusty but still-glossy magazine from the stack and brushing it clean. The headlines are from a few months before the outbreak, so far gone in his memory it takes him a moment to even remember these celebrities and events. He never much kept up with Hollywood news before Daniel had moved there, and even afterwards it had only been begrudgingly or when his friend was working on something. He tears the cover off the magazine and begins crumpling each page up into a little ball of kindling.
“I was up here, you know,” he says as he’s working on this task. “With Mara and a few other people. Back when the outbreak started.”
"Yeah?" Emmett asks. He cocks his head, inquisitive, watching his friend as he takes off his backpack to look for his survival supplies. "What were you doing out here?" When he'd talked to Mara, she'd mentioned that Roswell had been a friend of her late husband's, but that was about as much as Emmett had been able to gather. Emmett is not naturally-inclined to stick his nose in other people's business, but even he can admit that he's curious as to what had happened between them.
He unpacks a mint tin full of dryer lint, a flint fire starter, and a tiny bottle of horrible bottom-shelf whiskey that he'd been saving for a special occasion. This seemed as good a time as any to offer.
"You want a sip? Fair warning: it tastes like shit," Emmett offers, thinking that Roswell might enjoy a little treat while he works and reminisces. "Clark gave it to me for building his wife a bookshelf."
“Yeah,” Roswell concedes after not answering the question for several long seconds. He takes the bottle and downs a too-large swig which makes him cough and splutter for a second. He doesn’t ultimately regret it, though, as it sets warm burning going through his chest that makes his shoulders relax even if the Ranger Station is still nearly freezing.
“I was up here on a camping trip with Mara… and Daniel. Her husband,” he manages, before adding: “Naomi’s son.” He can’t really bear to describe him besides by his relationships to other people, but he tries to persevere anyway. “We used to go to summer camp up at Camp Winchester together when we were kids. We tried to get out into the park whenever we could.”
Emmett takes a modest sip for himself and continues unpacking as he speaks. "That sounds blissful. But I'm guessing something changed?" he asks conversationally.
He unrolls one of the blankets from his pack and offers it to Roswell. "Where did Daniel and Mara meet?" There is a little bit of guilt in his tone, since he wonders if Daniel had also been one of the ones who had moved away, gotten married, come back different. Perhaps Emmett was projecting a little, but he'd never met Daniel before, only the people he'd left behind.
Roswell rolls his neck and shrugs his shoulders. “They worked together on movies. In Los Angeles. He got busy with work, it got harder to get away. That’s just how growing up goes, I guess.”
He’d been busy too, after all. He’d seen Daniel and Mara at their wedding in Seattle, years ago, and then not again until this very camping trip. Years had started slipping by without him noticing. He finishes dismembering the magazine and jams his hands into his pockets, looking at the crumpled up text and photos where they’re piled on the desk in front of him.
“And then when we finally did get away from work a guy stumbled out of the woods and tried to eat us,” he adds, with a little levity in his tone.
Emmett gives Roswell a sympathetic look. "That sucks, man. I'm sorry. I'd say I wished things had turned out differently, but well—" He shrugs. There's no point in wishing for something impossible. He sweeps the crumpled up paper off the table and into a cardboard box, ready for transporting to the wood stove.
"I'm sure he still thought about you, even though he was gone," Emmett adds, in an attempt at reassurance. "I can say so from experience."
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Roswell says, although he sounds a little glum. He rubs one corner of his eye with his thumb. “It didn’t feel like a big deal at the time. Just a different season of life. I thought we’d have more of them.”
He doesn’t sound particularly emotional as he says it, but then seems to catch himself in a too-vulnerable moment and shakes his head, like he’s surprised. “We should get this fire going,” he says.
Emmett sighs and gives him a nod. "Yeah, you're right, better get this going," he agrees, not really wanting to press Roswell to talk if he doesn't want to say anything more. "Can you grab the flint and the lint?"
Emmett, carrying the box of paper, walks toward the back room containing the stove, continuing to chat over his shoulder, "I think we all thought we'd have more seasons. We'd all had plans. But I guess it's useless to dwell on them now. Onward and upward, or whatever." He didn't sound like he believed it.
“Yeah,” Roswell agrees, bringing him the requested tinderbox. It’s as enthusiastic an agreement as he can muster, because he clocked Emmett’s tone and he doesn’t really believe it either, but it feels a little too defeatist to acknowledge it out loud. He’s about ready for this particular season to be over. But just like this storm marks the beginning of what will presumably be another difficult winter, Roswell can’t help but feel like the incident at Lundegaard was the opening of a chapter in his life rather than the conclusion of one.
“Sometimes I’m not sure what we’re doing all this for,” he admits. Even as prone to melancholia as he tends to be, he tries to keep a brave face on for village residents in this regard. It’s the whole reason he built the village the way he did, to pretend like they were still somewhere else in time. But the artifice is wearing down, and the struggle has begun to seem pointless to him. “You think in ten years things are going to be better? Good?”
Emmett, however, is not in the public eye, so feels less like he needs to put on a happy face—especially to Roswell.
"I don't really think about the future," he admits with a shrug, tossing paper into the stove.
Roswell stares at him for a long moment as he sets the fire up. For all he seems to end up as people’s confidant and advisor at Lundegaard, he’s really never considered himself to be particularly socially canny, and sometimes it just seems best to keep his mouth shut if he doesn’t know he’s going to say the right thing. There is no right thing here, he’s pretty sure, so he presses his mouth into a thin line.
“Well, it’s not like we don’t have plenty to focus on in the present,” he manages after grappling with it for a moment longer.
He has a bolt-action rifle, a communal piece of property Lundegaard residents use for hunting. It isn’t the first time he’s held a gun since The Incident, since he isn’t insane or suicidal enough to go out into the Quad without one, but it still feels foreign and dangerous to him in a way it didn’t before — when being armed meant being safe, first and foremost. As he nudges another door, loose on its hinges, open in front of him, he braces himself to see a zombie in his flashlight beam. Shooting one of the undead is something he hasn’t had to do since The Incident, and he momentarily wonders if he could do it without flinching. But the room is empty, like all the others have been, and he lets out a sigh as he slings the rifle back over his shoulder.
“All clear back here,” he says, shucking his pack to the floor of the ranger station and ruffling the rain out of his own hair. It’s storming even harder than it was when they’d ducked inside, the torrential rain thunderous against the building’s metal roof. In the early days of the outbreak, rain like this was a godsend, offering a little relief from the critical need to be as silent as possible. Now, it’s a headache. He’s already thinking about the patchy spot in the roof of town hall that he’s been meaning to mend for weeks.
“Geez,” he remarks, pointing up towards the ceiling.
Emmett finishes his sweep of the other end of the station and returns to meet Roswell, giving him an affirmative nod as he slings his own personal hunting rifle back over his shoulder. "All clear on the rest of it, too," he echoes.
This time capsule of a station makes Emmett feel uneasy—for a moment, it's almost as though the past nearly-two years had ceased to exist. It's 2012 and there's terror and confusion and—
Roswell is here, as steady a presence as ever, and Emmett uses that to ground himself. His eyes follow Roswell's pointer finger up toward the ceiling. "It's really coming down now, yikes. Hopefully this roof holds up. Looks like we're gonna have to sit tight for awhile. Good thing I packed blankets."
“There’s a wood stove in the back room, too, if we can find some dry firewood,” Roswell says. He glances around the front room before tapping a finger on a solid oak table. “You think they’d mind?”
He’s only half-joking. They aren’t likely to find anything dry enough to work as kindling anywhere else, but there’s something a little too uncivilized about chopping up perfectly furniture for him to stomach, even a year and a half into the end of the world.
"Oh, but that's oak," Emmett sighs, equally aghast at the idea of it, silly as it is. He deeply appreciates nice things, despite all his efforts to keep this hidden. He's not impractical, but destroying something useful is never his first choice. "I've got some fire starter in my backpack, but maybe let's find some uglier furniture or a phone book or something before we start ruining the heirloom-quality stuff."
He begins to search the room, and finds a stack of old tabloid magazines rotting away in a corner.
"Here, let's start by setting the monarchy on fire. Good riddance," Emmett suggests.
“Good plan,” Roswell says, picking up a dusty but still-glossy magazine from the stack and brushing it clean. The headlines are from a few months before the outbreak, so far gone in his memory it takes him a moment to even remember these celebrities and events. He never much kept up with Hollywood news before Daniel had moved there, and even afterwards it had only been begrudgingly or when his friend was working on something. He tears the cover off the magazine and begins crumpling each page up into a little ball of kindling.
“I was up here, you know,” he says as he’s working on this task. “With Mara and a few other people. Back when the outbreak started.”
"Yeah?" Emmett asks. He cocks his head, inquisitive, watching his friend as he takes off his backpack to look for his survival supplies. "What were you doing out here?" When he'd talked to Mara, she'd mentioned that Roswell had been a friend of her late husband's, but that was about as much as Emmett had been able to gather. Emmett is not naturally-inclined to stick his nose in other people's business, but even he can admit that he's curious as to what had happened between them.
He unpacks a mint tin full of dryer lint, a flint fire starter, and a tiny bottle of horrible bottom-shelf whiskey that he'd been saving for a special occasion. This seemed as good a time as any to offer.
"You want a sip? Fair warning: it tastes like shit," Emmett offers, thinking that Roswell might enjoy a little treat while he works and reminisces. "Clark gave it to me for building his wife a bookshelf."
“Yeah,” Roswell concedes after not answering the question for several long seconds. He takes the bottle and downs a too-large swig which makes him cough and splutter for a second. He doesn’t ultimately regret it, though, as it sets warm burning going through his chest that makes his shoulders relax even if the Ranger Station is still nearly freezing.
“I was up here on a camping trip with Mara… and Daniel. Her husband,” he manages, before adding: “Naomi’s son.” He can’t really bear to describe him besides by his relationships to other people, but he tries to persevere anyway. “We used to go to summer camp up at Camp Winchester together when we were kids. We tried to get out into the park whenever we could.”
Emmett takes a modest sip for himself and continues unpacking as he speaks. "That sounds blissful. But I'm guessing something changed?" he asks conversationally.
He unrolls one of the blankets from his pack and offers it to Roswell. "Where did Daniel and Mara meet?" There is a little bit of guilt in his tone, since he wonders if Daniel had also been one of the ones who had moved away, gotten married, come back different. Perhaps Emmett was projecting a little, but he'd never met Daniel before, only the people he'd left behind.
Roswell rolls his neck and shrugs his shoulders. “They worked together on movies. In Los Angeles. He got busy with work, it got harder to get away. That’s just how growing up goes, I guess.”
He’d been busy too, after all. He’d seen Daniel and Mara at their wedding in Seattle, years ago, and then not again until this very camping trip. Years had started slipping by without him noticing. He finishes dismembering the magazine and jams his hands into his pockets, looking at the crumpled up text and photos where they’re piled on the desk in front of him.
“And then when we finally did get away from work a guy stumbled out of the woods and tried to eat us,” he adds, with a little levity in his tone.
Emmett gives Roswell a sympathetic look. "That sucks, man. I'm sorry. I'd say I wished things had turned out differently, but well—" He shrugs. There's no point in wishing for something impossible. He sweeps the crumpled up paper off the table and into a cardboard box, ready for transporting to the wood stove.
"I'm sure he still thought about you, even though he was gone," Emmett adds, in an attempt at reassurance. "I can say so from experience."
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Roswell says, although he sounds a little glum. He rubs one corner of his eye with his thumb. “It didn’t feel like a big deal at the time. Just a different season of life. I thought we’d have more of them.”
He doesn’t sound particularly emotional as he says it, but then seems to catch himself in a too-vulnerable moment and shakes his head, like he’s surprised. “We should get this fire going,” he says.
Emmett sighs and gives him a nod. "Yeah, you're right, better get this going," he agrees, not really wanting to press Roswell to talk if he doesn't want to say anything more. "Can you grab the flint and the lint?"
Emmett, carrying the box of paper, walks toward the back room containing the stove, continuing to chat over his shoulder, "I think we all thought we'd have more seasons. We'd all had plans. But I guess it's useless to dwell on them now. Onward and upward, or whatever." He didn't sound like he believed it.
“Yeah,” Roswell agrees, bringing him the requested tinderbox. It’s as enthusiastic an agreement as he can muster, because he clocked Emmett’s tone and he doesn’t really believe it either, but it feels a little too defeatist to acknowledge it out loud. He’s about ready for this particular season to be over. But just like this storm marks the beginning of what will presumably be another difficult winter, Roswell can’t help but feel like the incident at Lundegaard was the opening of a chapter in his life rather than the conclusion of one.
“Sometimes I’m not sure what we’re doing all this for,” he admits. Even as prone to melancholia as he tends to be, he tries to keep a brave face on for village residents in this regard. It’s the whole reason he built the village the way he did, to pretend like they were still somewhere else in time. But the artifice is wearing down, and the struggle has begun to seem pointless to him. “You think in ten years things are going to be better? Good?”
Emmett, however, is not in the public eye, so feels less like he needs to put on a happy face—especially to Roswell.
"I don't really think about the future," he admits with a shrug, tossing paper into the stove.
Roswell stares at him for a long moment as he sets the fire up. For all he seems to end up as people’s confidant and advisor at Lundegaard, he’s really never considered himself to be particularly socially canny, and sometimes it just seems best to keep his mouth shut if he doesn’t know he’s going to say the right thing. There is no right thing here, he’s pretty sure, so he presses his mouth into a thin line.
“Well, it’s not like we don’t have plenty to focus on in the present,” he manages after grappling with it for a moment longer.
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