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Zora has been many things throughout her life: a saviour, a murderer, a wildfire tearing through a forest, devouring anything that dares stand in its way, burning forever at the edge of the world, ever-present and ready to strike – the list goes on.
She doesn’t particularly feel like any of those things right now, though. Hardly more than the shell left behind by what once was, the vague fragments of a thousand moments and experiences pulled together to form the here and now.
Somewhere between the adrenaline still coursing through her veins from her frantic attempt on Magic's life, the ache of the consequent bullet wound and the worry that’s been ebbing away at her since the night she lost everything, that closing her eyes will result in her demise, Zora finds herself unable to sleep.
This isn’t new. As much as she yearns for the beauty sleep she’d once taken for granted, nestled in the warmth of the Salvation, she knows those days are long gone.
Instead, she finds herself out in the bitter air of Paradise City long past nightfall, letting the cold leech into her skin and drag up the ache of every wound she’s amassed. It should scare her, the darkness and what lurks in it, but the idea of facing the people sleeping so soundly in the church behind her in her current state almost scares her more. The act isn’t working, not the way she wants it to, but there’s still some integrity for her to uphold, a standard she can’t pull together when her hands shake so violently she wouldn’t be able to wield her axe properly (she could. She knows she could, that she’s pushed through much worse than a slight tremor and a gunshot wound. But it’s nice to think of herself as something more fragile than she is, temperate and breakable, no matter the blood staining her hands.)
It’s hard to picture this city as anything more than the festering wasteland it’s become, especially after so long desecrating it at will, shattering windows and tearing out bricks with no regard for the laws that would’ve once punished her for it. She never knew a functioning, bustling city in her own lifetime, only small but ultimately temporary settlements. She’s heard tales, seen the remnants of times long gone – but Zora can’t imagine Paradise City as anything else, as if it was only ever created to fall.
Cast in the gentle silver light of the moon, everything becomes muted, turning the greenery ashen, climbing every building and lamppost in sight like a dull, rotting parasite, and morphing shadowed windows into voids. They tower high above both her and the church, modern architecture jarring so close to its delicate granite spires, weathered sandstone and wood decaying faster than the concrete of the city at large.
A thousand stars litter the canvas overhead, vibrant and alive with no light pollution to obscure them. Zora wants to crush every single one of them.
Nothing more than mortal, they sit just out of reach. The closest she can offer is the smoke she exhales into the air, its grey cloud dissipating into the darkness before it can blot anything out, the cigarette doing nothing to soothe the fight or flight racing through her bones, only burning her throat and worsening her headache. This is stupid.
The door to the church opens, but she pays it no mind (visibly, at least. It can only be one of four people, and they try too hard to close it quietly behind them for it to be a zombie barrelling its way through. She quietly hopes it's Jawhn, that she won't have to explain a thing, but when has luck ever been on her side?)
“Those are bad for you, y’know?” Mike’s voice breaks the silence, rasped as if it hurts to talk, delivery falling flat. The pain he’s in doesn't make her want to punch him in the face any less.
“I have worse things to worry about,” She answers without so much as glancing over.
“Fair,” He hums, and that seems to be the end of it as he comes to stand on the steps up to the church, wise enough to keep his distance.
With her peace disrupted, Zora almost goes back inside. If Mike wants his brooding time or whatever he's doing, then she won’t be the one to interrupt; she’ll take her chances with the group sleeping inside. Yet she remains, letting his presence linger unchanging in her peripherals.
She’s never been quite sure what to think of him. They’ve only met once or twice, and everything else she knows has come through word of mouth she hadn't really been listening to. He was dead, and now he's alive, and nothing of her opinion shifted through either revelation because there was never anything to change.
Even still, she may have misjudged him.
He’s a frat boy, a jock, in the most traditional sense. In the same way a lot of boys his age used to become once they went off to college, when the world was still intact. Clearly, this subgroup still exists, held up entirely by the rich and powerful, and not much else. A Roghost through and through, she supposes, blinded by whatever foolish ideals drove him here in the first place. There has to be a reason his name is plastered all over this city, why he grimaces at any mention of it like he’s been burnt. He must know more than most, but she doubts it’s anything valuable if he’s just as woefully unprepared as the rest of them.
It isn’t like he’s proven himself to be much else to her, like one brief interaction has flipped the whole world on its head, but as Zora looks over, it feels like she’s seeing someone else.
Nothing has changed, not since they last spoke, but there’s something different to the way his eyes have become glassy, distant in a way he wasn’t when he was surrounded by friends. He winces as the wind picks up, pulling his left arm closer.
He’d done a good job of hiding it before, but those injuries have got to hurt. You don’t fall that far into an industrial facility and walk it off unscathed, and Zora would bet money on him having a little more than just a broken arm (because it’s definitely broken. She hasn’t actually seen him use it, and it takes far too much effort to move it. It’s hard to tell in the dim light with his body shielding it, but it might even be a little crooked.)
Mike is alive, but well is an overstatement. Without proper treatment, or at the very least more rest than he seems to be getting, none of his injuries will heal properly. He’s living on borrowed time, and if the resolve that finds his visage means anything, he must know that by now. People often forget they’re nothing more than flesh and bone when confronted with the greater threat of infection, that they’re still human, that they can still succumb to much more mundane fates than zombies. Mike is no different.
It would be pitifully easy to kill him right now. Half turned away, preoccupied by his own grievances and barely able to defend himself. Even if he struggled, there’s no way anyone in the church would make it in time, and she could definitely make her escape before they arrived. She’d be doing him a favour, if anything. Putting the poor thing out of his misery.
And after the day Zora’s had? It’s almost too perfect. Finally, her frustration has a vessel, something far more attainable and real than her previous attempts had been.
All she has to do is pull out her axe and go for the throat – she isn’t a monster, not yet, not tonight – and all the blood and gore will be worth it because this will be the time it finally settles the desperation rooted in her bones, when she truly avenges all those she’s failed. It never is, but she keeps trying, keeps going, because what else is she to do? How else can she bring justice to the Salvation? How many people will she have to kill before the sick thrill wears off and the lifeless eyes staring back at her are far too human once more?
He isn’t the traitor, the zombie who took Squiddo away from her, or Mr Flux – but he’s still just as fleeting and replaceable as all the bus people before him. He knows far too many of the horrors this city holds by now, but she will put a stop to his suffering at long last. Zora will be his saviour, just as she was always meant to be. Just as she failed to be oh so long ago for every soul she foolishly believed she could nurse back to health faster than something worse could take them.
She should kill him. She will kill him.
“Um, Zora…?”
Mike’s voice cuts through her train of thought, wavering uncertainly in the middle of his sentence. He’s turned towards her, she notices now, even if her eyes never left him – that might be part of the problem, actually. Zora looks away.
“... Yeah?” She asks, the image of everything casual and composed and sweet and all the things she’s ever hated, but all she needed to be once. Maybe he didn’t notice…
“Do you have any more cigs?”
What?
“What- No!” Zora tries to give him the most disbelieving look of her entire life, suddenly all too aware of the squashed, smouldering paper stick in her hand, utterly ruined “Why would I give one to you? Do you know how annoying these are to find out here?”
“Because you feel bad for me…?” Mike trails off as he meets her gaze, endlessly entertained yet nervous all at once as he laughs with his full chest – which is clearly a mistake, quickly devolving into a coughing fit so harsh he might bring up a lung. He continues like nothing happened, strangely proud, “Worth a shot.”
He’s using her tactics, but he’s significantly worse at it. She should’ve killed him while she had the chance.
"Weren't you just saying they’re bad for you?” Zora raises an eyebrow, absently flicking the misshapen cigarette to the floor and crushing it beneath her heel. A waste, honestly. Stupid Mike and his stupid killable face.
Mike shrugs, looking away in favour of staring up at the night sky, pale complexion cast in an almost ethereal white light, catching on the silver piercings littering his face like stars twinkling just for him. He smiles up at the sky, as if there’s someone up there who could ever care for them. “I’ve had a change of heart. Life’s too short to worry so much.”
Zora rolls her eyes, even if Mike won’t see it. She understands what he means, though, even if it is a little corny to dance around it like he is.
They’re both dying. Maybe not in the same way, but the timer counts down all the same. Neither of them are making it out of Paradise City, are they?
It would be so easy to skip the waiting, take Mike out right here, right now. Put an end to the one good thing their little quad seems to have going for them anymore, now that Rotation and Grayleigh are infected (and Meagon is nowhere to be found. Zora doesn't know – can’t know – why her absence feels poignant, like more than them simply losing each other in the chaos. But she’s sure there’s a reason, just as she’s sure they don’t have the time to fully repair the bridges broken in the fallout.) Tear him away from them so abruptly that they may never know he's gone, waiting forever for someone who will never come home as they stare at his lifeless body, uncomprehending, never truly setting in.
What good would that do, though?
Once Mike drew his final breath, Zora would have to run, breaking the already fragile illusion that her attack on Magic was in defence of Jawhn. Where would she even go? Her base is surely untouched, but without the protection of Jawhn and Woogie (not that she particularly cares for them, of course…), she isn’t sure she could hold out for long with her wounded arm and severe lack of firearms. Does Mike have a gun she could steal? It all sounds like way too much effort, honestly. She’s far too tired for all of this.
If the Doctor, or whatever his name was, doesn’t come up with a working cure soon, the infection will take her too. No blaze of glory, no battle well fought, just the same plague that’s terrorised her and everyone she’s ever loved their entire lives. It’s pointless.
Zora sighs, fishing around in one of her jacket's many pockets, producing the last box of cigarettes she’d scavenged from a backpack no one was using anymore and her lighter. She holds the offending box out to Mike, who only stares at it for a moment, perplexed, until his brain kicks into gear and he takes a cigarette.
No comment is made on the matter. Not when Zora lights her own, taking the longest drag she can without choking, nor when Mike repeatedly fails to light his with only one good arm and Zora takes the lighter back, doing it herself.
Soon, it will be over, and they will rot just like everything in this city seems to.
For now, Mike is warm at her side, just close enough for her to feel his presence in the cold, illuminated briefly by sparks of orange and amber, different from the fire burning her alive from the inside out. In another life, she likes to think she’d have hated him. Truly hated him, in a way she can’t find the passion to do so now.
Had he appeared in the Salvation in his current state, she wants to think he’d have annoyed her just as much. But she’d been soft, always had been before she learnt how to shut it all out. Before she failed those she loved so badly she vowed never to love like that again in fear of them meeting the same fate. She’d have loved him the same way she loved everyone, as if there was still gentleness in the world to be treasured and brought back into the light. Letting every loss sting like it was meant to instead of drowning it all out in bloodshed. Some good that ever did her.
Something fundamental in Zora is broken, shattered long before she was even born, only worsening with each day that passes without learning who did this to her – to all of them.
Even still, the night is quiet, almost eerily so as the city itself braces for something worse. Mike may never see midnight like this again, and Zora doesn’t like her odds either. But there’s no use mourning a fate they haven’t met yet.
The night draws on, the wildfire in her heart claims another soul.