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The sheer variety of texture, Lucy thinks, is the strangest part of this world. Even more than the violence and cultural differences. Those come in waves. The sensory input is constant, overwhelming. Visuals: sun-bleached wood rising from the earth like rotten teeth. Streaks of cloud across the too-bright sky. Dappled light through concrete and twisted rebar, casting shadows that move like living things. And physical sensations. The breeze sucking perspiration from her forehead. Aching feet and calves from walking so far. Cooper’s calloused hands, which she first felt in cruelty and now only touches fleetingly when he offers to help her up from where she’s fallen.
These small gestures of huge significance. She takes his hand, and in doing so, feels like she’s crossed another threshold.
Existence up here is so vivid. So intense. Horrible, yes. But between the horrors: insects creeping over leaves, the sweet smell of rain in the desert. Petrichor, he’d told her when she’d commented on it. Thunder crashing in waves through the air--and then the petrichor. The sharp kiss of sunlight searing her skin. The occasionally oppressive silence of the wasteland, so absolutely foreign to her ears after decades surrounded by the ubiquitous hum of machinery. And maybe most overwhelming to Lucy: the night sky, its stars sliding across that vertiginous expanse of dark. Her gaze always falls back earthward, to threats and delights more immediate.
Cooper’s mottled scars. Her hand in his.
So many textures. But mostly she thinks about the shape and substance of him: of his flesh and soul.
An unidentifiable emotion blows across the expanse of her mind. Nostalgia, maybe, but she struggles to identify it. A secret melancholy that runs as deep as her concept of self, inexorably tied to everything she is or will be. When she tries to coax the feeling to solidify, to give it a name, it vanishes. She pauses, stumbles. Wipes her sticky hands on her thighs a few times before clenching her fists, digging her nails into the soft flesh of her palms. What she thought was sentimentality reshapes itself. It’s not yearning, it’s indignation. She’s mad. For everything that was lost. Everything that was taken from her. The rage turns in on itself, bending and warping. She has been so foolish. She wants to thrash and scream and destroy. She craves blood, as if tearing off Cooper’s finger with her teeth has awakened a slumbering beast in her. Crushing bone, rending flesh. But it’s her own blood she wants. All of that fury turns inward, poisoning her. She’s never been this angry. She didn’t know this much rage could be held in a body. In her body. She’s terrified he’s right: There you are, you little killer. She is a killer now.
Cooper grunts and glances back at her, his expression a perfect portrait of annoyance. Oblivious of her emotional distress–or ignoring it. The question is: Ignoring it because he doesn’t care, or ignoring it to afford her privacy? He tilts his head and nods: Keep up.
“Yep,” she chirps, “I’m coming,” and adds some pep to her step, while inside part of her is withering. He makes another noise, this time more of a growl. He continues walking. She continues smiling. Over the past week, that noise has become an unspoken joke between them. A ritual. He pretends to be irritated, she ramps up her chipperness to exaggerated levels. He smiles when his back is turned: she’s caught his reflection in passing pieces of shattered glass.
They are alive. She is alive. And darned if that isn’t something to be happy about. Something powerful enough to sweep the anger aside. She stands in the sunshine and the world pulsates with life around her. The cacophony of nature throbs in her ears, clenches around her heart. She inhales until her chest aches and her clothes tighten uncomfortably around her ribs.
She will permit the death of that old version of herself. Decomposition brings new life: she read all about it in her biology texts. So she’ll allow a few precious parts of herself to decay, and then grow a new idea in their place, fresh and strong. She looks at the ruined world around her and thinks, I will demonstrate that change doesn’t necessitate desolation.
Shadows lengthen, and Cooper tells her they’ll stop here for the night. Another collapsed building. Another basement. They rest in the crumbling belly of a dead empire.
Today, they survived. She has more long-term goals than that, though the future of humanity is certainly on the backburner at present. So right now, to the version of Lucy in this moment, her concerns are selfish. Immediate. Don’t get shot, don’t get stabbed. Try to not have to shoot or stab anyone else. Eat. Don’t get eaten. In that way, she supposes, she does theoretically understand Cooper. To a degree. When you have nothing to look forward to, it’s hard to think beyond the present. When your own existence isn’t guaranteed, how can you worry about the existence of your descendants? How can you worry about the existence of the world? How could she ever have believed things would be so simple?
Cooper pauses once they’re out of the sun. Pulls out his canteen and takes a long drink, then turns to her. He holds it out and they briefly make eye contact, before his gaze slides away in what looks like a laborious effort at nonchalance.
She sips. Not too deeply: she’s not greedy. Enough to clean the grit from her teeth and wet her cracked throat. He’s put his mouth here, she thinks as she touches her tongue to the canteen. Tries to detect his flavor, hoping to find it revolting, hoping to find a tangible refutation to all the grimy little thoughts about him that are forming inside the edges of her skull, bad ideas gathering like storm clouds. It tastes of metal and semi-clean water, still warm from his lips.
Cooper moves through this world like a nightmare, but he is only a human--despite how he presents himself. He is broken, spiritually gangrenous, forsaken and forgotten. A cruel, dangerous man. When he closes his eyes for the final time, not a single person will remember him. A thought interjects itself in her exhausted stream of consciousness: Nobody will remember you, either, Lucy MacLean. We’re the same. You and him. You’re delirious, she reprimands herself, and takes one more sip, as if to spite him. You are losing your mind. We’re not the same, not at all.
I’ll remember him: startling herself with the ferocity of the emotion behind the thought. For whatever that may be worth. Then, wryly: If I outlive him.
She returns the canteen and her hand brushes against his finger. Hers. Theirs? The finger he claimed in retribution, then joined with his own flesh. Their eyes meet and she holds her breath, waiting for a Moment, some flash of realization where a subtle but undeniable emotional shift will occur between them. It doesn’t happen. He drops his gaze to the ground. A Moment wouldn’t even appear on the hazy horizon of his mind, she’s pretty sure. But they do not recoil from the contact.
Broken things can be mended. There’s a lot that she thought she knew. Some turned out to be lies or half-truths, but this is not one of them: almost anything can be fixed. Maybe a human’s soul can be put back together. Maybe he can be mended. If he’s receptive. And if she has the strength and patience to teach him.
Their eyes meet again, and this time he doesn’t look away. They regard each other frankly. She swallows the thank you from the tip of her tongue because acknowledging his generosity will call attention to his kindness. She blinks at him. He blinks back a few times, and she imagines it’s an elaborate performance in lieu of speaking the words you’re welcome. He probably has sand in his eyes. Or allergies. She opens her mouth to ask him if Ghouls have allergies, and the look on his face warns her away from giving sound to the question.
“What,” he accuses. “You’re gonna ask me some foolish thing.”
“Nothing, Cooper. I just like looking at you, is all.”
He scoffs. Their eyes still locked. Listen, she wants to tell him, you obtuse man: I care about you. She wants to take his hand in hers again. But she can’t be direct like that. For all his swagger, all his violence, he’s delicate in a strange way. For someone who will walk straight into danger, he is skittish around the softer things in life. Maybe because he’s more used to lead and iron than matters of the heart.
She likes to say his name, even though it irritated him at first. The texture of it is pleasant. The feel of his name on her tongue. He’s accepted it now, after she told him if he gets to call her sweetheart, she will call him by his Christian name, thank you very much. He’d smiled when she’d said that, though he didn’t know she’d seen. Maybe reaffirming his name, his humanity, will remind him. It’s naive optimism, but they need any bit of hope they can get.
They eat. She doesn’t ask for the specifics. It’s meat, she knows that. Stringy, chewy, dry. She’s eaten things she never thought she’d see, let alone taste. Before, it was all mashed potatoes and spam and jello. Soft and malleable as herself. Now all she eats has bones. The gristle and crunch of Cooper’s finger, the hot salty blood on her tongue, down her throat. The surprisingly neutral flavor of human jerky when that’s all they’d had to consume. You like that, Cooper had taunted as she’d gnawed on the leathery meat. She shrugged, and responded: Needs salt. He had laughed, though not derisively. More out of surprise, she thought. Had she properly made him laugh, then? Had she amused him? Sometimes she catches him looking at her when he doesn’t think she notices. Most of the time, he has a subtle smile. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, but she hopes that’s not the case.
I wasn’t always like this, he mumbles at her later that evening, in the gloom of the basement, after they’ve crawled into their beds. They go fireless that night, for reasons he hadn’t felt necessary to disclose. A gruff, “No fire” had been the only explanation, and that was good enough for her. So they’d hunkered down, and he’d been silent as she’d rolled her bed out close to his. Close enough that when he moves, she feels a change in the air. Close enough that she smells him. Dust and leather and sweat. Gunpowder and petrichor. Pepper and creosote. She wants to taste him again. But not, like, in a cannibal way, she quickly adds to her own thoughts. She’s not sure what’s more disturbing: that she has to qualify that, or that she’s now actively daydreaming about intimacy with him. Physical and emotional.
If it matters. I used to be. . . Well, hell. Different.
Of course he wasn’t always like this. He had been changed, in more ways than one. As she has, as she will be. The moment of stark honesty floors her.
Lucy has come to enjoy their mutual quiet. At first it was awkward. Now it is. . . Awkward, still, but maybe less. She fantasizes that it’s because, as he’s come to know her, he feels something akin to regret and shame for how he treated her in their initial encounters. But realistically, that’s probably not it. In the dusky light, she searches that scarred visage in a futile attempt to divine what he’s thinking, but he’s inscrutable and blank, blank. He’s so empty, she thinks. A puzzle with lost pieces and no box. She has no reference image to work from when trying to put together who he is. Empty, but--maybe--waiting to be filled with humanity again. She’s never known anyone like him, and she tries to convince herself that’s why he’s so fascinating. That’s why she thinks of him as she falls into a broken sleep. That’s why she catches herself staring at him when he’s not looking. That’s why she thinks such ridiculous things as, I want to crawl into bed beside him and be held. She won’t. She wouldn’t dare, nor would he. In this vast, frightening world where anything seems possible, that is an event that can never happen.
“Who did you used to be?”
He winces. “We’re not gonna talk about the past. I just need you to know. Wasn’t always this.”
“Did you ever have any other companions?”
“Leave it,” he says.
She doesn’t know if she should assume that means yes, and it ended badly--as things often seem to do up here--or no, he’s been alone all this time. Lucy reaches through the gloom, and touches his wrist with her fingertips. Where the stiff, ancient fabric ends. Her middle finger on his sleeve, her index and thumb presses to his irregular flesh. She moves her thumb once to stroke his knuckles, then takes his hand in hers. Holds it. He allows this. He squeezes her fingers, gently, and she doesn’t know if it’s a reflexive twitch, or an acknowledgment of the dizzying intimacy of the moment.
They continue to sit, silent, inert, even long after the wasteland evenfall has turned to oily black, and in that liminal space she imagines they are no longer two separate people with pasts, but are rather one idea joined of flesh, waiting to be reborn into something new.