shadow_vector | Aftermath

PG-13
IDW: LSOTW
Verity Carlo, Ironfist
warning: spoilers for LSOTW 5.
written for hc_bingo prompt “post-apocalypse”

It was the end of the world, and yet it wasn’t. And that was the worst part, as far as Verity was concerned. That life would pick up and move on after this.

She wasn’t sure she could.

Ironfist squatted down in front of her, deliberately blocking her view of the smoldering wreck of Overlord. As if that was what was bothering her. Frag. No way. Overlord deserved that—deserved to die a few thousand more deaths like that, one for each of the mechs he’d killed. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t the violence of his death. It was…this place.

It rang with horror, as if the walls had somehow become steeped in it. As if this place…as if no laughter had ever echoed off these walls, no kind words had ever intruded upon the air. Only despair and pain and horror seemed at home here. She felt trapped, confined by it, even though she was standing in the open, the blood-red sky of Garrus-9 stretching above her like some Amityville Horror ceiling.

“You okay?” Ironfist asked, his face unreadable behind the mask other than his optics. Which had changed too much already, she thought—darker and dimmer, as if they were weighted down Aequitas.

“Fine,” she lied. “Can we…just get out of here? Please?”

He nodded. She couldn’t tell if he believed the lie or not, and it bothered her. The old Ironfist would have. This new one….

They turned and started heading in the direction of their dropship. Walking through a landscape of horrors, the ground itself twisted and soured and wrong, spotted with broken shards of metal, splinters of glass, twisted and corroded wires. Every inch of this place has seen death, she thought. But then again, isn’t that always true?

She remembered one of her foster homes, the one she’d stayed at for six whole months but only because the caretakers were lazy and let her do what she wanted. She’d played Indiana Jones in the back yard—because they didn’t care if she ripped up the landscaping as long as they got their check from the state. She remembered coming in with a pile of finds, bones and bits of broken pottery and tattered bits of cloth. And it had struck her how ooooooold the earth was. That Indians may have camped and hunted and died there. That dinosaurs might have spread their toes in some thick ancient swamp far below her feet. That she was standing on soil made from the death of other things: plants and animals, bugs and germs. Death…everywhere, only covered over in green. Life feeding upon death, changing it, growing.

There was nothing alive here, except she and Ironfist. Nothing moved, not even the air, and even that felt…heavy, oppressive. As if it were pushing her down. Trying to stop her. She bet even the germs were dead here—only sterile corrosion, chemical degradation—had happened, oxidization eating at the longer-dead components, half-buried in the blood-colored sand. Feeding nothing except corruption.

“Nothing will ever grow here again,” she said, quietly.

Ironfist stopped, looking down at her, and for a moment his optics were the bright azure she remembered. “I think it’s kind of right that it doesn’t. Nothing should be allowed to cover up what went on here. We should be forced to look and see and know what what we do can lead to.” He stopped, suddenly.

“Yeah,” she said, watching, sadly, as the optics darkened again, the weight of Aequitas, like the weight of death itself, sucking the light from Ironfist’s optics. She shuddered, unable to suppress the sudden feeling that whatever had started this whole bloodbath, whatever had allowed it to go on, stood by, neutral and cold and detached, was climbing aboard the dropship with her.

She’d lost…everyone here. Everything that had ever mattered. And part of her wondered what part she had left here, what part she had lost, what toll she had paid to death. To Aequitas. Part of her wondered what the point was of even continuing, of just…not dropping down into this red sand and…succumbing.

“Remember, however,” and Ironfist’s voice was stifling, heavy, like the air that followed them into the dropship’s port, speaking as if he had read her thoughts. “We live, we outlive, because that is the only way. Life…persists.”

Aftermath

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