spin_kick_snap | The Mount, Ex-Los Angeles

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The Mount, Ex-Los Angeles

The last time anyone from Fandom had been in Kathy's LA, the heroes had been living inside the walls that surrounded Paramount Studios, with the exes and the South Seventeens laying claim to everything else. Since then, they'd expanded; the Big Wall pushing the borders out almost a mile in all four directions. In some spots, it was hard to tell that there had ever been a zombocalypse; the streets were clean, the buildings repaired, the blood all scrubbed away. There was a proper school, lots of farms and gardens, several churches, and even a small library. The studio was still the heart of the community, but people had started to spread out and settle. It was still a tight fit, several thousand people into one square mile, but honestly not much worse than Los Angeles used to be, back before the world died and reanimated again.

Life had fallen back into a rhythm again. People got up, got ready for the day. Kids were sent off to school, adults took themselves to various jobs, though there were fewer sales people, baristas, and aspiring actors and a lot more guards, scavengers, and farmers these days. There was a brewery down on Larchmont and a still over on Monroe. Burns Park let people enjoy a bit of nature where the kids could run around and burn off steam and a Gold's Gym practically against the Big Wall. That was where the Unbreakables spent most of their free time, with curious gawkers watching them put more and more weight onto the machines.

It was a bustling little community of survivors, as safe as a place could be, surrounded on all sides by millions of undead waiting to find a way inside to devour them all.

[For them that are there! NFB, and ~~please wait for the~~ OCD is up! Previous entry Next Entry]

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"Nope," Dante said. Keeping up the rear - no pun intended - as he shuffled after Max. "Living room sounds like the right idea, though. I don't think this place was all that big..."

A beat.

"I don't know. Where do people keep Christmas shit anyway?"

"Most of these places aren't," Max agreed. He was familiar with the LA version of 'shitty old apartment,' even if this was the first time he was in the Koreatown version of it. "Most families have a closet somewhere to stash holiday shit." Or a chest somewhere, but if that was the case, they were probably fucked. So he wasn't going to mention that.

"Where does Kathy keep her Christmas shit? She probably keeps hers in the same place her family did. Most folks who grow up with families do shit like that."

"And suddenly I feel like I'm about to fail a relationship pop quiz," Dante muttered. "Um..."

Right, think back to last Christmas. "...Living room, yeah. I think."

"Okay, now what's her favorite color and what does she do when she's feeling sad," Max asked, because he was an asshole.

The hallway wasn't particularly long, ending in a T with the kitchen off to the left and the living room directly in front of them. The living room was in shambles and the fire had raged long and hot here.

But not hot enough to completely destroy a giant, hardwood table, still surprisingly sturdy looking. And not hot enough to completely destroy the two skeletons by it, one wearing a mostly-melted sneaker that was still pink under the ash and dust.

"Fuck," Max said softly.

Dante's mouth curved in the wannest smile it had carried in a while.

"Her dad went zombie right after she died," he said. "Raven had to kill all of 'em."

Should he bring the shoe, too? Maybe not. Too morbid to be a momento.

"Jesus," Max said again. "Her sister was just a kid, right?"

Not that they hadn't seen hundred of child-zombies, maybe thousands. Still, this slight skeleton had Max's...stomach...twisting. Yes, definitely stomach. That was absolutely the organ that was hurting right now. "Let's just find these ornaments and let's go," he said.

Fuck, if he'd known they were walking into the mausoleum of Kathy's family, he never would have suggested this little pleasure jaunt.

He had no one else to blame for it but himself, either. If he hadn't brought up knowing where Kathy lived, Dante would've just broken into some Korean-looking store and grabbed something.

"Huh," he said, shooting Max a thoughtful look. He wasn't going to admit the guy had shot up by a few... points of a point in the last few minutes, but still.

Instead of saying anything else, he picked a cupboard that looked... vaguely structurally intact, and started to rifle through the debris.

Jesus, how fucking low was his opinion that Max just not saying something dickish over the body of a kid counted as surprising enough to be worth points?

Max poked around a bit himself, not that there was much to see. This place had been hit harder than Kathy's room had been and almost everything had been destroyed. More books, a TV, a bunch of little side tables for what had probably been knickknacks and the like. "How long had her family been in the country?" he asked.

Please. Max had possessed a demon lord for shits and giggles, and used his powers on people just to get his rocks off. It'd been easy to think of him as nothing more than an asshole, without a scrap of real humanity.

Dante couldn't have been the only one going into this with that image in mind.

"A while, I think," he said. "Kathy only remembers Korea from family trips." His fingers hit on something metal. Huh.

"So at least one generation, maybe more," Max said, studiously drawing lines in the soot on the table. "I guess that makes sense. It's the older part of Koreatown you go to for the more established families, the ones who have been here since the nineteenth century or earlier."

He paused, realized he'd been talking in the present tense. "Well, went. I had some contacts in here for supplies."

It was a box. Or a tin, Dante wasn't sure. He drew it from the wreckage.

"You spend a lot of time here?"

"Nah," Max said, finishing the symbol he was making. It was an odd thing, of twists and turns and lines. "My magic is a lot more Western than Eastern. But only an idiot ignores a third of the world's magic just because it's different."

He looked over his shoulder. "You find something?"

"I think so."

Dante pushed off the lid, looked inside, and found...

"Yeah. Yeah, I think I have it."

"Well, what is it?" Max asked, wiping off his hands on his pants, leaving dark smears behind. "I'm getting cancer just breathing in here, I at least wanna see."

Dante rolled his eyes. He held the tin open and up grudgingly, just enough for Max to see.

It was one of those tins that were supposed to hold cookies but inevitably just held sewing supplies, or, in this case, small ornaments. The decorative layer had melted away and the whole thing was malformed, like it had gotten incredibly hot and then left to cool. If Dante hadn't been stronger than he had any right to be, the lid probably never would have gotten pried off.

Inside were the remnants of a bunch of different ornaments, mostly homemade. There were a few charred wooden ones, the kind you bought and painted yourself, and wisps of fabric that had once been bows or angels or god only knew what.

There were only two ornaments that had survived relatively unscathed: a glittery, green vaguely-triangular blob that was blackened on one side and a collection of delicate little fans that had somehow escaped being warped by the heat. They were lying loose now, but all of them had small holes at the base where a string would tie them. They looked very old and worked by hand.

"This one, one of the girls made in school I bet," Max said, pointing to the green blob. "I made something like that myself when I was a kid. It's meant to be a little Christmas tree. And these ones...they look old. Probably came over from Korea with them."

Dante pressed the tin back shut. "Good," he said, raising to his feet. "I don't know shit about Christmas stuff."

Max shrugged. "It's not really my bag, either, but I remember enough about the trappings to fake it. Ready to go then?"

He was.

"My parents weren't big on it," Dante said, not sure why he felt like explaining it. "And after that, well, demons aren't big on Christmas, go figure."

He shrugged. "But yeah, let's go."

Back to the hall.

And angels probably didn't appreciate the commercialization, not that Max knew about that part.

"Finally," Max sighed and flicked his fingers a few times. The air in the living room shimmered for a moment as he headed for the door and the symbol on the table glowed.

Dante caught something from the corner of his eye and turned his head, blinking. "What's that?"

"Nothing bad," Max said defensively.

"I didn't say it was bad, I just asked what it was," Dante retorted, and jumped across to Kathy's bedroom.

"Just a spell," Max said, still sounding defensive as he inched across the remaining floor. "Some random shit's gotten into the house. Seeds. Think I even spotted an acorn. From birds and carried on the wind and whatever. I'm just...encouraging shit to grow if it lands in there."

He looked supremely uncomfortable to be admitting this.

"Making a few Li family trees happen, huh," Dante said. He was mildly surprised his first instinct wasn't to think Max was lying, but he tried to keep that under wraps.

He walked up to the back of the room and got ready to climb back onto the balcony.

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