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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Ezra didn't feel like explaining himself. In fact, he didn't seem that interested in saying much at all.

Besides, getting up said enough, he thought.

That was fine with Dante. He wasn't exactly full of words right now, himself.

He shrugged his coat back on with an idle gesture, nudged aside the mattress and opened the door, slipping out into the hallway.

Ezra followed like a ghost, light on his feet.

Closed the door after them about as quietly as he moved, too.

Dante stuck his hands in his pockets, pausing just long enough to look over his shoulder, to determine where Ezra was and give him a moment to catch up.

He resumed walking after that, through the hall, down the stairs, out that final door.

In other circumstances, his mind would go hunting for something to say: eager to make another futile attempt to put a crack in the ten-feet-wide wall of distance around Ezra. That urge wasn't here now; he was satisfied with the quiet.

This time, Ezra wasn't even doing it on purpose. It was more like he'd momentarily checked out, and was ten feet away from himself.

His hair was getting longer. It flopped in his face as he walked. He was keeping pace with Dante, hands stuffed in his pockets.

The streets weren't very crowded at this time of the evening, but they hadn't emptied out yet. In absence of conversation, Dante watched: the faces of the people, the structure of the Big Wall, the words on windows and signs and what they said about this place.

People had learned to live with this.

They always did.

"They're doing pretty well for themselves," he said, eventually. It was an idle observation, not any attempt to draw Ezra out. It didn't need to be answered, but it could be.

"Mmh," Ezra agreed, though it was more a vague sound than it was anything else.

Luckily he didn't leave it at just that. "Humans are resilient like that."

It'd probably be curfew soon, if they still had that, Dante reflected at some point between the 'Mmh' and the rest of it.

"Yeah," he said quietly. "It'd be so easy to just give it up. Die, or crowd each other out, or something. Instead it's almost normal out here."

Ezra snorted. "I vote for purging the word 'normal' from vocabulary," he said, drawing out the words in a soft drawl that was somehow reminiscent of some of his more seductive purrs, yet somehow the complete opposite of that. "It doesn't actually mean anything."

After a pause, he added, half just to himself, "Never has."

Dante thought about it.

"Not sure that's true," he said, his own tone even, thoughtful even.

"Well, hasn't meant much to me," Ezra amended.

He didn't sound like he could muster up much caring, either way.

Dante chewed on that thought another little while.

"It probably means something different to everybody," he said. "When I say normal, I just think about... a day, you know? A day where nothing particularly bad happens, and nothing particularly good. I wake up, I eat, I hang, I go to bed. Baseline. Normal."

A beat.

"But five years ago, a day like that would've been weird as shit."

"That's what I meant," Ezra replied without much color to his voice. "For something that's supposed to convey ordinariness, it's too mutable for me. It means... nothing."

He'd never felt like normal applied to him, anyway.

"I probably woulda said the same back then," Dante said.

Still thoughtful, but now halfway to himself, like he was trying out a thought.

"I guess I just mean they're getting back to doing as humans do when there's not so much shit going on," he said. "You could almost forget about all the fucking zombies."

Ezra shrugged. "Never disagreed with the principle."

No, he got it. Grasping at semantics just came naturally when his thoughts were a jumble.

"I know," Dante said.

He blamed Kathy; he'd never narrated his thoughts this much before he met her.

"Just thinking, I guess."

"It's okay."

Not much of anything else was. But that was.

Ezra brushed some hair away from his eyes. But it didn't really stay there.

Dante's mouth curved, just a little, in spite of himself.

"Maybe they have hairdressers now."

Ezra rolled his eyes.

It was a little half-hearted, but still. "I'm too worn down to listen to half-assed insults to my hair, so please stop immediately. Thank you."

"It's a joke, not an insult," Dante said, with an easy lightness.

He blew a long strand of his own unnaturally vibrant white hair away from his face to demonstrate his point.

It practically reached his jaw now.

"That you think you can joke about the glory of my hair is an insult, darling."

It was very dry, but at least he'd added the endearment there. Made him sound a little more normal.

But normal wasn't real, right?

"Touchy, touchy," Dante teased gently. Then dropped it. "Looking forward to getting a shower for mine."

Hey now, wasn't the narrative who'd made that claim, now was it?

Ezra sighed. Almost wistful. "Oh, a shower will be nice."

"Right?" Dante said. "I don't wanna smell of zombie gunk all week."

It'd also make him feel - there was that word again - normal.

"And I don't want to keep smelling the gunk on all of you."

Please spare a thought for your friendly neighborhood werefox's supernatural senses.

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