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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"You want my ass to go down, you just gotta say so," Max told him. Sentimentality? What sentimentality?

Dante rolled his eyes and hoisted him back up without bothering to ask permission. He'd earned that.

"Dick," Max said, barely keeping himself from gasping aloud in surprise. "Seriously, romance is fucking dead with you."

"What, were you hoping for flowers?" Dante asked, and stepped off the balcony.

"I've put out for less," Max mused.

"I don't question that," Dante said, landing on the ground. "Too bad for you, I'm taken."

And set Max back down again, a little more gently than he'd picked him up.

"Always a dibs thing," Max sighed, his feet back on solid ground. "And, pretty sure in this instance, it's too bad for you."

"Yeah, sure, you're a real catch," Dante snarked, securing the tin in one of his pockets. It still peeked out from the side; he really needed bigger pockets.

He glanced at Max and added, "You think they have a liquor store or something nearby that hasn't been looted to shit yet?"

"I dunno if the Mount would have bothered searching this deep into Koreatown yet," Max said. "But this was Seventeen territory first, so they might have. And the fire would have shattered most of the bottles. But there might be a few somewhere?" He shrugged. "I know of one liquor store in the area, but if it's empty, we're SOL."

"You wanna go find it?" Dante said, with a casual shrug.

He could personally take it or leave it. But after all that shit with Kathy, he figured Max should probably get something out of this deal.

Plus, booze.

Max looked up at the sky and reluctantly shook his head. "I'm not sure how much longer my spell hiding us from Cairax is going to last. A bottle of brandy isn't worth getting caught outside the wards when it fails."

"All right," Dante said. He shoved his hands back into his pockets. "Then let's go back."

"Feel like we were out on furlough," Max said, sticking his tattoo'd hands in his pants, "and the warden is calling us home."

"Well, you did kinda unleash the warden on everybody," Dante mused, surprising himself with how casual he sounded about it.

It wasn't the kind of casual you sounded about a threat you didn't understand, or about something you thought wasn't worthy of your time. It wasn't oh-I-dropped-my-sandwich-casual.

It was the instictive casual of someone who understood, deep at heart, that he was the apex predator here, even if no one else acknowledged it. That he didn't have much to fear, at least for himself.

And it surprised him.

Edited 2018-10-06 06:10 (UTC)

Max gave a small snort of something akin to amusement. "Well, without him, we never would have had this great bonding experience. We're gonna head back to the Mount and paint nails, right?"

"Nah, I feel like that'd ruin the mood we're setting here," Dante joked, looking up at the large ruins ahead of them. "You probably should talk to someone, though."

"Talk about what?" Max asked. "Hair-braiding techniques? Cause I was never super-good at that. Ma--" He stumbled over a rusty bit of pipe and went quiet.

Dante blinked. "Max?" he called, looking over at the guy.

"Fine, I'm fine," he said, waving Dante off. "Just tripped, it's fine."

He wasn't ready to talk about Marie-Anne. Not to anybody. She was probably dead by now, so it didn't even matter, but still, not ready. It had been almost a decade, but still, not ready.

Dante shook his head. "Okay," he said. "Sure. Let's go with that."

"Look, I tripped," Max said, catching up. "LA was a garbage dump before the exes showed up. Don't read into it."

"I'm not reading into anything," Dante said lightly. "I'm just telling you to go talk to someone. You clearly need to."

"I talk to lots of people," Max said. "Barry..."

Not that Barry had been talking to him much since the whole 'not entirely truthful' thing.

"...Nick..."

You know, trading barbs.

"...St. George..."

Who talked to everybody.

"Whatever, man."

He was worried about Max, but not enough to make a big stink out of it. They both knew Max was full of shit, that was enough.

"You think any of those exes are still left near here?"

"Hard to say," Max said, looking around. "Koreatown was cleared out and so the exes followed. But I made a lot of fucking noise trying to get the fire escape down, so they're on their way if nothing else."

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