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Who| R and Julie Grigio [Closed]
What| R continues to do what he’s best at: he wanders, takes a breather against the Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse statue near the Cornucopia, and runs into a surprise Julie.
Where| The Cornucopia
When| Later in Week 4 after he's fed again
Warnings/Notes| R’s wandering around as a beat-up zombie, mentions of zombie corpse stuff.
R develops a new habit in the Arena, as crazy as that is – he keeps cupping his shattered eye socket with his hand, making sure the eye is still there. It’s dark in that side. For all he knows it’s there for looks. At least he hasn’t had crows pecking it out, part of the reason R’s been on the move so much. They tend to ignore moving targets. Knowing it’s still there, though, makes him feel better and not lop-sided like he hasn't been falling to pieces over the past couple of weeks. It’s been a few weeks, hasn’t it?
He hates he isn't sure. If he was alive, he’d know. He could read the calendar and point at a date and say that’s today.
R keeps shuffling on, doing his best to ignore his hunger. He snagged a rat awhile back, big and fat and pissed off, but rats are junk food and it’s more to keep his hands and mouth busy than because it makes a dent. The ankle’s probably gonna go soon. Concentrating on his foot barely hanging on there gives him something to do when he runs out of rat, R staggering along with his head drooping down and looking at his ankle. Yup. It’s totally snapping off today. He can be Peg Leg R after this. R rasps out a grunt at the idea and looks up to find he’s wandered back to the Cornucopia.
Why’d he come back here?
Maybe it’s a guilt thing over biting Air at this place. Maybe it’s because it’s shiny. Or maybe it’s the fact garden is pretty and he likes the colors.
Whatever it is, R decides he’s done with shuffling for now. He can pick it up later. Now he wants to go lie down somewhere, check his eyelids for holes because that’s a thing you need to do every now and then when you’re a zombie. Shake up his usual routine of shuffle - stagger - stare at a wall, maybe throw in a groan. Do the whole expanding his horizons thing. Is it possible for him to dream again? The last – first? – time he did, he woke up to find Julie booked it.
“Gghhh,” R moans to himself as he flops down to slouch against a statue he thinks he should recognize. He told himself he’d go back to Before Julie but it’s harder than he thought. It’s a work in progress, he guesses. The zombie’s good eye eventually drifts closed.
The next time the pedestals rise near the Cornucopia’s garden, R’s fallen asleep for the second time in his un-life, slumped like he died all over again. His other eye's frozen open, his shirt still covered with dried gore when he pigged out on that Tribute.
What| R continues to do what he’s best at: he wanders, takes a breather against the Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse statue near the Cornucopia, and runs into a surprise Julie.
Where| The Cornucopia
When| Later in Week 4 after he's fed again
Warnings/Notes| R’s wandering around as a beat-up zombie, mentions of zombie corpse stuff.
R develops a new habit in the Arena, as crazy as that is – he keeps cupping his shattered eye socket with his hand, making sure the eye is still there. It’s dark in that side. For all he knows it’s there for looks. At least he hasn’t had crows pecking it out, part of the reason R’s been on the move so much. They tend to ignore moving targets. Knowing it’s still there, though, makes him feel better and not lop-sided like he hasn't been falling to pieces over the past couple of weeks. It’s been a few weeks, hasn’t it?
He hates he isn't sure. If he was alive, he’d know. He could read the calendar and point at a date and say that’s today.
R keeps shuffling on, doing his best to ignore his hunger. He snagged a rat awhile back, big and fat and pissed off, but rats are junk food and it’s more to keep his hands and mouth busy than because it makes a dent. The ankle’s probably gonna go soon. Concentrating on his foot barely hanging on there gives him something to do when he runs out of rat, R staggering along with his head drooping down and looking at his ankle. Yup. It’s totally snapping off today. He can be Peg Leg R after this. R rasps out a grunt at the idea and looks up to find he’s wandered back to the Cornucopia.
Why’d he come back here?
Maybe it’s a guilt thing over biting Air at this place. Maybe it’s because it’s shiny. Or maybe it’s the fact garden is pretty and he likes the colors.
Whatever it is, R decides he’s done with shuffling for now. He can pick it up later. Now he wants to go lie down somewhere, check his eyelids for holes because that’s a thing you need to do every now and then when you’re a zombie. Shake up his usual routine of shuffle - stagger - stare at a wall, maybe throw in a groan. Do the whole expanding his horizons thing. Is it possible for him to dream again? The last – first? – time he did, he woke up to find Julie booked it.
“Gghhh,” R moans to himself as he flops down to slouch against a statue he thinks he should recognize. He told himself he’d go back to Before Julie but it’s harder than he thought. It’s a work in progress, he guesses. The zombie’s good eye eventually drifts closed.
The next time the pedestals rise near the Cornucopia’s garden, R’s fallen asleep for the second time in his un-life, slumped like he died all over again. His other eye's frozen open, his shirt still covered with dried gore when he pigged out on that Tribute.
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Once she realized the cot underneath her was about a million times harder than her bed, she woke quickly. Look around, take it in. Okay -- industrial. Not outside. Point. Bonus. Took away the bonus because it was a room she was not familiar with, about the opposite of the painted walls of her room --
And no Nora. No R. She feels panic bubbling up worse than when she saw a fucking zombie stumble into the stadium after her. She still doesn't know how the hell he'd managed to get in, and after chasing away Nora and her questions, she hadn't managed to ask him herself.
There's no pillow to hide her Beretta, so she doesn't reach for it. When she's surrounded by a few white-washed assholes (the cleanest clothes she's ever seen, that she remembers seeing, because you don't wear white when it attracts attention and stains like a motherfucker), Julie feels the very real, animal-like fear that makes her freeze.
They lead her out of the room. Four of them. She's smart enough not to try to start a fight with four men when she's weaponless and they look like they're expecting it. Do it when they don't. Always catch them off guard.
The shit they dress her in is garish and she has to wonder: this is it. She's being turned into zombie bait. And then she does fight, or tries to, until she's shoved in a tube and told that, goddamn, what a pleasure, what a fucking honor.
She rises up into a garden. Admittedly, being kidnapped and whatever the fuck this is is surprising, sure, but a garden. A honest to god garden. It looks taken care of. In the middle of nowhere, a freaking hand-grown garden, and there weren't zombies munching on pumpkins pretending they're brains or corpses rotting all over the petunias.
She thinks they might be petunias. She's never seen one.
Julie steps off the pedestal and sees that, just beyond the hedges, the place is what she expects. Ruins. It's what she's used to. Grown over ruins, smoke, burned carcasses of old business buildings. Except she's pretty sure that's... that's a spire.
Christ. She shakes herself awake, staggering after she nearly misses her first step. Don't be distracted. Sure, easy to say, harder to do. There's too much to look at, too many open spaces and not enough corners to put behind her back for protection. She has to start over, just like when they first found the stadium. Look for weapons, look for a hide-out, map while you move.
Julie bites back the urge to call out for Nora, to see where the hell they'd stashed her friend. Knowing Nora, she'd probably gotten loose before even getting this far. She'd be fine, though. Obviously. Hopefully she had a gun or five.
She takes a few more tentative steps, gaining her footing. It's been practically forever since she wore anything but jeans because god knows they last, they suffer blood and tearing and the rain well. She loses the cape thing, rips it off and leaves it behind, because the last thing she needs is something some zombie can grab onto and pull her back with.
Another few steps, just around the edge of a cut bush, and she sees it. There. Corpse propped up against a statue that she does recognize, an iconic image she snorts over, hiding her face in her elbow before she laughs. No way. No fucking way.
Somehow it's fitting to see a dead guy under that. Very artistic.
And it's gotta be a corpse, not the Dead, because she knows, like everyone, zombies don't sleep. Except R, and she's only seen it a couple of times. Just R. Right. The zombie-not zombie that had better wondered off before this. Before she got... what, kidnapped?
Maybe he ate one of those guys in white.
She's still cautious anyway, each step soft and slow. Zombies can hear, they can smell. She can jet, easily run from one, but that huge silver thing -- she's gotta check that out. Get a focus on where she was. It'd be an easy landmark, at any rate --
Nope. Gotta be fucking kidding her.
"Hey." If she's wrong, she's. Well, not screwed, but kind of hurting herself here. She's gotta make sure, though. The whole flashy getup would've been off-putting if the blood wasn't splashed down the front. The face is fucked and one of the eyes is staring at her. Come on, zombie. Don't be dead here.
The irony is suffocating.
She gets closer, tried to look past the messed up gouges. The hair's the same, messy as hell, and the eye. Okay, Dead wrong, hah hah, because the corpse color is there in the iris, even from this far away. "R?" Has to be him. She's close enough to hit his foot, turned to the side at a broken angle. Looked like someone lost a fight with, like, a lion or something. "Wake up, come on."
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He thinks he sees Julie, smells her coming from a mile away because no matter what happens, she’ll always reek of Life even when she’s hobbling around with a cane at eighty. R’s good eye flickers behind his closed eyelid. She pops up in front of him like the very last time he saw her, alive and disappointed and resigned and that hurts in a new way that he can’t pinpoint. It spreads like the hunger, faster, aching and pulling him down to the ground. Should’ve come clean with her from the beginning. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. He opens his mouth to gasp out “I’m sorry” like that’ll be ever enough for Perry.
Julie lifts a finger to her lips and crouches down next to him. She’s staying low, using him for cover.
When he turns, he sees another Tribute suddenly charging them across the square. R lurches to his feet, but he’s too slow and Julie has nowhere to run. The Tribute, the big, square-jawed guy from weeks ago at the Crowning, suddenly has a shotgun out, taking a bead on Julie because she’s the bigger threat here than he is. R feels the need to scream rattling around in his lungs, building up as the Tribute squeezes the trigger and -
Something nudges his foot.
“R? Wake up, come on.”
That’s a mistake kicking his foot, because it really was hanging on by a thread up until now. Julie’s little kick snaps it clean off. The foot sloughs off at the ankle, shredded boot and all, his tibia sticking out and now he really is Peg Leg R. The zombie gives a flinch as he comes around between the voice and the kick, his working eye fluttering open and then fixing on the blur of yellow and pink in front of him. The image refocuses into a girl, then refocuses into Julie Grigio and suddenly R’s wide awake again as he gapes because she’s the last person he expected to see here.
“J…Julie?” R doesn’t even register the ankle, his eye wide as a plate. “How…did you get…?” R’s so confused that he has to try again. “I thought you…went home.”
What is he even feeling right now? He thinks he’s overjoyed, singin’ in the rain happy, and then R remembers the last time he saw her and then that ache comes back again, hitting him where his heart used to be. She looks larger than life itself right now. R stares at her, drinking in all the details like that quirk of her mouth, the way her hair prefers to fall to one side, all the little things that those Polaroids don’t do her justice. She’s here. She’s really here and she’s talking to him and….uh oh. She’s here. In the Arena.
R tries to get back to his feet then, pushing off the floor, grabbing at the Walt Disney statue’s base, and he puts his foot down only to find out surprise, surprise, it’s gone just like he’d been waiting for. R slips on the new stump and nearly bowls over Julie.
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But that's his voice, obvious as hell, and a grin splits her face open (relief like she swears she's never felt), fading instantly as he almost crushes her to the ground. Good thing her muscles were wound so damn tight, because she manages to catch him around his middle, squeezing herself to him.
So maybe she was really happy to see him. She had time to be horrified by the fact she'd just kicked his foot off right about -- give her a second to enjoy this hug -- okay, now.
Her head jerks up, unwinding her arms from his torso but keeping a hard hold on the blood-drenched shirt of his. She's not thinking about that. One thing at a time. "Jesus R, what the fuck happened to you?" Julie's hand comes up and cups one of his cheeks, tentatively pressing her thumb over the swollen skin. He looks like hell, and yeah, he can't die, but now she can freak out that he doesn't have a foot and she's pretty sure his eyes is falling out, Jesus Christ that is disgusting.
It's a selfish moment, testing his cold skin with a soft, probing hand, taking in all the cuts around his face, the unnatural angle of his nose. She might've almost forgotten she'd been kidnapped or whatever, that they were standing in the middle of an unnatural garden, that there were probably some Dead waiting around for the perfect moment to snap her up.
Julie doesn't want to be a dick, but she's pretty sure she's never seen him look so awful.
Her gaze drops down to his foot -- or where it should be. Instead there's bone and some hanging threads of rotting Dead flesh. Julie swallows. "Fuck, how are you going to get that back on?" Miss Practical over here. Can zombies reattach their limbs? Pretty sure no, or she'd see a lot less zombies missing arms. "God, I'm so sorry. What the fuck." She looks back up at him.
This is like, at least sixty shades of Seriously Fucked. "Hey, you okay?"
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R can only stare down at her mutely and realize oh yeah, she’s talking. He needs to start groaning up a reply, stat.
“Long…weeks happened,” R rasps, suddenly glad all over Howard did such a good job putting his eye back in again. Thank God it hasn’t popped out in front of Julie. Having it hanging down his cheek is a surefire way to drive off a girl. “I’m…still here. I’m okay.”
It’s not exactly what Julie’s asking but it’s the only answer he can give. He’s on his own two feet - was on his own two feet, until Julie got to his broken ankle – and he’s fed. Killed a man, turned him, watched him die again for real. Kinda-sorta made it up to a friend. Sat down and opened his eyes and his dream girl is here, hugging him and now she’s a target. She could get attacked like Howard did.
R thinks “okay” is relative.
Except for the part where Julie’s asking hard questions like what they’re going to do about his foot. R follows her gaze to his foot, lying on its side a few feet away with strings of muscle attached, blackened where it was meeting his tibia up until a few minutes ago. Now it’s just a lump of meat even the rats here might turn their noses at. He stares at it and feels nothing, sees it like he sees the statue he’s holding onto: it’s there, maybe it should mean something but that connection’s been severed.
R shrugs. “We can’t…reattach. Not your fault. I don’t have…duct tape. Do…you?” R tries to look on the bright side, wanting to see Julie smile. “I could…be…a pirate…?”
Which would be great, except he barely remembers what a pirate is. He remembers some Arrrghs and Shiver Me Timbers and parrots and peg legs and…yeah, that’s about it. R hopes he got that right. As if to prove he’ll live tottering around, R slowly lets go of the statue, putting everything into maintaining his sense of balance. He reaches down to give Julie’s warm shoulder a squeeze, brushing her hair out of the way. It’s soft, not brittle and bone dry. Look, see? I can stand. It’ll work. The important thing is Julie’s here and he needs to get her out of the open.
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Pressing matters. Severed foot. More than enough to take down any human, give them an absolute death sentence. There's some of that very familiar black sludge on the end of his -- his leg, and the foot, and sometimes it's really a miracle she doesn't lose what's in her stomach more often. Seriously, she's seen some nasty shit, but sometimes kicking off someone's foot just does it in for you. Makes a difference that it's R, by the way. Real big difference.
Julie might've been up for laughing, like, a week in the future, but right now she just stares at him like he's goddamn crazy. Duct tape. Was that seriously a joke? Was that some kind of zombie thing, laughing about losing limbs? Maybe that's why the one-armed ones flailed so much.
"Not the time." Jokes later. Really bad jokes later. She's still high on fear and, you know, there's a foot there. IT also sucks being buddies with a zombie when you need rapid-fire explanations, because explanations weren't gonna come. She gives him the support with her shoulder, tipping her boot against the foot.
What are you doing here? Were you seriously sleeping? Why did your foot just come off? What happened to your face? Where the fuck are we?
See the problem here? So she focuses on the big thing, because R might be pseudo-reformed here, but she's not missing the blood all over him. And it's not black, it's red. Living red. "You're alone?"
She's waiting for the posse to come out, the pack of zombies that haven't caught on to that old spark of humanity. They're always attracted, and she's Living and maybe the only live thing around here. Not only that, but. Nora. They'd been all in her room, and now it was just the two of them.
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R leans more heavily than he wants to on Julie’s shoulder. She’s short and he died tall, so it’s not something they can keep up for that long. “Yeah. Not many…others…here. Other Dead,” he adds, just to be clear. “I…saw only two.”
Other Living, though. Plenty of those. He’s even chewed up few, stuffed himself until his hunger shut up. All stuff he rather keep Julie away from, even though she’s probably figured it out by now. R wants to reassure Julie, moan that it’ll be okay, that they managed to get her out before, they can do it again. The problem is he knows how to deal with other corpses. Humans are another beast entirely and R can’t promise anything when they start throwing in other Tributes.
He races to think of something else to say. This isn’t how a reunion should go, not that he’s suddenly an expert on those. He purses his mottled lips, wracking his brain, trying to think fast on his feet. Foot, he reminds himself. Foot, not feet.
“I told you, I won’t…eat you,” R says, as it suddenly dawns on him why she’s bringing up all this. “We should…move on. It's...not safe.”
Julie has every reason to be worried, R tells himself. She’s alone, she can see the evidence he fed recently splattered all over his shirt. The math adds up. She’s a smart girl – she has to be – and he can’t blame her for having any second thoughts. R shifts his head slightly to look down at Julie. Everything about her is exactly like he remembers, the only thing different is the clothes. He can’t remember ever seeing her in a dress and even Perry mostly remembers jeans and more jeans (Perry hadn’t minded). R thinks she looks nice in the dress.
R decides he needs to get used to his stump now, lifting his arm off Julie’s shoulder, making sure he didn’t clock her upside the back of her head. He staggers forward a few paces, testing it out. The stump where his foot used to be skids a bit until he gets used to it, the zombie turning toward Julie. He's proud to say he didn't get dumped on his butt in front of her.
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Except the garden. She still has no idea what to think about this garden.
Her mind's still racing as he steps away from her, her eyes focused on that stump that touches the ground with each step. The practical part of her brain wonders how much slower he's going to be now, how that's going to slow both of them down. The other part is wondering why seeing corpse upon corpse doesn't really prepare you for watching a zombie walk on a stump.
"No where is safe," she says, following a step behind. She keeps checking behind her, around her, because that's how she been trained, reassurance or not. It might've been more of a snap than she meant because she was still on the edge, still remembering the men in white shoving her into a tube into this shit.
She needs a break. A ten-minuter. She needs someone who can talk at a rate faster than ten words a minute.
Julie shakes her head, annoyed with herself more than anything else. "You've been here weeks? You know the area?"
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He uses the silence to try to work out what to say.
The zombie shifts at her question, one shoulder hunching. “…I know…some of it. Wandered…for a bit.”
He starts leading Julie along the same route he took his first week here, a lazy kind of loop that’s taking them into Tomorrowland at a slow clip. Tomorrowland has dark corners and ducks and water, and it’s also plenty far away from Howard’s hiding spot. They pass the fake golden rocks, a lot of the paint weathered away and covered in bird shit. There’s evidence of fights between other Tributes along the way. A few splashes of dried blood. A grand total of zero, count ‘em, zero corpses lying or stumbling around. R slows down as they reach the rockets, the Astro Orbiter all over the ground in pieces with weeds trying to grow over them in a carpet. R by now has a few questions ready, most of them not even remotely related to survival because he can’t begin to get on that level with Julie (he was still adjusting to her needing food that wasn’t alive and talking back, for starters).
R starts to pick his way through the first couple of rockets. “…They said…this is…Disn…eyland,” he groans. Moan casual. Play it cool, he reminds himself as he sneaks a glance at Julie. “Do you…recognize?”
He turns to watch Julie, a hand coming up unconsciously to help her across one of the rockets blocking the way before he realizes what he’s doing. She’ll be okay. She’s a big girl. She’s got this. R knows that. He still sticks his hand out.
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She nods, even if he can't see it. Guess she was spoiled with that whole balcony reunion; here she can't even muster up enough to feel anything beyond relief that he's here and moving. Not well, but it's something. Now she's focusing on what it takes to survive, now that she's not surrounded by an army and an overprotective dad. Hell, she didn't even have a knife to her name. Just a zombie.
Kind of helpful.
Julie snorts at his hand but takes it anyway, eager for the contact. You missed your zombie boyfriend? Nora, always getting under her skin. Especially with those rough edges of truth. Like stabbing someone with a broken butter knife.
"I've seen it," she answers, maybe holding his hand a little too hard and letting it linger once they're past the rocket. It's old and faded like everything else, broken and on the ground. She swears it should be standing up. The place is a wreck. The dome in front of them has high, pointed spires, but one of them is broken, jagged.
She doesn't add that when she saw it, it was filled to the brim with people. Just pictures -- god knows Colonel Grigio isn't a Disneyland kind of guy -- but the kind where kids were riding shoulders, laughing, lights ablaze all over the place. She remembers Perry, one time, finding a brochure for one of the Disney places, stuck in a drawer under some condoms. The condoms had been for the immediate distraction, but then she'd looked through the brochure afterwards.
It'd made her ache. So she threw it away.
"How did we get here, R?" Miles in a manner of hours. Or how long had she been asleep? Maybe she'd been out for days. Didn't feel like it, though. She was still stuffed with food from dinner. Christ, this didn't make any goddamn sense. "Did you get the big guys in white shoving you up here, too?"
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Of course Julie wants to compare notes. R nods, one of those weirdly floppy yet stiff ones of his.
“Same…deal. Soldiers…?” R has to take a break, regroup, get his words back in order. In his opinion he’s hauling ass for a zombie. “They said…no Dead where they’re…from,” R throws that in because it seems like that’s important. “I asked.”
He has no idea where the Capitol is and even if he did, he can’t point it out on a map for Julie. His sense of geography is shot to pieces, but he knows where Julie’s from and that a place where the infection – or whatever – hasn’t reached is a Big Deal to someone like her. What he doesn’t get is why they’re taking other Living and using them as entertainment instead of banding together, though. Seems to him like it’s a big waste, but no one’s asking him to start groaning his opinion, so R keeps it to himself.
Anyway, he’s said his piece. R can only offer Julie a shrug and a lost look when she starts asking how they got here. It’s one of those questions he actually hasn’t thought of too much. It didn’t matter before. He’s gotten lazy with the whole thinking thing since he came clean to Julie and she took off. After that, everything stopped mattering. Now she’s back. Suddenly things are complicated and he feels like he better step up his game if he wants a second chance at being friends. At whatever this thing is – was? – between them. R has no idea. It’s weird.
The zombie starts to head deeper into Tomorrowland, his stump making a wet sounding thunk for every dragging footstep. They have to circle around the crashed monorail, whatever's left of the overhead tracks providing some shade. R squints with his good eye at whatever signs are still up. No dice. Giving up on trying to read, R tries to steal a page from Julie’s book and copy her, try out the whole paying attention thing. He looks, he listens, he sniffs. As far as he can tell, they’re the only ones out in the open. Looks clear to him.
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No Dead. Julie's attention snaps to R, staring at him. Can't be. Impossible. Hadn't the plague spread everywhere? She'd been traveling so long, moving so much, it felt like she'd just accepted it. Everywhere was trashed, everywhere was covered in the Dead. The U.S., Canada, Mexico. How could they be in Disneyland and not have any Dead?
Fucking impossible. Funny, to try to lie to someone who was already Dead. She shoved it to the side, a topic to be remembered but not picked at out in the open.
"This is completely fucked," she says, holding her arms out wide and then dropping them back to her hips. This. Everything. Dad was probably freaking the hell out and Nora was god knows where, and now she's stuck in a theme park with a zombie missing a foot. Which was squelching, by the way, and squelching was one of those words she'd figured didn't really apply well to anything.
"We gotta find you a boot or something." She tilts her head down, towards. That. Leaving spots of black zombie goo behind. Plus, seriously. The noise. She keeps thinking she should've brought the foot with her, just in case. In case what, she finds a staple gun? "You're leaving breadcrumbs."
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Don’t ask him what that means. All he knows it’s her, it has her personal color splashed all over it and he doesn’t have the words to explain. It doesn’t really need it, he thinks. R lets it go.
The zombie stares back, watching as Julie files away the info he threw at her and gets down to business.
“…It’ll…dry out. I think?” R isn’t sure where you would even get shoes around here. If she asks him, he did leave a boot back the way they came, even if it’s shredded to pieces from the piranha and his foot’s still rotting away in there. “Keep…moving, okay? No…biggie.”
Give him another day and he’ll probably forget he had a foot instead of a stump anyway. It’s not something that’s seared into his skull, like Perry and Julie. As far as he’s concerned it’s already gone. Out of sight, out of mind. R will wander around looking for a shoe if that’s what Julie wants, but personally he thinks they have better things to be doing with their time together. He’s still not sure if he wants to try taking her to Howard or not. Put all his friends in one place, hope they get along. R looks at the trail of black ooze leading back the way they came without registering it, grunts to himself, and looks toward what might’ve been Captain EO or something a long time ago. Space Mountain’s still in one piece, but it’s high, like Howard’s hideout and he thinks that might make it a spot where other Living want to hole up.
Normally that’d be a good thing for Julie. She’d be safe with others like her. Here, though, here’s different and R wants to hover protectively over Julie even though he knows she can take care of herself. That dream sends a shiver up his spine, R glancing at Julie as if he needs to make sure she’s still there and she is. Her head isn’t blown off by a shotgun. She’s still in one piece and Alive.
R brings up a hand to point at the auditorium. “There? We could…look.”
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Again, she envies the Dead. The way they can just get over something as monumental as losing a foot, like it's something that happens every day. Like R's blood trail behind them won't freak someone the fuck out if they can figure that black goo is zombie blood. Or that he's leading someone right to them, whether Dead or Living. Some part of Julie's still waiting for the Dead. They'll smell R or something and come.
Eventually. If not now, then later.
Julie moves to his side like she's gonna catch him if he slips on the stump, following his hand. Like she knows what anything around here even is. But they gotta move -- or her body feels like that's what needs to happen, because sticking in one spot is always trouble -- and she's eager to get anywhere. Even if it's to find a stupid boot.
She loops her arm around R's to give him some balance. If they're gonna get going, she's gonna make sure he has good footing. So to speak.
"Let's go. It's good as anywhere else. You been there before?"
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R starts to think losing his foot might be worth it when Julie comes over to help him walk, her arm looping through his so he doesn’t end up on the ground. Having her there makes R try twice as hard not to fall on his butt – being afraid he’d tip over and squash her is a pretty good incentive, actually. They shuffle down the ramp, concrete walls rising behind them. A line of doors starts along their right, R leading them around toward the last of them.
“No,” R shakes his head, a slow back and forth compared to a human. “But…out of the…open. You should…rest.”
He hurries on because he’s known Julie long enough to see that argument brewing all over her Living face like a storm cloud. Perry’s seen it too. It’s a lot more impressive in person, though. R’s in such a hurry that he’s slurring his words as he wheezes.
“You should be…hundred…percent, Julie. Big…day.”
R hopes she doesn’t get any funny ideas about striking off on her own like the last time he told her to stay put. Julie’s not so great at listening. Selective listening, maybe, or "stay here" isn't in her vocabulary to begin with. R doesn’t know if that’s a human thing or a Julie thing and maybe it doesn’t matter. All R knows is he needs time to scope things out. He needs to bother and care instead of shuffling from Point A to Point B, hoping for that next big meal.
Julie being here changes everything.
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"Rest? I haven't even been here that long." Though the whole tube thing was somewhat traumatizing, she's pretty sure she's had worse days. Actually, make that extremely sure. The storm is definitely brewing, just like R expected; last thing she needs is a damn zombie trying to protect her again. It'd gone badly enough last time. (And she might be still feeling a little guilty about ditching him. Twice.)
He's pushing. There's something out there, then, because Julie recognizes this urgency, like when he was trying to get her past the Dead the first time she ran. But he said no Dead. Well. Just two.
No Dead. It's still ringing in her ears. It can't be true. Literally can't be. Impossible in every single way. They could never purge them, not permanently. Not completely.
"What are you running from?"
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So R goes with the truth. It's easier in the long run. Besides, R has no idea how to handle the other Living Tributes here, not in these numbers. A hive of other Dead was easy in comparison. At least he spent years bumping shoulders and groaning with them.
"The...others. Living out...there," R tries to keep his voice down. The problem is moans tend to carry. "They'll...hunt you. It's...them or...you."
That was the easiest way to put it. The problem is R knows he can't stash her in this auditorium forever either. She needs food and it's not like the airport, where he knew where most of the stuff was probably left behind when the Dead took it over. Disneyland's new to him - or it is now - and he could be gone long enough for someone to wander in on Julie. There's Howard. Maybe he could help? R's still kicking around that idea as he glances sidelong at Julie with his one eye.
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She doesn't need an explanation past that. There's nothing about being Living that automatically makes them safe. She's had plenty of humans try to kill her. It's an every day occurrence on the run -- people who want the food, the supplies, or the women of people better off than them.
Dog eat dog. The door closes behind them and the auditorium stretches out, dilapidated chair after dilapidated chair. It seems empty, endlessly quiet, but the wet noise of R's stump echoes off the walls. She leans him against a chair and watches the door like she expects it to bust open. How many Living are here? If there's no Dead, then what are they all doing here?
"I'll take that rest." She's gonna have to take it while she can. She looks up at him, plopping down in a seat. A cloud of dust rises around her. "You still okay?"
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"Sorry...didn't think...until now," R sighs.
He falls silent again, trying to think of how he could get Julie out of this, who he knows that can help her in Disneyland. That he didn't try to bite, because that's a terrible first impression and the sad thing is R lost count of how many people he even tried to make passes at the first place. R's lost in thought when Julie cashes in that raincheck, the zombie's eyes going to her. Julie's a splash of color in the dark with her princess dress even as the dust settles around her.
"Yes. I'll...keep watch. Wake you...up?" Sleep's not a problem for R. Him being able to move at anything more than a crawl, kind of a bigger deal. But he doesn't think anyone saw them slip in and he can wait as long as it takes for Julie to get rested up.