Imagine That: Multifandom Part Two

moving on【five】| alicia clark

"Hi," I said, knocking on their open door with a friendly smile. "It's me, Y/N. I was at the gates earlier when you arrived? I just wanted to check in and make sure you were all okay. I didn't mean to just shoot off like that."

Chelsea returned my smile as the father and young boy hung back, unpacking.

"It's okay, you looked busy," Chelsea replied, meeting me by the door. "We're doing a lot better now, thank you. It's honestly just amazing that there's a place like this out here. We've..." She paused, a frown forming on her face as she remembered something. "It's been hard recently. We really needed this. I guess we got lucky finding your patrol when we did."

I frowned, too, remembering exactly how it had been before I'd arrived here. That felt like forever ago now.

"Has it always been just the three of you?" I asked curiously.

She glanced over her shoulder at her family before motioning for me to join her outside. We both took a seat on the bench just outside the door and she began to open up to me.

"We were with a group, a long time ago," she explained. "But disagreements happened, people became untrustworthy, and my husband, Jack, and I decided it was better if we relied on ourselves. Of course, it's dangerous out there. We just didn't realise how much."

She paused, and then I realised a tear had slipped from her eyes and I immediately felt guilty.

"I'm sorry, Chelsea, you don't have to tell me if you don't want to," I said quickly, wishing I had a tissue or something to give her.

She wiped it away and smiled through it. "It's okay, honestly. I just– we were on the move for a while. Getting by. We were lucky enough to find a temporary safety net in a loading dock at a supermarket. That's when we ran into this girl. She was alone and said she needed help. Jack, he didn't trust her. But I couldn't just leave her. It was one person. We had a lot of supplies from the trucks we'd found."

As she told the story, I could see the instant regret on her face and pitied her without meaning to.

"It was a trap," she said what I was thinking. "The girl was with a group. This big guy, their leader, I think, came in the next morning and stormed the place with his people. Jeremy or Johnny or something like that. They'd planned it all along. The girl was just scouting us out..."

As soon as she mentioned Jeremy, I froze and wondered if I'd heard correctly. It had to be a coincidence, right? But she'd mentioned a girl. It couldn't be... was it Y/S/N?

"We were lucky to have made it out alive, but they left us with nothing," Chelsea continued. "And then we were struggling for weeks before we found your patrol."

I was beginning to feel something I hadn't felt in a long time, and I wasn't sure it was a good thing.

"The girl who tricked you," I said, mouth going dry, "what did she look like? Where did you meet her?"

Confused, Chelsea answered, "That's weird, Alicia asked the same thing."

Alicia had heard this story before?

"It was a few hours west of here. She had Y/H/C hair, about 5'5 in height. A tattoo on her collarbone, right here."

She motioned to her own collarbone and I swallowed thickly because this was Y/S/N. It had to be. I couldn't believe what I was hearing.