Survivor - Connor x OC

Hello

Evanescence - Hello

Taylor sat at her mother's vanity, brushing out her wet hair. The house was deathly still around her, but it had been for years. Her mother had fired a gunshot and blanketed it with silence ever since. For her, the house had been silent since she was nine years old.

No one would look for her here, at least not at first. She had booked a hotel yesterday and moved everything she brought to Detroit there. By thae time anyone thought to look for her, they would check there before they came here. She didn't plan on being here when that happened.

She knew Markus was probably marching in Detroit right now. He'd told her that she couldn't come. She'd dropped off two androids with one of her contacts at the edge of the city. That's why she'd come back to this house, because there was still an old car in the garage that wasn't self-driving that belonged to her mother.

Her eyes kept glancing at the bed in the mirror. It wasn't the same bed her mother had died on. That would have been macabre, and anyway that bed hadn't been salvageable. No, just some ostentatious four-poster in place for the sake of having furniture in the master suite.

She could still picture her mother's corpse stretched across it either way, the gun curled in her perfectly manicured fingers, brain and skull fragments splattered over the white silk sheets.

Taylor placed the brush down on the vanity, staring at her face in the mirror, at her mother's eyes looking back at her. She wondered if it would be easier to sleep here, in this room, than in her own room. Would the night terrors find her no matter where she slept, slipping over her like water, drowning her?

She would sell it, she decided. She'd held on to the house for years, clinging to it, a festering and jagged wound that refused to heal. If she could burn it to the ground, she would. She considered donating it to charity, but she couldn't imagine it as a shelter, or anyone coming here seeking safety.

She'd left her phone at the hotel, switched off. There was no cable service at this house, no internet. She was at a total disconnect from the wider world right now, and she found it both terrifying and wildly freeing. She had no idea, however, how Markus was faring at the moment.

Eventually, she made her way back to Jericho. The sun was just starting to set, the cold already setting in. She took the car, a classic red Corvette that had once belonged to her father. Her mother had kept it, for sentimental reasons, even after she remarried. She never talked about it, never drove it herself, but had never once considered selling it.

Taylor supposed they were alike in some ways.

As she pulled up near the docks, she began to feel uneasy. Like her house, the docks felt unusually quiet as she closed the car door and slid the keys in her coat pocket. Pausing, she ducked back into the cab and took her gun out of the glovebox. Despite her apprehension, she picked up her pace as she made her way onto the freighter.

The peaceful exterior of the ship was a mask for the chaos of the interior. Everyone inside was in motion, and it took her a long time to make her way through the pulsing crowd of slightly panicked deviants toward the hold. No one she attempted to stop could give her a straight answer on what was happening.

A huge weight shifted from her when she finally caught sight of Markus, in his usual spot overlooking the hold. It was another few moments before she could make her way up the stairs to where he was. When he finally turned and caught sight of her, she couldn't stop herself from crossing the remaining distance and throwing her arms around him.

Her senses returned to her a beat later and she pulled away again. He was looking at her with puzzled surprise, and she felt herself flush. "Sorry, I just... everyone looked panicked when I got here. I thought something had happened to you."