For a long time, Eden Perkins believed she wouldn't find another human being she would willingly die for - she didn't want to. The past few months of her life, ever since the day the dead had started coming back to life - and maybe even before that...
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╔────╝ ☠ ╚────╗ xviii. | YEARNING OF THE VOID. ╚────╗ ☠ ╔────╝
THERE HAD BEEN SEVERAL moments in the past few years of her life when Eden has had the feeling like the world around her was standing perfectly still — like everything just froze in time. Inside her head only, of course, because it had always kept going, not caring about how much one person's life on the planet might be breaking apart at that instant. No, the sun still kept rising and setting, taking turns with the moon and going on like nothing had ever happened. Like the dead hadn't started coming back to life, like her brother had never died, like she hadn't pulled the trigger on a young girl, sealing her fate with just one bullet.
But none of that felt as intense as it did now. Nothing felt as horrible as not knowing. Not knowing why her brother had always taken a beating by their dad when he came home from a date? (Something Eden didn't understand back then but did now — she wouldn't say knowing the reason changed the situation for the better, though) Not knowing why on Earth the dead came back as man-eating monsters nowadays? Those things Eden could live with not knowing. Those things didn't unsettle her mind like her current situation.
Not knowing where Clementine was, where Carver had taken her, what he would do to her — that was a hell Eden had never hoped she'd ever be put through. But she had been. And she had watched them take Clementine, her small wrists tied together behind her back as she was abducted, completely defenseless.
The guilt was eating her alive.
Should she have done something? Even if it had only resulted in Eden getting kidnapped as well, at least she could have done something—anything—to protect Clementine. But now? Now she could only hope she got to the girl before it was too late. From what she had heard, Carver was unpredictable. She wouldn't put it past him to kill a little girl. And that made everything even more terrifying.
Eden's anxiety grew by any passing second, by every step she took and after walking through the whole night, the weight on her chest felt so heavy that she believed if one more horror scenario came up in front of her inner eye her sore legs would finally give in under all that burden she was carrying with her. She wasn't made to be Atlas, to carry this horrible, hopeless world upon her shoulders, and she came closer to crashing and falling the more she thought of Clementine and the distance that just seemed to grow between them.
Right as another terrifying image pieced itself together inside her tired mind, Luke — despite all the heartbreak he carried inside of his body himself — sensed Eden's fragile facade was about to shatter. Unsurely, he spoke, "We should be closer now." He could have slapped himself for his stupid words, knowing they didn't bring any sort of comfort to neither of them. But watching the hopelessness spread as the brown of her eyes seemed to lose its colour, leaving them almost completely dull, caused for him to keep talking, "According to the map," as he spoke, he unfolded it — a moton he by now knew by heart since he had looked at it so many times it was already torn and faded by its edges — and studied it once again, "we've got about one fourth of the way down."
