— CHAPTER ONE —
wildfire
[ 4627 words ]
Before day one, she was naive. She thought she knew just how much evil this new world has birthed, how far it's broadened people's limits of cruelty, but this is something else. It's not day one anymore — it's day thirteen, her third day alone in this train car since the Termites took Wes — and a fortnight spent toiling in the darkness, stewing in cries and screams, has severed her naivety. That which she once accepted as truth has been split open, and she is sure of only one thing now.
Wes is going to die and she is too.
Every morning and every evening, Termites drop food in from above. For the first few days they ate like normal people: canned ham sandwiches, fresh fruit and raw vegetables. But she was naive — she believed the humanity would last.
One evening, somebody pulled open the big door. Some cowered, some wailed, some begged, but he didn't take and he didn't kill — he gave. He clanged the door shut and, in the darkness, left behind a basket. For hours it remained untouched, until someone tentatively peeled back the stained cloth on top and uncovered a generous helping of cooked meat. Nobody so much as prodded it. But she did. She ate, and after her, the rest reluctantly tucked in. She knew what it was, but they needed it. They were ravenous, starved dogs, surviving only on whatever the Termites allowed them, which so far had been rationed thin. That, and refusing to eat it would anger them. They weren't fattening them up just to keep them alive; the adults whispered about glimpses of Terminus' kitchen when they thought she was asleep. But they haven't whispered in a while. Now they only scream.
Since they seized everybody else, they've been giving her scraps: half-eaten toast for breakfast and cold meat between firm and flaky bread in the evenings. If they're planning on feasting on her next, they'd need her to be eating well — nobody likes stringy meat. But maybe they aren't far enough gone for that yet. Today they haven't given her anything, but today has been different.
She tracks the phases of the day by the light which slips through the few gaps in the walls: orange at dawn, bright and yellowish at day, purple at dusk, nothing at night. When noise roused her, orange spilled along the floor in slim columns. She gave into the familiar and comfortable ache of impulse, pressing her ear to the door and holding her breath. Gunfire spread like a stain across the courtyard, until finally that blond man Gareth's smug voice rang out. Whoever came across this place had put up a fight — they're fighters. But it's been silent since the afternoon: they didn't win.
Like them, she used to be a fighter. She still could be. She could forge something from the wood panelling on the doors, maybe file off a section with the rope on the floor that used to be around someone's wrists. But it's too much effort for something so futile. So she tucks herself beneath the threadbare blanket they'd tossed in on day one and plucks up an old bone to fiddle with. From its shape and density, it must be human. But there is no other way to pass the time. She is already tired of watching the light.
There is nothing to fight for anymore. Wes is dead. She is marked for it. Even if she lives, it won't be worth it.
———
It's day fourteen — bright and yellowish light seeping in — when everything rumbles. She feels it before she hears it. It's as if the earth is convulsing, the air vibrating, the ground trembling. Every component of reality is thrown off balance and it hurts. On instinct, she ducks, but fire doesn't burst through the walls, nor does black smoke curl through the walls to claim her. Something aches in her and that threatens impulse. To ground herself, she tugs Wes' hoodie tighter around her, but all it does is remind her of his absence. The ache pulses, stronger.
Blinded by the darkness, she scrambles about wildly for a gap wide enough to see through. She traces a sliver of light pooling from a bullet-hole in the door and forces her eye up against it, jaw tensing at what she can discern. Snatches of fire — smoke and the tail-end of broad, orange flames — and the dead, staggering in masses into Terminus' courtyard. Brittle and humourless, she laughs. If Wes were here, he would call it divine intervention. When she positions her ear against the hole, she knows it is revenge. Amongst all the growling and snarling and yelling and shuffling of feet, there's the distinct crackling of gunfire. It must be them, she thinks. It must be the fighters.
In truth, she doesn't have many options; she pushes herself away from the door, like it might push down the impulse to choose the wrong one. There's nothing promised for her out there, other than the death and destruction with which she's become so acquainted, or the fire and smoke set on consuming all in its path. But she's doomed in here, alone and submerged in shadow.
Faye always called her a pessimist; the dark to her light. So momentarily, she wears Faye's optimism to widen her options.
She doesn't need promises — she could find something. Maybe not people, not yet, but a car, a map. She already has a destination. But Faye never told her that optimism could be so exhausting. It would be so much easier to let the fighters dispatch a single bullet in her skull, or let the Termites slaughter and roast her for a late dinner, or let the skin eaters gnaw on her until she's one of the bones laying too close to her makeshift hoodie-pillow. But she has always been stubborn and angry, and the gunfire lures her like fisherman's bait — it might be all wrong, it might be a farce, it might kill her.
But she wants to fight.
With all the strength she has after fourteen days locked in this train car, she charges at the wall and launches her weight against it. It hurts, but she's got enough energy to try for optimism, so she supposes it's a reminder she is alive and feeling. It's also loud. She charges again and again and she screams with all the voice left in her unwatered throat, but the only attention she manages to attract is the undead kind; with each noise she makes, their moans only grow closer. Despite this, a fire still burns within her. She slaps and kicks the metal like Wes did and cries like Wes did and yells for help like Wes did. And in the end, the unchanged distance of the gunfire extinguishes her flames. Like Wes did, she crumples into silence and slumps against the door, palms stinging and legs throbbing.
Gunfire cracks closer. She covers her ears with her hands.
As shots fire, the chorus of skin eaters against the door quietens until there's no more groaning, only a final bullet. Blinking out of her daze, she scrambles up and takes a firm stance, infused only with the temporary ghost of her previous fire. The door is wrenched open. As her gaze is assaulted by the daylight she hasn't felt for so long, a gun cocks. With the sun finally crawling on her, it feels like one of those things that is supposed to happen. Fate, or death.
Maybe both. She is marked for it, after all.
"If you're gonna shoot me, don't just stand there." Her tone doesn't waver, but her voice is hoarse from everything, and her heart trills with something at once light and heavy and unnamable. "Do it."
"Calm down, okay? I'm not gonna shoot you," he says. It's certainly a he, his voice boyish and awkward, tone unsure and poorly mimicing reassurance. She can't see him, eyes scarred by light, but she can make out his blurred outline. "Just follow me. We have to get out of here."
We? She wants to question him: when did you decide on a we? But he's right — they have to go. The dead have undoubtedly been drawn by the excess gunfire, and if she were more sure he could survive them alone she might stay and let him soldier on. That, and this stupid boy risked his life for her. She curses him for deciding on an option in her stead, but there's no time to rebuke him. He tosses a gun at her feet and she scrapes it up hastily. Once more, her fire is stoked. The cool feeling of the metal in her hand, the singed air, the freedom and the fighting... It all satisfies a hunger she never knew she bore.
"We haven't got all day. Come on," he urges, more on edge now and motioning her towards him.
When she blinks her way back to sight, she manages to stumble forwards and out of the train car, almost knocking against him. Asphalt under her shoes, sun in her eyes, breeze in her hair — even amongst the violence and all the smoke in her lungs, she's spoiled for comforts. It has been too long since she's stepped anywhere that isn't a couple square feet of metal; in these few moments of relative peace, however afflicted with gunfire they are, she savours her newfound liberty. But all the shadows must have eaten away at her depth perception. She can hardly walk, but the boy is considerate enough to sense her struggle. Taking her gently along by the arm, he steers her through the wreckage of Terminus.
Before day one, she'd marvelled at this place: never had she seen such humanity. Now she knows what it truly is, what it has always been — a graveyard, where humanity is butchered and picked over but never buried. Knowing this, she tries not to look at the evidence as they hurry by, but she has always been curious: blood on the concrete; skinned legs suspended on rope, veins and tendons on display; yet no sign of Wes. That could mean any number of things, only a couple of them good.
She decides to keep her eyes to herself for now and lets the boy juggle navigation and crossing off skin eater after skin eater. It isn't that she's incapable: she's had too much guidance not to be a flawless marksman. But she's still deciding whether she wants him to know that, his friends too. He's steering her directly into the gunfire; they round the corner into a particularly smoky sector of Terminus just as another shot strikes too close to her ear.
"Carl? Carl! I told you to stay close!" a man barks out, furious authority carrying through the smoke. But he soon parts it, striding towards them with a rifle in hand and a blood-splattered hatchet tucked into his belt. Sweaty, dirty, wide-eyed, messily bearded. He looks crazy, but she must look even crazier. He narrows those crazy eyes as he studies her with wild frenzy.
"Dad, I—" In an instant, Carl is yelling. She whips her head around to see a skin eater snapping its jaws too close to the back of his neck. Without a hint of hesitation, she shoots. It collapses just as Carl turns to her, breathless and something dangerously close to gratitude in his eyes.
"We don't have much time," reminds the man, Carl's dad. He doesn't scrutinise anymore. There must be some form of thankfullness in that, too. "Come on. Stick together, for real this time," he adds firmly.
Carl's dad anchors the two of them to a larger group — the rest of the fighters. Each of them has taken up a defensive stance, back-to-back, knives and guns and other makeshift weapons held up and braced to kill. She receives a few curious glances, but when Rick pats her back — a gesture of pride, maybe — the curious eyes abandon her in favour of scouring the approaching smoke. They pick their way through the smouldering debris, slicing down the dead, shooting at Termites, until they're metres from the walls. Like them, she has nothing on her mind but survival, until she doesn't.
One of the skin eaters stumbles out from the smoke, spilling blood and muscle from its slashed throat. Its cheek is a bloody cavity, the skin split open by teeth and still bleeding; on its arm is a bitemark, as if another skin eater attempted to chew it off and was killed before it could sink its teeth in.
There is only one person who would fight off death so desperately.
This. That familiar grown-out fade, now half-seared off. Those scuffed, grimed converses she's had to look at even before the world transformed. All of it confirms the truth that, three days ago, she told herself she accepted.
She swings her gaze around wildly, flitting from face to face, trying to find something, anything, anyone, in their faces. She can barely breathe.
"That's— That's my brother."
Rick's nostrils flare. She doesn't know what he's seeing, but she has an idea. He is a father; he knows the fragility of children. She wants to protest: she's not a child, not anymore, and she's too strong for fragility. But she reaching for her gun is harder than she thought it would be, requiring a strength that hasn't yet been forced on her. Like a child, she cries.
He unholsters his revolver; she squeezes her eyes shut as if she could will this moment away, will this skin eater away, will the past fourteen days away. But the shot never lands. It doesn't even leave the barrel. Somebody grasps her hand and holds it loosely, their grip sweaty as they press her previously-holstered gun into her palm. She meets Carl's steely eyes.
"It has to be you."
It is her nature to defy, to kick and punch and scream a violent 'no'. But she must have lost herself in the fortnight she spent in the dark. She hauls the handgun up to her eye, levels it straight, and — through her tears — fires.
In a final spray of blood and brain, Wes crumples.
Surprising is the sudden impulse to dash across the courtyard and into the mouth of the encroaching flames, to drag his body somewhere greener, somewhere prettier, somewhere where he can get the rest he needs. But someone's tugging at her arm — no, not tugging, but wrapping themselves around her. She is close to crumpling too. "I know, honey," she says. This woman doesn't fight against her wailing and thrashing, but weathers it like a storm. And when her knees give out, the woman goes down with her. "I know."
Rick's voice seems to cut through worlds to reach her, distant and grounding. "We need to go, Maggie. There's no time."
"Rick—"
"No," he says, sounding on the verge of shouting. "We go, and we decide what to do with her later."
Leave me here, she wants to say, leave me with Wes, with his bones and the memory of his warmth. But her voice is broken, lost, and Maggie is hauling her up before she can locate it. Maggie slides a hand across her back — support, or a threat — and they again begin to slaughter their way to the walls together, fire and smoke and bloodshed behind them.
Wes, behind them.
———
In a teary and dramatic sequence of embraces and smiles, they reunite with their own, because of course they do.
A woman bloodied and stern-eyed, with short, gray hair. Carol, her name is, won't stop watching her out of her corner of her eye. Though she thinks it's futile, she lets this woman study her. The fight that she'd had — the fight that has landed her here, amongst them — is all gone. There's not much left to discern.
A burly man named Tyreese, who — despite his frame — determines her worthy of the softness in his dark eyes. He almost sacrificed himself for a baby. It's the type of altruism that gets you killed, but he must know this. Everyone has their principles, she thinks, though some are more realistic than others.
Then there's the baby, Judith. The last time she saw a baby, she had practically been a baby herself; she might be amazed if the new world hadn't turned them into sentient hazards. Judith coos and grins and fists the fur of her father's coat in her tiny fingers. She could both envy and detest this baby's naivety.
They convene outside of the cabin Tyreese emerged from and arrange themselves around her, so at ease operating alongside each other that she is almost moved to study them. Soon they're all flanking her. Some of them try not to look at her, like removing her from their sights might will her away entirely; some of them regard her with pity she doesn't want and doesn't know what to do with; some, like Rick and Carol, examine her.
Arms still locked around his baby, Rick turns to her, brows dark. "What's your name?" he asks.
A question this simple feels like ice sloshed down her back. So entangled in her own detached analysis, she's forgotten she belongs to a heart, a mind, a name. "Sylvie," she says.
"Rick Grimes," he replies, voice still stern, but not cutting. Authoritative. "How'd you end up at Terminus?"
"My brother and I—" Sylvie stumbles, again wilting into stupid, useless emotion.
Wes had said something once, about Faye, about before: you never know what you'll miss until it's gone. It wasn't his own wisdom, a commodity which had always been in short supply. No, it was a haphazard quote plucked from somewhere else, someone else. But it rang true then and it rings even truer now.
Once more she bends into stability. Maggie had held her, before, and some seem sympathetic to the little girl who's lost all she had. But after the grief decays, they might not be so patient as to shoulder dead weight like people less well versed in survival. This group isn't that. This this group is tough. They're fighters. In the Terminus courtyard, even amongst a thicket of greyish smoke, they organised into a tight structure and rammed into dead and alive alike. No doubt they've weathered worse than this and no doubt they'll do so again. She hasn't yet made up her mind about being part of the future, let alone theirs, but she knows she can't lie if she wants to keep this option open. Not yet, at least, and not about this.
"We were with this group. They wanted to go to Terminus, so we went. They all died and got eaten. For some reason I didn't."
A few of the group curl their shoulders, bow their heads, cast around uneasy looks at each other, the ground, the forest — anywhere but the pitiful thing in front of them. She is glad to have their attention elsewhere, even if only for a moment. But Rick Grimes faces her with no such discomposure. He sucks in a breath. "I'm sorry. We've lost people in the past."
A person, she almost corrects — not people. But already she's shared too much. She settles on mirroring the actions of the others, glancing away, and hopes it's a convincing enough play at discomfort.
"How do you know she's not one of them?" says Carol suddenly. Another string of fitful stares. The wind holds its breath, the air is a cage, and Sylvie is pinned by Carol's sharp eyes.
Common sense, she thinks. But Carol's judgement seizes them all by the neck. There's a hierarchy; in groups like this, there always is. No matter how much it pricks her pride, she must brook Carol's suspicion — with no excuses and no snark.
But sooner or later someone has to wrench the beams off that ladder.
"She's my age," asserts Carl, to Sylvie's surprise. His eyes are blown wide, lips parted slightly as he sucks in a breath. "They wouldn't keep one of their kids locked up in a place like that—" He spins to face his father. "—I found her there. Alone."
"Her brother was there, too," says Maggie. In Sylvie's direction she smiles wanly. "We saw what they did to him."
Or what was left of him, what he's become: a corpse on top of corpses amongst Terminus' bloody and smoking skeleton. All that blood. Those shoes. She blinks away all fragments of feeling. She has to.
"They're right, Carol," says Rick, muscling past her thoughts. "I know you're looking out for us—" With his bloodied hand, he rubs the back of his head and motions towards her. "—But look at her."
She would rather not be looked at. Already she's glanced down at her bloody and ashen hands; for weeks she's snarled her fingers in hair matted enough to pillow on come nighttime. Even now, sweat sticks her guts-stained shirt to her chest. If she hadn't shed embarrassment long ago, she would feel it here. Instead she just feels pathetic. It's nauseating.
After thoroughly dissecting Sylvie with her glare, Carol relents, though still sounding dubious. "Fine. But I'm not looking after her."
Reflexively, Sylvie says, "You don't have to." She meets Carol's eye. "I can take care of myself."
Can I? Do I trust myself? The questions arise, unbidden, though she already knows the answer.
It doesn't matter.
She can't take care of them and she doesn't want to burden them with that. If she were any smarter she would have stayed in that train car and waited for skin eaters to rip her apart — skin from muscle from bone — but she'd been naive again. She'd hoped. She'd hoped and she was wrong and she can't pin that mistake on them. Keeping her options open has always been crucial, but from the start she'd been without options, without choice, only she didn't know it yet. Now she accepts it's meant to be this way. By fate or death, she's meant to be alone.
Before, she was living for Wes. Wes was living for home.
"I'm heading north. Give me a gun and I won't be your burden."
A black-haired man almost stitched to Maggie's side makes a noise of disbelief. "Rick, she's just a kid. She's tiny—"
"She's made her choice," he says, not maliciously. He must understand what this world has made of kids; Carl wouldn't be alive if he denies it. Like adults, they have to seize their own choices, eke their own paths, mark their own destinations. Like adults, they have to be strong. She has to be strong.
For this reason, Sylvie tilts her head and says, "I want a knife too." Predictably, Carol's brows pinch together in scrutiny. Words half-sigh, she adds: "I won't do whatever you think I'll do. I just need to survive."
(Or she needs to survive up until the point she decides not to anymore. She needs a quick and easy way out when she finally gives in, because she will. Everyone does.)
As if it could bring comfort, she tugs at the zip on Wes' hoodie.
Rick scrubs at his beard and glances warily between her and Carol. Sunlight shifts. It slinks across his face and illuminates the calculated glint to his eye. "A gun or a knife," he says with gravitas, like it's at all honourable to compromise on her chances of survival.
At this, Sylvie scoffs. "A gun and a knife." The black haired man gawps down at her. "I'm just a kid, remember?" He fixes his jaw into a grimace.
"You ever handle a machete?" Rick cleaves whatever tension they were beginning to assemble.
"I'm familiar."
"Good."
After handing Judith over to Carl, Rick slides the bag of guns off his shoulder and tosses it to the ground. Dirt and dust kick up on landing. He yanks the zip across its teeth, pulls apart the two black flaps of fabric and plunges his hand into a thick bed of unnamable weapons. At last he extracts a machete — the blade streaked with old, copper blood — and a gleaming silver revolver.
"Thank you for what you did for Carl." He passes her the gun and she tucks it into the band of her belt, slung high across her too-big jeans. "Keep safe." Then the machete. "And if you decide you want company after all, we're headin' to Washington."
"I will."
"You sure you don't wanna stay?" asks Maggie. It's another beam off the ladder as she breaks ranks, stepping forward. "It'll be dark soon. You could at least rest up with us for the night before heading out. We're goin' in the same direction."
"I'm sure." She's not, she can't be when the earnesty in Maggie's pale eyes scatters her heartbeat. When she can still feel the ghost of her arms around her midriff, cinching her broken pieces together. Sylvie looks away to try to remember how to breath.
Oblivious to all of this, Maggie takes her small hands in her own larger ones. "Survive."
To Rick, maybe, but to Maggie, Sylvie can't bring herself to deliver false promises. So she only squeezes Maggie's fingers in worldless acknowledgement. Nothing more.
Only to busy herself, Sylvie secures her gun and machete. Goodbyes, or hellos, or the in-between, have never been her strengths; when people exit her life, she rarely gets the chance to impart any closing lines. One bite, one bullet — there's never much space for sentiment.
"You're being stupid." Comes a familiar voice before she can so much as think up some parting words. "You should stay." Carl thins his too-blue eyes at her from beneath his bloodied Sherrif's hat. Even in the clear light, he remains frustratingly inscrutable. "You'll die out there, alone."
In the peripheries of her vision, she glimpses the others watching, averting. Beneath their judgement she feels a beetle spiked against earth, wriggling and trapped.
As if her departure has beckoned the wind, it picks up, northbound and hurtling forth with more warm intensity than before. In her mouth, skittering across the exposed parts of her brown skin, it breathes. She breathes. She might last two weeks, might last two days, might not even last two minutes. But those two minutes would be on her, not them. Her, alone.
"I know."
— AUTHOR'S NOTE —
i hope this is a compelling enough start! this won't be the last written about terminus and sylvie's brother, just to clarify. they have a really interesting dynamic both before and after the apocalypse that i'm excited to explore. he contributes greatly to her goals, motivations, choices and storylines.
i'm also excited for you to know sylvie. she's a very complex and guarded character who handles her emotion in ways which may at times seem irrational. she might appear dislikeable or difficult at first but i know she'll grow on you like she did me.
please let me know what you think by interacting, whether through comments or liking/voting/starring idk. thank you for reading!!