[ Send “cloth blindness” for a starter where my muse is wearing a blindfold. Sent by @inthisfire-ifindrain. featuring @standingxbear ]
"You dumb sons of bitches, you think you're hot shit? I know you! I was you!" Cary had been going on for a good while in the middle of the raider camp, tied up and blindfold. Of course he had worked through his gag and if there had been any raiders left alive, Cary probably wouldn't be.
Standing Bear needed a minute. It was one thing to take on a gang of raider with your friend. Fiona was more willing to get her hands dirty than West these days, sometimes Betty tagged along, but he was lock step with West about the research and clinic and all those things about modded guns and robots that Standing Bear, and probably Fiona, too, kind of stop listening to when they went on...
It was one thing to kill a bunch of raiders. It was another to find your teenage best friend their prisoner. Someone he hadn't seen in nearly 40 years. Apart from a little gravely texture, Cary Robinson sounded exactly the same. The news that he had been a raider was a little surprising. But... after the White Legs War, well...
Standing Bear was overwhelmed. Would Cary even want to know him? He had found Two Rivers years ago... His own sister didn't want to remember that life. Nevermind he'd spent 30 years looking for her. Nevermind that he loved her, that he knew she still loved her big brother. You couldn't just erase that. You couldn't just forget that. Bear wrote to her. But she never wrote back.
"You think I haven't killed? C'mon, I could take any of you in a knife fight. Bunch of chicken shit punks... Hello?" Finally Cary figured out he wasn't actually speaking to anyone, hands tied behind him, ankles chained to a large piece of arched rebar in a road side slab of concrete in the middle of the camp. It was getting dark, the fire cast odd shadows on Cary's face.
Standing Bear cleaned off his knives against the dirty bandana he took from one of the corpses. A little too diligently. He was nervous. No, he was scared of getting rejected again. He was scared of Cary not remembering him, or their band, their friendship. He was scared of seeing that same cold look on his sister's face: I have a new life now, why should I need you?
"Talk to him," Standing Bear whispered to Fiona, off handedly as if he were too busy to do so. Normally, he would have insisted, or just been the one to handle the sociable situation as Fiona was a little more blunt. "He's a friend. But-- Nevermind, just make sure he's not a threat."
