Hello my lovelies! I’ve been working on an apocalypse fic, and while I’m not ready to post on AO3 yet (I want to have enough written in advance that I can keep a regular posting schedule) I thought it would be fun to share a little here, and see what you think!
In every universe, the Curtis brothers find a way back to each other—even at the end of the world.
Outsiders Apocalypse AU
The train yard is where the infected go to die. Once a week, Ponyboy walks through piles of rigor mortis, bodies twisted where they were gunned down, and looks for his brothers.
The scent of scorched earth burns his nose. Smoke hangs listlessly, thick with ash. The military torches the place when there's too many bodies to shoot, when the deadheads crowd against the barricade and threaten to breach it. Ponyboy has never seen a firebomb, but he walks through the aftermath. Charred bone and melted fat smear his shoes.
The barricade looms where the West Side used to be. Pin prick figures dot the top, silhouetted against the hazy sky. They won't shoot. From this distance, they can't tell if he's diseased or not, but as long as he doesn't approach the cement walls, they'll leave him alone.
He used to play here, when he was younger, and you could run across the tracks without rib cages splintering under your feet. Sometimes he tries to remember how it looked back then, but the memory is blurry, like a picture out of focus. Remembering things is hard these days. If he goes too far back in his mind, he's in danger of getting stuck there forever, lost in a world where flesh didn't rot off living creatures, and no barricade loomed over the railroad. Back then, if someone yelled "Curtis!" Ponyboy would ask which one.
He doesn't ask anymore. He doesn't need to.
Something rustles behind him. He swings around, his knife out quicker than a heartbeat. A vulture stares back, unblinking, where it perches on someone's skull. His heart seizes when he glimpses a patch of filthy blond hair beneath the bird's talons.
He stumbles toward the body. The bird flaps away with an indignant screech, the only sound to pierce the stillness as Ponyboy turns the corpse over, looking for the place where a face used to be. This one is more rotten than most, with the disease taking most of its skin, the skull peaking through in oily patches. There's nothing to look at, let alone recognize, except—the eyes are all wrong, he realizes, brown instead of blue, and bulbous even without the disfiguring. The eyes aren't familiar, they’re not his eyes, and Ponyboy can breathe again.
Just as quickly as the relief comes, it's replaced with guilt. The barrenness of the train yard overwhelms him. So many people, with lives and families and love and heartbreak, so much loss, so much death. The sky behind the barricade is tinged in red.
That's what he misses most, Ponyboy thinks—with all that smoke, he hasn't seen a sunset in years.
