Chapter 171 As Things Stand

The snow crunched beneath my feet as I shifted against the rock, the rifle lying beside me, a cigar burning between the fingers of my left hand and a white jade bottle resting in my right.

Tikki was tucked inside the pocket on my shoulder, with only his little head sticking out, looking about as thrilled with the weather as I was.

"Mea..."

"Don’t start. You’re the one who insisted on coming."

He blinked at me.

Traitorous little bastard.

The wine was good, at least. The System had promised me a proper buzz.

After all, I can’t get drunk on ordinary alcohol anymore.

Six doses of Physiological Enhancers had done wonders for my body, but they had also turned my favorite whisky into a particularly unpleasant beverage. I could still taste it. I simply couldn’t get much else out of it.

A truly magnificent upgrade.

So here I was, halfway up a mountain, drinking System wine in the middle of a freezing night, with a cat for company and a rifle I had absolutely no intention of using.

Productive evening.

The sky above me was clear, the stars bright enough to make the valley below look like someone had scattered diamonds across a sheet of black velvet.

The moon illuminated the snow-covered slopes, and the cold air carried every little sound with a clarity that would have been downright offensive if I hadn’t spent the better part of my life getting used to it.

From up here, I could see everything.

The Hart estate, the Concealment Dome making the place look like an abandoned farmhouse to anyone standing outside it. The church glowing in the distance, warm lights burning behind its windows, while thousands upon thousands of Infected stood around the Hart estate, their motionless silhouettes scattered across the fields.

I could even make out individual figures near the perimeter.

Not that I was looking at any of it.

I was doing my very best to stop thinking.

Just for a minute.

One minute without calculating the number of Infected outside the walls, without wondering what Stroud was hiding beneath that church, without planning the next ten things that needed doing before I could afford to leave.

One minute without remembering the people I had lost, the people I had failed, or the people I was going to lose if I made one wrong decision.

One minute without thinking about Dean.

Or Kara.

Or Nia.

Fucking hell.

Was that really too much to ask?

I took another swallow of wine, leaned my head back against the rock, and stared at the stars.

Then I took another. And another.

Eventually, something inside my head loosened.

The endless calculations faded. The noise quieted. The valley disappeared from my attention, along with the dome, the church, the Infected, the people sleeping beneath the roof I had built for them.

For the first time in what felt like forever, there was nothing.

Just me, the cold, the wine, and the stars.

And then I saw her.

A warm cabin surrounded by snow.

The soft glow of a kitchen window. The smell of pancakes drifting through the air. A woman standing beside the stove, her back turned to me, chestnut hair falling over her shoulders as she leaned forward to check something in the pan.

And I sobered up instantly.

And what followed was a grin spreading across my face.

[There you are...]

I stared at the vision for a moment, then let out a quiet chuckle.

"Well, I’ll be damned."

The craving had returned.

For a while there, I had almost forgotten what it felt like.

The Revenant’s hallucinogen was one hell of a drug.

The first exposure had left me with an appetite for more, and every time the craving struck, the same vision returned. The same cabin. The same woman. The same impossible little life that had never existed outside my head.

I had spent days fighting it, enduring the cravings until the six doses of both Enhancers finally made them disappear.

And now, after all that time, here it was again.

Maybe the craving had some passive effect. Maybe it had simply been waiting for me to lower my now-enhanced guard.

Or maybe I was just an idiot who had deliberately bought wine strong enough to get around his own enhanced physiology, climbed a mountain in the middle of winter, and then acted surprised when his brain decided to dig up the one thing he had been trying not to think about.

That sounded about right.

I shook my head, smiling faintly at the absurdity of it.

Then I stopped smiling.

Because the truth was, I hadn’t come up here to drink.

Not really.

I had come up here because I didn’t want to think about what Dean had told me.

And because, for the first time in a long time, I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with myself.

I had spent so long thinking about survival that I had almost forgotten there were other things inside me.

Getting the crew back together. Finding Lexie and his family. Reaching Angelica. Building a settlement strong enough to withstand the shitshow waiting for us.

Those were the things I knew how to do.

They were objectives. Problems with solutions, even if some of those solutions involved spending enough money to make an accountant spontaneously combust.

But beneath all of that?

What was actually there?

What did I want, once I stopped thinking about what I needed to do?

I took another sip.

And I stopped trying to find an answer that would be useful.

I tried to find an honest one instead.

And the first person who came to mind was Nia.

Nia had been there for me when almost nobody else was.

A year into the apocalypse, I had found her surrounded by fifteen men, battered, exhausted, and still fighting despite having nothing left to fight with.

I had three rounds in my hunting rifle. Just three.

I had no idea who she was. I didn’t know her name, her history, or whether she was worth the risk of getting involved.

I just knew that fifteen men were trying to hurt one woman, and I had a rifle.

So I shot one and bluffed my way to her rescue.

Then I spent the next two months risking my neck to scavenge supplies and trade with the settlements nearby, nursing her back to health until she could walk properly again.

And when she could, we left together.

That was how it started.

No grand declarations or promises. No dramatic bullshit about standing together until the end of time.

Just two people who had lost everything, deciding that the world was slightly less unbearable with someone else around.

We traveled together, fought together. We watched each other’s backs, shared what little we had, and trusted each other with the one thing neither of us could afford to lose.

Our lives.

Eventually, somewhere along the way, we became something more.

Or perhaps we didn’t.

I still remembered the first time we kissed.

We had been running from a horde after a supply run went spectacularly wrong, with Sprinters snapping at our heels and enough infected behind us to make a sensible person reconsider every decision that had led them there.

We barely escaped.

By the time we reached the outskirts of the city, we had climbed onto a billboard, exhausted and terrified, with a dozen bullets between us and no guarantee we would see the next morning.

That’s where we shared our kiss.

One thing led to another, and we spent the night together.

That was it.

No conversation the next morning about what we were. No awkward attempt to define a relationship; neither of us had the energy to think about.

We just carried on.

Two desperate rats trying to survive another day.

We had never said I love you.

Not once.

And I had told myself that was because there had never been anything to say.

Nia had lost everyone she cared about. Being a beautiful woman in a world full of desperate men was its own kind of nightmare, and she had already experienced enough of it to last several lifetimes.

I had lost everyone, too.

Tikki’s and Kara’s deaths had haunted me for years. I had nightmares about them, nightmares that followed me through the worst nights of my life, and even after I stopped waking up screaming, I never really stopped thinking about them.

Nia and I had found comfort in each other because we needed it.

We had been each other’s antidepressants.

That was what I called it.

A convenient explanation for two people who had been alone for so long that the simple act of having someone beside them had started to feel like a miracle.

And maybe that was all it had ever been.

Except...

Even in this life, when Nia had awakened with her memories, she had packed up with her father and rushed straight to my city.

That very same day.

She had come looking for me.

She had stood beside me through everything that followed, never once asking me to slow down, never once demanding that I explain every decision I made, even when those decisions were the sort that should probably have earned me a complimentary stay in a padded room.

She had fought beside me. She had argued with me when I was being an idiot. She had saved my life at the truck stop, even when doing so had cost her almost everything.

And when she had found Kara among us, she had stayed.

Nia knew our history. I had told her about Kara in the previous life, back when I hadn’t even understood what Kara had felt for me.

I had told her about the girl next door, the friend who cooked meals in exchange for rides to university, the woman who had made the happiest years of my life feel effortless.

And Nia had stayed.

She had trusted me enough not to pretend she was insecure about it.

Time and time again, she had been there to make sure I didn’t go so far that I lost myself.

And when I had lost myself anyway, when the Revenant had dragged the ugliest parts of me out into the open, and I had beaten her while screaming things I could never take back, she had still fought to keep me alive.

She had been bitten because of me.

She was alive because of a monthly injection that cost a hundred and fifty million Credits, and I had spent the better part of the last few days arranging matters so that I could keep paying for it.

I owed her more than I could ever repay.

That much was certain.

But was that love?

I stared at the woman in the cabin, her chestnut hair shifting as she reached for something beside the stove.

Was it love when you trusted someone with your life?

When you knew they would stand beside you in a fight, no matter how badly the odds were stacked against you?

When you could spend days with them without feeling the need to fill the silence, because their presence was enough?

Maybe...

But I had felt all of those things for people I didn’t love romantically.

I felt them for Leo.

For Nora.

For the Harts.

Hell, I had just spent a small fortune giving an old dog another ten years because the thought of Dean losing him hurt more than the Credits did.

Love came in a lot of shapes.

And not all of them involved wanting to drag someone into bed.

So what did I feel for Nia?

I cared about her. That was easy.

I trusted her more than I trusted almost anyone. That was easy, too.

If something came for her, I would put myself between them without thinking. I knew that much because I had already radiated a third of the country for her, and because I would do it again.

But when I tried to imagine something beyond that, I found myself staring at an empty space.

In this life, I hadn’t been looking at Nia and wondered what it would be like to hold her.

And from what I could tell, the thought had never crossed her mind either.

I knew her well enough to notice.

[Maybe we were just antidepressants...]

The thought settled into my head, and I sat there for a while, watching the vision flicker at the edges.

Maybe we had simply been two people who needed each other badly enough that we mistook the relief for something else.

Maybe what we had shared in the previous life had been real, but not in the way I had always assumed.

Maybe it had been love.

Maybe it hadn’t.

And maybe the reason neither of us had ever tried to put a name to it was that we had both been afraid of finding out.

I took another drink.

[Makes sense...]

Back then, we had only had each other.

Now, Nia had her father back. She had people she cared about, people she could protect and return to, a future that didn’t require her to cling to the only person left beside her.

I had Nora, Leo, Dean, Walter, and June.

I had Kara and Tikki.

We weren’t alone.

And perhaps that changed things.

Perhaps it changed everything.

Another thought rose before I could stop it.

Maybe Nia had seen Kara and quietly given up.

Nia was many things, but she wasn’t the sort of woman who would stand in line for someone else’s affection.

She was too proud to make a fuss, too proud to ask whether she stood a chance, and certainly too proud to make herself an option in a competition she had never agreed to enter.

She might have decided that whatever we had was enough.

She might have decided it wasn’t worth risking.

Or she might simply have looked at the people we had found again and realized that neither of us needed the other in quite the same way anymore.

I didn’t know.

For all the time we had spent together, for all the things I knew about her, I couldn’t tell myself what she felt.

And that bothered me more than it should have.

"Doesn’t matter..." I roughly messed up my hair and let out a breath.

And those words sounded thin even to my own ears.

"I don’t have time for that stuff."

There were too many things to do. Too many people to protect. Too many problems waiting for me to stop drinking on a mountain and get back to work.

Besides...

Kara was moving on.

And perhaps that was the part I had been trying hardest not to think about.

But what about now?

What about as things stood?

I continued staring at the stars. As things stood now...

The answer was obvious. Nia.

I mean, who else?

She had stood beside me through hell and back, and when the Revenant had dragged me into the deepest pit of my own insanity, she had fought to bring me out of it, taking a bite that would eventually cost me a hundred and fifty million Credits every month to keep her alive.

She had saved my life. More times than I could count across two lives.

She had also spent years beside me in a world where every day was a fight, every mistake was the last, and the difference between waking up tomorrow and becoming another corpse in a pile often came down to whether the person standing beside you was paying attention.

She had been my teacher, my partner in crime, my fellow lunatic, and the one person who understood the particular flavor of insanity that had kept me moving long after any sensible person would have given up.

Even now, after getting her father back, after finding people worth living for beyond the two of us, she had stayed.

She had trusted me.

She had fought beside me.

And she had never once made me feel as though I had to choose between her and Kara.

So, yes.

Nia was the obvious answer.

The problem was that I wasn’t entirely sure what the question was anymore.

I tipped the bottle back, swallowed a mouthful of wine, let the cold settle against my face, and took a puff out of the cigar.

Did I love her?

I cared about her more than I could explain, and if anyone so much as looked at her wrong, there was a decent chance I’d stop considering the cost of ammunition or the bones I’d get broken getting that someone.

That part was easy.

But love?

Romantic love?

I wasn’t so sure.

And the truly irritating part was that I had absolutely no idea whether she felt any differently.

We had been together for years in the previous life, but we had never been a proper couple. We had never said those three words, never made promises, never sat down and decided what we were to each other.

We had simply been there.

And when the world had taken everything else, that had been enough.

But this wasn’t that world anymore.

Not entirely.

Nia had her father. She had people who cared about her, people she could protect, people who would notice if she didn’t come home one night.

And I had Tikki, the Harts, Nora, and Kara.

For the first time in either of our lives, we had something resembling a future that didn’t revolve entirely around staying alive until the next morning.

Perhaps that was why I couldn’t look at her and see what I used to see.

Perhaps the circumstances had changed enough that whatever we had been in the previous life no longer fit.

Or perhaps I was just an idiot trying to turn something simple into a mathematical equation because numbers were easier to deal with than feelings.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

I had spent years with Nia, and I knew her better than almost anyone alive.

I knew how she moved when she was preparing to shoot. I knew how she breathed when she was angry, how she went quiet when she was thinking, and how she could turn a perfectly ordinary sentence into a threat that made grown men reconsider their life choices.

I knew how much she hated being pitied.

I knew she would rather die than ask someone to choose her.

And I knew that she had seen Kara.

She knew our history. She knew what Kara had meant to me, even before I understood it myself. I had told her everything in the previous life.

Nia had heard all of it.

Then she had come to this life, found Kara standing in front of her, and stayed beside me anyway.

Maybe that meant she trusted me.

Maybe she knew there was nothing to worry about.

Or maybe she had already made her decision and simply hadn’t bothered to tell me.

The thought sat badly with me.

Nia was too proud to compete for someone else’s affection.

If she had looked at Kara and decided that I wanted her more, she wouldn’t have made a scene. She wouldn’t have demanded answers or tried to force my hand.

She would have stepped aside.

And knowing Nia, she would have done it so quietly that I might not even realize she had gone until it was too late.

After all, we barely even held hands in this timeline.

[Fantastic...] I rubbed my face.

I had somehow managed to build a life in which I could calculate the cost of constructing a nuclear bunker, estimate the number of Infected in a valley, and determine how much gold I needed to sell to finance a small private, heavily armed fortress.

Yet here I was, unable to work out whether the woman who had spent years sleeping beside me actually wanted to sleep beside me.

I deserved a medal. A very small one. Made of plastic.

Still, there was one thing I couldn’t deny.

If I had to choose someone to stand beside me for whatever came next, I would choose Nia.

Not because we had survived together in the previous life.

Not because I owed her.

And certainly not because I needed someone to keep me company.

Because I trusted her. Because she understood me.

When the world came apart, and everything that mattered was stripped down to its ugliest essentials, she had been the person who stood beside me and kept going.

Whatever name I put on that, it was real.

Whether it was love in the way people wrote about it, whether it could survive in a world where neither of us needed the other quite so desperately, whether she would even want me if I asked her...

Those were questions I didn’t have answers for.

And I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

I took another drink.

Then my thoughts drifted back to Kara.

Of course they did.

Because apparently my brain had decided that one unresolved emotional disaster wasn’t enough for a single evening.

Kara was moving on.

I had seen it myself.

Dean made her laugh. Not the polite little smile she sometimes gave people when she was being patient with them, but a proper laugh, the sort that made her shoulders loosen and her face brighten before she could stop it.

I had heard it from the wall.

And I had turned away.

Dean was a good man.

I had known him for years, and for all the shit I had given him, he was exactly the sort of person you wanted beside you when things went wrong.

He cared about people. He did what needed doing without making a performance out of it, and he had enough decency to tell me about Kara before he tried anything.

He hadn’t tried to claim her, nor had he assumed she owed him a chance.

He had simply told me how he felt and asked me to wish him luck.

And I had.

So what the hell was my problem?

I had no claim on Kara.

I had never asked her to wait for me. I had never told her how I felt, never admitted that I had spent years chasing the wrong woman while the person who mattered most was standing right beside me.

In the previous life, I had found her too late.

In this one, I had found her alive.

That should have been enough.

It should have been a miracle I could appreciate without trying to turn it into something else.

But then I had watched her laugh with Dean, and something inside me had twisted so hard that I had spent the rest of the night walking away from the people I had built an entire fortress to protect.

Hypocrite.

The word came easily.

I had spent years surviving in a world where people took what they wanted, where promises meant nothing and affection was often just another thing people used to get through the night.

I had learned to be ruthless because the alternative was dying, and I had carried enough of that ruthlessness into this life to make decisions that would have horrified the man I used to be.

I had slaughtered people.

I had killed Infected by the thousands.

I had literally provoked a nuclear disaster to save someone I cared about, knowing perfectly well that the consequences could poison the lives of people who had never even heard my name.

And I had looked at the people around me, people who were still trying to hold on to the better parts of themselves, and quietly decided that I would do whatever it took to protect my own.

Nothing before us.

That had been my answer.

My line in the sand, except I had spent so long moving the damn thing that I wasn’t entirely sure there was still a line left.

And Kara had seen some of it.

She had seen what I could do. She had watched me make decisions without hesitation, had watched me treat human lives as numbers when the numbers suited me, and had seen the kind of man I had become.

Maybe she had finally understood that the boy she had fallen for no longer existed.

Maybe she had already figured that out long before Dean ever spoke to me.

I didn’t know.

I only knew that I wasn’t the man Kara had known before the apocalypse.

That dude had been an idiot, certainly, but he had been a different kind of idiot. He had worried about exams, complained about university, spent too much time chasing Bella, and somehow failed to notice that his best friend was in love with him.

He had been happy.

The man sitting on this mountain was not him.

And no amount of wishing, drinking, or hallucinating was going to change that.

Even if Kara wanted me, what exactly was I supposed to offer her?

A place in a fortress?

A lifetime of watching me turn every problem into a threat to be eliminated?

A front-row seat to whatever I was going to become when I finally reached Bastion and began the work I had been planning since the moment I returned to this world?

I could give her security. I could give her resources, a home, enough weapons to outfit a small country, and a System capable of building things that should not exist.

I could make sure she never went hungry again.

I could probably arrange for her to have a private swimming pool, a personal chef, and a lifetime supply of whatever the hell she wanted.

But could I give her a life she would actually want to live?

I wasn’t sure I could.

And Dean... Dean could.

At least, he had a chance.

He was a decent man who had spent the last few weeks getting to know her, helping the family, and making her laugh without carrying the weight of two lifetimes on his shoulders.

He could stand beside her without constantly looking over his shoulder at the next disaster.

He could build a life with her.

A normal one, as normal as anything could be in this world.

And if that was what Kara wanted, then who the hell was I to stand in the way?

I exhaled slowly, watching the breath leave my mouth in a pale cloud.

[Good... That was good. Really... I meant it. Mostly... God, I’m pathetic.]

I took another sip of wine and looked down at the valley.

The Hart estate was still there, hidden beneath its dome, its walls standing between the people inside and the world waiting to eat them alive.

The church glowed in the distance, and the Infected remained gathered around the property, waiting for their unseen master to give them another command.

There were problems to solve. The real ones.

And a world that wasn’t going to fix itself just because I had discovered that my emotional life was a complete fucking mess.

I would finish the estate.

I would make sure the defenses were operational, deal with Stroud and whatever the hell he had locked beneath that church, and ensure that the Infected surrounding the farm could no longer threaten the people inside.

Then I would leave in a few days, perhaps.

Long enough to finish what I had started, long enough to make certain the Harts could survive without me hovering over them like an overprotective mother hen with a nuclear arsenal.

Then I would head west.

First, I would find Lexie and his family. I would bring them back here, where they would have walls, food, water, medicine, and people who would look after them.

The Hart estate would be their home.

They would be safe.

And once that was done, Lexie and I would go to Bastion.

Angelica was there, holding together the largest settlement in the west, and I knew what that meant.

I knew what was coming, what the Variants would do. I knew what would happen when the ordinary Infected stopped being the greatest threat anyone had to worry about.

I had lived through that future once, knew what would become of Bastion.

And I knew that Angelica would fight until there was nothing left to fight with, because that was the sort of woman she was.

She would rather die than lose Bastion a second time.

And I knew how much would be lost.

She had been our leader in the previous life. She had done everything she could to keep us alive, even when the world had given her no reason to believe it was possible.

More importantly, I knew what she wanted.

A place where people could live without spending every waking moment afraid of what was outside their walls.

A settlement that could survive millions upon millions of Infected banging on its walls, even with Alphas and every variant under the sun in their ranks.

A future worth fighting for.

And I was going to give her one.

I owed her that. Not Bastion. Hell, I had never even stepped a foot in there. Nia and I had Angelica long after Bastion had fallen.

And even if I hadn’t owed her anything, I still would’ve been there for her. She’s family.

The System could build the strongest settlement in the world. It could supply weapons, ammunition, vehicles, medical facilities, defenses, and enough infrastructure to make Bastion a nightmare for anything that tried to bring it down.

It could give us an advantage nobody else had.

And I intended to use every last bit of it.

There would be millions of Infected to deal with, Alphas, Variants, and things I hadn’t even encountered yet in both timelines.

It would take years to pacify the West, perhaps longer.

And we’re going to do it. Angelica, Lexie, Nia, and Me. The four of us.

Even if I had to tear the whole damn world apart to do it.

And this was one thing people at the farmhouse wouldn’t understand.

Not pacifying the west part.

What they wouldn’t understand is what we’d have to do to achieve it.

They would understand wanting to protect family. They would understand fighting to survive, building walls, stockpiling food, and killing the things that threatened them.

But there would come a point when I would have to make decisions they couldn’t accept.

A point where saving thousands might require sacrificing hundreds, where the safe choice for one settlement could condemn another, where doing nothing would be just as much a decision as pulling the trigger.

I knew myself well enough to understand that I wouldn’t always choose the option they wanted me to choose.

I might not even choose the option they could forgive.

And I wasn’t going to ask them to follow me into that.

Leo and Nora deserved a chance to build something here.

Walter and June deserved to grow old in a home that was theirs, surrounded by people they loved.

Dean deserved the chance to find out whether Kara would laugh at his jokes for the rest of his life or eventually throw him out of a window.

Preferably a ground-floor window.

I wasn’t unreasonable.

They had a life here.

And I wasn’t going to drag them into a war that would demand pieces of them they might not be willing to give.

Nia was different.

She knew what the world was. She knew what I was capable of, and she had spent years beside me in the previous life, seeing the things I had done and the things I had been willing to do.

She had argued with me. She had stopped me when she could. She had reminded me that there were limits worth keeping, even when I had been too angry or too desperate to see them.

And she had stayed.

If there was anyone who could walk beside me on the road ahead, it was her.

I didn’t know whether she would want to.

I didn’t know whether what we had was love, or whether it was something that had grown out of the worst years of our lives and had never quite found a name.

But if I had to choose someone to take with me down a road where I’d be standing stripped naked down to my ugliest part, I would choose Nia. Tikki too.

That much I knew.

As for the rest... I could let things happen as they were happening.

Dean and Kara looked good together.

Two sisters, two brothers.

Neat little arrangement.

Symmetrical. Almost suspiciously so.

Maybe Leo and Nora would get married one day. Maybe Dean and Kara would, too. Maybe the Harts would have children running around the farmhouse, and the place would become something even better than the home I was trying to build for them.

Perhaps, years from now, I would return to find the place full of people I had never met, with the next generation growing up behind those walls.

The thought made something twist in my chest.

And I couldn’t help but laugh at it.

Quietly, because Tikki was asleep in my pocket and I wasn’t a complete monster... yet.

[Look at me...]

I was sitting on a mountain, drinking wine, smoking a cigar, making plans to fight a war against millions of Infected, and getting upset because a woman I had never confessed my feelings to might end up happy with someone else.

I had no claim on Kara. I had no certainty with Nia.

But I had a goal to accomplish which, on the surface, sounds noble until you get into the nitty-gritty of it.

What a fucking life.

I lifted the bottle and took a long drink.

"Doesn’t matter," I muttered to the stars. "I’ll be gone in a few days."

Dean was a good man. I’d known him for years. He would take care of her.

And if Kara chose him, then that’d be the end of that.

I was going to go west, to find Lexie, then send his family to the estate, and then we’d head to Bastion.

I would do what needed to be done, and I would keep doing it until there was nothing left to fight.

And in no version of that little plan do I see Kara being able to walk beside me. Or choosing to wait for me until it was done only to see a complete stranger standing before her.

At least this way, by the time I returned, the people here might have entire lives of their own.

Memories that had nothing to do with me, and that was good.

That was what I wanted for them from the start.

I finished the wine, lowered the bottle, and stared at the stars for another long moment.

"As for me...I don’t matter enough... and I got shit to do."

"Maybe at the end of the road... when it’s all said and done..." I gave a small, humorless laugh. "I’d look back, find this all amusing, and then get myself a harem."