Edgar (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hate_gettin_older) wrote2025-11-01 10:07 pm
hate_gettin_older) wrote2025-11-01 10:07 pmIC Inbox for Pumpkin Hollow
[Ping me to discuss starting a thread!]
hate_gettin_older) wrote2025-11-01 10:07 pm
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"Hey," he says, dully. "Yeah. Gimme a hand with those?"
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"Yeah, sure."
He looks tired. The sort of tired that drapes across your back like a wounded brother-in-arms— or a hay bale— heavy. She can't blame him. Worst month here, at least in her experience. Carolina hoists a bale up onto her shoulder, walks it to the base of the loft.
"Animals doing okay?"
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"Yeah, they're good. Dunno what the Fears bullshit was like for them. Probably missed the whole fuckin thing, lucky little bastards."
The words would sound like bitter spite if not for the tone, which sounds more like weary relief; like a parent whose strayed child has been found, none the worse for their adventure.
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She lifts the bale up to him, then crosses the barn for another. In their pens, animals toss themselves languidly on their sides to breathe and sleep and kick their legs. She watches them over one shoulder.
"Tch. Lucky. Maybe something— put them somewhere. To keep them out of the way. I don't remember seeing any of them during— you know, everything."
Carolina hefts up another bale.
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A grunt, heaving the bale up and onto the loft.
"Don't think I saw any of em in the safe zone, but ... wasn't there all that long."
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"Yeah, me neither. Keeping track of time got— hard." That's one word for it. Try utterly fucking impossible, on account of the torture. "Climbing to the summit wasn't any easier though, so, I guess it's peaches all around."
Carolina kneels down in front of Greta's pen. "Can you even eat peaches?"
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"She can eat fuckin anything if you ask her," says Edgar, and then "wait, you climbed?"
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"Mm. Now I feel like an ass for cheating you out of fruit I don't have," said, regretfully, to the goat. Please, drill sergeant Greta, in all her grand and terrifying authority, spare Carolina a head-butt to the shins for this indiscretion.
"Want this?" She grabs a handful of hay, drops to her haunches and offers it instead.
"...Yeah, sure did. It was a nightmare going through the Buried. I think the only reason it didn't suck me in was because it doesn't tick any boxes for me. I don't care about getting stuck. I'm not claustrophobic. I knew I needed to check on someone, so I pushed 'til I got to the top. I was only there for... a day? Maybe two, before it all just— stopped. Before that, I remember being in the fields. Dunno for how long. Felt like... years."
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Edgar's quiet for a moment, then says "All I saw of it was the train."
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Carolina stops mid-reach for another bale and turns her attention to him. It feels like the right thing to do. Then like the wrong thing as she realizes she wouldn't want to be stared at, especially now. She lifts the bundle, carries on. Pays close attention.
"What was it like?"
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"I dunno." Low, subdued. "Wasn't that bad. That's the worst part, that it wasn't that bad. 'F that makes any fuckin sense."
The last words are on a near-explosive grunt of effort, as he hauls up the bale.
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"Yeah, it does. Parts of it I think I sort of... enjoyed? Which feels gross now that it's over."
Gross is the understatement of the century.
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Silence, for several beats.
"They fuckin put me in charge," he mutters, barely audible at this distance. "Still dunno why."
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In charge is all Carolina catches, and all she really needs to hear. Remembers, like a photoflash, a thing he'd said at Dahlia's. Ah.
"Well, that's probably the last sort of person you want to be, right? In charge. Responsible for the safety of others. The person who promises one thing and never delivers it, either because they can't or won't. Am I warm?"
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Carolina knits her brows. "I didn't expect you to stop for me. I chose to go up there. If you got people where they needed to be, great. I was just saying—" a beat. What is she saying? "—I assume it wasn't a joyride."
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"It wasn't. I thought, I was trying ... I was just trying to get people out. Din't even --"
His jaw tightens. "Din't even get what it wanted me for, til someone told me. Fuckin genius, I am."
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Standing at the base of the loft, chin tilted up at him; "What did they tell you?"
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The word extinction, despite Edgar's efforts to shrug it off, sits heavy and crushing in the hay. "Is that what you're afraid of?" She asks, not thinking. "The world ending."
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"I know what you mean. When I got dropped into the farmland— when I realized what was happening— it almost felt like... going home."
Never mind that she had changed herself so irrevocably. From human being into greasy, kerosene-and-blood covered dog.
"And now we're supposed to pretend like everything's normal again."
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Except for the ways in which it isn't. But he's not going to talk about that.
"But we're not."
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"As if any of us ever were to begin with," she says, inspired to pick herself up from her bale and lift it onto her shoulder. This one she tosses straight up to the loft. It fwomps against the wooden floor.
A little less icy; "Yeah, you're pretty low on my list of normal people I've met around here. Could be worse, though."
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