Spideychelle one-shots

And The Stars Watched Them Die

Everything was dark. Cold. 

Before, Peter might have said that the sky was beautiful. Before, he might have appreciated the way the stars gleamed against the dark tapestry of the night.

Now, all he worried about was freezing to death. About being found by Others. About the way MJ had started coughing two days ago, and about the way it was only getting worse. 

Now, all seeing the stars meant was that there was no cloud cover, which meant it was cold. On the flip side, it also meant no rain, which now came in two varieties: stinging slushy hail, or acidic. And when he said acidic, he meant acidic.

No one went out during the rain. Not anymore. 

Not even the Others, the rabid animals that now wandered the land, bodies twisted by radiation and crippled by the bombs that fell Before. 

Everyone hid during the rain and the night. 

The night, when the wind whistled through the burnt out valleys and the craggy mountains, when there wasn't enough light to see your hand in front of your face, when you were in real danger of freezing to death if you weren't careful. The nights, Peter and MJ spent huddled in front of whatever scrap of a fire they had managed to scrape together. 

Today it was an abandoned mall, posters and sheet music curling into flame in front of them. Yesterday it had been a crashed semi, and they'd burnt the driver's magazine collection. The day before that the underpass of a bridge, and it had been their last bits of money and whatever paper cards or receipts they had in their wallets, the last remnants of a world now destroyed. 

MJ didn't speak much, anymore. Neither did Peter, but it still hurt him to see her like this, dark hair hanging tangled and lank around her face, her eyes animal and scared. Her hands twitching, jumping at every movement. 

It hurt him to see her broken. 

What was he supposed to do without her? Peter couldn't imagine a world in which she wasn't their. They were each other's magnets. They held each other together in a world that fallen apart long ago.

Peter couldn't remember what it was like to drink a can of soda, or ride the school bus. He couldn't remember what it was like to go through a day where he wasn't scared, or tired, or hungry, or cold.

He couldn't remember what it was like to be safe. 

But he had MJ. 

In the Before, things burned. Peter remembered this. He remembered the screaming. He remembered the bombs.

He remembered watching people die. 

He had had to see it all fall apart. Watch everything get worse and worse and worse until their was nothing left, just a burnt out shell. 

There wasn't such a thing as government anymore. Or money. Or help. 

Or people.

Peter couldn't remember the last time MJ and him had seen someone else. 

At the start, the roads were full of them. Refugees. Fleeing one place or another, chasing rumours of a better life. None of them true, of course. 

The whole world had burned. Maybe there was a place out there that was better off - Peter though that anywhere had been better than here - but there was no where that was the same.

How could there be? After what they had done to each other - because in the end, of course, humanity had killed themselves, picked themselves off until the bones were clean. No meat.