@fiinalgiirls / ingrid & your choice of muse! most likely someone that already has an hs verse or might have known her at the start of the outbreak? / made with legacy.
ten years ago. ingrid tried not to think about that too much, that the world ended ten fucking years ago. a whole decade had passed, long years that stretched on forever. she went from a high school girl to an adult survivor within that decade. now she could barely remember what life had been like before it all began, who she even was before the bloodshed and the dirt and the pain. cheyenne had changed along with her, the ersatz society they tried very hard to form had fallen away soon after it started. sometimes, when the night was still and the cries of the walkers were miles away, she tried to remember the baby she had been. holed up in her family home, the only one of the family still in it, allowing a man much older and far wiser into it and her heart naively. how she was so scared to be alone, still clinging onto the idea that maybe all this shit would just go away or how there would always be someone there to protect her. sometimes she mourned no longer being that girl, sometimes she was sickened that she had ever been that weak.
like every woman on her own, ingrid had to learn to be self-reliant. it helped, growing into adulthood, losing that older man to someone else. her relationship with theo ended over a childish reason—then again, that’s what happens when you date a child, wouldn’t he think?—and it had hurt very much at the time, but it had been a blessing. she had relied on him for everything: his protection, her self-esteem, her housing and then his after the sergeant home fell to a horde and raiders. it forced her to grow up, as if living in an apocalypse wasn’t enough. a lot of it had been bravado, at least at first. truthfully, ingrid had been tired of everyone assuming she couldn’t hack it on her own, that she was useless. she was underestimated by nearly every other survivor she came across, and for a long time, she had understood that. she had believed herself to be less than everyone else. if she wanted perception of herself to change, she had to change herself. fake it to make it, or whatever.
so ingrid worked hard. she pretended she was colder than she was, stronger than she was, slyer than she was, until she was naturally those things. ingrid used to hate being greeted with a knife to her throat, but now she was the one holding the knife. now she was the one that looked down on others, eyed them cautiously, never trusted them farther than she could throw them (which, granted, was never very far). it had been a hard process, becoming the survivor she used to be envious of, but now she had trouble remembering what it had been like at the beginning.
even ten years later, the undead were still a threat, but humans were far more dangerous. evil didn’t have to wait until sundown, but it did make it bolder. ingrid had spent more of her life in wyoming than she had in any other place, so she knew the mental map of cheyenne better than if she had a paper one in her hands. that was her advantage. her disadvantage? the arrowhead in the back of her calf. limping greatly, ingrid tried to push through the pain, tried to keep her labored breathing quiet as she could. surprisingly, she was able to hear the crunch of forest floor over said breathing and the pounding of her heart, having presence of mind to suddenly dart behind a tree. listening quietly, ingrid tried to conspicuously look behind her, only to see jean-clad shins and the black rubber soles of doc martens. fuck!