𝑪𝑶𝑵𝑵𝑬𝑪𝑻𝑰𝑶𝑵 𝑺𝑻𝑨𝑹𝑻𝑬𝑹 ! The following is a closed starter to 𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑨𝑴𝑶𝑬𝑩𝑨 connection, of which is ( 𝐎𝐏𝐄𝐍 / 𝐂𝐋𝐎𝐒𝐄𝐃 ). Any muse is free to respond to this starter, provided it is tagged as open, as doing so will secure the connection for your character. Please read the full connection excerpt before contacting me with interest. Please do not respond to this starter if it is tagged as closed or you do not intend to fill the connection. Setting: A river approx. 30 min outside of the compound
𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑴𝑶𝑶𝑵 𝑺𝑰𝑻𝑺 cool and high in a sea of meteors, alight some lightyears away. There is a chorus of crickets sharing stories amongst the overgrown vegetation. No longer are yards mowed into polite lawns; trees do not get ripped up from the ground by their roots, to preserve some idea of what the world should look like. No, the world is exactly as it is now. Save for the small speck of gardened plots their compound serves, the map is devoid of humanity's reign. In its place sits reminders of a life now passed: cars veered off roads with windows burst through by triumphing weeds; signs erected in fields pointing that way to the hospital, the McDonald's, the closest gas. The last decade of Reuven's life has felt like some strange, ever-unfolding fever dream. It reminds him of a book he read to his children, in the nursery so the baby could be read to sleep, about an island full of wild things and the child that lived amongst them. Only, in this grim reality, the wild things are feral and terrifying and unforgiving in their violence. And there are no children that live amongst them. Not really.
Palpable is the duality of man forced into survivalism. He re-imagines his life before, himself before, as some pleasant and funny clipshow where fathers ran around disinfected rooms, playing airplane with toddlers, and the worst anxiety that could be borne was from property taxes and falling out of love. How simple and menial it all seemed now, beneath this waning gibbous. How heavily the man yearned to beg his children to stop fighting over the remote during a phone call. Or to try performing a miracle to get his baby to eat mushed peas. Or to bicker with his wife about who would be the one to do the dishes tonight, one last time.
Now, it all really was just so complicated, wasn't it? This heaviness in his heart. Some days he wasn't sure how he could go on, and why he should. Some nights he stayed up staring at the smooth blankness of the ceiling from his springy bed, and dissipated into it. Other nights, he felt restless, body ready to fight against a threat that was not coming. At least, not right then. Some nights he would resort to pushups, or pullups, or jogging aimlessly around the compound. Others, he would purge the grief from his body through an unbecoming violence: he would venture out into the privacy of the forest to untether from his decency. Axe would beat into trees, bullets would hurl through unsuspecting infected and sometimes, accidentally, wildlife, though once his little rampage was finished he would feel guilty enough to go back and honor the latter's death through burial or meal-making. Other nights, he would sneak out of the compound for an opposite unbecoming: to go resign to himself; to who he truly was, deep down. To go rediscovering himself, amongst the forest. As he was set out to do now, sleuthing out of the compound from some underused section where a tree's branches had overhang past the wall. He could have just walked out the front gates, but he didn't want anyone worrying, or... searching, if he decided on a whim not to return. It was a steep drop, but nothing he hadn't successfully done before, and then a relatively quiet hike without much pest control to be done, until the trees opened up upon a river, untouched by the hands of the living or the dead. Its waters were unperturbed by the world around it, and it had become Reuven's secret sanctuary since he'd discovered it a few months prior. The previous missions to find solace here had all proved successful, but unbeknownst to the man, this time he'd gained a plus one. He'd been followed, and hadn't noticed.
The moonlight cast a long greyed hue down the surface of the water, illuminating clusters of lilies and algae and mosses climbing up surrounding trees. Reuven stripped to his boxers and carbine, unwilling to part with it even during a swim. It rested across his back, and he stepped into the water, allowing its icy lull to slowly climb up the longitude of his stature, until the ground had disappeared beneath his feet and the bottom few inches of his dark beard had been soaked through. Some lifetime ago, he'd been taught of leeches and whirlpools and brain eating amoebas. Their danger was so far from him now; the idea that any one of them could be his demise now, after so many years of surviving the worst that life could serve, it was inconceivable. The night pressed in on the man in the most soothing of ways. A deep inhale brought in a lungful of cool, refreshing oxygen before he disappeared into the river's darkness. When Reuven re-emerged, he filled his lungs again, feeling the comfort of the water's familiarity; of his own trueness, within it, and how it had made him free again in this moment, just as it had done so many other times in his life.
He was leaning back, eyelids dropping closed, to face the moon in spirituality; in truce; as if to tell it: I am you, and you are me, and I stop pretending otherwise. A few minutes passed in his meditation, as his form floated gently, carried along the calm sway of waves. The years' long ache of so many long days seemed to dissipate from his body and into the river. Reuven felt the peace of it all begin its nourishment, and he sighed almost as if in relief from the most vicious of pains, and then suddenly eyes snapped open and he drew his rifle's buttstock into the nook of his shoulder. Heart thudded with the shiver of surprise, as a voice had suddenly interrupted this agrestal scene.
Drenched in his own authenticity, the man fumbled to ground himself back into the danger of the moment. He was exposed raw in vulnerability, physically but also mentally, and he suddenly felt as if he were a trapped animal, waiting for the incisors of a predator twice his size. "Hello?" he called out, uncharacteristically tentative, after he didn't hear an encore. Dark eyes cast into the unlit forest, wondering if it had all just been his imagination. He stayed there, treading water, gun still drawn and pointing at nothing in particular because he could see nothing. Then, his company spoke again.
"Hello," they responded softly.