Chapter 40: What She Went Through
The city beyond the fortress gates was nothing like the one Lucas remembered.
Storefronts along the main road stood gutted and dark, windows shattered, doors hanging off broken hinges where looters had long since stripped anything worth taking. A burned out car sat abandoned in the middle of an intersection, rust already creeping across its blackened frame, and the traffic lights above it blinked uselessly through a cycle nobody was left to obey.
"It’s only been a few weeks," Eleanor said quietly, staring at the wreckage of what had once been a coffee shop, glass crunching under her boots. "How did it fall apart this fast?"
"Doesn’t take much," Lucas said, though the words felt hollow even as he spoke them. "Take away the systems people rely on without noticing, power, law enforcement, basic trust that your neighbor isn’t going to rob you and most places aren’t as sturdy as we like to think."
Graffiti covered entire walls in places, some of it panicked and pleading
IS ANYONE ALIVE, MISSING: PLEASE CALL
The words scrawled beside a dozen names and phone numbers nobody would ever answer and some of it uglier, territorial markings staking claim to blocks and buildings the way gangs once staked claim to street corners. A church a few blocks down had its doors thrown open, dozens of makeshift bedrolls visible inside where survivors had apparently gathered for whatever comfort still existed in a building meant for exactly that.
Further along, an entire pharmacy had been stripped bare, shelves overturned, not even the empty boxes left behind.
They passed a grocery store with its windows boarded from the inside, some remaining occupants clearly still holed up within, and further down the block, a group of men lounged on the steps of an old bank, weapons visible at their hips, watching Lucas and Eleanor’s approach with the particular, predatory calculation of people who’d already decided violence was simply how things worked now.
Eleanor’s fist clenched and the men, apparently deciding the risk wasn’t worth it, let their attention slide elsewhere as the two of them passed without incident.
"Not everyone got pulled into the Edgewalk," Lucas said once they’d put enough distance behind them. "Whoever didn’t they’ve had weeks with no explanation, no aid, no idea what happened to the people who vanished. Of course some of them turned into this."
"Doesn’t make it easier to look at."
"Nope," Lucas agreed. "It really doesn’t."
They walked on, following the faint, insistent pull of the system’s map toward a destination that remained frustratingly vague, the pin marking the Relic’s location sitting somewhere well beyond the edge of the city they could currently see.
Abandoned cars littered the roads in worse and worse states of disrepair the further they traveled, some clearly used as barricades by groups defending territory, others simply left where they’d died along with whatever crisis had first emptied the streets.
A child’s shoe sat alone in the middle of a crosswalk, small and pink and utterly out of place, and Lucas made himself look away from it before the sight could settle too deeply into his chest.
Somewhere past the third mile, they passed what had once been a school playground, swings still creaking faintly in the wind, and Eleanor’s steps slowed just slightly as she looked at it, a silence between them that needed no explanation, both of them thinking, probably, of exactly how close their own graduation had come to unfolding just as normally as any other year.
By late afternoon, the map’s pull had shifted further than either of them expected, the destination clearly still a full day’s walk away at minimum.
"We’re not making it there before dark," Eleanor said, studying the horizon with a tactician’s assessment rather than any real disappointment. "We should find somewhere to hole up for the night. Somewhere defensible."
"Agreed." Lucas scanned the surrounding block, mostly residential now, rows of houses in various states of abandonment. "That one looks intact."
He nodded toward a modest two story house near the end of the street, windows dark but unbroken, front door still closed, no obvious signs of prior looting or occupation.
They approached carefully, Eleanor’s blade flickering to life just in case, but the house proved empty — dusty, undisturbed, the kind of quiet that suggested its owners had left in a hurry rather than having anything left to defend.
A framed photo still hung crooked in the front hallway, a family Lucas didn’t recognize smiling out from some ordinary, unremarkable day that had probably felt permanent to them at the time.
"This works," Eleanor said, stepping inside and surveying the small living room with a critical eye. "Give me a second."
She pressed both palms against the doorframe, and Lucas watched as earth rose from the ground outside, sealing the entrance shut behind a solid, reinforced barrier that would take considerably more than casual effort to breach. Dust drifted down from the ceiling with the vibration of it, settling over furniture that hadn’t been touched in weeks.
"Nobody’s getting through that without a lot of noise first," she said, satisfied, dusting off her hands. "We’ll hear them coming."
They settled into the living room as the light outside faded fully into evening, Eleanor conjuring a small, controlled flame to sit in an old ceramic bowl someone had left on the coffee table, casting warm, flickering light across a room that had probably once hosted movie nights and ordinary arguments about whose turn it was to do dishes.
"You’ve been quiet," Eleanor said eventually, settling onto the couch beside him, closer than strictly necessary. "More than usual, even for you."
Lucas had always been the quiet type. But seeing him this quiet was way too weird.
"Lot to be quiet about." Lucas gestured vaguely toward the boarded windows, the city beyond them. "This isn’t exactly light conversation material."
"Fair." She was quiet for a moment, staring into the small flame, tracing a slow circle against the fabric of her jumpsuit sleeve, an old nervous habit Lucas hadn’t seen from her since finals week freshman year.
He asked a question. "Can I ask you something?"
"Why’d you want me to come with you? For the Relic, I mean. You could’ve picked anyone. Bertram’s steadier in a straight fight. Iris tracks things better than either of us. But you specifically wanted me."
Eleanor considered the question longer than she probably should have, then decided to answer...
"Would you believe me if I said I just wanted the company?"
"I would have believed there’s more to it than that."
She exhaled, watching the small flame dance in its bowl. "Fine. Yeah. There’s more."
Lucas waited, as patient as he could.
"The weeks I spent looking for you," she said slowly, "and then all the time after, once I actually found you some part of me still hasn’t caught up to the fact that you’re really here. That I’m not going to wake up back in the Edge and have to start looking all over again." Sje glanced at him, something raw in her expression she didn’t bother hiding this time. "I wanted to be near you. As much as I reasonably could be, given everything else going on. It’s complicated, I know."
Something in Lucas’ expression softened completely, the careful, guarded composure he usually carried slipping away entirely.
"That’s not complicated," he said quietly. "You’re just honest."
"Feels complicated from in here." She tapped her own chest lightly.
Eleanor pulled her knees up onto the couch, angling herself more fully toward him before saying again. "There’s more"
Lucas nodded. "I’m listening..."
"Those weeks without you... I know I told you some of it already, the looking, the worrying. But there’s a part I haven’t said." She stared into the flame, voice dropping lower. "I used to have dreams where I found you. Actually found you, alive, and I’d wake up right before I got to see your face, every single time. For a while I stopped telling Mark about them because I didn’t want to say out loud how much they were messing with me."
"Elle—"
She cut him short. "The point is, I don’t think I fully understood how much of myself I’d built around just having you nearby, until I didn’t. Building the fortress, learning to fight properly, becoming whatever everyone insists on calling me now, I did all of it half convinced you were already dead and I was just refusing to admit it to myself. So when you actually walked through that gate—"
Her voice caught, and she pressed on anyway.
"I don’t think I’ve fully believed it’s real yet. Some stupid part of me keeps waiting to wake up and find out you’re still just a hope I built the whole fortress around instead of an actual person sitting next to me."
Lucas reached over instinctively, taking her hand gently, and she let him, fingers curling around his without hesitation.
"I’m here," he said quietly. "For as long as I have any right in it, I’m not going anywhere."
"You’d better not." Her voice wavered slightly, though she managed a dry laugh to cover it. "I did not build an entire fortress and become a literal goddess just to lose you to some system glitch or unlucky beast encounter."
"Wow, no pressure."
"None at all." She bumped her shoulder against his, and some of the heaviness in the room finally eased, replaced by the same easy warmth that had always existed between them, buried now under weeks of trauma but never quite gone.
"For what it’s worth," Lucas added, quieter, "I don’t think you needed to become a goddess to keep me around. Pretty sure regular Eleanor was already plenty terrifying when she wanted to be."
"Regular Eleanor didn’t have four elements at her disposal."
"Regular Eleanor once roasted Mark so hard he was rethinking his life’s choices... I stand by my point."
That startled a real laugh out of her, bright and unguarded, and the sound of it did more to settle the weight in Lucas’s chest than anything either of them had actually said all evening.
They sat like that for a while, talking about smaller things — old memories from before the sky had ever cracked open, half formed plans for what the fortress might look like once things settled, whether Mark would ever actually manage to find someone willing to put up with him.
The small flame in its bowl burned low, casting long, gentle shadows across the room, and the conversation gradually slowed into comfortable silence, exhaustion finally catching up to both of them after a day of walking through a broken city.
Eleanor’s head found his shoulder somewhere in the quiet, her breathing evening out gradually, and Lucas glanced down to find her eyes closed, features finally relaxed in a way he hadn’t seen from her in a long, long while.
He didn’t move. Didn’t want to risk waking her, not after everything she’d carried these past few weeks, not after finally hearing just how much his absence had cost her.
She’d been strong for so long now, for everyone, all the time, in front of survivors who needed a goddess, a fighter and a leader all wrapped into one person who never got to simply be tired... that watching her finally let all of it go, even just for a few borrowed hours in an abandoned house, felt like something worth protecting all on its own.
Outside, the city sat dark and dangerous beyond Eleanor’s earthen barrier, but inside the small, borrowed living room, for one quiet stretch of night, none of that mattered at all.
Lucas settled back against the couch, careful not to disturb her, and let himself watch the last of the flame flicker low in its bowl, keeping quiet, careful watch over both of them until sleep eventually found him too....
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