This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?

[notathreat]

WHO: Ellie + OPEN (Grab me if you want a custom starter, even if they haven't interacted yet!)
WHERE: Dreamscape!
WHEN: September 22-25 2512
WHAT: Ellie's managed to keep y'all out of her head until now, but everything's got a breaking point.
NOTES OR WARNINGS: Violence, death, torture, body horror (zombie-type), violence towards a teenager.

Radio Nowhere

Comments

[armd]

Ellie a tempest, wild and desperate, the pitch and shift in her expression making Abby want to duck and brace against the expected tidal wave of violence to follow. This is why she doesn't want to fucking ask why Ellie stopped, because the reminder of it might make her start again. She has reason to want Abby dead, and Abby has reason to want her the same and she can see this stretching out ahead of them and into the distance and the notion makes her want to run away. It's not who she wants to be any more, but what if that's all she knows how to do? What if all she ever amounts to is carrying this bloody weight around with her, until she sinks to her knees and can't move it any further?

That's not true. Lev would tell her otherwise. Abby knows he would, but he's not here with her right now to confirm it. She misses him. She needs him. She's scared to think of him being on Catalina, carrying on without her, because that would be better for him in the long run but it isn't what she wants. She's too selfish, too alone, and too heavy with grief.

"Ellie." Her voice is a low, slow warning. The water is moving up her thighs, to her hips. To her stomach, fast, and so cold. "Ellie."

It isn't working. The door won't move.

Abby surges forward, making her decision, and Ellie is warm when she grabs the back of her hand to help her try and push it open. She puts her shoulder to the wood, and shoves with the water at her waist. Lapping at the bottoms of her elbows, even higher on Ellie, who is shorter, smaller. Sharper.

Alone she wouldn't be able to do it, but together–

[notathreat]

Together they might.

Abby's hand curling over hers feels like a shot of adrenaline directly to the hard. Sadness and anger and exhaustion, soul-deep exhaustion, and fear. The fear is what hits hardest, the desperation of let me go that strikes and sinks deep, because it so thoroughly mirrors her own.

All of it does, in fact.

Ellie immediately wants to pull her hand away, as if she's been burned. It's disgusting, this is disgusting, and seeing Abby so clearly as not just a person, but one she can fully understand, makes her want to be sick.

But she swallows it back, feeling frantic and blurred, desperate and angry and grieving not just Joel, but all the parts of herself she burned on the way here. The door creaks and cracks and she wonders if it's going to give, but then it finally moves.

The water rushes in a wave, pushing them both, shoving through the door as it tries to equalize. They are swept away.