When you're dropped into the timeline to kill Five Hargreeves, you're really not expecting to encounter the apocalypse. You're also really not expecting to not want to kill him. Yet, somehow, here you are: pining over a lost boy who has probably gon...
Injustice is a funny thing. With each step forward on the concrete, your toes twist in your boots, heels turning into bleeding calluses as you fight to keep walking. Despite all your many wrongdoings, you can't agree that you deserve this kind of torment. Very few people on the planet have ever deserved the torment they've endured. That had been an early lesson you'd learned as a child. Cruelty and injustice fall on good people every single day. While you can't say you're a good person, you certainly don't deserve having to walk this far.
It's a long walk to Terre Haute, and there are a million routes you could take. After a night at the mother of all rest stops, you decide on a path. Down Highway 2 to 59. Across 10 to St Cloud. Minneapolis to Cedar Rapids. South to St Louis. Then, 55 all the way to Terre Haute. Roundabout and messy, but hopefully with plenty of opportunities for food and shelter. You'll need it, if the rapidly cooling nights are any indication. The chill scares you, a silent warning of death sure to come.
You walk for more weeks than you dare to count. There are high points—a peanut butter factory, a warehouse of canned goods, and a mostly-in-tact section of a clothing store (it mostly sells men's hunting gear, but you're desperate enough not to care)—and there are low points—more bodies and rot than you care to tally. But you're subsisting on what meager supplies you can find while making steady, albeit navigationally-challenged, progress toward Terre Haute. It feels like a fool's errand; nobody else has lived through this apocalypse, so why would Five Hargreeves? It feels even more like a fool's errand when you consider how easy it would be for an agent to hop in and take you back to the Commission or Terre Haute or anywhere other than bum-fuck-nowhere. But no one comes. No one comes, and you are alone in the world.
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You continue to be alone in the world for a number of weeks. It is easier to call them weeks, though you know they've turned to months far longer ago than you'd ever dare to admit to yourself.
Picturing this as a quick inconvenience with an end in sight is the only way you can fathom surviving alone.
When the snow begins to fall, you pretend it's a quick inconvenience. When you spend weeks holed up in abandoned buildings, burning remnants of said buildings just to stay warm, you pretend it's a quick inconvenience. When the hunger sends you out in search of questionable food, you pretend it's a quick inconvenience. When you have to raid stores for fresh clothes because your Commission-issued clothing has become awkward and oversized from starvation, you pretend it's a quick inconvenience.
Days trickle by. The weather is cold, hot, rainy, variable. The air crackles with lightning, and buildings boom louder than thunder when they collapse to the ground, rubble echoing like hand grenades in your wake. Nature becomes tedious. The rot of cities becomes even moreso. With every step, you're certain you've been stranded in a lifeless world, abandoned to die a lonely death.
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