Out of Cryo - Season 2 | A Horizon: Zero Dawn Fanfiction

Chapter 12: What We Could Have Had

I let her enter the room first, then followed before shutting the door behind us. I shook my head as I looked around. Same bed (apparently, I made my bed on a consistent basis in this timeline), same desk (it was pretty clean – I always appreciated a neat desk), same stupid ancient print posters of bands I liked that Dennis made fun of me for having.

"Er...this is it!"

Aloy didn't say anything. At first, I thought something was wrong (well, even more wrong – our situation was pretty fucked as it was), but when she turned around it was obvious she was more intrigued than anything.

"This is...where you sleep?"

I nodded. "Yeah," I said and walked past her to sit on my bed. So weird. The bed looked and felt like my bed, right down to the fluffy down comforter and possibly more pillows than was really necessary. At the base of the pillows sat a small stuffed otter. "Actually, I used to spend most of my time in here." I stopped and corrected myself. "Not here."

"Because this isn't real. I know, Becks." She shifted a bit, a slight grimace taking over the curiosity on her face. It didn't take me long to figure out what it was.

"You know, you can take that coat off. We have heating here," I told her. She blinked at me – most likely trying to figure out what I meant by "heating" – before she started to remove the heavy coat. She had some difficulty at first with the zipper and it took me a second before I figured out why. I got up and went over to help her.

"Here." I removed the gloves from her hands before taking one of them in mine and showed her how to pull the zipper down. "Easy, right?" I said as I helped her get her arms out of the coat sleeves.

She gave a nervous laugh, but seemed much more comfortable in the black, long sleeved shirt she was wearing under the coat. "I've never seen anything like that." She turned to walk to one of the walls near the door, where a poster had been taped up. "This is all really, really strange," she murmured and touched the paper. "What about food?"

"Huh?"

"Where do you get your food? Who hunts it? Your mother? And what's a 'design position'?"

I sat down on the bed again. Here we go. It was odd but a little fulfilling to be on the receiving end of the questions this time. Showing Aloy where I was from and how I lived before going into cryo was something I never imagined in my wildest dreams I would get to do. But here we were – even if it was all fake, it was still a pretty accurate representation of how things were before Ted fucked it all up.

"Well," I began, "we don't really have to hunt. I mean, some people do, but they do it for...for sport." Hearing the explanation come out of my own mouth made me pause – the Carja had the Lodge of course, but the machines were an actual threat to humans. I shook the thought away for the time being and continued. "We get most of our food from a market...or delivered."

Aloy's brow furrowed. "But, then where does the market get it?"

I smiled and picked up the otter before leaning back on the pillows. This is kind of fun. "From a farm, just like in Meridian. We have-had a lot more animals that we would use for food, too."

She seemed amused. "Is that," she pointed at the otter in my hands, "one of them? Why do you keep one where you sleep?"

I didn't get what she meant at first until I looked down at Mr. Otter and burst out laughing. "No! I mean...yes, we had animals like this, but we didn't eat them. Or at least I didn't." I held up the stuffed animal. "This is Mr. Otter. He's not real but I've had him forever."