our new wilderness

PART V: OURS

But then Brett woke up.

*

This wasn't real, Eddy thought. Surely it couldn't be real at all, whatever hallucination was causing him to see his friend's chest rise and fall, causing him to hear lungs taking in air and heart thumping away, wild but alive.

Omegas turned into the undead within mere hours of getting infected by the omicron virus. He had been prepared for it, even, albeit with his gun shaking uncontrollably where it was clutched tight in his hand like a lifeline. This thing happening before him wasn't real; it couldn't be. Maybe he really was losing his mind.

But then: Brett was sitting up and hissing a little in apparent pain and then he was touching him. Brett was touching him, and he was tangible, and that meant he wasn't just a figment of Eddy's imagination. Brett was touching him, and his skin felt warm.

That left the truth, unbelievable as it was: Brett Yang was alive.

Eddy clung to his hand so tight, he was probably crushing it in his grasp, but Brett didn't care and neither did he, because oh my god, Brett Yang wasn't dead.

He wasn't dead.

"You're immune," came tumbling out of his mouth in a hurried rush of disbelief, and was it even true? Was this real? He still didn't believe any of it at all. "You're alive, and you're immune, and you're alive. What—what does that mean?"

Something twinkled in Brett's eyes, then: an untamable, furious kind of hope. "It means I get another chance."

*

The sight of the bandage, ragged and worn as it was while plastered high on Brett's neck, made something in Eddy shudder every time, a flickering light sputtering off into nothing but darkness. It didn't matter that Brett was immune and therefore was not about to die anytime soon—Eddy had failed him, back there when Brett first got bit.

He had failed him the very second he let go of Brett's hand in that desperate attempt to save him.

"Hey." Eddy's focus was pulled back to reality, and he met Brett's eyes with a wordless question making a home in his own. "Stop thinking about bullshit."

"The hell do you mean?"

"You're beating yourself up over my death—which, as you can now see, was more of a non-death after the resurrection shit I pulled, so please, just stop blaming yourself."

Oh god, but Brett had seen right through him. Fuck. "If I had just—"

"Stop," the other man snarled, and it was as if Eddy was suddenly the omega here, his teeth clattering as he shut his mouth quickly to obey the command. Brett sighed and closed his eyes. "You tried to save me. You did save me. You stayed even when I was already—already gone, just so you could be there if I turned. Remember what you told me when I asked you?"

He did remember: I go where you go. I'm not leaving you.

All the words had left him. All the air on the planet had left him. Eddy couldn't speak a word in reply.

"You saved me. You keep on saving me." Brett raised his hand, left it there suspended in the air, waiting and alone in the empty space between them. "Now, let's just finish this and then go home, wherever that is out there."

Go home. Now that was something he could look forward to.

Eddy took his hand, shakily but firm. Unyielding.

I promise I'll make it up to you. I promise I will never let go.

And so they continued on.

*

They approached the high-fenced walls of the Yang estate—it had grown to a veritable mini-city standing on its own might, bright lights in the sky a beacon to all who were looking for a safe haven to survive and thrive—and Eddy began to believe, just a little bit, in miracles.

*

As they entered a structured state of civilization once more on the back of a pickup truck manned by private escorts, Eddy leaned against Brett's lean form and took a deep breath; it seemed like it was the first real one he had since the outbreak began.

Brett smelled more like blood than anything else, now. He smelled like blood, but then he also smelled like the morning dawn, petrichor, a new beginning. The scent of a home found within a person; the scent of an omega protected and safe and loved.

And that, Eddy thought, was exactly right.