No Fearsome Tide: Hardison 4/5
Apr. 26th, 2011 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
weaselettFor warnings and notes see masterpost here
no fearsome tide: part four
Hardison
If there’s one things that Hardison misses most of all, it’s cars.
The walk from Boston to the little corner of Georgia they’ve staked their claim upon had taken a long time, longer than he had thought it would. He’d known, intellectually that it was a long way, or as Sophie had described it ‘a fair distance’, but knowing was a very different thing than actually knowing. Being able to say how long it took for a person to walk that many miles.
He is not, by any means, an outdoors person. He has always been happier hidden away in his room, his eyes fixed on a screen. He understands computers, and it’s that understanding that had formed the basis of his original friendship with Garcia and Amita, but more what’s more important is that for the most part, he could control computers.
Walking across country, surrounded by nature, he’s all too aware of how little control he has, especially in the face of what’s been happening. Before their little band of five had seemed perfect, not too many, not too few, but now he wishes that there were more of them, that there had been more of them. He almost wishes that Sterling was with them, but then this really would be hell.
It’s a relief, meeting up with Amita and her little band in Arkansas, and then a few short days later, meeting up with the people Garcia has sent to meet them and guide them to their new home. He struggles, as they plod on through unfamiliar countryside, to think of the place they’re headed as home. It’s an army base, or at least, the army were the ones who had built it. He can remember the plans, and the listing of all of things that would be waiting for them, and there’s nothing in it that makes him think of home.
Home is the flat above the bar back in Boston, even if it’s not where they sleep. He’d just managed to work a little dent into the sofa in front of the screens, only just managed to get used to the slightly uncomfortable stools at the breakfast bar. There were so many little things about that flat that they’d worked on. The little stashes in the walls and fake books, the wiring that he’d set up so that he could control most of the building more securely. The painting.
He’s never felt quite so broken up over having to leave a place behind. Though he knows it’s not really about leaving the place. It’s about the other thing. The one they don’t talk about.
As they travel he gravitates towards Amita, and he’s not the only one. She has a small group of caretakers, intent on making sure that she stays on her feet, that she eats and drinks enough. Every so often, she’ll shoo them away, either out of annoyance or embarrassment, but none of them care. She’s become a focal point for them, a source of emotion that isn’t fear or weariness.
His team keeps their distance from the others, though Parker still toys with them, stealing little things from one person and swapping them for something from another. He can understand why they’re doing it. They’re surrounded by FBI agents and geeks, people that they’d never really have spent any time around under other circumstances, unless there was a con involved. The only problem is, these are the people they are going to spend the immediate future with, stuck within the bounds of an ex-army facility.
He wonders if maybe they would be better off alone, in their little group, though he knows they wouldn’t be. It’s the end of the world, and they need as many hands, as many people on their side, as they can get to hope to even keep going, let alone make it to the other side. If there was an other side.
They needed to group together, get past their differences, and possibly do any number of other things that motivational posters where always talking about. Mostly he only remembers ‘keep calm and carry on’ and ‘don’t blink’. Though it’s a bit late on the blinking part.
He pushes the others, trying his best to pick the right moments to nudge them towards the people they’re travelling with, though he knows it’s not something he’s good at. Sophie smiles at him across the camp fire when as he tries to convince Parker to make friends with Prentiss, Emily, the only girl out of the group Garcia has sent to fetch them. It doesn’t really work though, mainly because Parker is still Parker, and Prentiss is a profiler.
Parker might be a bit crazy, but she’s generally harmless. Enough.
Provided there isn’t any cutlery.
And provided she doesn’t get hold of a taser.
He figures he’s best leaving it at that with Parker. She’ll work her way into their hearts, like she did his, in time. He hopes. Larry at least seems to like her, though Hardison doesn’t really get why. He had asked, but he hadn’t really understood the answer. Hadn’t expected to, considering Larry was forever referring to Amita’s bump as a wormhole.
He wasn’t even going to try pushing Eliot. Pushing Eliot never ended well for him. So he just let the glaring matches and shows of macho power continue, doing his best to ignore the idle commentary Sophie had taken to providing. He was fairly sure that if she had her way, she’d have the vast majority of the men wrapped around her fingers in no time.
In hindsight, Hardison wonders if in the week they’d been travelling they had become complacent, because they hadn’t met anyone on the route. That said, he isn’t surprised because Garcia’s lot had come the same way before.
They’re just a few short days from the camp when a mob ambushes them. It happens so quickly, and their attackers are wearing clothes that hide so much of them, that Hardison isn’t entirely sure what goes down. He knows that Alan, Amita’s father in law, goes down hard and there’s enough blood that he knows the man won’t be getting up again. Eliot and Morgan, backed by Colby and Prentiss, take up positions around them, taking the brunt of the rest of the attack.
It’s almost over as soon as it’s started, the survivors of the group that attacked them vanishing back to wherever they’d come from in the first place. Hardison’s too focused on Amita and Parker to really notice, and if he’s honest, he’s more aware of the warm hand on the small of his back, holding him in place.
They regroup quickly, Colby kneeling down to check on Alan, despite the look that Hotchner gives him. There’s too much blood and Alan isn’t moving. Hardison moves closer to Amita, helping her pull Charlie away, they don’t have long, they have to keep moving, put as much distance between themselves and their attackers as they can.
They don’t have time to grieve, or even consider doing anything but covering Alan as best they can. Hardison knows only too well how much this whole situation sucks. He’s been here, and it hurts like anything, but there’s not a thing he can say to make it better for any of them.
Time isn’t something they really have anymore.
After losing Alan, they keep moving, stopping only to rest for an hour or so whenever they really have to. Hardison does his best to keep Amita moving, helping her keep pace with them, with Hotchner’s help. It’s not entirely unexpected, the man has been doing his best to make sure that they are all ok the whole time, and like Hardison, he has the least blood on him. They’re the only two who can really offer Amita aid.
Traveling like that, they cover the distance in half the time they’d expected, the foreboding, if ancient, military sign appears on the horizon just as Hardison starts to wonder just how many of them are going to make it. There’s only so much a person can take before they need to take a break, and even with the thirteen of them, they can’t really rest safely. They don’t know the ground, it’s unfamiliar and there’s too many places that could be secret hiding places for the enemy.
Not that they’re the enemy, they’re just, not with them.
He sees Garcia before he sees anyone else, her faded red hair still noticeable enough to make her stand out from the two blond women and the three men standing with her. He spots two kids as well, off to one side, watching them from under the shade of the tents.
It’s the sight of Garcia that gets to him though, her smile, something he doesn’t think he’s seen anyone do in years, is brighter than anything else. He falters a little, losing his grip on Amita, only to start as she shifts away. He turns, swaying a little, to watch as Hotch lifts Amita gently into his arms, offering Hardison a faint smile and a shrug. They’ve not got much further to go, but it’s too far for Amita.
It’s been a hard journey for them all.
There were no zombies in the beginning, just desperate people armed with guns, looking for someone to blame, or someone to punish for what was happening.
Eventually though, as time goes on, more of the people they’re shooting resemble the zombies Hardison remembers from films. He knows, all too well, that there were a lot of places in the US that had been hiding secrets, both of the deadly kind and not, and with the world in the state it is, those secrets have been seeping into the world.
The first time someone breaks down after shooting someone, it’s Prentiss, one of Garcia’s team. It’s a surprise to him, but the grim looks on the other profilers’ faces tell another story. She’d shot a kid, which was enough to mess with anyone’s head, but this kid hadn’t been one of the zombies, hadn’t even really been evil as such. What he had been was armed with a rifle and the need to take his pain out on others. It sucked that Prentiss had had to shoot, but the kid had already winged Rossi.
Hardison never thought that he would get used to killing people, but somehow he has, and he knows that since Amita had finally given birth, he was finding it even easier. Given the choice between whoever it was that was threatening his family, and his family, he was always going to choose his family. It might make him cold, but he just can’t bring himself to care anymore.
Maybe one day, when their lives aren’t hanging in the balance anymore, he’ll find the time to deal with all of this, but for now he’s more than happy to just not think about it.
There’s a list, he doesn’t know who started it, but they all keep it now so it doesn’t really matter. It’s a list of the dead. He knows some of the names on it, he’d written Nate’s on it himself, knowing that neither Eliot nor Sophie would ever manage to, but there are far more that he doesn’t. Each and every one is the name of someone that a member of the camp had known, Before. It’s a way of remembering, of making sure that one day, when they can afford to, they’ll take the time to make sure that those names don’t die along with the people they’d belonged to.
Hardison wonders who will be the one to put his name on the list, when the time comes. It’s not that he wants to die, it’s more that he’s aware that it’s a distinct likelihood that he won’t live to see forty.
Their camp grows, slowly but surely, as they bring the odd person back with them, along with much needed supplies. They start to work on making themselves self-sufficient.
Hardison helps the scarily smart Doctor Reid build a generator, using parts of old bicycles and whatever else they can gather from amongst the wreckage of the world they used to belong to. There’s no petrol for their cars, which sit, slowly rusting away in a corner of the camp, and gas is almost impossible to get hold of outside of the bunker that their camp sits on top of.
It’s take a few months of trial and error before they manage to figure out a way to heat their tents, without risking burning them down or flooding them, and it’s wins Hardison the first smile from Eliot in months. It’s slow, the way they’re all recovering from what they’ve lost, but they are finally finding their feet, finding new ways to deal with almost constant risk of death.
There are a lot of ways to die.
There’s infection, because drugs have shelf lives, and there’s a whole lot of trial and error involved in trying to create effective alternatives. It makes paper cuts a whole lot scarier than they ever were before.
There’s by human hands. Which happens less than infection, though they’ve been lucky on both counts. There haven’t even been many suicides. Less than Reid had been expecting. Not that Hardison had wanted to know that, but Reid doesn’t have a filter anymore. He’ll go off on tangents while they’re working on whatever project they’ve been tasked with that day, in between the trips that they take out for supplies.
There’s animals, which includes the ones they’ve managed to collect to add to their motley group. Cows are just as dangerous as bears. In fact, considering that none of them have been injured by bears, they’re more dangerous than bears.
And then there’s nature. The ash cloud’s still there. It’s getting smaller, but it’s still there as are its after effects. Hardison can’t remember a colder winter.
Hardison had expected Parker to be jealous, of Garcia and Amita, and later of Hotch, because she always had been before, but she isn’t. It’s like they’ve finally gotten to the point that they’ve actually defined their relationship. She doesn’t do sex; she’ll have sex, if it’s what he wants, but Parker herself isn’t interested in it. She doesn’t get anything from it.
She’s happy crawling into bed to lie between him and Hotch, curling up between them and making a happy little noise that always makes Hotch smile. Hardison is just relieved that she doesn’t mind, he had had images of her stabbing Hotch with kitchen utensils for a long time, and it’s nice not to have to sneak around.
Eliot on the other hand, is always pointing out that it’s impossible to sneak around now, considering they live in a community of just under thirty people, living in heavy canvas tents that in no way block sound. Plus most of the camp beds creak. Parker had always known, she’d just stopped letting it bother her. The fact, Eliot had argued during the most disturbing conversation of Hardison’s life, was that with almost everyone in the camp sharing a bed with at least one other person, sometimes on rotation, Parker had come to see it as normal. As much as Parker had a normal.
Hardison still slips into Amita’s tent on occasion, sliding into her bed on the other side of the sleeping baby, and Garcia still joins them. It’s no more sexual now than it ever has been, Garcia has Kevin and Morgan for that, and Amita has Charlie and Colby, it’s a simple comfort, reminding one another that they’re still there. Making sure they don’t wake up alone when their partners are out on raids.
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part five: Before
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no fearsome tide: part four
Hardison
If there’s one things that Hardison misses most of all, it’s cars.
The walk from Boston to the little corner of Georgia they’ve staked their claim upon had taken a long time, longer than he had thought it would. He’d known, intellectually that it was a long way, or as Sophie had described it ‘a fair distance’, but knowing was a very different thing than actually knowing. Being able to say how long it took for a person to walk that many miles.
He is not, by any means, an outdoors person. He has always been happier hidden away in his room, his eyes fixed on a screen. He understands computers, and it’s that understanding that had formed the basis of his original friendship with Garcia and Amita, but more what’s more important is that for the most part, he could control computers.
Walking across country, surrounded by nature, he’s all too aware of how little control he has, especially in the face of what’s been happening. Before their little band of five had seemed perfect, not too many, not too few, but now he wishes that there were more of them, that there had been more of them. He almost wishes that Sterling was with them, but then this really would be hell.
It’s a relief, meeting up with Amita and her little band in Arkansas, and then a few short days later, meeting up with the people Garcia has sent to meet them and guide them to their new home. He struggles, as they plod on through unfamiliar countryside, to think of the place they’re headed as home. It’s an army base, or at least, the army were the ones who had built it. He can remember the plans, and the listing of all of things that would be waiting for them, and there’s nothing in it that makes him think of home.
Home is the flat above the bar back in Boston, even if it’s not where they sleep. He’d just managed to work a little dent into the sofa in front of the screens, only just managed to get used to the slightly uncomfortable stools at the breakfast bar. There were so many little things about that flat that they’d worked on. The little stashes in the walls and fake books, the wiring that he’d set up so that he could control most of the building more securely. The painting.
He’s never felt quite so broken up over having to leave a place behind. Though he knows it’s not really about leaving the place. It’s about the other thing. The one they don’t talk about.
As they travel he gravitates towards Amita, and he’s not the only one. She has a small group of caretakers, intent on making sure that she stays on her feet, that she eats and drinks enough. Every so often, she’ll shoo them away, either out of annoyance or embarrassment, but none of them care. She’s become a focal point for them, a source of emotion that isn’t fear or weariness.
His team keeps their distance from the others, though Parker still toys with them, stealing little things from one person and swapping them for something from another. He can understand why they’re doing it. They’re surrounded by FBI agents and geeks, people that they’d never really have spent any time around under other circumstances, unless there was a con involved. The only problem is, these are the people they are going to spend the immediate future with, stuck within the bounds of an ex-army facility.
He wonders if maybe they would be better off alone, in their little group, though he knows they wouldn’t be. It’s the end of the world, and they need as many hands, as many people on their side, as they can get to hope to even keep going, let alone make it to the other side. If there was an other side.
They needed to group together, get past their differences, and possibly do any number of other things that motivational posters where always talking about. Mostly he only remembers ‘keep calm and carry on’ and ‘don’t blink’. Though it’s a bit late on the blinking part.
He pushes the others, trying his best to pick the right moments to nudge them towards the people they’re travelling with, though he knows it’s not something he’s good at. Sophie smiles at him across the camp fire when as he tries to convince Parker to make friends with Prentiss, Emily, the only girl out of the group Garcia has sent to fetch them. It doesn’t really work though, mainly because Parker is still Parker, and Prentiss is a profiler.
Parker might be a bit crazy, but she’s generally harmless. Enough.
Provided there isn’t any cutlery.
And provided she doesn’t get hold of a taser.
He figures he’s best leaving it at that with Parker. She’ll work her way into their hearts, like she did his, in time. He hopes. Larry at least seems to like her, though Hardison doesn’t really get why. He had asked, but he hadn’t really understood the answer. Hadn’t expected to, considering Larry was forever referring to Amita’s bump as a wormhole.
He wasn’t even going to try pushing Eliot. Pushing Eliot never ended well for him. So he just let the glaring matches and shows of macho power continue, doing his best to ignore the idle commentary Sophie had taken to providing. He was fairly sure that if she had her way, she’d have the vast majority of the men wrapped around her fingers in no time.
In hindsight, Hardison wonders if in the week they’d been travelling they had become complacent, because they hadn’t met anyone on the route. That said, he isn’t surprised because Garcia’s lot had come the same way before.
They’re just a few short days from the camp when a mob ambushes them. It happens so quickly, and their attackers are wearing clothes that hide so much of them, that Hardison isn’t entirely sure what goes down. He knows that Alan, Amita’s father in law, goes down hard and there’s enough blood that he knows the man won’t be getting up again. Eliot and Morgan, backed by Colby and Prentiss, take up positions around them, taking the brunt of the rest of the attack.
It’s almost over as soon as it’s started, the survivors of the group that attacked them vanishing back to wherever they’d come from in the first place. Hardison’s too focused on Amita and Parker to really notice, and if he’s honest, he’s more aware of the warm hand on the small of his back, holding him in place.
They regroup quickly, Colby kneeling down to check on Alan, despite the look that Hotchner gives him. There’s too much blood and Alan isn’t moving. Hardison moves closer to Amita, helping her pull Charlie away, they don’t have long, they have to keep moving, put as much distance between themselves and their attackers as they can.
They don’t have time to grieve, or even consider doing anything but covering Alan as best they can. Hardison knows only too well how much this whole situation sucks. He’s been here, and it hurts like anything, but there’s not a thing he can say to make it better for any of them.
Time isn’t something they really have anymore.
After losing Alan, they keep moving, stopping only to rest for an hour or so whenever they really have to. Hardison does his best to keep Amita moving, helping her keep pace with them, with Hotchner’s help. It’s not entirely unexpected, the man has been doing his best to make sure that they are all ok the whole time, and like Hardison, he has the least blood on him. They’re the only two who can really offer Amita aid.
Traveling like that, they cover the distance in half the time they’d expected, the foreboding, if ancient, military sign appears on the horizon just as Hardison starts to wonder just how many of them are going to make it. There’s only so much a person can take before they need to take a break, and even with the thirteen of them, they can’t really rest safely. They don’t know the ground, it’s unfamiliar and there’s too many places that could be secret hiding places for the enemy.
Not that they’re the enemy, they’re just, not with them.
He sees Garcia before he sees anyone else, her faded red hair still noticeable enough to make her stand out from the two blond women and the three men standing with her. He spots two kids as well, off to one side, watching them from under the shade of the tents.
It’s the sight of Garcia that gets to him though, her smile, something he doesn’t think he’s seen anyone do in years, is brighter than anything else. He falters a little, losing his grip on Amita, only to start as she shifts away. He turns, swaying a little, to watch as Hotch lifts Amita gently into his arms, offering Hardison a faint smile and a shrug. They’ve not got much further to go, but it’s too far for Amita.
It’s been a hard journey for them all.
There were no zombies in the beginning, just desperate people armed with guns, looking for someone to blame, or someone to punish for what was happening.
Eventually though, as time goes on, more of the people they’re shooting resemble the zombies Hardison remembers from films. He knows, all too well, that there were a lot of places in the US that had been hiding secrets, both of the deadly kind and not, and with the world in the state it is, those secrets have been seeping into the world.
The first time someone breaks down after shooting someone, it’s Prentiss, one of Garcia’s team. It’s a surprise to him, but the grim looks on the other profilers’ faces tell another story. She’d shot a kid, which was enough to mess with anyone’s head, but this kid hadn’t been one of the zombies, hadn’t even really been evil as such. What he had been was armed with a rifle and the need to take his pain out on others. It sucked that Prentiss had had to shoot, but the kid had already winged Rossi.
Hardison never thought that he would get used to killing people, but somehow he has, and he knows that since Amita had finally given birth, he was finding it even easier. Given the choice between whoever it was that was threatening his family, and his family, he was always going to choose his family. It might make him cold, but he just can’t bring himself to care anymore.
Maybe one day, when their lives aren’t hanging in the balance anymore, he’ll find the time to deal with all of this, but for now he’s more than happy to just not think about it.
There’s a list, he doesn’t know who started it, but they all keep it now so it doesn’t really matter. It’s a list of the dead. He knows some of the names on it, he’d written Nate’s on it himself, knowing that neither Eliot nor Sophie would ever manage to, but there are far more that he doesn’t. Each and every one is the name of someone that a member of the camp had known, Before. It’s a way of remembering, of making sure that one day, when they can afford to, they’ll take the time to make sure that those names don’t die along with the people they’d belonged to.
Hardison wonders who will be the one to put his name on the list, when the time comes. It’s not that he wants to die, it’s more that he’s aware that it’s a distinct likelihood that he won’t live to see forty.
Their camp grows, slowly but surely, as they bring the odd person back with them, along with much needed supplies. They start to work on making themselves self-sufficient.
Hardison helps the scarily smart Doctor Reid build a generator, using parts of old bicycles and whatever else they can gather from amongst the wreckage of the world they used to belong to. There’s no petrol for their cars, which sit, slowly rusting away in a corner of the camp, and gas is almost impossible to get hold of outside of the bunker that their camp sits on top of.
It’s take a few months of trial and error before they manage to figure out a way to heat their tents, without risking burning them down or flooding them, and it’s wins Hardison the first smile from Eliot in months. It’s slow, the way they’re all recovering from what they’ve lost, but they are finally finding their feet, finding new ways to deal with almost constant risk of death.
There are a lot of ways to die.
There’s infection, because drugs have shelf lives, and there’s a whole lot of trial and error involved in trying to create effective alternatives. It makes paper cuts a whole lot scarier than they ever were before.
There’s by human hands. Which happens less than infection, though they’ve been lucky on both counts. There haven’t even been many suicides. Less than Reid had been expecting. Not that Hardison had wanted to know that, but Reid doesn’t have a filter anymore. He’ll go off on tangents while they’re working on whatever project they’ve been tasked with that day, in between the trips that they take out for supplies.
There’s animals, which includes the ones they’ve managed to collect to add to their motley group. Cows are just as dangerous as bears. In fact, considering that none of them have been injured by bears, they’re more dangerous than bears.
And then there’s nature. The ash cloud’s still there. It’s getting smaller, but it’s still there as are its after effects. Hardison can’t remember a colder winter.
Hardison had expected Parker to be jealous, of Garcia and Amita, and later of Hotch, because she always had been before, but she isn’t. It’s like they’ve finally gotten to the point that they’ve actually defined their relationship. She doesn’t do sex; she’ll have sex, if it’s what he wants, but Parker herself isn’t interested in it. She doesn’t get anything from it.
She’s happy crawling into bed to lie between him and Hotch, curling up between them and making a happy little noise that always makes Hotch smile. Hardison is just relieved that she doesn’t mind, he had had images of her stabbing Hotch with kitchen utensils for a long time, and it’s nice not to have to sneak around.
Eliot on the other hand, is always pointing out that it’s impossible to sneak around now, considering they live in a community of just under thirty people, living in heavy canvas tents that in no way block sound. Plus most of the camp beds creak. Parker had always known, she’d just stopped letting it bother her. The fact, Eliot had argued during the most disturbing conversation of Hardison’s life, was that with almost everyone in the camp sharing a bed with at least one other person, sometimes on rotation, Parker had come to see it as normal. As much as Parker had a normal.
Hardison still slips into Amita’s tent on occasion, sliding into her bed on the other side of the sleeping baby, and Garcia still joins them. It’s no more sexual now than it ever has been, Garcia has Kevin and Morgan for that, and Amita has Charlie and Colby, it’s a simple comfort, reminding one another that they’re still there. Making sure they don’t wake up alone when their partners are out on raids.
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part five: Before
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