Chapter Text
This whole world is dying/
Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming/
Before all the water disappears?
- ‘Donut Seam’ Adrienne Lenker
The end, when it comes, slow as Spring in the halls of her memory and then all at once, is predictable.
As in, scientists had been yelling about it for decades; doomsday clocks and climate accords and extreme weather events, the whole thing shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. Except maybe to the average ATN viewer, who were all probably pretty fucking surprised that the things the network had been built around denying as woke bullshit came to pass far faster than most of the experts had predicted.
Who could have guessed that installing fascist governments around the globe, slashing protections for people and environments, burning oil and gas and coal and rainforests, and wasting millions of gallons of water to get some AI system to spit out images of a three titted dragon girl on command would fuck even the least conservative of climate models?
Not that any of it matters now. This is the last gasp for humanity, before the fire and flood, deep freeze and desertification, wipes the slate clean of people for good. For Gerri, for now at least, the end of the world is remarkably peaceful.
There is only so long that supplies are going to last, Gerri knows, being the one to take charge of inventorying the stocks the first day she had arrived, before they will have to admit defeat here. Roman knows it too, she thinks, though neither one of them has said a word about it. It’s in his eyes, though, a twitch of desperation she hasn’t seen since the morning he had come to get her out of the city.
Unlike a lot of her circle, Gerri had stayed in New York when things began to nosedive - she had told Cat and Lily that she would rather die in the comfort of her apartment than in the frantic chaos on route to get to them in DC, or wherever it was they were going to try to convince her to go, and she had meant it. Pragmatic to a fault, they had said their goodbyes, made their peace over an hours long satellite call full of laughter and tears, and Gerri had known then that in her heart they would all live forever, but, the world being as it had become, the inevitable would come for each of them sooner than later. She hadn’t called anyone else.
Gerri had accepted it, glad that her apartment had been very well stocked when the sea claimed the city a handful of weeks after that call, and planned to spend the end of her days with a lukewarm martini in hand, watching the waves lap against the buildings below, eventually popping enough sleeping pills to send herself out without a fuss.
It had been startling, after days of silence, to hear the sound of helicopter blades again. Gerri had plastered herself to the window to catch a glimpse of the thing, only to have it land on the roof of her building.
She didn’t move. Didn’t make a sound for long minutes, even though her heart was beating so hard against her ribs her shirt was quivering with it, because her building is nice, each unit occupied by a decently privileged set of people when there had still been people in the place apart from her, but helicopter-at-the-end-of-days nice? No.
There is only one person she can think of who might have the means to achieve this kind of stunt right now, but it couldn’t be him, because they have gone entire years without so much as a whisper between them. There is no reason at all for Roman Roy to have come back to New York, back to her building specifically, when the entire world is falling apart. And yet, there’s a helicopter on the roof. She has had a long time to put all of it, all of him and the terrifying ways he had made her feel, into the back of her mind, and yet at the first sign of him, her heart is right back there, leaping. It could be someone else entirely, and a dangerous someone at that, she reasoned with herself in the pin drop silence of her apartment, but if it was Roman…
“Gerri?” The knocks, tentative though they are, echoed through the hallway, and his voice, the way her ear attuned to it instantly, hadn’t changed at all. “Gerri, are you in there?”
The speed at which she had run to open the door could be excused as being purely safety motivated; who could say whether anyone else was in the building and desperate enough to attack someone? The truth, that she had been so desperate to see his face, to know he was real and there, is one she will take to her grave.
It took her a second to get the locks undone, but when she finally did fling the door open, there was Roman. Bearded, a hint of silver finally peeking through his still abundant hair, tanned and a little more solid than he had been five years ago when she had seen him last, the relief he felt profound enough to be visible the instant he laid eyes on her. He might just be the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.
“Roman, what are you doing here? What-” Gerri had started, but she barely got a word out before Roman cut across her.
“Look, I know you probably hoped I was dead already or whatever, and I’m with you 100%, but we only have a few minutes before anyone else who wants to get out of dodge is up our asses here and I have somewhere, ok? A safe house or bunker or whatever the fuck you want to call it, not important - the important part is that I want you to come. Everything is completely fucked, and I know this is insane, very glad you’re alive and its fucking amazing to see you? But I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t go for real when I knew you’d still be here - which, also kind of crazy on your end when you step back and really think about it - so please, just, save the 20 questions for later and please just come with me,” Roman pleaded, desperation written in every line of his frame, chest heaving as he stared into her eyes.
With about 800 questions whirling through her head, Gerri snapped into crisis management mode, and replied simply, “Ok.” She hadn’t even really thought it through beyond one fundamental thing: there was no way in hell she was watching him leave again. So much for dying in her apartment.
“You take whatever is still good in the kitchen, I’ll grab some essentials and we’re gone within the next 5,” Gerri pointed Roman in the direction of the kitchen, shut the door, and true to her word was back with a bag of clothes, documents, first aid supplies, and two photographs of her family in 4 minutes.
“Overachiever,” Roman had joked when he had hustled out after her a few seconds later with a bag of his own. Gerri hadn’t argued that of the two of them, probably the one who had shown up with an entire helicopter out of nowhere would win that particular moniker. In fact, she hadn’t said anything at all.
Not when they had emerged onto the roof and she had realised that Roman had managed to convince an actual pilot to do this trip, not when they had flown over the destruction that pockmarked every populated area below, not even when the pilot, who had introduced himself as Harrison, warned them that they were starting their descent over some random field in the middle of nowhere she could recognise. There was so much she wanted to say, so much she wanted to know, needed to know, that she felt almost paralysed by it. For his part, Roman hadn’t pushed, obviously aware of the amount of extreme changes that had occurred in such a short space of time, but Gerri could feel his eyes on her like a physical weight for most of the flight.