Pack your things
1405 Words
Amara was the one who asked.
She did it quietly, in that careful way she had — like she'd been holding the question for a while and finally decided the weight of it wasn't worth carrying anymore.
"Grandpa David."
He looked at her.
"Who was Lia to you?" She paused. "You said really good friends but—" She tilted her head. "That's not the face you make when you talk about really good friends."
Old David looked at her for a moment.
Then he just said, "No. It's not."
And continued.
Three weeks changes a person.
Not always in the ways you'd expect. David had gone into that coma as a nineteen year old boy running from creatures and grief and a cliff edge. He came out of it still nineteen, still grieving, but something had shifted underneath. Like the fall had rearranged things internally. Put certain weights in different places.
He noticed it first in how he moved. Slower. More deliberate. Less of the restless energy that had always lived in his legs. Brian used to joke that David walked like he was late for something even when he had nowhere to be.
Now he walked like a man calculating exits.
The ribs healed. The skull healed. The body did what bodies do when someone stubborn refuses to die.
It was during those three weeks that he and Lia actually talked. Really talked. The kind that happens when there's nothing else to do and nowhere to go and the world outside is something neither of you can fully process yet so you just — turn toward each other instead.
He told her about Brian on a Tuesday afternoon. Just started talking and didn't stop until it was all out — the kitchen duty at 0530, the crackers, the graduation ceremony, the hug, wanna get a drink — and by the end his voice was doing something he couldn't control and Lia didn't try to fix it or fill the silence with wrong words.
She just sat with him in it.
That meant more than she probably knew.
"He sounds like he was something special," she said eventually.
"He was the best person I knew," David said. "And that's just true."
She nodded. Looked at her hands. Then she asked carefully, "What's your surname?"
Something in her tone made him look at her sideways. "Carter," he said. "Why?"
Her face did something complicated.
"Richard Carter," she said slowly. "ShockWave."
"Yeah."
She stood up and moved to the window. Outside the abandoned hospital the street was empty and wrong — no transit pods, no people, just hollow quiet. "I heard about you. When you left at sixteen." She turned. "I was fifteen then. I remember thinking — what kind of stupid kid walks away from all of that?"
David raised an eyebrow.
"I know," she said quickly. "I know that now. I didn't know what was in that house. What he was really like." Her jaw tightened. "I looked up to your father. ShockWave was everywhere, he was always in the feeds — all these interviews about building something from nothing—" She stopped. "I used to think his son was an idiot."
"And now?"
She looked at him across the room.
"Now I think his son was the only smart one in that building."
Something loosened in David's chest.
Then he frowned. "Wait — how old are you actually?"
She blinked. "Eighteen."
"Eighteen." He stared. "I thought you were twenty."
She looked genuinely offended. "I look twenty?"
"You look mature—"
"That's the same thing."
"It's really not—"
"It's literally the same thing David."
He laughed. Actually laughed — short and surprised, the first real one since he'd woken up. It pulled at his ribs and he winced and laughed again anyway.
One year younger than him.
He didn't know why that was comforting. It just was — like finding out the person standing next to you in the same storm is just as cold as you are.
By the time he was ready to leave he had taught her everything Brian had taught him.
The gap between heartbeats. The exhale. The way stillness finds you when you stop forcing it. He stood beside her in the empty hospital corridor with makeshift targets at the far end and talked her through it almost word for word the way Brian had talked him through it.
Passing something forward.
She was a fast learner. Annoyingly fast.
"You've done this before," David said after she put three clean shots through the center.
"First time," she said, handing the gun back.
He stared at her.
She shrugged. "Quick study."
The morning he decided to leave he found her organizing medical supplies with that quiet focused energy she brought to everything.
He stood in the doorway.
She looked up.
He held out the gun.
"Parting gift," he said. He set it on the table with the ammunition beside it. "Those blinkers are still out there. When they find their way here—"
"Where are you going," she said. Flat. Not a question.
"To find my mother."
Silence.
Lia looked at the gun. Looked at him. Something moved behind her eyes.
"I can't use that better than you can," she said.
"You'll be fine—"
"David." She crossed her arms. "I'm a nurse. I can patch you up when you do something stupid which based on everything I've seen is going to be frequent. I know field medicine. I don't panic." A pause. "You need me."
"I'll manage—"
"You fell off a cliff."
"That was—"
"Three week coma."
"I didn't—"
"Couldn't hack a car."
He opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
She waited. Eyebrows slightly raised. The picture of patience.
The room was quiet except for the sound of David accepting that she was completely and infuriatingly correct.
"Pack your things," he said.
Lia blinked. Like some part of her hadn't fully expected it to work.
Then she turned and walked quickly toward her room and David stood in the corridor not smiling.
Definitely not smiling.
He heard her moving — quick and efficient, things being organized, bag being packed. Then footsteps, rapid, and she appeared back in the doorway still mid pack looking at him with those serious brown eyes.
"You won't leave while I'm packing right?"
David looked at her.
This girl. Standing there needing that one small reassurance in the middle of the end of the world, and something about it was so quietly, completely human that it did something to him he wasn't ready to name yet.
"No," he said. "I won't leave."
She held his gaze one more second. Nodded once. Disappeared back inside.
David leaned against the wall and looked at the ceiling.
He was about to walk into a world full of fast, strong, rotting things that wanted to kill him, looking for a woman who might not even be alive, with a teenage nurse who'd been shooting for three weeks.
Brian would've loved this.
Four minutes later Lia came out. Bag perfectly packed, not a strap out of place, like she'd been ready long before today and was just waiting for a reason to go.
"Ready," she said.
David pushed off the wall.
"Let's go."
They walked out into the world together — just the two of them, the morning light strange and too quiet, the city holding that hollow breath it had been holding for weeks.
Neither of them looked back.
Old David went quiet for a moment after that.
Just sat there with his tea, looking at nothing particular, a small expression on his face that the kids couldn't quite name. Not sad exactly. Not happy exactly. Something older than both.
"She just invited herself," he said eventually.
Amara was smiling. "And you let her."
"She made valid points."
"You let her because of the brown eyes."
"I let her because she was a trained medical professional with field experience—"
"Grandpa."
He picked up his tea. Took a long sip.
"Valid points," he said firmly. Into the cup.
The kids laughed.
And David sat inside the sound of it — the morning, the laughter, the memory of a girl who packed a bag in four minutes flat and came back out just to make sure he was still there.
Still here, he thought quietly.
Still here.
- Writer
